ProPublica

by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing

It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.

Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud.

Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar.

But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.

“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.”

Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.

It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.

In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.

And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.

This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.

The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.

ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life.

Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

Halimi was forced to flee Afghanistan in 2021. “I had no choice,” he said. (For ProPublica)

Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over.

Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more.

Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself.

About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4x4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days and repeatedly beaten and questioned about Halimi and his recently publicized yet ambiguous work for the United States.

The account of the beatings is based on interviews with multiple people familiar with the events. ProPublica did not interview any sources in Afghanistan, a country where people are sometimes imprisoned for speaking out against the government.

Zabihullah Mujahid, chief government spokesperson for the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, said Halimi “is not important to us and we do not want to talk about him that much.” He added that there was no active criminal investigation targeting him. The spokesperson did not answer questions about the treatment of Halimi’s family, saying, “I do not consider it necessary to answer.”

While Halimi felt powerless to do anything, his relatives in Afghanistan braced themselves for even worse. He tried to put on a brave face, though he knew from his own near-death experiences with the Taliban that the situation was increasingly bleak.

“To keep the morale of the family high, I did not show them my panic,” he told ProPublica in one of multiple interviews conducted through a translator.

He’d been frantically reaching out to his bosses in Washington to ask what was behind Musk’s social media blasts against him and to seek help clearing his name. But everyone Halimi worked with had been fired.

A 28-year-old college dropout named Nate Cavanaugh had been installed as USIP’s new president. DOGE had ousted its leader, State Department veteran George E. Moose.

Halimi and his loved ones were on their own. Maybe, they hoped, this would all pass if they stayed quiet and lay low. Then Musk and DOGE took their campaign against USIP and Halimi to another level.

In May, a little more than a month later, DOGE invited Fox News host Jesse Watters to sit in and film one of its team meetings. It was the first major media appearance by the larger DOGE team. For nearly 30 minutes on prime-time TV, Musk and more than a dozen triumphant young men in suits sat around a table congratulating one another. They swapped war stories about the government fraud they had exposed and the wasteful bureaucrats they had brought to heel.

At that point, DOGE was riding high: It had mostly shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, the main foreign aid agency. The watchdog Consumer Financial Protection Bureau had been reduced to a skeleton crew. And at the Department of Education, DOGE had cut hundreds of millions of dollars to an internal research arm that tracks the performance of public schools.

For weeks, DOGE had been posting online hundreds of contracts it had canceled and tallying up the savings — though in multiple cases, the totals were later found to be wildly off, or the contracts mostly misrepresented. The White House has defended the accuracy of DOGE’s claims, with a spokesperson recently saying, “All numbers are rigorously scrubbed with agency procurement officials.”

With Watters, the DOGE team zeroed in on government spending. Steve Davis, Musk’s right-hand man at DOGE, shared an eye-popping example of waste from the Education Department. He said that the department had misused taxpayer money by funding parties at Caesars Palace, a casino and hotel in Las Vegas, before DOGE implemented new requirements to submit receipts. The claim appeared to have little resemblance to the truth: One school district in Utah had used DOE funds to send teachers to an education conference hosted at a Caesars hotel. Davis did not reply to a request for comment.

Musk went around the table, prodding the other members of the team as they one-upped one another with outrageous examples of their own. With each story, Watters egged them on, raising his eyebrows in disbelief. Every so often, the DOGE team would burst into laughter.

“The Taliban Gets DOGED” The segment in which Nate Cavanaugh, Elon Musk and others mislead viewers about the content in Halimi’s contract (Fox News)

Watch video ➜

At one point, Musk cued Cavanaugh with an awkward joke about how the work he’d found being done at the United States Institute of Peace was actually “the opposite of the title.”

Cavanaugh agreed, saying, “It was by far the least peaceful agency we worked with.” To prove his point, he turned toward Watters and said he’d uncovered documents showing that the agency was making payments to a contractor associated with the Taliban.

Watters looked at Cavanaugh in disbelief: “Get out of here.”

“This is real,” Cavanaugh said. Watters raised a hand, pressing on: “What was the money going to the Taliban for? … Was it for opium, or weapons, or a bribe?”

“Or nothing,” Musk interjected.

He and Watters burst into laughter. The chyron at the bottom of the screen read, “THE TALIBAN GETS DOGED.”

In a statement, a spokesperson with Fox News said, “It’s clear ProPublica is trying to insert FOX News into this story despite acknowledging the network having no part in any unmasking or identification of the independent contractor.” The spokesperson added, “At no point was the contractor identified, and the focus of the interview was on extreme spending practices and potential billing fraud within government agencies.”

In an email, Cavanaugh said he was mandated by Trump to dismantle the USIP, and “that includes the contract with former Taliban member Mohammad Qasem Halimi.” Cavanaugh added, “An overwhelming majority of Americans would agree that the Federal Government should not be funding former members of the Taliban when our country is $36T in debt.” He did not respond to questions about why DOGE chose to publicize Halimi’s contract or whether it knew the risk in doing so.

While DOGE initially referred to Halimi as a “former Taliban member,” the distinction was sometimes lost as Halimi’s contract became a viral social media and news story. For example, one social media post claiming that USIP had been “funding multiple terrorist organizations” was viewed by more than 180,000 people. And on Fox News, Cavanaugh dropped the reference that Halimi was a “former” Taliban member, describing his USIP work simply as payments to the Taliban.

Cavanaugh told Watters that DOGE was unable to find any justification for those payments. But ProPublica’s reporting showed that four weeks earlier, Cavanaugh had been sent dozens of pages of internal records from USIP outlining Halimi’s work in detail, according to documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. There were invoices, project descriptions, and dates and times showing what Halimi was supposed to be doing on specific days. Cavanaugh did not respond to questions about his access to these records or how they appeared to conflict with his statements on Fox News.

Timeline of Events

March 17: DOGE staffers, standing alongside local law enforcement officers, work their way into the USIP headquarters in downtown Washington.

March 31, 3:58 p.m. EST: DOGE sends Halimi an email notifying him that his contract with USIP has been terminated.

March 31, 7:17 p.m. EST: In a post on X, DOGE exposes Halimi’s work with the USIP, worth $132,000, and calls him a former Taliban member.

March 31, 7:29 p.m. EST, to April 1, 2:41 p.m. EST: Two USIP holdover employees — who supported Musk’s initiative and, as IT staffers, had wide access to USIP systems — sent Cavanaugh and his DOGE team a series of emails with documents about Halimi’s employment, including receipts and a scope of work, making it clear his duties were well documented.

April 1, 7:46 a.m. EST: DOGE’s post about Halimi’s USIP contract is picked up by local press in Afghanistan, where the Taliban notice the development.

Around April 9: Members of Halimi’s family are picked up by Taliban security forces around Kabul, taken to prison and beaten.

May 1: Cavanaugh, Musk and other DOGE staffers meet with Jesse Watters on Fox News, where they describe the payments to Halimi as a rogue contract with a Taliban member. Watters asks whether taxpayer money was really being used to run drugs and guns inside Afghanistan — allegations that are untrue.

USIP’s own records, obtained by ProPublica, show that none of the institute’s work involved payments to the Taliban. Much of what Halimi did was actually routine foreign policy consulting: He provided expert advice to the State Department to help U.S. diplomats understand religious dynamics and civil society in Afghanistan. He was paid to attend Islamic conferences, where he made contact with other prominent political and religious figures across the Middle East on behalf of the USIP.

He was also an adviser to USIP on women’s issues in Islam, something he was uniquely qualified to do both personally and professionally. Years earlier, Halimi’s sister had been murdered by her husband in an act of domestic violence, and Halimi spoke about her openly and emotionally, recalled Mary Akrami, an Afghan women’s rights advocate who opened the country’s first women’s shelter after the Taliban fell.

As an official in the government of Hamid Karzai, Halimi was an outspoken advocate for the shelter. “He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known,” Akrami said in an interview.

Halimi went on to serve in a number of high-profile posts in the U.S.-backed government, including as an investigator at the Supreme Court, a spokesperson for the national religious council, an adviser to the national security council, and finally the minister for religious affairs and hajj under the last democratically elected president, Ashraf Ghani.

“He was one of the most supportive and open-minded religious scholars I have ever known.”

After the Fox News interview, Halimi was struggling to move forward. By early spring, the Taliban had released his beaten and terrified family members. But they made it clear that they expected Halimi to publicly admit that he was an American spy. There were no good options. Such an admission would mean that his family would never be safe again, since they’d forever be associated with a traitor. But if he refused, they would also be under constant pressure.

Halimi had barely escaped the country four years earlier, when the U.S.-backed government he worked for collapsed in the face of a rapid Taliban military advance into the capital. A prominent Taliban cleric had publicly singled him out as an apostate — a traitor to Islam — placing a bullseye on his head. And Halimi said that a broad amnesty offer from the Taliban, extended to most of their enemies, would not apply to him. (The Taliban spokesperson told ProPublica that Halimi was free to return to Afghanistan.)

The situation was dire, and the U.S. government knew it too. In those final days, a CIA operative reached out to Halimi and directed him to catch an evacuation flight. Disguised as an ambulance driver and with his nephew donning a nurse outfit, Halimi evaded multiple Taliban checkpoints en route to the U.S.-controlled airbase at Bagram. A CIA spokesperson declined to comment. The Pentagon declined to comment and referred questions about Halimi’s past work with the U.S. to the State Department.

“I never cried harder in my life than I did that night when I left my country,” he told ProPublica. “But I had no choice.”

It wasn’t Halimi’s first time in exile.

When he was 7 years old, his mother took him and his six siblings across the border to Pakistan to escape the civil war that engulfed Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion. “My earliest recollections are just of war, of violence, of blood and of killings,” Halimi said. “My mother used to tell me Afghanistan was a peaceful place in the past. I have no memory of it.”

Halimi’s father, the town imam in a rural Afghan village, had died when Halimi was young. He and his siblings grew up in a tent across the border within a refugee camp. From a dirt-floored classroom, Halimi found a way out through a scholarship to study Islamic law in Egypt.

Halimi’s time in Cairo, where he socialized with international students from across the globe, changed him. He began looking at the world differently, he said, with a curiosity about other cultures and a lifelong interest in foreign languages.

Halimi, front, second from the left, with Afghan students in Egypt (Courtesy of Mohammad Halimi)

But by the time he returned home, a group of conservative religious students turned rebel fighters were dominating Afghanistan’s messy, multisided civil war and had consolidated power over the capital. They were known as the Taliban.

Halimi took a job in a government office responsible for dealing with foreign diplomats, not because he believed in Taliban ideology, but because, for a man with a college degree and political aspirations, “it was the only good job I could find,” he said.

Then came the U.S. invasion, which ousted the Taliban government and ushered in a bloody, protracted war. The George W. Bush administration ordered the detention of swaths of the Taliban government at a giant prison at Bagram Airfield. Halimi was among them. The treatment was brutal. He was constantly shackled by his hands and feet, except for short bathroom breaks. But along the way, he said, he learned English and built an understanding of his captors.

While some prominent Taliban fighters and leaders were sent to Guantanamo, Halimi, as a relatively unknown bureaucrat, was part of a group that was gradually let out. Some people were enlisted to join the U.S.-backed government; their experience made them useful to Washington and its local allies’ efforts to understand, and even communicate with, the Taliban.

In those early days of the conflict, the U.S. military and intelligence communities were under tremendous pressure to stop further attacks on the homeland. Yet they knew virtually nothing about their assumed enemy. What followed was two decades of American military intervention across the region that led to hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths and the resurgence of the very groups the U.S. once sought to unseat.

When U.S. forces finally withdrew for good from Afghanistan in late 2021, so did Halimi. His country had been savaged by warring powers for decades. Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.

Somehow, he had managed to stay alive through all of it, but now there was no place for him.

Nate Cavanaugh had nothing in his background to suggest he would be chosen to wind down an international conflict-resolution agency. His 15 minutes of fame on Fox News represented an unlikely turn for a young man who’d spent his short career founding niche tech startups.

Cavanaugh comes from a wealthy family — his father built a $100 million sports supplement company — and he told people he was inspired by the tech mogul Peter Thiel. He started two small companies, which focused on specialized software tools to help companies manage their finances and intellectual property. But investors in both told ProPublica that neither company successfully took off.

When DOGE was announced, Cavanaugh was eager to join up, a former co-worker told ProPublica. It’s not clear how he ultimately got connected to the group, but DOGE recruited heavily from young right-wing tech circles in California.

Nate Cavanaugh, the DOGE team member integral to the takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

Friends and former colleagues said they’d never heard him discuss American foreign policy or show an interest in geopolitics. Yet in January, as a leader in Musk’s DOGE, he was assigned to evaluate and oversee budget cuts across a variety of federally funded international programs. Among the agencies in Cavanaugh’s portfolio were the Inter-American Foundation and African Development Foundation. He was part of the DOGE team that sought cuts at the National Endowment for the Humanities and redirected its funds to build a park full of statues of “American Heroes,” according to a lawsuit by NEH grant recipients.

But it was the U.S. Institute of Peace, housed in a futuristic, glass-encased building overlooking the Potomac River in downtown Washington, where Cavanaugh hit resistance. Established under President Ronald Reagan, the agency had once enjoyed bipartisan support. While it’s largely taxpayer funded, USIP is not a government agency; its contracts have not typically been posted publicly, and its employees operate with a degree of removal from U.S. officialdom. That gives the institute some ability to operate behind the scenes and establish relationships with figures at the center of complex conflicts — figures such as Mohammad Halimi.

It’s often pushing informal diplomacy: In 2023, for example, USIP staff helped facilitate a ceasefire between Islamic rebels and the government of the Philippines in the country’s restive south.

But in 2024, the Heritage Foundation — which led Project 2025 — published a report arguing that USIP had become a partisan, Democrat-controlled institution.

When Cavanaugh and several other DOGE officials first showed up to take control of the USIP in March, he was physically blocked from entering the building by its security chief, Colin O’Brien, who spent 15 years working as a police officer before joining the institute. Cavanaugh tried to enter again a little later, this time with two FBI agents in tow. O’Brien blocked him again, believing Cavanaugh and DOGE had no business dismantling the USIP, which had been established by Congress as an independent entity.

Over the next few days, DOGE put more pressure on O’Brien. FBI agents indicated O’Brien was the subject of a new Justice Department investigation. And they visited the home of one of his subordinates for questioning. Ultimately, the interim U.S. attorney in Washington at the time, Trump ally Edward Martin, demanded that USIP officials give DOGE access to the building.

The next time Cavanaugh appeared at the agency’s door, he and a phalanx of local police officers forced their way in. “I am a firm believer that what makes this country special is that we follow laws and process,” O’Brien said. “What happened that day was the antithesis of everything I believe in.”

An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the role of FBI personnel in the takeover. Martin did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Metropolitan Police Department of D.C. referred ProPublica to a published statement, which said that police officers spoke with the new acting USIP president and assisted him in removing “unauthorized individuals” from the building.

Once in possession of its offices and information systems, Cavanaugh and his team fired virtually all USIP personnel, including over 100 overseas staff. With little warning or awareness of the potential danger to overseas employees, former staffers said, they shuttered USIP offices in Pakistan, Nigeria and El Salvador. After DOGE fired USIP’s international security team, its staff in Libya feared for their safety and were forced to flee on their own across the border. Cavanaugh and his staff canceled more than 700 contracts over 12 days.

They rifled through other USIP files, spotlighting expenditures they used to publicly embarrass the institute. On Fox, DOGE also bragged about uncovering payments for “private jets,” when, in fact, records show that USIP chartered a single plane for an evacuation mission out of a war zone for its staff. Cavanaugh did not answer a question about the assertion.

An aircraft charter agreement shows that USIP chartered a plane during the period of the 2021 Kabul airlift in Afghanistan. (Obtained by ProPublica)

Over the following weeks, the DOGE team celebrated its newfound power inside the USIP building. Members were seen smoking cigars in the office and drinking beer as they worked late into the night. The agency’s insignia was torn from the entryway.

“DOGE was completely indifferent to the effect their actions had on human beings,” said Barnett Rubin, an Afghanistan expert who has served as a senior adviser for the United Nations and State Department. All it cared about, he said, was making “its enemies look bad.”

Months after Musk’s fateful retweet, Halimi is still picking up the pieces and trying to get answers.

During his long career as an official in the Afghan government, Halimi often rubbed shoulders with senior U.S. diplomats and generals, but now no one in the Trump administration is calling him back. He proudly showed ProPublica a letter he received from Stephen Hadley, the former U.S. national security adviser under George W. Bush, thanking him for his contributions to “promoting democracy” in Afghanistan.

A letter on White House letterhead sent to Halimi in 2005 from Stephen Hadley, assistant to the president for national security affairs, thanking him for his work (Obtained by ProPublica)

Former senior State Department, White House and national security officials who worked on Afghanistan over the last two decades described the Trump administration’s attack on Halimi as not only absurd, but also dangerous.

Johnny Walsh, a former State Department official who worked with Halimi, recalled that “he wanted the same thing as the Trump administration,” which was for a peaceful end to the war.

Lisa Curtis, a former senior adviser to the National Security Council who focused on Afghanistan in the first Trump administration, said, “DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

“DOGE did not do their homework. They are putting at risk individuals who are helping the United States.”

As for the graying Afghan scholar, the Taliban relented just long enough for several family members to make it out of the country. ProPublica is not disclosing how that happened or where they are for their safety, but they remain stranded without immigration status.

Cavanaugh, DOGE’s man inside USIP, announced he was leaving government service on Aug. 6. In a tweet, Cavanaugh thanked Trump “for the opportunity to help reduce wasteful spending” and said that “I’m hopeful the United States continues to prioritize sensible spending — I believe it is critical to maintain our supremacy 🇺🇸.”

USIP’s operations have been essentially frozen. Its headquarters is under federal control — standing empty aside from a few security guards monitoring the entrances. A new acting president, Darren Beattie, was named in late July.

Beattie is a former Duke University professor and Trump speechwriter who was fired in 2018 after it came out that he spoke at a conference regularly attended by white nationalists. Beattie did not address a ProPublica question about the event but previously dismissed the criticism, calling it “an honor to be attacked by the far-left.”

At USIP, he has promised to rebuild the organization to match the Trump administration’s foreign policy priorities.

In an emailed statement to ProPublica, Beattie defended the administration’s treatment of Halimi. The takeover of USIP, he wrote, “underscores President Trump’s resolve to end the weaponization of government, cut off funding to adversaries, and shut down reckless so-called peacebuilding programs that end up undermining our national security.”

George Foote, the former head lawyer of USIP who still represents its old leadership in ongoing litigation against the Trump administration, called DOGE’s outing of Halimi “criminally careless.”

The USIP headquarters, with its insignia torn from the wall. The missing letters — U, S, I and P — form the group’s acronym. (Christopher Bing/ProPublica)

Halimi remains without work. He wonders how he will support his wife and children and whether there’s any chance he can clear his name. At the very least, he hopes that the Trump administration will admit the error that has caused his family so much harm.

In one of ProPublica’s final interviews, Halimi made a last request: Could we help him get an audience with Musk?

“Why would one of the richest men in the world commit such an act of injustice?” Halimi asked. “Sometimes I think that if Elon Musk himself were fully informed about this matter, he would likely be deeply ashamed.”

Design and development by Allen Tan.

by Wendi C. Thomas, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with MLK50. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Marilyn Gooch was already skeptical about one of her newest neighbors, xAI’s supercomputing facility, when her cousin walked across the street in June with a blue mailer from the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce.

Her cousin didn’t know what to make of the postcard featuring the logos of nine local, state and federal agencies and the chamber’s assurance that billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company operated “in full compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local regulations and oversight.” The facility — part of Musk’s bid to dominate the AI market — opened at a breakneck pace almost a year before, brought to Memphis, Tennessee, largely due to the efforts of the local Chamber of Commerce.

Across the country, communities are grappling with the boom of data centers and supercomputing facilities, which consume voracious amounts of electricity and water and can emit smog-producing pollutants. In places from Maricopa County, Arizona, to Prince William County, Virginia, residents have used zoning restrictions as a means to keep supercomputers at bay — an option not available to Memphians because the xAI building was already zoned for industrial use.

Since the opening of the xAI supercomputing facility, Gooch had joined residents and environmental justice advocates sounding off at meetings about potential health impacts of xAI. She learned about the area’s already high concentration of toxic emissions from nearby industrial plants, including an oil refinery, and the county’s high asthma rates.

Of greatest concern: the emissions from the dozens of methane gas turbines — each roughly the size of a semitrailer — that were initially used to power xAI’s new facility located less than 2 miles from her home in southwest Memphis. Based on its analysis of county health ordinances and federal regulations, the Southern Environmental Law Center has asserted in multiple official and legal documents that these turbines violated the Clean Air Act and should never have been allowed; the Shelby County Health Department disagrees.

Gooch saw the mailer as an attempt to quiet their concerns.

First image: Heat shimmers above gas turbines at the Memphis, Tennessee, xAI site in April. Second image: Marilyn Gooch. (First image: Ariel J. Cobbert for MLK50. Second image: Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America.)

In the face of intense public opposition, the chamber has gone to unusual lengths to promote xAI, whose $12 billion investment the chamber believes will transform the shrinking city into a global hub of technological innovation. The chamber wants Memphis to be known as part of the “Digital Delta,” expanding beyond its blue-collar identity as the distribution capital of the country and FedEx headquarters.

This all-out push includes a five-member special operations team to provide what it calls “round-the-clock concierge service” to ensure “seamless execution of the company’s rapid expansion plans.” The chamber also managed xAI’s PR efforts, and while it has not held open public meetings about xAI, it hosted at least 12 invitation-only meetings to tout the project’s benefits to Memphis. And the chamber sent its first mailer in recent memory, which spread incorrect information about the governmental oversight in place to monitor Musk’s new facility.

Former chamber president Beverly Robertson said she can’t recall another instance of the chamber doing such a full-court press for a company — but then again, she and others noted, Memphis has never attracted a company of xAI’s scale.

The public had no input into the opening of the facility in their community. As a private business, xAI had no obligation to seek community feedback, the chamber has said. And because xAI did not seek or receive tax incentives, it wasn’t subject to review from government bodies or elected officials, some of whom learned about xAI’s arrival from the news.

The community’s lone chance to hear from xAI in person came in April during a heated health department hearing about residents’ concerns over the gas turbines. Brent Mayo, an xAI executive, read a statement about the company’s plans to meet the highest emissions standards. He left before the public comment period began.

An xAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment about the chamber’s mailer or to questions about the number of gas turbines powering the supercomputer.

The Chamber of Commerce announced xAI’s arrival with a page on its website titled “xAI Marks Its Spot in Memphis” over a photo of Mayo, center, flanked by chamber employees. (Screenshot by MLK50)

In this reliably Democratic and majority-Black city, some residents were upset by Musk’s alignment with President Donald Trump, his brief tenure as the chainsaw-wielding head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the antisemitic and racist posts from xAI’s chatbot Grok, which is powered by the supercomputer known as Colossus. In response to this criticism, the chamber says it defends projects, not people.

But what dominated the civic discussion was potential damage to the region’s air from xAI’s temporary turbines, especially the nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde they can emit, which contribute to smog. Even with brief exposure, smog increases the risk of respiratory problems, asthma and heart diseases, according to the World Health Organization.

The mailers sent in mid-June to residents in at least two neighborhoods, including Gooch’s, appeared to be addressing those fears, asserting that the chamber “will continue to prioritize compliance with existing standards and policies.”

For seven generations, Gooch’s family has lived in Boxtown, a Black neighborhood in southwest Memphis. Environmental justice activists say Boxtown has been plagued for decades by pollution from nearby industrial plants. In Gooch’s ZIP code, the median household income is just shy of $37,000 and the poverty rate is twice that of the city as a whole.

Boxtown residents gathered for a National Night Out event in the neighborhood in August. (Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America)

Gooch took the mailer from her cousin and scanned the alphabet soup of agency acronyms for the nine the chamber claims have “regulatory oversight and authority over xAI’s Supercomputing Facility.” Before retiring, she worked in human resources for 25 years and maintained workplace safety reports. “There’s no way they’re going to be monitoring and looking at all this,” she remembers thinking. “That’s so far beyond their reach.”

Only two agencies on that mailer have clear oversight over xAI’s impact on air quality and public health, the community’s primary concerns. The first is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which under the Trump administration aims to make the United States the world’s AI capital. Local oversight falls to the Shelby County Health Department, which says it is installing a long-awaited air monitor in south Memphis. Both agencies help ensure compliance with the Clean Air Act, the enforcement of which the current administration is weakening as part of a pattern of broader environmental rollbacks.

Two other agencies represented on the card — Memphis Light, Gas and Water Division and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation — told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and ProPublica that they have no authority over xAI’s supercomputing facility. The other five agencies say they do oversee some aspects of the facility, such as fire safety, zoning or potential whistleblower complaints — none of which address the health concerns that most preoccupied the community.

The mailer sent by Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce in June (MLK50)

The “Chamber’s mailer stating MLGW has regulatory oversight and authority over the xAI facility is in error. MLGW does not have regulatory authority or oversight of xAI or any business,” Ursula Madden, Memphis Light, Gas and Water’s spokesperson, said in an email.

Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation spokesperson Jennifer Donnals said in an email that “TDEC does not have regulatory oversight over supercomputer facilities.” The agency issued a permit related to construction and stormwater management at the Colossus site, she said.

Bobby White, the chamber’s chief government affairs officer, who said he wrote the text featured in the mailer, told MLK50 and ProPublica that he’d used the word regulatory “loosely.” He said the chamber sent the mailers to show residents that xAI didn’t set up shop in Memphis without consulting with anyone.

”It has been my intent to make sure people have understood that the company has essentially abided by rules and law as they currently exist,” White said in a written statement. “I have also in public and private ways tried to advise activists and leaders that changing this company’s or any company’s behavior comes down to changing the policy that allows for it.”

One of xAI’s staunchest critics is State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who represents a majority-Black district that includes Boxtown. Memphis Community Against Pollution, co-founded by Justin Pearson and now run by his brother KeShaun Pearson, was at the forefront of the fight to get the Shelby County Health Department to deny xAI’s permit for 15 permanent turbines. It was joined by other local groups including Young, Gifted & Green, the Chickasaw Group of the Sierra Club and Tigers Against Pollution.

State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, standing on the right, is one of xAI’s staunchest critics. (Andrea Morales/MLK50)

Justin Pearson said the chamber’s mailer misled residents by including agencies that have no authority or only indirect authority over xAI.

“It’s the red handkerchief of the magician,” Pearson said. “The propaganda that they are putting out to try and convince people that there’s nothing to see here, there’s nothing to worry about, is only at the behest of a multibillion-dollar corporation.”

White said xAI did not ask the chamber to send the mailer and accused environmental activists of misleading residents with claims that “the turbines were somehow operating counter to existing policy and regulations.” He said he got involved after seeing his former sixth grade teacher, church members and community leaders he’s worked with for years at a “raucous town hall meeting on the subject of gas turbines, where people were being whipped into a frenzy and still leaving without good information.”

The chamber emphasized White’s message in a more nuanced way in a July webinar held less than a month after the mailers arrived in Gooch’s neighborhood: “XAl’s presence in Memphis has occurred with the oversight of, input from, and/or strategic alignment with the following agencies/organizations,” read a slide, with the logos of the same agencies.

Chambers of commerce exist to promote businesses and lobby for a pro-business climate, said Darrin Wilson, an associate professor at Northern Kentucky University who studies local economic development. But he said pro-business organizations should still be expected to provide accurate information.

“You want to make sure that the residents of Memphis and Shelby County have 100% accurate and full information around something that is going to impact their day-to-day lives,” he said, “so that they can make decisions for themselves and advocate on their own behalf.”

First and third images: Tigers Against Pollution, an environmental group, protest against xAI at the Shelby County Health Department in Memphis in July. Second image: Surveillance cameras monitor xAI’s Colossus site. (Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America)

The chamber maintains that xAI is an indisputable win for the city, expected to create an estimated 500 high-paying jobs and, in the first year alone, generate tens of millions of dollars in city and county property taxes, soaring to as much as $100 million next year. The city’s mayor plans to direct 25% of tax revenues from xAI’s first facility to the neighborhoods closest to the operation. xAI has recently committed to funding repairs and new athletic fields at four neighborhood public schools.

According to press reports, xAI’s presence is continuing to expand in the Memphis area. Its second supercomputer facility, Colossus 2, is expected to come online soon. Musk has announced he’s moving a power plant from overseas to power Colossus 2. And just across the state line in Mississippi, an xAI-affiliated firm purchased the site of a former Duke Energy power plant less than 2 miles from Colossus 2.

After months of weighing whether to approve xAI’s permit request to operate 15 permanent, cleaner turbines, the county health department granted the permit in July. The Southern Environmental Law Center has appealed the permit decision to the Shelby County Air Pollution Control board, an appointed body that hears such protests. The health department did not publicly explain its decision to grant the permit.

A gas turbine outside xAI in March, four months before the Shelby County Health Department approved a permit for 15 permanent turbines. (Andrea Morales/MLK50)

The chamber says that xAI has taken a number of steps to address environmental concerns. It claims that emissions from the permanent turbines, which will be a backup power source, will be far less than the maximum the EPA allows. To protect the electrical grid in times of peak demand, xAI is also using Tesla Megapack batteries as another backup power source.

In addition, the company is building an $80 million wastewater facility that will allow xAI, plus the Tennessee Valley Authority and a nearby steel manufacturer, to use recycled water to cool their plants instead of relying on the aquifer the region depends on.

“What we’re really seeing is a company that, quite frankly, is doing as much as you could hope a company would do in terms of being environmentally conscious,” White said.

Still, people in Gooch’s neighborhood have reason to worry about air quality. Last year, the American Lung Association gave Shelby County an F grade for ozone, an air pollutant that contributes to smog. The county also has the state’s highest rate of ER visits for asthma, and the city has been named an asthma capital by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.

In southwest Memphis, the cumulative cancer risk associated with exposure to 13 carcinogens in the air was 4 times higher than the national average, according to a 2013 study by University of Memphis researchers.

Many of Marilyn Gooch’s relatives are buried at Boxtown’s New Park Memorial Gardens. (Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America)

“Every family member that I’ve had that lived in the Boxtown area has died of some form of cancer,” Gooch said, acknowledging that some were smokers.

Gooch, a member of the Boxtown Neighborhood Association, attended one of White’s xAI presentations at a nearby church this spring. She remembers White saying that Memphis needs more tax revenue and can’t afford to let xAI, or other companies, slide across the state line to Mississippi.

She’d planned to ask questions, but after listening to White focus on the finances, she decided not to.

“His whole spiel was about money, economics,” she recalled. “Not all money is good money.”

by Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala, illustrations by Sam Green for ProPublica

When the Trump administration announced massive cuts to federal health agencies earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was getting rid of excess administrators who were larding the government with bureaucratic bloat.

But a groundbreaking data analysis by ProPublica shows the administration has cut deeper than it has acknowledged. Though Kennedy said he would add scientists to the workforce, agencies have lost thousands of them, along with colleagues who those scientists depended on to dispatch checks, fix computers and order lab supplies, enabling them to do their jobs.

Done in the name of government efficiency, these reductions have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions, ProPublica found, according to interviews with more than three dozen former and current federal employees.

Over 20,500 Workers Lost as of Aug. 16

Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.

Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses or the mice needed to test vaccines.

And less than five years after a pandemic killed more than a million Americans, scientists who study infectious diseases are struggling to pay for saline solution, gloves and blood to feed lab mosquitos.

The Trump administration has refused to say how many workers have been lost so far. But ProPublica’s analysis reveals the cuts in unprecedented detail.

Who HHS Has Lost Since January

More than 3,000 scientists and public health specialists are gone.

Over 1,000 regulators and safety inspectors have also left.

In total, more than 20,500 workers, or about 18% of the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce, have left or been pushed out, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal worker departures using public information from the HHS employee directory.

The analysis is an undercount — it doesn’t include the hundreds or even thousands of workers who have received layoff notices but remain on administrative leave.

No health agency has been spared, with some important divisions losing more than 1 in 5 workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in charge of public health, lost 15% of its staff; the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, 16%; and the Food and Drug Administration, which ensures the safety of most of what goes into people’s bodies — from baby formula to cancer drugs to hip implants — 21%.

Thousands of these employees were laid off or had their contracts cut, while some took buyouts or retired earlier than anticipated. Divisions have experienced a brain drain of epic proportions, ProPublica found, losing senior leaders behind some of the biggest health initiatives of the modern era, like the rapid rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Many of the cuts contradict what the administration has said about its priorities.

The secretary who has questioned the safety of vaccines has pushed out scores of regulators who work to make vaccines safe. And while he has declared a new era in the fight against chronic disease, he has decimated a center dedicated to that very goal.

Division leaders and staffers told ProPublica the cuts will lead their agencies to neglect their duties: Federal researchers will conduct fewer clinical trials and studies, regulators will conduct fewer or less-thorough inspections of egg farms and foreign drug factories, and public health specialists will be less prepared to combat outbreaks of deadly viruses. With exit and severance packages pending, many former and current workers would only speak anonymously, out of fear of retribution.

HHS did not dispute the findings of ProPublica’s analysis and didn’t directly respond to questions about the consequences of the cuts of thousands of scientists, public health specialists and safety inspectors. HHS also did not respond to our questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions. A spokesperson for the department said the idea that Kennedy is weakening public health is “dishonest.”

“Yes, we’ve made cuts — to bloated bureaucracies that were long overdue for accountability,” the spokesperson said in an email. “At the same time, we are working to redirect resources to science that delivers measurable impact, rebuilds public trust, and helps Make America Healthy Again.”

Former health secretary Xavier Becerra, who served under President Joseph Biden until earlier this year, called the cuts reckless.

“Public health isn’t a luxury — it’s a core function of government,” he said. “This hollowing out of expertise could leave us dangerously exposed. It takes years to build a professional workforce with the technical knowledge and public trust these roles require. Once you lose that, it’s not easy to get back.”

REGULATORS LOST

Spotlight: The Food and Drug Administration

When HHS announced the federal worker cuts, the department said that the FDA's safety inspectors and reviewers overseeing food, drugs and medical devices would be spared.

However, ProPublica has found that the FDA has lost more than 400 workers who support inspections of everything from dairy farms to seafood processors to blood banks, and who ensure that companies follow federal regulations. More than a third of them worked at its Office of Inspections and Investigations, which serves as the “eyes and ears” of the agency. More than 240 consumer safety specialists have left across the agency, including nearly 40 workers responsible for safeguarding food, plus about 220 chemists, biologists and toxicologists.

21% of FDA Workers Have Left

The Food and Drug Administration, the primary agency responsible for regulating food, drugs and vaccines, has lost over 900 scientists and health experts since January, along with over 500 regulators, investigators and compliance workers.

Many of the investigators who left had honed their skills over years of field visits and inspections, developing a sixth sense for possible violations. “I could walk into a plant and within five minutes could tell you if there was a rodent problem,” said a former division director at the investigations office who left the FDA after inspecting countless facilities over more than two decades. “Once you’ve been in a hot warehouse and you smell rodent urine, it’s like fresh-cut grass, you know exactly what it is the minute you smell it.”

With diminished capacity to spot potential problems, the system of oversight, which has historically been short-staffed, could break down, several former investigators told ProPublica. “They might miss something — a contaminant in a drug, a contaminant in a piece of food, a microbug in something because we had to freeze it for six months until they had enough person power to actually look at the sample,” the former director said. In April, CBS News reported that the investigations office was already planning on reducing routine “surveillance inspections” in response to worker cuts.

Key support staff who make sure investigators have everything they need, from essential supplies to travel visas, have also been cut. About 65% of the staff in the division responsible for budget, facilities and travel for the investigations office have left.

Dr. Peter Lurie, who was an associate commissioner at the FDA during the Obama administration, said that such drastic cuts will hamper the agency’s ability to recruit future inspectors and scientists.

“The big attraction of federal employment has always been its stability and its benefits, and we’re at the point that the stability is undermined,” said Lurie, who is currently the president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “This is a set of cuts that is going to hamstring the FDA for a decade or more.”

Vaccine Regulators Pushed Out

One of the divisions of the FDA most impacted by workforce cuts has been the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. It ensures the safety and quality of biological products for human use, like red blood cells for people with sickle cell disease, immunotherapy for those battling cancer and vaccines for everyone. Since January, the center has lost about 500 people, or 26% of its workforce.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the center played a crucial role in ensuring the quick rollout of safe and effective vaccines. It reviews and approves new vaccines and oversees their manufacturing and use. The center also conducts its own research to support the development of vaccines.

But in February, when the administration began slashing the federal workforce, the research stalled. “At some point, we decided which experiments were the priority for us,” a former CBER scientist told ProPublica.

“The center was already somewhat understaffed for the workload,” said Dr. Peter Marks, who led the center from 2016 to 2025. “Now with these cuts, particularly cuts of the most experienced individuals who have left for various reasons, the agency, and in particular the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is just a shadow of its former self.”

Marks, who helped launch the program to rapidly develop COVID-19 vaccines, resigned under pressure in March, citing an “unprecedented assault on scientific truth” in his departure letter. Kennedy, who has long been a fierce critic of vaccines, has used his office to further sow doubt about immunizations, despite decades of evidence of their safety and efficacy.

Two of the center’s top cell and gene therapy officials were placed on leave this summer. HHS did not respond to questions about the high-profile exits, but it has previously suggested the gene therapy leaders weren’t aligned with the administration’s goals and said that Marks had no place at the agency if he did not support “restoring science to its golden standard.”

As civil servants have departed the center, political appointees have gained a foothold. Under the leadership of Dr. Vinay Prasad, who the administration brought in to lead CBER in May, the center “was run as a political organization,” said Marks. “Decisions were not being made on science, nor were they even being made on articulated policy. They were being made essentially on an arbitrary basis.” The New York Times reported that Prasad overruled his center’s experts on the use of COVID vaccines, recommending restricting the shots. Prasad did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

A spokesperson for HHS said in an email that Kennedy was not antivaccine and that the agency would continue to regulate immunizations. “The FDA remains steadfast in enforcing rigorous vaccine oversight, ensuring the highest standards of safety and protection for all Americans,” said the spokesperson, adding that Kennedy was “pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability.”

SCIENTISTS CUT

Spotlight: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In May, Kennedy claimed in a Senate committee hearing that HHS had not fired any “working scientists,” only targeting those in IT or administration. “In terms of working scientists, our policy was to make sure none of them were lost and that that research continues,” he said.

But ProPublica has found that more than 1,050 scientists, physicians and public health specialists — many of whom were conducting research and disease surveillance — have left or been pushed out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alone since January.

Over a Thousand Scientists Lost

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lost over 3,000 workers. A third of them worked as scientists or in health care roles.

One of the key responsibilities of scientists at the CDC is surveillance — gathering and studying data on deaths or disease outcomes; many of the experts leading this work are gone. The team tracking maternal and infant health outcomes, which helps the public understand how people die in childbirth, has been placed on administrative leave. The program cataloguing the frequency of common injuries, such as car accidents, overdoses, dog bites and drownings, was cut. The staff that monitors lead poisoning in children was eliminated.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, who led the CDC during the Obama administration, said the cuts were endangering the public.

“What public health does is it helps us see the invisible: See whether it’s the microbes that are killing us, or the toxins that are poisoning us, or the trends in diseases that we need to respond to protect ourselves and our families,” he said. “To the extent that these actions weaken our ability to see health trends and health risks, they make Americans less safe.”

Chronic Disease Experts Forced Out

During one of his January Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy declared war on chronic disease. “President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again,” he testified.

Despite this proclamation, Kennedy-approved cuts slashed the staff of the CDC’s chronic disease center by about 20%; nearly half of those lost were scientists and public health workers.

Several divisions of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion have also been radically diminished: 45% of its oral health division, which protects the teeth of kids whose parents can’t afford dentists, has been lost, along with more than 35% of the division that focuses on preventing heart disease and strokes.

The cuts are worse than they appear on paper because they don’t reflect the people on administrative leave. At the center’s smoking and health office, for example, our analysis shows more than a quarter of the workforce is gone, but according to multiple former staffers, only one federal employee is actually still working there.

As the office emptied out following a wave of mass layoffs and forced retirements, a handful of stragglers frantically boxed up historical research, guidance documents and reports so that they wouldn’t be destroyed. “It’s 60 years of work that could be thrown in trash dumps,” said a former staffer.

The work of the office, which tracks tobacco use and supports state smoking prevention programs, has essentially been eliminated, said multiple workers. Federal grants have been delayed, leading some states to cut their programs. While cigarette smoking has decreased in recent decades, vaping and e-cigarette use has surged, particularly among young people, even as evidence mounts of their dangers. But after this year, the office’s tracking of youth smoking and tobacco use is expected to be discontinued.

“If eliminated, the expertise that existed at the Office on Smoking and Health, it doesn’t just pause, it disappears, and that would take years to rebuild,” said Ranjana Caple, the national senior manager of advocacy at the American Lung Association. “The nation loses its ability to prevent the next wave of nicotine addiction, protect kids and help people quit.”

RESEARCH STAFF TARGETED

Spotlight: The National Institutes of Health

One of the central roles of the NIH is its funding of research at academic and biomedical institutions. It awards roughly $30 billion annually. Since January, the administration has terminated more than 1,450 research grants and withheld more than $750 million in funding.

Even the grants that survived are not being paid out, partly because the administration has fired the workers who administer the funding, said former and current staffers.

“There were all of these cuts to the people who deliver the grant funds, the people who are in charge of the funds and reviewing the funds,” said Anna Culbertson, a former NIH scientific program specialist who was a probationary federal employee and was laid off in February. “The consequence of grant funding delays is that some experiments and trials that take years may have to be restarted.”

At three NIH institutes focused on mental health, aging and infectious disease, 30% or more of the workers in divisions responsible for approving and dispatching money have been cut, leading to substantial delays in payouts. A recent analysis by STAT found that NIH grant funding levels have dropped nearly 30% compared with previous years.

The Nation’s Primary Medical Research Agency Has Lost 16% of Its Workforce

The National Institutes of Health has lost more than 7,000 workers since January. Because HHS does not provide job titles for the majority of workers at the NIH, we are unable to show worker departures by job category.

“With the resignations, retirements, firings and contractors being lost, the capacity to get grants out the door is diminished,” said a scientific review staffer still with the agency. “We just can’t get everything done.”

The delays have forced universities to pause research, fire staff and even turn away students. At the University of Washington, the renewal of 73 federal grants totaling over $61 million was delayed as of April, leading to furloughs and layoffs, court documents reveal. And at the University of California, the delays have contributed to a systemwide hiring freeze on new faculty and staff. The financial instability created by the funding delays led the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to reduce admissions to its doctoral programs by 250 students.

Infectious Disease Researchers Scaled Back

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which supports research that develops and tests vaccines, lost more than 850 workers, or roughly 17% of its workforce, since January.

The institute has long played a critical role in combating infectious disease: It funded decades of research on coronaviruses, laying the foundation for vaccines; it extensively supported HIV/AIDS research, which has transformed the disease from a death sentence to a chronic condition; and it has trained scores of scientists and researchers, fostering their careers and discoveries.

But in recent years, it has become a target of the right. Its former director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the center for nearly four decades until 2022 and was a member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, was accused by Republican lawmakers of “wielding unchecked power over public health policy” by encouraging temporary stay-at-home orders. Citing his leadership, Senate Republicans in 2023 proposed abolishing the institute and divvying up its functions.

Since January, scores of senior officials at the institute have been forced out or placed on administrative leave, which several former high-level employees told ProPublica they believed was political retribution in response to pandemic policies. HHS did not respond to questions about whether the moves were retaliatory.

The most recent director of the institute, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, was forced to choose between dismissal or a reassignment in an outpost of the Indian Health Service.

“They’re taking out the head,” said a NIAID scientist who recently left, “because then there’s no one to protect us.”

Sophie Chou contributed data reporting.

Art Direction by Andrea Wise.

by Pratheek Rebala, Annie Waldman 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.

The Trump administration has refused to reveal how many workers have left federal health agencies amid a massive purge. Without official figures, ProPublica turned to a federal employee directory to quantify the impact.

Several news outlets — including ProPublica — have used this directory to show who is entering and leaving the federal government, spot political appointments and identify members of the Department of Government Efficiency. According to multiple former and current employees and health agency documents, the HHS employee directory helps workers locate and authenticate their colleagues. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions.

To understand staffing changes over time, ProPublica has been regularly archiving the HHS directory since before President Donald Trump returned to office. Unlike official government worker datasets, which are often months out of date and incomplete, directory data provides a more current picture of who is, and isn’t, employed at the nation’s largest health agencies.

The HHS directory covers staff in the department’s main office and across more than a dozen health agencies and institutions, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health.

The directory provides a worker’s name, email address, agency, office and job title. Some employees are flagged as “non-government,” indicating they may be working on contract or have another temporary status.

While official HHS employment figures suggest its workforce is about 82,000 employees, the directory contained nearly 140,000 entries. The difference is explained by nongovernment workers such as contractors, fellows, interns and guest researchers. Roughly 30,000 records in the directory were explicitly marked as nongovernment, but this label was far from comprehensive. We found hundreds of workers who had titles that suggested they were contractors but were not flagged as nongovernment.

While these workers were not directly employed by the government as civil servants, we included them in our analysis because they are crucial to agency operations, particularly at research-heavy institutions such as the NIH, FDA and CDC. We excluded interns, students and volunteers, as well as directory entries that were tied to group mailboxes or conference rooms rather than individual people.

To analyze turnover, we tracked when a worker’s email address first appeared and last appeared. When an email address disappeared, we marked it as a departure. When a new one appeared, we marked it as a hire. To quantify cuts to the workforce, we counted the number of entries that appeared in the directory before Jan. 25 and disappeared on or after that date. We chose Jan. 25 to account for delays we observed in updates to the directory. Starting the analysis a few days after Trump was sworn in should exclude most political appointees who left at the end of the Biden administration from our analysis, but there may be cases where a political appointee was dropped from the directory after this date. Our analysis includes departures through Aug. 16.

While our analysis is intended to understand workforce cuts, not all departures are layoffs. Workers may have left for other reasons, including retirements, resignations, buyouts and contract cuts.

To test the directory’s accuracy, we spot-checked employment status using LinkedIn, other open-source records and interviews. While we did not find up-to-date, publicly available profiles that matched the directory for every person we searched, we were able to confirm the employment status for dozens of current and former workers.

Some high-profile departures enabled us to test our methodology: Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was appointed to lead the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in May, left the agency in July and resumed his role again in August. The directory data accurately reflected each of these employment changes.

We also wanted to understand the role of the lost workers and how their departures would affect their agencies. For this, we relied on an “organization” field in the directory, which allowed us to link employees to their specific office within HHS using public organization charts. At large agencies, this field proved incredibly valuable to understanding the exact divisions where the losses took place.

Job titles in the directory are inconsistent, so we used a local large language model classifier to assign each title into one of four major groups: science/health, regulators/compliance, tech/IT and other. We manually reviewed the job titles in each category and looked up former employees on LinkedIn to confirm their employment status and nature of the work they performed. Our totals for the NIH are an undercount because 78% of entries there do not list a role. We relied on workers’ most recently listed role, which may reflect a job a person had for only a short time.

The employee directory is the best data we have access to, but it is not without limitations.

Our understanding is that each record represents an individual worker. There are some cases where our analysis counts a worker twice because they were seen in two agencies or had multiple email addresses, likely due to a name change or clerical fix. Our review of these records suggests these types of duplicates are uncommon.

Our rigorous review found some instances where the directory is not up to date. We excluded the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from our analysis because its directory has not received regular updates. We also excluded the Indian Health Service because it has an abnormally high rate of churn.

We are not counting about 2,500 entries that can be found in search but that are missing a detailed record or do not list an email.

Sophie Chou contributed data reporting.

by Drew Shaw, Fort Worth Report

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

Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, came one day after President Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots. The president lacks the unilateral power to decide how individual states run elections, but his declaration speaks to long-brewing and unfounded claims by some conservatives that the country’s electoral system is insecure and vulnerable to widespread fraud. Trump has repeatedly and falsely asserted that he won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden.

Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, who heads up the commissioners court, has also raised numerous questions about the security of local elections, helping to launch an electoral integrity unit in the county after he became judge in 2022. As of last summer, however, the unit had received fewer than 100 allegations of voter fraud. He and fellow Republican commissioners also cut funding to provide free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents. “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” O’Hare said at the time. And commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about what they said were left-leaning groups holding registration drives. (ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have previously written about O’Hare’s political influence in North Texas.)

On Tuesday, O’Hare voted with the two Republican commissioners on the court to reduce the number of polling sites in the county to 216, down from 331 in 2023. The decision also cut down the number of early voting sites.

County officials said the move was to save money, as they historically see low voter turnout in nonpresidential elections.

Throughout the meeting, O’Hare repeatedly emphasized that the cuts were intended to make the election more efficient. He argued that both the switch to county-wide voting in 2019, which allows voters to cast a ballot at any polling site in the county, and the expected low turnout made the cuts appropriate.

"I would venture to guess 99% of the public cannot name a single thing on (the 2025 ballot),” he said during the meeting.

Fewer voting sites means fewer voters, Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told the Report.

“If you move a polling place farther away from someone’s house, then they’re less likely to vote because you’ve increased the cost of voting,” said Rottinghaus, who has studied poll placement and its impact on turnout. “The cost can be your time. It can be your gas.”

The county’s move falls in line with a national trend that generally sees Republican-led states and localities “restrain and restrict” how voting operates — often in the name of discouraging illegal voting or, in Tarrant County’s recent case, cutting costs, Rottinghaus said. This could look like reducing voting locations or shortening early voting hours, he said.

Texas has led multiple efforts to make going to the polls more difficult, he said, such as making mail-in ballots harder to obtain and requiring photo IDs when casting a ballot.

No single law dramatically impacts voter turnout, Rottinghaus said, rather, it’s the collective of ever-changing policies that can discourage people from voting.

“The more you move around how voting occurs, like the hours and the locations, the harder it is for voters to understand exactly what they’re supposed to do and when,” he said. “A confused voter is usually a nonvoter.”

This is not the first time Tarrant County has been at the forefront of changing political headwinds. Earlier this summer, the commissioners, led by O’Hare, voted along party lines to redraw the county precincts; such changes usually happen after the decennial census rather than in the middle of the decade. O’Hare admitted the goal of the redrawn maps was to favor Republican candidates.

“This is about Republican versus Democrat, period,” O’Hare told Dallas television station WFAA ahead of the commissioners’ June 3 vote. “If it passes with one of the maps that I would want to see pass, it’s a very strong likelihood that we will have three Republicans on the Commissioners Court.”

In July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added redistricting to the agenda of a special legislative session — a step he was apparently reluctant to take until he received a call from Trump to discuss the issue, the Tribune reported. The proposal has sparked a national fight over the redrawing of congressional maps. On Wednesday, the GOP-led Texas House took an initial vote adopting a new map designed to increase the number of Republican seats in the U.S. Congress.

Abbott has also fanned concerns about allegations of illegal voting, last year announcing the removal of more than 1 million ineligible voters from the state’s rolls, including more than 6,500 potential noncitizens. An investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and Votebeat, however, found that the number of alleged noncitizens the governor cited was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong.

Concerns About the Cuts

More than three dozen speakers at Tuesday’s meeting denounced the move to cut polling sites and early voting locations, with some raising concerns that it amounted to the suppression of Black, Hispanic and college-age voters. Several speakers called the cuts a more extreme version of O’Hare’s failed effort to remove eight early voting locations at colleges last year. Only one person spoke in favor of the reductions.

Sabrina Ball, who opposed reducing the polling sites, said she has worked as an election judge in Republican Commissioner Manny Ramirez’s district in northwest Tarrant County. She said she’s seen firsthand people working hard to find the time to get to a polling location and vote.

“You’re not saving money. You’re sacrificing democracy to save a buck,” she said.

The two Democratic commissioners, Roderick Miles Jr. and Alisa Simmons, voted against the changes after unsuccessfully trying to delay the decision.

“Everybody deserves the right to have a place that they are comfortable with and familiar with to go and to cast their vote,” said Miles, who represents predominantly Black neighborhoods that saw a reduction in voting locations. He later added, “To dismantle or take those rights away from us that we worked hard to get is unacceptable at any level.”

Simmons said it was inappropriate to reduce voting locations as Tarrant County’s population grows. She pointed out that the Republican members of the Commissioners Court used that growth as a reason to redistrict the county’s precincts midcycle this year — a change that would significantly increase the chances of a GOP candidate defeating her in 2026.

A Texas law passed in May reduces the county’s minimum Election Day voting locations to 212 — rolling back a 2023 requirement of 347.

Tarrant County Commissioners Alisa Simmons, a Democrat, first image, and Manny Ramirez, a Republican, second image. The move to reduce polling places passed by a 3-2 vote. (Drew Shaw/Fort Worth Report)

Tarrant County Election Administrator Clinton Ludwig said the sites meet the state’s new “bare minimum,” with “a little bit of wiggle room” in case certain planned locations fall through. He told commissioners that the initially proposed cuts aimed to save about $1 million.

He said he based the reductions on voter turnout in 2023, which saw about 12.5% registered voters cast ballots, he said. Locations’ accessibility and ability to securely store voting information were also considered, Ludwig said.

He said that no commissioner had any influence on the list and that no partisan analysis was taken into account.

Ludwig and O’Hare’s office did not immediately respond to requests to comment following the vote. O’Hare has also not responded to ProPublica and the Tribune’s previous reporting about him, declining multiple interview requests and refusing to answer questions, though a spokesperson sent the newsrooms a list of eight of his major accomplishments, including cutting county spending and lowering local property tax rates.

Rottinghaus said some counties “yo-yo” year to year in the number of polling places they have. Elections such as November’s typically have fewer locations than presidential and midterm ones, he said. Still, Tarrant County’s reduction seems “aggressive,” he said.

Once the number of polling places goes down, it usually stays down, Rottinghaus said.

“You’re going to generally see that same number continue for at least the near term,” he said.

Though he ultimately voted to reduce polling locations, Ramirez pushed back on the initial list of cuts to early voting sites, some of which he said were established and popular with voters. Ramirez said the county must balance access and efficiency. Commissioners then added back nine early voting locations. O’Hare was the lone vote against that move, saying some of those sites had historically low turnout.

“The formula for where you put these voting sites has to be scientific,” Ramirez told the Report ahead of the vote. “It should be population-based and proximity to additional site-based.”

Several Fort Worth City Council members urged their constituents to speak against the effort in the lead-up to the vote.

Council member Carlos Flores, who represents parts of northwest Fort Worth, issued a statement against the vote, saying fewer sites negatively impact diverse communities. In a statement to the Report, he added that limited polling locations and inconvenient voting procedures contribute to low turnout.

Mia Hall, who represents southwest Fort Worth, sent a news release to her district on Monday, decrying the proposed cuts in parts of her district that are predominantly Black or Hispanic.

“These communities have long fought for equitable access to the ballot box, and removing their polling locations is simply unacceptable,” Hall wrote. “While I understand the pressures of state regulations and budgetary constraints, disenfranchising entire communities is not an acceptable response.”

Drew Shaw is a government accountability reporter for the Fort Worth Report. Contact him at drew.shaw@fortworthreport.org.

by Sharon Lerner

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

Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery.

Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer.

McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done.

“That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred.

As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes.

For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms.

He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest.

In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.”

Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.”

As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism.

Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview, and an HHS spokesperson did not answer specific questions from ProPublica, including those related to the concerns of the coalition of autism scientists. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is taking action on autism as the public health emergency it is,” the spokesperson wrote. “NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic — employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science. The Department will follow the science, wherever it leads.”

Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back.

Kennedy would have been well positioned to advocate for researchers looking into the environmental causes of autism while sitting on President Donald Trump’s cabinet.

The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of his former attorney general, Bobby, Kennedy spent decades as an attorney battling some of the world’s most notorious corporate polluters. Once heralded by Time Magazine as one of the “heroes for the planet,” he railed against actions by the first Trump administration, complaining in his 2017 introduction to the book “Climate in Crisis” that 33 years’ worth of his work was “reduced to ruins as the president mounted his assault on science and environmental protection.”

But recently he has remained publicly silent as the Environmental Protection Agency halts research and weakens regulations on air pollution and chemicals, including some McCanlies and her colleagues have identified as possible factors in the development of autism.

“I don’t think he’s aware of my work,” McCanlies said, “or most of the literature that’s been published on what the causes of autism are.”

McCanlies was studying how a toxic chemical, beryllium, causes chronic lung inflammation in workers when she began to think seriously about autism.

It was 2005, and her college-age stepson had a job shadowing children with autism. As he described helping them navigate playground dynamics, reminding them to return a wave or a greeting, McCanlies wondered whether their behaviors might be tied to chemicals their parents had encountered on the job. Could the exposures have altered genes their parents passed down? Could they have infiltrated the kids’ developing brains through the womb or through breast milk?

The questions remained abstract until McCanlies met another researcher named Irva Hertz-Picciotto, who had a unique data set. She had collected detailed information on the occupations of two large groups of parents: those who had children with autism and those whose kids developed neurotypically. Comparing the groups’ chemical exposures before their children were born could help illuminate causes of the condition, McCanlies realized.

Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist based at the University of California, Davis, was a pioneer in the search for the causes of autism. In 2009, she published a much-cited paper highlighting a sevenfold increase in diagnoses in California. While others had asserted the rise was due to increased awareness and broadened diagnostic criteria, Hertz-Picciotto found those factors could only partially explain it. She and others went on to document additional contributors to autism risk, including parental age at the time of birth, a mother’s fever during pregnancy and more traditional environmental considerations, such as chemical exposures.

McCanlies hadn’t studied autism. But she offered Hertz-Picciotto her experience in genetics and epidemiology as well as the considerable resources of her agency. NIOSH was established in 1970 to investigate the dangers of the workplace, and its statisticians and industrial hygienists were among the world’s experts on the health impacts of chemical exposures.

The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Nate Smallwood for ProPublica)

Their first collaboration, published in 2012, used Hertz-Picciotto’s data to see if parents of children with autism were more likely to have been exposed to chemicals already thought to be dangerous to the developing brain. The work was technical and time-consuming, but the analysis showed a clear relationship: Mothers and fathers of children with autism were more likely than the parents of unaffected children to have been exposed to solvents such as lacquer, varnish and xylene on the job. These solvents evaporate quickly and can be easily inhaled or absorbed through the skin. Chemical plant workers, painters, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, cleaners and medical personnel are among those who may be exposed to these solvents.

The sample size was small — just 174 families. But the results lined up with recent findings showing possible links between autism and exposure to metals and certain solvents during pregnancy or early childhood, including a solvent called methylene chloride. They also tracked with studies linking the chemicals to miscarriage, reproductive problems, birth defects and developmental problems other than autism.

McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto followed up with a 2019 study that looked at more than 950 families. It showed that women exposed to solvents at work during pregnancy and the three months leading up to it were 1.5 times more likely to have a child with autism than women not exposed to the chemicals. (The study did not find a link for chemically exposed men.)

Their third study, published in 2023, took the link between solvent exposure and autism as a starting point. Using blood samples to examine the genetic makeup of the parents of children with autism, McCanlies and Hertz-Picciotto found that when exposed to solvents on the job, people with specific variants of 31 genes had an especially elevated risk of having a child with autism. Their genetic makeup appeared to increase the risk that solvents by themselves posed. Some of those 31 genes help cells connect with one another; others play a role in helping cells migrate to different areas so they can grow into the various parts of the brain; still others ensure that cells clear away toxic substances.

Researchers were also making strides under the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, a division of Health and Human Services, which has financed investigations into dozens of environmental contaminants. Several have been linked to autism, including air pollution, certain pesticides, a plastic additive known as BPA and diesel exhaust, which causes “autism-like behavioral changes” in mice. In 2021, Hertz-Picciotto co-published a study linking “forever chemicals” called PFOA and PFNA with the condition. (In 2023, a second paper also found an association with PFNA.) Other government-funded research has established a link between autism and another solvent, trichloroethylene, also known as TCE, which has been used for dry cleaning, manufacturing and degreasing machines.

Together, the results have shown that many exposures can increase the likelihood of autism, and that there can be multiple causes for any one person.

At least one exposure can have the opposite effect: A study by a researcher named Rebecca Schmidt — and funded by the NIEHS and NIH — found that a B vitamin called folic acid was associated with a significant decrease in the chances of an autism diagnosis. More than a dozen studies have since confirmed the association.

One problem hung over much of autism research. The sweeping diagnosis includes everyone from people who treasure their neurological differences to those with debilitating symptoms, including repetitive behaviors, excruciating sensitivity to touch and sounds, and difficulty responding to social situations. McCanlies and Hertz–Picciotto wondered whether certain chemicals were linked to the most severe cases or to specific symptoms.

In 2023, they set about finding out.

They were preparing to submit their study for publication when newly inaugurated Trump put Kennedy in charge of America’s health.

Despite having made chronic health conditions the focus of his agenda, Kennedy has quietly abided environmental policies that will exacerbate these problems, including autism.

The Environmental Protection Agency, under Administrator Lee Zeldin, is rolling back rules and regulations that will result in an increase in air pollution, which multiple studies have linked to autism. The agency is in the process of reversing bans on several chemicals, including TCE, one of the solvents associated with the disorder, and has told a federal court it won’t legally defend certain aspects of a ban on methylene chloride, another of the solvents linked to autism. It also began dismantling its Office of Research and Development, which has funded research into the environmental conditions contributing to autism. According to an EPA spokesperson, more than 2,300 workers have so far elected to leave the agency through Trump administration programs encouraging early retirement and resignation.

The EPA also began canceling grants, including one it had given to Schmidt, the researcher who studied the protective effect of folic acid. Schmidt had been awarded $1.3 million to determine whether air pollution from wildfires might increase the risk of various neurological conditions. Schmidt and her colleagues had just done preliminary analysis and found that there was a significant association between wildfire pollution exposure and autism when she received a letter saying that the grant was terminated because the project was “no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.” After a judge ruled in a class-action lawsuit on behalf of University of California researchers alleging their funding was unlawfully terminated, her grant was reinstated last month. But the EPA has appealed the judge’s ruling, leaving Schmidt unsure about the fate of the project.

Schmidt said there is an urgent need to finish the study and warn people about how to avoid the dangers from wildfire smoke by staying indoors and using air filters and N95 masks. “Millions of pregnant women are getting exposed as we speak,” she said.

Meanwhile, Kennedy has presided over his own gutting of research. Known for sharing videos of his bare-chested workouts, he likened his agency’s cuts to getting rid of “unhealthy fat,” but his plan to reduce the staff of HHS by 20,000 amounts to slashing the workforce by roughly a quarter, including veteran scientists. Among the divisions Kennedy eliminated was one that studied air quality and collected data on chemicals found in human blood. Some workers in the division were subsequently reinstated. After a lawsuit and pressure from Congress, HHS has also rehired some NIOSH workers, though none at the division where McCanlies worked. Those whose jobs have not been reinstated remain on administrative leave.

People participated in a candlelight vigil (first image) in front of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta after Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (second image) announced cuts to HHS this year. (First image: Elijah Nouvelage/Getty Images. Second image: Samuel Corum/Getty Images.)

The reorganization plan for HHS involves consolidating the remnants of these parts of the agency, along with several others, into a new division called the Administration for a Healthy America. Asked about the transition, an HHS spokesperson told ProPublica in an email that the reorganization would save taxpayers $1.8 billion a year and that “critical programs will continue.”

Meanwhile, a ProPublica review of federal data found that more than $40 million in grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health for dozens of autism-related research projects were canceled under Kennedy’s watch. Some had been awarded to universities the administration is now targeting, while others ran afoul of Trump’s “anti-woke” priorities by mentioning gender and other verboten terms. Among them was a grant to Harvard University to use data on nearly half a million Israeli children to evaluate whether men’s exposure to air pollution affects the risk of having a child with autism. (A small number of grants have been recently reinstated.) A survey of researchers conducted by the Autism Science Foundation, which tallied cuts to training grants and the anticipated cuts to future grants over the next few years, estimated that the total loss of funding could be tens of millions more.

“We’re talking about probably decades of delays and setbacks,” said Alycia Halladay, chief science officer at the Autism Science Foundation. “To take money away from all these areas of need to focus on a question that the HHS director considers high priority seems not scientific and not the way that science is done.”

Housed under the National Institutes of Health, Kennedy’s new $50-million Autism Data Science Initiative is looking to fund two- to three-year research projects that plumb large public and private datasets to find “possible contributors to the causes of autism” as well as conduct research on existing treatments.

With the deadline for his promised discovery fast approaching, Kennedy recently acknowledged that his initial six-month timeline was overly optimistic. He told Carlson he should have “some initial indicator answers” about the causes of autism by September, his original deadline, and promised unqualified answers within another six months.

While the NIH typically releases the names of the scientists on the committees that review grant applications and the criteria they use to review them, it has not done so in this case. Nor has the agency clarified what role NIH staff will have in awarding the grants, who will make the final selection, or what terms and conditions researchers must agree to if they receive funds. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about who will make the final grant selection and why the agency has not yet made this information public, but a video NIH created for applicants of the funding acknowledges that reviews of the proposals “do not follow the traditional NIH review process.” According to the video, the process was “designed to ensure integrity, fairness and transparency.”

Hertz-Picciotto, who laments the fact that Kennedy is “shutting down good studies,” is among the researchers in her field who have decided to apply for the funding. “Some of his agenda is really ridiculous and very counterproductive,” she said. “But if something good can be done with this money, I’d like to be part of that.”

If her project is approved, she plans to hire McCanlies to consult on it.

McCanlies said she agreed to work on the project because she has complete confidence in her longtime colleague, if not the health secretary. “I don’t trust him at all,” she said.

McCanlies in her home office in Morgantown, West Virginia (Nate Smallwood for ProPublica)

McCanlies had never paid much attention to Kennedy — or to politics. Throughout the seven presidential administrations that governed while she had been at NIOSH, her work had been utterly uncontroversial. But weeks after his confirmation, she knew her job was in peril. She had deleted the first email she received from Trump’s Office of Personnel Management. The tone was so strange and disrespectful, hinting that she might be punished if she didn’t respond by confirming her email address, that she assumed it was a phishing attempt. By the time she received a second, suggesting that she find a “higher productivity” job in the private sector, firings and budget cuts were rolling across federal agencies.

The 58-year-old, who has short, greying hair, hazel eyes and three graduate degrees, hadn’t been ready to leave NIOSH’s Health Effects Lab in Morgantown, West Virginia, a place where she had mentored young colleagues, taught a lunchtime meditation class and helped conduct several yearslong research projects. The lab is also where she met Fred, her husband, another Ph.D. scientist who studied workplace chemical hazards. She reluctantly put in for early retirement just days before the entire lab was dissolved.

McCanlies spent her final days at NIOSH finishing her last paper, which explores the association between workplace chemicals and the severity of autism. Normally, she would have her supervisor sign off on her submission to a journal, but he had already lost his job. The rest of her colleagues were gone, too, and the lab’s hallways were empty as she gave the manuscript a final edit.

She felt proud of the study, which answered some of the questions she and Hertz-Picciotto had posed years ago. There were indeed links between exposures and the severity of autism. Parents’ exposure to plastics was “consistently and significantly associated” with lower cognitive scores in their children who had autism, increases in “aberrant behaviors” and deficits in basic life skills, the study found. The exposure was also linked to particular symptoms of autism, including social withdrawal, hyperactivity and repetitive behaviors such as hand flapping and body rocking. Higher autism severity scores and weaker daily living skills were also linked with ethylene oxide. Last year, the EPA imposed stricter limits on the chemical, which is used as a sterilizer. But the agency is now reconsidering those restrictions, and, in July, Trump exempted some of the biggest polluters from them.

The paper, which is now available as a preprint, recommended that regulatory agencies “consider increasing awareness of these hazards and make clear recommendations for implementing protective measures at the worksite.”

Having just watched so many occupational health experts forced to leave their jobs, McCanlies suspected their advice was unlikely to be heeded anytime soon.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke

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Microsoft, as a provider of cloud services to the U.S. government, is required to regularly submit security plans to officials describing how the company will protect federal computer systems.

Yet in a 2025 submission to the Defense Department, the tech giant left out key details, including its use of employees based in China, the top cyber adversary of the U.S., to work on highly sensitive department systems, according to a copy obtained by ProPublica. In fact, the Microsoft plan viewed by ProPublica makes no reference to the company’s China-based operations or foreign engineers at all.

The document belies Microsoft’s repeated assertions that it disclosed the arrangement to the federal government, showing exactly what was left out as it sold its security plan to the Defense Department. The Pentagon has been investigating the use of foreign personnel by IT contractors in the wake of reporting by ProPublica last month that exposed Microsoft’s practice.

Our work detailed how Microsoft relies on “digital escorts” — U.S. personnel with security clearances — to supervise the foreign engineers who maintain the Defense Department’s cloud systems. The department requires that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents.

Microsoft’s security plan, dated Feb. 28 and submitted to the department’s IT agency, distinguishes between personnel who have undergone and passed background screenings to access its Azure Government cloud platform and those who have not. But it omits the fact that workers who have not been screened include non-U.S. citizens based in foreign countries. “Whenever non-screened personnel request access to Azure Government, an operator who has been screened and has access to Azure Government provides escorted access,” the company said in its plan.

The document also fails to disclose that the screened digital escorts can be contractors hired by a staffing company, not Microsoft employees. ProPublica found that escorts, in many cases former military personnel selected because they possess active security clearances, often lack the expertise needed to supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. Microsoft has told ProPublica that escorts “are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data” and preventing harm.

Microsoft’s reference to the escort model comes two-thirds of the way into the 125-page document, known as a “System Security Plan,” in several paragraphs under the heading “Escorted Access.” Government officials are supposed to evaluate these plans to determine whether the security measures disclosed in them are acceptable.

In interviews with ProPublica, Microsoft has maintained that it disclosed the digital escorting arrangement in the plan, and that the government approved it. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other government officials have expressed shock and outrage over the model, raising questions about what, exactly, the company disclosed as it sought to win and keep government cloud computing contracts.

None of the parties involved, including Microsoft and the Defense Department, commented on the omissions in this year’s security plan. But former federal officials now say that the obliqueness of the disclosure, which ProPublica is reporting for the first time, may explain that disconnect and likely contributed to the government’s acceptance of the practice. Microsoft previously told ProPublica that its security documentation to the government, going back years, contained similar wording regarding escorts.

Former Defense Department Chief Information Officer John Sherman, who said he was unfamiliar with the digital escorting process before ProPublica’s reporting, called it a “case of not asking the perfect question to the vendor, with every conceivable prohibited condition spelled out.”

In a LinkedIn post about ProPublica’s investigation, Sherman said such a question “would’ve smoked out this crazy practice of ‘digital escorts.’” His post continued: “The DoD can’t be exposed in this way. The company needs to admit this was wrong and commit to not doing things that don’t pass a common sense test.”

Experts have said allowing China-based personnel to perform technical support and maintenance on U.S. government computer systems poses major security risks. Laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has deemed China the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.”

Following ProPublica’s reporting last month, Microsoft said that it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems. The company did not respond directly to questions from ProPublica about the security plan and instead issued a statement defending the escort practice.

“Escorted sessions were tightly monitored and supplemented by layers of security mitigations,” the statement said. “Based on the feedback we’ve received, however, we have updated our processes to prevent any involvement of China based engineers.”

Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote to Hegseth last month suggesting that the Defense Department needed to strengthen oversight of its contractors and that current processes “fail to account for the growing Chinese threat.”

“As we learn more about these ‘digital escorts’ and other unwise — and outrageous — practices used by some DoD partners, it is clear the Department and Congress will need to take further action,” Cotton wrote. He continued: “We must put in place the protocols and processes to adopt innovative technology quickly, effectively, and safely.”

Since 2011, the government has used the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, known as FedRAMP, to evaluate the security practices of commercial companies that want to sell cloud services to the federal government. The Defense Department also has its own guidelines, which include the citizenship requirement for people handling sensitive data.

Both FedRAMP and the Defense Department rely on “third party assessment organizations” to evaluate whether vendors meet the government’s cloud security requirements. While the government considers these organizations “independent,” they are hired and paid directly by the company being assessed. Microsoft, for example, told ProPublica that it enlisted a company called Kratos to shepherd it through the initial FedRAMP and Defense Department authorization processes and to handle annual assessments after winning federal contracts.

On its website, Kratos calls itself the “guiding light” for organizations seeking to win government cloud contracts and said it “boasts a history of performing successful security assessments.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Kratos said its work determines “if security controls are documented accurately,” but the company did not say whether Microsoft had done so in the security plan it submitted to the Defense Department’s IT agency.

Microsoft told ProPublica that it has given demonstrations of the escort process to Kratos but not directly to federal officials. The security plan makes no reference to any such demonstration. Kratos did not respond to questions about whether its assessors were aware that non-screened personnel could include foreign workers.

A former Microsoft employee who worked with Kratos through several FedRAMP accreditations compared Microsoft’s role in the process to “leading the witness” to the desired outcome. “The government approved what we paid Kratos to tell the government to approve. You’re paying for the outcome you want,” said the former employee, who requested anonymity to discuss the confidential proceeding.

Kratos said it “vehemently denies the characterization from an unnamed source that Kratos’ services are pay for play.” In its statement, Kratos said that it has been “accredited and audited by an independent, non-profit industry group” for factors that “include impartiality, competence and independence.”

“Kratos hires and retains the most technically sophisticated, certified security and technology experts,” the company said, adding that its personnel “are beyond reproach in their work.”

For its part, Microsoft said hiring Kratos was simply part of following the government’s cloud assessment process. “As required by FedRAMP, Microsoft relies on this certified assessor to conduct independent assessments on our behalf under FedRAMP’s supervision,” Microsoft said in its statement.

Still, critics take issue with the FedRAMP process itself, saying that the arrangement of a company paying its auditor presents an inherent conflict of interest. One former official from the U.S. General Services Administration, which houses FedRAMP, likened it to a restaurant hiring and paying for its own health inspector rather than the city doing so.

The GSA did not respond to requests for comment.

The Defense Information Systems Agency, the Defense Department’s IT agency, reviewed and accepted Microsoft’s security plan. Among those involved were senior DISA officials Roger Greenwell and Jackie Snouffer, according to people familiar with the situation. Neither responded to phone messages seeking comment, and DISA and Defense Department spokespeople did not respond to ProPublica’s request to interview them.

A DISA spokesperson declined to comment for this article, saying “any responses will come from Office of the Secretary of Defense Public Affairs.”

The Office of the Secretary of Defense did not respond to questions about whether Greenwell and Snouffer, or anyone at DISA, understood that Microsoft’s China-based employees would be supporting the Defense Department’s cloud. A spokesperson also did not directly respond to questions about Microsoft’s System Security Plan but in an emailed statement said the information in such plans is considered proprietary. The spokesperson noted that “any process that fails to comply with” department restrictions barring foreigners from accessing sensitive department systems “poses unacceptable risk to the DOD infrastructure.”

That said, the office left open the door to the continued use of foreign-based engineers with digital escorts for “infrastructure support,” saying that it “may be deemed an acceptable risk,” depending on factors that include “the country of origin of the foreign national” being escorted. The department said in such scenarios foreign workers would have “view-only” capabilities, not “hands-on” access. In addition to China, Microsoft has operations in India, the European Union and elsewhere across the globe.

In a statement to ProPublica on Friday, Hegseth’s office said the Pentagon’s investigation into tech companies’ use of foreign personnel “is complete and we have identified a series of possible actions the Department could take.” A spokesperson declined to describe those actions or say whether the department would follow through with them. It’s unclear whether Microsoft’s security plan or DISA’s role in approving it was a part of the review.

“As with all contracted relationships, the Department works directly with the vendor to address concerns, to include those that have come to light with the Microsoft digital escort process,” Hegseth’s office said in the statement.

Photography and text by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica

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Mireya Sandia was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open. Her skin was pale, her white hair nearly gone. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer years earlier, and more recently it had spread to her brain and affected her speech. When we first met, in May, she waved me closer, grabbed my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and said, as best she could:

“I want to see my son again.” Then she began to cry.

With a knot in my throat, I held her hand, fearing that there would not be enough time for her to see her only son, Wilmer Vega Sandia.

Her health was what led her son to migrate to the United States. His detention and later deportation to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, known as CECOT, had, in turn, led me to her bedroom in a small village in the Andes.

Over the past four months, as part of a ProPublica-led investigation in collaboration with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters), I have documented in photographs the lives of five families whose sons had been imprisoned in El Salvador, as well as their return to Venezuela, where I am from. I had visited with mothers like Mireya Sandia and other relatives to see how the absence of their loved ones had affected them.

I walked beside them when they protested on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. I saw them as their hopes grew when there was word that the negotiations for the men’s return were ongoing, and I saw them again when those hopes were deflated after the first negotiations failed.

I documented the homecomings, when the men were abruptly flown back.

Lina Ramos Hidalgo sits in the bedroom that used to belong to her son Juan José Ramos Ramos while he was detained in CECOT. First image: Mireya Sandia cries after eating lunch at her home while her son, Wilmer, was held in CECOT. Sandia has breast cancer, which has spread to her brain. Second image: Doris Sandia, Wilmer’s aunt, in her home. Crisálida Bastidas plays with her grandson Jared at her home in El Tocuyo, Venezuela, while her son José Manuel Ramos Bastidas was detained in CECOT.

Lina Ramos lived in a humble neighborhood on the outskirts of Caracas and attended several marches that I photographed. I knew how tight money was for the family and the incredible effort it took for her to advocate for her son, Juan José Ramos Ramos. Lina told me that she had to crowdfund and get donations from her church, family and neighbors to afford a $2 round-trip bus ticket to the capital. The anguish of his imprisonment, she told me, didn’t let her sit still.

Crisálida Bastidas’ home was also modest. Imagine a tiny kitchen in the left corner and, on the opposite wall, two big beds beside one another for several people to sleep on. Her son José Manuel Ramos Bastidas had been in CECOT for more than three months by the time we met, and I could see her hope vanishing as his imprisonment stretched on. Her sadness was visible, and she looked exhausted. She told me that she couldn’t sleep unless her 1-year-old grandson Jared was with her, the two of them nestled together, with a picture of José Manuel as a child hanging above the bed. The two were identical as children, and she clung to her grandson to feel near to her own son.

As more time passed, they sometimes slipped into speaking about their sons in the past tense. Then they’d quickly correct themselves and say, “He’s alive.”

I remember one mother on her knees, crying and asking, “Please make this stop.”

Carmen Bonilla waits for her son to arrive near their house in Valencia, Venezuela. Zoe Martínez plays with balloons used to decorate the house to celebrate the return of her uncle Juan Ramos. Lina Ramos, center, hugs family members during a march in Caracas to celebrate the release of her son and other Venezuelan men held in CECOT.

One morning, I got a call telling me that the men were coming home. It was one of the many mothers I had met in the past few months. I was wary, because this was not the first time I had gotten a call like that, and I always worried what disappointment would do to them. Doris Sandia, Wilmer’s aunt, called me and asked several times if I was sure the men were coming home. She was wary of getting her heart broken again. But this time it was true.

By the time I got out of the house, families that could afford to come to Caracas were already marching downtown. This time they were celebrating.

I ran into Lina Ramos and almost didn’t recognize her. She had a wide smile that I had never seen before. She hugged me tight, relieved to see a familiar face behind dozens of cameras. I walked next to her for miles.

The next day I was at Lina’s house at sunrise, waiting to finally photograph her son. Lina had gotten $20 in donations from family members and neighbors, and she used that money to decorate her house. She made stewed chicken with rice and plantains, her son’s favorite. Lina didn’t want to take any phone calls, to keep the line clear in case Juan called. She wouldn’t leave the house because rumors had gone around that if nobody was home, the police officers escorting the men wouldn’t drop them off. Lina was forced to stand still for the first time in four months.

Lina’s granddaughters grabbed me by the hand and took me to help them pick flowers to welcome their uncle. They spent hours making the flower arrangements, and then tied yellow, blue and red balloons into an arch. But time passed and Juan didn’t arrive. The balloons started to pop in the heat. By the time I left, the flowers had withered and the balloon arch was halfway gone.

Carmen Bonilla had to call off from one of her jobs — she drives a taxi and sometimes buys and then resells cheese — just in case someone brought her son Andry home. Those last few days, when the men were back in Venezuela but not yet home, felt longer than the rest. Nobody dared to leave the house or take a call. I remember Carmen looking through her phone and seeing a video of Andry singing a song on a bus after the men arrived back in Venezuela. Carmen was happy but puzzled. “He must be very happy to be singing,” she said. “Andry is not like that. He’s very serious.”

I think she realized at that moment that the son she’d raised might not be the same person who was coming home. That whatever had happened to them in those months in prison had probably changed them forever.

First image: Days after being released from CECOT, Juan José Ramos Ramos cries while recalling his experience in prison at his house in Guatire, Venezuela. Second image: Sara Martínez holds a flower arrangement to celebrate Ramos’ return.

When Juan José Ramos arrived at Lina’s house, he cried and pointed at the peeling paint. He said he wanted to give his mother a more decent house; it had been one of his reasons for going to the U.S. In prison, he had asked the guards to end his life rather than force him to live that way any longer. Listening to her son talk about his experiences, she tried to understand the weight of his words.

I returned to photograph Mireya Sandia once again. This time she cried in joy while her son held her. Much like his mother, he had spent four months with the daily thought that maybe he wouldn’t make it home in time to say goodbye to her.

She held my hand once again and I leaned in to listen to her speak. She’d become so weak over the previous four months that I could barely make out her words: “Thank you, thank you, thank you.” It dawned on me that during this time in El Salvador, each of the men were not only losing time, they were losing loved ones. They were missing major life moments that can never be recovered. Not only did the men say they were tortured during these four months; their families said they were too.

As fireworks exploded in the town of Umuquena and residents surrounded Wilmer Vega, Mireya Sandia said, “It felt like an endless night.” Wilmer fell to his knees as if he could barely carry the joy of the moment.

Several men had said that guards told them every day that they were worthless and nobody was looking for them. I thought of those words and wondered what Wilmer Vega was thinking as the people of his hometown filled the streets to greet him.

A caravan follows Wilmer Vega Sandia as he drives into his hometown of Umuquena, Venezuela, after months in detention. Wilmer Vega Sandia kisses his mother, Mireya, after seeing her in person for the first time since he was released from detention.

The men said they returned home deeply traumatized. Most of the men I met were struggling to sleep, drink water or leave their homes. Wilmer broke into tears telling me that he had a panic attack the first time he walked down a busy commercial street. In many cases, the celebration was bittersweet. The men were home but they were scarred.

I thought this would be the end of a chapter, a long-awaited reunion. But life is more nuanced than that. Once I saw and heard from these men, it was clear the path before them was steep. They are coming back to Venezuela after losing what little they had made before. Most of them said they lost everything, either during detention in the U.S. or during their imprisonment in El Salvador.

In many cases, these men left Venezuela nearly a decade ago. Their beds, their friends, their employers, even their children are no longer here. They returned with only the clothes they were wearing, with no equipment to resume their jobs, to a country that is, in many ways, the same one they had to leave. When asked about the future, they didn’t have an answer.

Carmen Bonilla hugs her son Andry Blanco after he returned home from months in detention.

All this made me think of Venezuelans’ longing for opportunity, safety and freedom. It made sense for millions of people to imagine a life in the U.S., which has been perceived as a haven. Many Venezuelans supported President Donald Trump’s policies, especially after his first term. I don’t know how much this episode will change their views, but it has undoubtedly been a sobering moment for many.

Still, thousands of Venezuelans are packing their suitcases. Boats, planes and buses continue to depart for other destinations: Colombia, Peru, Brazil, even Spain. They are filled with people who want to give their children medical care, buy their mother a prettier house, afford a parent’s cancer treatments.

But it may not change the question that many Venezuelans now ask themselves and each other: Where will we be safe?

Wilmer Vega Sandia kisses his mother.

Photo editing by Cengiz Yar.

by Maya Miller and Jeremy Kohler

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

During his first term, President Donald Trump frequently turned to the issue of mental health, framing it as a national crisis that demanded action. He linked it to opioid addiction, mass shootings and a surge in veteran suicides — and he later used it to argue against COVID-19 lockdowns and school closures.

At times, he backed up his rhetoric with action. His administration issued tens of millions of dollars in grants to expand community mental health services and continued funding contracts to help federal regulators enforce the parity law, which requires insurers to treat mental and physical health care equally.

But just months after Trump returned to the presidency this year, his administration paused new rules issued in President Joe Biden’s final months that were designed to strengthen mental health protections and hold insurance companies accountable when they unlawfully denied coverage. That pause came after an industry group that advocates for large employers on issues related to employee benefits filed a lawsuit seeking to block the new rules.

What’s more, Congress has curtailed funding for the Employee Benefits Security Administration, or EBSA, a small agency in the Department of Labor that enforces mental health parity in most employer-sponsored health insurance plans. The squeeze is largely due to the expiration of temporary supplemental funding Congress approved just weeks after Biden was elected president but before he took office.

While the impact of these changes is hard to measure, federal employees, policy experts and front-line workers warn that suspending the rules and cutting enforcement funding could have serious consequences. They say it could mean longer waits for help when patients challenge insurance decisions, fewer investigations of insurers and employer health plans over possible violations of federal mental health protections, and more people going without care they’re legally entitled to.

Their long-term predictions include more untreated mental illness and growing anger at insurers.

“Imagine if you are a parent calling about lifesaving care your kid needs,” said Ali Khawar, who was second in command at EBSA before stepping down at the end of the Biden administration. With less money and fewer employees, he said, the agency isn’t equipped to open new investigations quickly.

The suspended rules were meant to strengthen enforcement of the 2008 Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act. The failure to provide the same level of access to mental health care as physical care has been well documented by researchers as well as by a recent ProPublica investigation. We found that insurers often block care, underpay mental health providers and make it hard for patients to find help — sometimes with deadly consequences.

The rules, released in September 2024, required health plans to gather and report detailed data on how they restrict or deny mental health claims. If the plans found disparities when compared with medical care, insurers had to explain what they were doing to close those gaps, a requirement the Trump administration put on hold.

In his first term, Trump positioned himself as an advocate for expanding mental health services and strengthening parity enforcement. His commission on opioid abuse even recommended giving EBSA more authority to penalize insurers that violate the parity rules, though Congress never approved the proposal.

But after returning to office, his administration has moved to roll back several Biden-era initiatives, from solar energy grants to student loan relief. The new parity rules were no exception.

Days before Trump’s second inauguration, the ERISA Industry Committee, or ERIC, a trade group representing large employers on employee benefits policy, sued to block the regulations. After that, the Trump administration went to court to ask to have the lawsuit paused while it considered whether to rescind or modify the rules.

A federal judge granted the request, and the Trump administration promised not to enforce them during the litigation or for 18 months afterward.

ERIC says that the new rules went beyond what Congress intended when it created the mental health parity law and were too vague and burdensome. But advocates for the new rules said the action effectively gutted the parity law’s strongest protections.

“The expectation was that these rules would be incredibly significant in driving better compliance,” Khawar said. “So now that it is on hold, it is a significant benefit that will never be realized.”

James Gelfand, ERIC’s president and CEO, said he believed the Biden administration went too far.

“While we do support mental health parity generally, we don’t support this rule,” he said. “We don’t think that the Biden administration had any authority to write it.” He added that it created “an impossible standard that we can’t meet,” and that rules were “purposely vague so they could choose to enforce against whoever they wanted, whenever they wanted.”

EBSA, which safeguards workplace benefits for 150 million Americans, has always had to make do with a small staff, and it was struggling even under the Biden administration, which backed its mission. In a 2023 report to Congress, the agency acknowledged that with one investigator for every 7,700 health plans, its resources “are limited compared to the vast universe that it regulates.”

Those limits showed in the results: Between February 2021 and July 2024, EBSA conducted 150 investigations and issued just 70 letters finding violations of the parity law — though in many other cases, the agency worked with insurers and employers to resolve problems without a formal violation finding.

And now it is pressing ahead with far fewer employees. The Senate Appropriations Committee has proposed holding EBSA’s base funding at the same level as last year but without the temporary boost Congress provided under the December 2020 No Surprises Act. That law, designed to protect patients from surprise medical bills, included extra funding to help EBSA handle a surge in complaints and new responsibilities.

That funding expired a few months after Biden left office. With that support now gone, EBSA’s workforce is set to drop by nearly one-fifth from two years ago, from 831 workers in 2024 to 687 or fewer employees in 2026.

The Senate Appropriations Committee signaled that mental health parity enforcement was still a priority, including a note in its bill report saying it “supports additional efforts directed toward systemic and targeted audits of health care coverage” provided by employee-sponsored plans and to “ensure parity between mental and physical health care coverage as required by current law.”

Gelfand said his group wanted EBSA to be “robustly funded” so it could work to help employers comply with the law. But he said that until EBSA’s mission changes, his organization supports not adding funding.

Although many of the positions were lost through attrition in the months leading up to the expiration of No Surprises Act funding and the start of Trump’s second term, other staffers left soon after Trump took office through voluntary separation packages.

Neither the White House nor representatives for EBSA responded to questions about the paused rules or the reduced funding.

A front-line worker said with so many departures, key institutional knowledge was lost. The losses have hit hardest in two key areas: The benefit advisers, who field calls from people around the country facing insurance denials they believe are wrong, are down by about 30%. The investigative staff, which leads the in-depth probes into insurance practices, has shrunk by nearly 40%, according to current and former employees. As a result, investigators are juggling higher caseloads and people seeking help are facing longer delays.

EBSA oversees a wide range of employee benefits, including retirement plans, health coverage and protections under federal labor law. In recent years, enforcement of mental health parity laws has grown to make up about 25% of its investigative work, according to current and former officials.

The agency has the power to help millions of patients who have health insurance through their workplace. When investigators reveal systemic violations, they can require what’s known as a global correction, forcing insurers or plan administrators to fix a problem across multitudes of plans and patients. For example, after an investigation by EBSA’s Kansas City office, a major claims administrator agreed to stop denying drug testing tied to substance use treatment, reprocess more than 3,000 claims and return nearly $2 million to patients and providers.

For some families, it can be a matter of life or death.

During the darkest months of the pandemic, a Massachusetts woman, who asked that her name be withheld to protect her teenage daughter’s privacy, watched her child unravel. Isolated at home, the girl started following social media videos of people cutting themselves and soon began doing the same. She became severely anorexic and started talking about suicide.

The parents got their daughter admitted to a residential treatment center, believing it was her best chance of improvement. But their insurer denied coverage, leaving them with more than $80,000 in bills. What followed was a two-year battle for reimbursement. So she turned to the Department of Labor for help. An EBSA investigator took the case, helping her navigate the complex claims process and advocating for her in negotiations with the insurer.

Last year, the insurer agreed the claim had been “inadvertently denied in error” and agreed to repay most of what the family had paid.

by ProPublica

ProPublica announced that Ryan Little and Kevin Uhrmacher have been hired as deputy editors on our data and news applications teams. Little will serve as one of two deputy data editors, and Uhrmacher will work as deputy news applications editor. Together, they will strengthen ProPublica’s editing capacity and streamline collaboration between our data, interactive and reporting teams.

“We’re so happy to have Ryan and Kevin joining us at ProPublica,” said Ken Schwencke, senior editor for data and news applications. “They are excellent managers and journalists, and we’re excited to bring them on to make the already-excellent journalism coming from these teams even better.”

Little joins ProPublica from The Baltimore Banner, where he served as data editor and worked on stories that won a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award and an Investigative Reporters and Editors Award, among other honors. Those stories included a series revealing the city’s overdose crisis, an investigation of the transit nightmare Baltimore students face to get to school, and how listless container ships like the one that collapsed the Francis Scott Key Bridge are more common than previously known. Prior to his time at the Banner, Little worked at Mother Jones as a Roy W. Howard fellow.

Little previously collaborated with ProPublica in 2022 on a rent pricing investigation that led to a Department of Justice inquiry and a settlement with Greystar, the nation’s largest landlord, who agreed to stop using anti-competitive rent algorithms.

He holds a master’s degree from the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland, where he also teaches data journalism.

“ProPublica has set the standard for accountability data journalism, and I am delighted to join the team,” Little said. “I’m eager to pursue audacious, high-impact work together.”

Uhrmacher comes to ProPublica from The Washington Post, where he worked for more than 11 years, most recently as graphics assignment editor overseeing data visualization and interactive stories. Uhrmacher was a driving force behind some of the Post’s most impactful visual journalism, including doing graphics editing on work that was a part of three Pulitzer Prizes.

He launched numerous trackers, including those that followed state abortion laws and presidential appointees. He also served as a graphics editor and project manager for a database-driven story that detailed the history of enslavers in Congress, which won a Salute to Excellence Award from the National Association of Black Journalists.

“I’m thrilled to be joining ProPublica’s stellar news applications team, which has been an industry leader in interactive accountability journalism, including by making consequential data more accessible to the public,” Uhrmacher said. “ProPublica’s work exposing abuses of the public trust — at a global, national and local scale — makes it a top destination for any journalist, and I’m honored that the institution has entrusted me with this role.”

by Jacob Orledge, North Dakota Monitor

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

Millions of Americans own the rights to oil and gas underground. When they’re approached by an energy company to lease out those rights, they’re offered a cut of the revenue, called a royalty.

“Royalties saved our place,” said James Horob, a farmer in northwest North Dakota, who used oil royalties to rescue his family’s farm from bankruptcy in 2008 and replace equipment that had been auctioned off. “We’re lucky to have what we got.”

However, the royalty income that mineral owners like Horob get can depend in part on the state where they live. In North Dakota, estimates show that in recent years companies have been deducting hundreds of millions of dollars annually to help cover the costs incurred once oil and gas leave the ground on their way to being sold. North Dakota officials have not stepped in to help royalty owners, even though the state, in its own leases, has explicitly prohibited oil and gas companies from taking deductions from government royalty payments since 1979, as the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica reported this month.

“It’s tough to think that there isn’t some better solution out there than what we currently have,” said Aaron Weber, a Watford City-based attorney who represents mineral owners in North Dakota.

In contrast to North Dakota, at least seven oil-and-gas-producing states have taken either legislative or judicial action to restrict the costs that can be deducted from royalty owners’ checks. Here are the key ways North Dakota differs from these other states when it comes to protecting the interests of royalty owners:

The Debate in North Dakota

North Dakota Gov. Kelly Armstrong has called the oil and gas industry the “No. 1 driver of our economy” in the state. The industry contributed $32 billion in oil and gas taxes to state and local governments between 2008 and 2024, according to the Western Dakota Energy Association, which advocates for energy-producing communities. That same study found that more than 50% of all local tax collections are tied to oil and gas.

Oil and gas companies owed the state’s private mineral owners, like Horob, an estimated $4.6 billion in 2023 before deductions, according to North Dakota State University research.

Deductions from that royalty income — which can vary greatly by company and mineral owner — are deeply contentious in the state: Companies say they’re withholding transportation and other expenses that should be shared with royalty owners; the owners say those “postproduction deductions,” as they are generally known, shouldn’t be permitted in most circumstances.

The energy industry says the postproduction deductions, which began surging about a decade ago, reflect changes in the oil business. Oil, discovered in the state in 1951, used to be sold primarily at the well site. Now, oil and gas are often sold farther away, and companies incur costs to process and transport the minerals. The companies say this enables them to fetch a better price, benefiting the royalty owner as well. The industry also attributes an increase in deductions to regulations added in 2014 to reduce natural gas flaring, requiring companies to make new investments.

A gas flare in Williams County, North Dakota, in June (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Owen Anderson previously worked for North Dakota’s regulatory agencies and helped draft language to prohibit companies from taking deductions from royalty payments owed to the state. Anderson, a law professor who studies the energy industry, called the issue “a big, big deal.”

Armstrong declined to comment.

How Courts Have Addressed Oil and Gas Royalties

Around the country: State supreme courts in Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas and West Virginia have determined oil and gas companies are responsible for the costs that make the commodities “marketable.” That means there are limits on the expenses that companies can pass on to royalty owners after the minerals leave the ground. Those expenses may include removing impurities, gathering the products in central locations, and transporting the oil and gas to where it will be sold.

Still, the costs that companies can deduct from royalties vary by state, depending on how states define when a product is marketable.

West Virginia provides royalty owners the most protection from deductions, the result of state Supreme Court of Appeals decisions in 2001 and 2006. In those cases, the court found that companies cannot pass on costs to the owners unless a lease explicitly allows it. This matters because many leases across the country were written before shifts in the industry led to more extensive deductions, so most early leases don’t explicitly mention them.

“The default is, you cannot take deductions unless they’re specifically agreed to,” said Tom Huber, the leader of West Virginia’s royalty owner association. The 2006 court decision “basically says if there’s ambiguous language, you go on the side of the royalty owner because the company constructed the lease,” he said.

That decision also determined that deductions cannot be taken unless leases specify which costs can be shared and lay out how the deductions will be calculated. Rulings in 2024 and 2025 confirmed the court’s stance.

Courts in Colorado, Kansas and Oklahoma also have placed limits on what costs can be deducted from royalty payments. Those courts have determined that companies must make the oil and gas “marketable” before costs can be deducted from royalties. Each state uses different criteria to determine at what point in the process the commodities become marketable.

Courts in other oil-and-gas-producing states have taken a legal approach that is more friendly to the industry. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi and others have determined that companies can deduct costs incurred between the minerals’ extraction and when they are sold unless there is lease language to the contrary.

That is also true in Pennsylvania. But in 2015, the state’s attorney general cracked down on a company, Chesapeake Energy, alleged to be taking artificially excessive deductions. The attorney general’s lawsuit, prompted by complaints from landowners, was resolved with a $5.3 million settlement for royalty owners and an option to receive royalties moving forward without deductions. The company did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement.

In North Dakota: As is the case in Texas, Louisiana and some other states, the North Dakota Supreme Court has sided with companies. In 2009 and 2021, the court ruled that royalties, in most cases, should be based on the value of the oil and gas when the minerals are extracted from the ground. Costs incurred between when the minerals are extracted and when they are sold can be shared proportionately between the oil company and the royalty owner, the court found. Companies can deduct these costs unless a lease clearly specifies otherwise.

I hope that the people in North Dakota wake up and realize how much money should be in their pockets instead of industry’s pockets.

—Tom Huber, the leader of West Virginia’s royalty owner association

Josh Swanson, a Fargo-based oil and gas attorney who is involved in multiple pending lawsuits contesting deductions, said he’s concerned companies will impose even more “excessive” deductions unless courts place limits on what the companies can do.

“Operators are going to continue to be very aggressive in the amounts they’re taking for postproduction costs until a court tells them they’ve overstepped and gone over the line,” he said.

In responses to questions from the North Dakota Monitor and ProPublica, officials from three energy companies that operate in North Dakota said they follow the language in the leases when determining what costs they can deduct from royalty payments. Older leases often don’t mention deductions, however.

How Lawmakers Have Addressed Oil and Gas Royalties

Around the country: Some state legislatures have passed laws that limit postproduction deductions. Laws in Wyoming and Nevada, passed in 1989 and 1991, respectively, prohibit companies from taking deductions for specific expenses incurred soon after extraction, such as gathering the commodities from well sites to get them to central hubs.

In Michigan, a law passed in 1999 allows companies to deduct from royalty income only two types of expenses — transportation and some gas treatment costs — unless a lease explicitly allows for other reasons.

The West Virginia Legislature, meanwhile, has helped royalty owners with what it called “oppressive” leases. Many West Virginia mineral owners receive royalties from “flat rate” leases signed as long as a century ago that provide owners a few hundred dollars a year instead of a percentage of the revenue. Calling those leases “unjust,” West Virginia lawmakers passed a measure in 1982 that guarantees owners at least 12.5% of the revenue, effectively overriding the original leases. A 2018 amendment requires that postproduction deductions not be taken from this royalty.

West Virginia’s law ensuring a minimum royalty for those leases is enforced by state regulators, who will grant new drilling permits only if the company files an affidavit promising to adhere to the law.

Huber said his state’s legislative and judicial branches have historically tried to protect landowner and royalty owner rights while encouraging the growing natural gas industry.

“It sounds like North Dakota doesn’t have that, and that’s a shame,” Huber said. “I hope that the people in North Dakota wake up and realize how much money should be in their pockets instead of industry’s pockets.”

In North Dakota: Legislators and state officials have argued that disputes should be settled in the courts. They rejected a measure in 2021 that would have prevented companies from taking deductions unless explicitly allowed in a lease, and another bill in 2023 that would have required oil companies to provide mineral owners with more information about how royalties are calculated.

State Sen. Dale Patten, a Republican from Watford City, said the Legislature is ill suited to address concerns related to private contracts and royalty owners should seek relief from the courts. Legal action would be prohibitively expensive for most families, however.

North Dakota Sen. Dale Patten, a Republican from Watford City, served as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee in the legislative session that ended in May. (Kyle Martin for the North Dakota Monitor)

“We’re getting into really complicated issues. And actually in my mind the proper venue to solve that would be in the courts,” said Patten, who has served as chair of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “And you deal with it on a company-by-company basis.”

Public officials have argued that royalty owners should have negotiated language into their leases to prohibit deductions. But leases in many cases were signed decades ago, before this was an issue, and don’t mention who should pay for postproduction costs. The leases don’t expire unless production stops. And in new lease negotiations, mineral owners are at a disadvantage against companies unless they own a large percentage of the mineral rights in the area.

“It’s really difficult for a private landowner to negotiate a no-deductions lease in North Dakota,” Anderson said.

Ron Ness, president of the North Dakota Petroleum Council, which represents the oil industry, warned that regulating or limiting the expenses that companies pass on to owners would discourage oil and gas investment in the state and drive business away.

“It’s one of the most foolish things the state of North Dakota could ever do, is to try and essentially financially punish operators from getting a better price for their commodities by not allowing postproduction costs on some of those things,” Ness said in an interview.

But Weber, the attorney who represents mineral owners, said it’s time for the Legislature to get involved and address the concerns.

“Given that the court has already selected what it is going to do,” he said, “the only way to fix it is to get it to the Legislature.”

by Abe Streep

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

The top Democrat on a House committee is demanding that Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins account for discrepancies between her public statements about wildland firefighter staffing and a ProPublica report showing there were thousands of vacancies in the Forest Service’s firefighting workforce as peak wildfire season approached.

In June, the Forest Service claimed it had reached 99% of its hiring goal for its wildland firefighting workforce. But ProPublica’s reporting indicated that the agency was selectively counting firefighters, presenting an optimistic assessment to the public. As many as 27% of jobs were vacant as of July 17, according to data obtained by ProPublica.

Rep. Robert Garcia, a Democrat from California and the ranking member of the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, made the request to Rollins in a letter sent Thursday morning. “The Trump Administration’s staffing decisions are exacerbating an already dire situation: The Forest Service’s firefighting capacity has been dangerously hampered by Department of Government Efficiency and Trump Administration layoffs, deferred resignations, and other early retirements and resignations just as climate change is extending the fire season,” he wrote.

The Forest Service’s assertions about its readiness are contradicted not only by its own staff — a wildland firefighter in California quoted in the ProPublica report called the 99% figure “grossly inaccurate” — but by its own statistics. In July, ProPublica reported that, according to agency data, its fire and aviation management program contained more than 4,500 active vacancies, including for such crucial primary firefighting positions as hotshots, dispatchers and engine captains. At the time, a spokesperson for the Agriculture Department disputed that the Forest Service had that many vacancies within its fire and aviation management program but did not provide data showing otherwise. A spokesperson for the Forest Service later claimed that ProPublica’s figures were inaccurate, telling the High Country News, “Their numbers likely come from outdated org charts and unfunded positions.” However, ProPublica excluded all unfunded positions from its analysis, and its data came from active agency organizational charts.

When asked to support its claims that the agency’s fire service is fully staffed, a spokesperson wrote: “The Forest Service is fully prepared and operational to protect individuals and communities from wildfires. The Forest Service has over 19,000 workers, both in and out of the Fire and Aviation Management group, who hold incident response qualifications.”

According to experts, the agency has long resisted providing a comprehensive and transparent breakdown of its wildland firefighting force. “Unless Congress tells them to, they’re not going to do a report of that magnitude,” said Robert Kuhn, a former Forest Service official who between 2009 and 2011 co-authored such an assessment. Kuhn cited the cost and effort involved in analyzing a sprawling and complex agency. Earlier this year, Grassroots Wildland Firefighting, a labor advocacy organization, wrote, “None of the federal agencies have developed a modern formula for determining how many wildland firefighters and support personnel are truly needed to address 21st century issues.” Most federal wildland firefighters work for the Forest Service, within the Department of Agriculture. In addition, the federal government employs thousands of wildland firefighters at four agencies in the Department of the Interior. President Donald Trump has ordered all of them to consolidate their wildland fire programs. Details about that unification have not been released.

Every year, the Forest Service reports that it has filled its ranks with what are known as primary firefighters. But according to current and former Forest Service employees, that assessment — the basis of the claim that the agency reached 99% of its hiring goal — is misleading on a number of levels. The Forest Service simply counts “operational firefighters” working within a specified pay range. That figure includes both temporary seasonal firefighters who have just joined the agency and experienced year-round veterans — but it does not distinguish between the two and therefore elides a great loss of institutional knowledge. In recent years, the agency has suffered an exodus of experienced firefighters. The agency’s assessment also excludes both senior-level fire managers and crucial support staff. The public associates wildland firefighting with its most iconic figures: smokejumpers, hotshots and members of engine crews, who often are supported by aircraft dropping retardant. But the nation’s wildland fire apparatus also includes, for example, human-resource specialists, ecologists, wilderness rangers, meteorologists, trails workers and other employees who possess qualifications allowing them to work on a fire line. Those qualifications are listed in what’s known as a “red card.” An archaeologist could have a red card allowing them to, say, oversee the distribution of food at a fire camp.

A recently departed staffer received this email of Forest Service wildland firefighting job openings in August. (Obtained and redacted by ProPublica)

According to internal data reviewed in July by ProPublica, approximately 1,600 red-carded staff left the government this winter and spring. The Forest Service has claimed that the actual figure is 1,400. Garcia asked for a full accounting of DOGE’s impact on the Forest Service, demanding “all documents and communications regarding staffing, hiring, reductions in force, the Deferred Resignation Program, or the ‘Fork in the Road,’ and firefighting resources and capacity at the Forest Service.”

The agency’s rosy public assessments of its own force have also been belied by its efforts to rehire the workers it forced out. In a July memo, the Forest Service’s chief, Tom Schultz, allowed that the agency did not have enough resources and was now recruiting red-carded staff who had separated from the agency. More recently, emails reviewed by ProPublica show that, since July 22, the Forest Service has sent multiple recruiting notices to departed staff. The emails advertise dozens of openings for essential firefighting positions — such as dispatcher, engine captain and hotshot superintendent — in at least seven states. When asked about the emails, an agency spokesperson wrote, “We do have active recruitments out for FY26.”

In his letter, Garcia requested that Rollins provide the oversight committee with “a detailed and comprehensive accounting of current staffing and staffing changes at the Forest Service, including firefighting jobs” since Jan. 20.

by Tony Schick, 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.

During the outcry against nuclear power in the 1970s, liberal Oregon lawmakers hatched a plan to slow an industry that was just getting started. They created a burdensome process that gave the public increased say over where power plants could be built, and the leading anti-nuclear activists of the day used appeal after appeal to delay proposed nuclear plants to death. It had a huge impact: Oregon’s first commercial nuclear plant, the one that spurred lawmakers into action, was also the state’s last.

What those lawmakers didn’t plan for was that 50 years later, an Oregon citizen activist would use that same bureaucracy to hinder some of the very energy projects that today’s liberals want: wind farms and the new high-voltage lines needed to support them.

They didn’t plan for Irene Gilbert.

The 76-year-old retired state employee, former gun store owner and avid elk hunter from La Grande, Oregon, is on a mission to keep turbines and transmission towers from blighting the rural landscape. She has filed more challenges to energy projects — 15 in all, including lawsuits — than anyone in the state, according to Oregon’s Department of Energy.

“I kind of have a reputation,” Gilbert said.

Renewable energy advocates treat activists like Gilbert as relentless gadflies who need to be stopped for the good of the planet.

They say Oregon’s slow process for approving energy projects, with its endless appeals, is one reason the state ranks near last in the country for green energy growth despite setting a deadline to eliminate fossil fuel use by 2040.

Democratic leaders up and down the West Coast are reckoning with liberal policies of the past that they say clash with today’s progressive agenda. In California, for example, Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed a rollback of environmental review laws to expedite the construction of affordable housing. Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek has been pushing to roll back her state’s vaunted land-use restrictions for the same reason.

But Oregon leaders have been far less aggressive in confronting the historical artifacts that critics say hold green energy back. One, the Depression-vintage federal agency that runs most of the Northwest power grid, which has set a sluggish pace for upgrades; the other, the energy siting system Oregon created long ago for nuclear power. (The federal agency says it makes financially prudent decisions about construction.)

In the past five years, the Oregon Legislature has repeatedly rejected or watered down bills to streamline permitting of energy projects. The efforts included legislation supported by renewables advocates as well as farming and land conservation groups, both of which share Gilbert’s concerns about development in rural spaces.

In response to questions from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica, the governor’s office acknowledged “existing significant impediments” to renewable energy growth in Oregon.

Kotek is “carefully considering opportunities to streamline Oregon’s energy siting processes,” spokesperson Anca Matica said in an email, “while maintaining opportunities for community input and preventing detrimental impacts.”

In the meantime, Kotek and lawmakers let another effort to modernize the system fall through the cracks this year. A proposal to limit public appeals and speed up permitting decisions resulted in only minor changes to the process. The status quo means developers remain locked in battles with Gilbert and others for years on end.

“I figure I can lose a thousand cases,” Gilbert said. “Even if it doesn’t look like it, I have made a difference.”

An Old Lady With a Laptop

Gilbert was retired from a career in state government and was running the Oregon Trail Trader gun shop with her partner in La Grande when she first heard about the Antelope Ridge wind farm. It was 2009, and only a handful of wind farms existed in the state. But an energy company suddenly wanted to erect 180 turbines across the scenic Grande Ronde River valley just outside town.

Energy infrastructure was a sore spot for Gilbert. Decades ago, she’d married into a ranching and timber family, and a chunk of the forest she owned was bulldozed for a transmission line. She blamed the line when she couldn’t get the timber to grow as she wanted.

She also had a stark memory of how quickly a business can erase a beloved part of rural Oregon. The company that owned Kinzua, the timber town where she grew up, razed it without a trace after shutting down operations in 1978.

Now that she was older, she said, she wanted to give back, and she was motivated by the idea of helping farmers and others protect their land from the government and electric companies.

“I feel like my reason for participating now is to do what I can to help these poor folks,” she said.

Gilbert became the legal research analyst for an opposition group known as Friends of the Grande Ronde Valley.

The tangle of rules governing energy siting was no problem. She’d worked as a trainer for the Oregon Department of Human Services and later Oregon Occupational Safety and Health, where she taught people how to understand the statutes that guided their work.

“So I know how to read government regulations,” she said.

She also enjoys it.

“It keeps my brain working,” she said with a laugh.

Gilbert spoke against the wind farm at public hearings. During one meeting in which she tried to add to her previous comments, she was cut off because the time for public testimony had passed.

She argued against the wind farm before the Oregon Energy Facility Siting Council, which has ultimate authority over whether major pieces of infrastructure like wind farms, solar projects, power plants and transmission lines get built. She sent a letter to the governor’s office stating she would sue and make all of the state’s dealings with the energy company public along the way.

That wind farm never materialized. The company backed out in 2013, citing poor market conditions.

“We were successful in stopping that,” she said. “The company would say that it was a financial decision. I think it was more than that.” (The company told OPB and ProPublica in a statement that it was “the lack of strong commercial prospects.”)

Proposals for new wind farms kept cropping up, and she contested as many as she could, even ones three hours from her home. She’s missed only a handful of the energy siting council’s monthly meetings in the past decade, driving all around the state before video conferencing became common. Developers have approached her after meetings, she said, and asked her what it would take to make her happy.

“I’ve been called ‘an old lady who has access to a computer,’” she said. “That’s kind of, I guess, how I’m viewed, and OK … I guess that’s OK.”

She sometimes works at the antique desk in her home office, sometimes from the couch in a living room filled with her grandchildren’s artwork. She’s filed multiple challenges to five wind farms plus one big transmission line since the demise of Antelope Ridge. The transmission line is moving forward. Two of the wind projects were scuttled by developers, while three others got built.

Landowners and lawyers from around the region eventually began seeking her input for filing their own objections to energy projects.

“And my advice is free,” she said.

A committed Republican, Gilbert said she doesn’t do all this because she opposes the idea of clean energy. She owns a cabin powered by rooftop solar panels. She said she doesn’t believe in the need for large-scale solar, but said she did support a solar farm in the scenic Columbia River Gorge after developers listened to public input and took steps to reduce the project’s impact.

But she finds herself quite often at odds with the work of major wind, solar and transmission players, “Just because it’s taking so much land.”

Fuji Kreider, a self-described liberal Democrat who relocated from New York, started a friendship with Gilbert while both campaigned against a major transmission project.

“She calls herself a redneck environmentalist,” Kreider said during a visit at Gilbert’s home.

Kreider’s husband, Jim, chimed in: “A redneck, gun-toting environmentalist.”

“Something like that,” Kreider said.

The Boardman to Hemingway Line

In late summer 2023, Adam Richins, the chief operating officer of the electric utility Idaho Power, sat down in a black leather wingback chair at Paddy’s Bar & Grill in downtown Portland to swap horror stories with other Northwest leaders in the industry on a niche podcast called the Public Power Underground.

One of Richins’ doozies involved Irene Gilbert.

Richins at the time was in year 16 of trying to build a 300-mile transmission line through eastern Oregon, known as the Boardman to Hemingway line, or B2H for short. It is the crucible of Oregon’s energy growth, the single piece of infrastructure that utilities and renewable advocates are most eager to see built. It would connect Idaho green energy suppliers with Oregon data centers that demand loads of electricity.

“Anybody want to guess?” Richins asked his fellow power execs at one point during the show. “State process application. How many pages?”

“10,000,” one offered.

He shook his head, raised his thumb upward. Higher. And higher still.

“It was close to 20,000 pages,” Richins told them.

By the time the executive finished his tale of environmental reviews and land use certificates, he joked that he had tears running from his eyes.

“But then, guess what happens?” Richins said. “We got sued.”

By Gilbert.

Gilbert’s fight against B2H has been her biggest yet. Slicing through 300 miles of land Gilbert desperately wants to keep undisturbed, the line illustrates the stakes she and other rural Oregonians see in ridding grasslands and forests of massive new energy projects.

One of Gilbert’s “Stop B2H” allies, John Williams, owns the last remaining swath of what was once a sprawling family ranch and timber estate, just a few minutes’ drive from Gilbert’s home. Bushwhacking through wildflowers along his property line on a recent day, Williams, Gilbert and the Kreiders looked out on Twin Lake, its surface carpeted in yellow pond lilies and dotted with nesting birds. The activists worry the line will harm birds and that construction and maintenance crews driving through the transmission line corridor will carry in noxious weeds and invasive species.

Williams said Idaho Power’s proposed path, which runs through his property, has evolved over time — for the worse. “It’s lipstick on a pig,” he said, “but the original route I think made a lot less damage. It was lower in elevation. It took less timber.”

Idaho Power spokesperson Sven Berg told OPB and ProPublica the company has altered the transmission line’s path numerous times in response to public feedback and that the project is better for it.

John Williams points to a section of a map showing the planned route of the Boardman to Hemingway power transmission line. Williams, along with Gilbert and other Stop B2H allies, believe the project will ruin rural ecologies in Oregon. (Steve Lenz for ProPublica)

About an hour west of Twin Lake the next day, Gilbert sat with Sam Myers, who runs a fourth-generation wheat farm that the B2H line would transect. Myers said he worries the high-voltage lines could spark wildfires or electrocute people operating farm machinery nearby. (Idaho Power says planting and harvesting crops near the B2H will still be safe but cautions farmers against using machinery taller than 15 feet underneath. The company says its equipment meets or exceeds industry standards, that this equipment is closely monitored, and that the tall, metallic structures used for lines like B2H pose less fire risk than with smaller ones.)

Myers said he’s turned down developers offering “huge amounts of money” to put solar panels on his property.

“I don’t want to change farm ground to solar,” he said he’s told them. “Is there a way we can have a coexistence?”

Gilbert’s Stop B2H coalition, with 1,000 members, raised more than $350,000 against the project. (Kreider, the group’s treasurer, said the vast majority of donations — aside from larger checks from a few landowners and two historic preservation organizations — were less than $1,000 and came from individuals in Oregon and Eastern Idaho. She said the money went mainly to legal fees.)

B2H opponents filed a total of 117 challenges to the power line project, keeping the appeals process going long after the state approved construction in 2019.

In late March, though, the opponents lost their final appeal in court. Idaho Power began construction last month.

If Richins, the utility’s COO, feels exasperated by the two decades it took to overcome complaints from Gilbert and others, Gilbert thinks mainly about the outcome for her side.

For all its delays, the state’s energy council, in practice, does not reject proposed projects. And despite the claims that she’s gumming up the state’s process with her appeals, Gilbert has never actually reversed a council decision.

“My perception is that I’m ignored,” she said.

Oregon’s Energy Law

It might seem paradoxical that Gilbert considers herself an environmentalist while standing in the way of what most environmentalists today see as progress. But her right to do so has its roots in Oregon’s storied conservation movement of the 1970s.

Portland General Electric, a leading utility, prompted a fierce public backlash when it announced construction in 1967 on the Trojan Nuclear Plant about an hour outside of Portland. To address concerns about the safety of nuclear power and radioactive waste, Oregon lawmakers created the Nuclear and Thermal Energy Council.

PGE would eventually shutter Trojan after decades of regulatory violations, forced shutdowns, construction flaws, costly repairs and constant harrying from antinuclear activist Lloyd Marbet through the state council. Marbet’s tactics also delayed PGE’s efforts to build two more plants on the Columbia River until voters passed a ballot measure in 1980, creating strict rules for nuclear power that effectively killed the industry in Oregon.

The council lived on, rebranded as the Energy Facility Siting Council to cover more than just nuclear power.

Oregon is one of only 10 states with statewide energy standards, and renewable energy developers consider its approval process one of the country’s most rigorous. Covering everything from environmental safety and wildfire risk to sites of archaeological significance , Oregon’s law requires developers to follow many of the same steps federal regulators require.

The process is supposed to take no more than a year. But the energy siting council will suspend the deadline anytime someone formally objects to a project’s approval. A protest triggers a hearing, after which an administrative judge can ask the council to reverse itself, after which the council can agree or disagree, after which anyone can file a lawsuit, after which years of litigation may begin.

Oregon’s assistant director for energy siting, Todd Cornett, said public involvement can slow projects down, but that’s what the Legislature intended. While most of the power gets consumed on the more populous west side of the state that includes Portland, he noted, the new windmills and solar arrays are generally destined for dry, windy and rural eastern Oregon.

“We want to make sure that we’re taking into consideration all of the issues and concerns that people who are going to have to live with these facilities raise in the process,” he said.

Cornett denies this process has held back renewables, noting that projects have stalled even after the council’s approval. But he also acknowledged such holdups arise because new wind and solar farms will need more transmission lines to carry their output. There aren’t enough, in part, because it’s so difficult to get new ones through Cornett’s agency.

Some Oregon progressives give a nod to the bureaucracy that once mired nuclear reactors and say it’s time to give windmills and solar panels a faster pass.

“The process back in the early ’70s was meant to be a little bit more plodding,” said Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Democrat from the Portland suburbs, during a House floor speech in April. “Now that we are many, many decades past that time, we’re finding that the procedures EFSC operates under are really too slow for the relatively low-risk renewable energy that we’re seeking.”

The Boardman to Hemingway transmission line is projected to cut through Williams’ property. Some Oregon progressives say it’s time to give windmills, solar panels and transmission upgrades a faster pass to approval and construction. (Steve Lenz for ProPublica)

Yet lawmakers have balked at meaningful changes.

Two years ago they rejected a bill to create committees of farmers, developers, tribes and conservationists to identify places in each county for transmission lines and energy production. The bill also would have directed state agencies to streamline the renewable energy approval process.

This year, lawmakers rejected a bill to promote solar farms that coexist with cropland. Research at Oregon State University has found that the shade from solar panels increased crop yields and that, in turn, the crops can make solar panels work more efficiently by keeping the air around them cool.

With Gilbert’s long battle against B2H dragging on earlier this year, some lawmakers became galvanized. The 20 years it had taken to get the project on track was “ridiculous,” said Rep. Mark Gamba, a Portland-area Democrat who is vice chair of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment.

In February, Gamba introduced legislation to overhaul the state’s approach to siting and permitting energy facilities. Among the proposed changes: a tight restriction on appeals from members of the public. The provision would require that any lawsuit challenging the state’s approval of a project be fast-tracked to the state Supreme Court.

“So the NIMBYs will only get one bite at the apple,” Gamba said, using the acronym for “not in my backyard” that refers to people considered reflexively opposed to development near them.

The Legislature was coming after the gadflies like Gilbert.

An Overachiever for the Underdog

When members of the Stop B2H coalition gather in Gilbert’s living room, a computerized display of properties in the path of the project sits on a chair just beneath a portrait of a Native American man in a headdress of fur and bison horns. One of Gilbert’s brothers made the canvas from the hide of an elk he shot, and another painted it.

Both brothers died of Hungtington’s disease, a genetic disorder that began to severely debilitate them during their 30s. Gilbert, who had the same likelihood of inheriting the disease but did not, said losing them turned her into an overachiever who always wanted to fight for the underdog.

“I think I kind of try to compensate for what they weren’t able to do,” she said.

Fights against energy and transmission projects have been her mainstay for more than a decade. She said she sometimes awakens in the middle of the night, struck by an idea about a rule or statute that might be of use.

“Most of the people in Stop B2H believe that we need more energy. And I agree, we need more energy. But we cannot provide the energy needs of this country or this state by taking all of the farmland,” Gilbert said. “There’s a point where we aren’t going to have the land needed to produce food.”

When Gilbert heard about Gamba’s bill to upend her main means of objecting, she did not panic. She did what she has always done. She spoke up.

On a recent May afternoon in Salem, Gilbert sat on a window bench outside a Capitol hearing room where she’d testified against Gamba’s bill.

“I remember you!” exclaimed Gilbert’s state representative, Republican Bobby Levy. “You’re one of the smartest people. You do your research.”

Levy said she was working to oppose the bill.

Gamba in the end was disappointed with what the Legislature was able to pass. After setting out to overhaul Oregon’s energy siting bureaucracy, he said the scaled-back legislation only “dabbled around the edges.” It might shave 10% off approval times for green energy, he said.

What did survive was Gamba’s effort to move lawsuits filed by people like Gilbert directly to the Oregon Supreme Court. Gilbert was dismayed to lose the chance to build a case over time. But it won’t stop her.

Now that the Boardman to Hemingway line is actually getting built, Gilbert said, it will bring a rash of new applications from people seeking to build wind and solar farms along the power line’s route. Gilbert will be standing by to file challenges.

“I figure I’m going to be really busy,” she said.

Land where the Boardman to Hemingway transmission line is expected to be built (Steve Lenz for ProPublica)

by Lexi Churchill and Jasmine Aguilera, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Ellis Simani, ProPublica

Texas’ education landscape is changing. Our reporters at ProPublica and The Texas Tribune know that education policy today will shape the state’s future for generations to come. That is why we need your help covering this issue. Whether you’re a teacher; parent; school leader; student who has been affected by decisions made at the local, state or national level; or one of the government employees shaping them, we want to hear from you. Tell us what issues you believe require greater oversight, whether they are the impact of vouchers, misuse of public funds, disproportionate disciplinary policies, budget deficits or anything else that is affecting how students learn.

We appreciate you sharing, and we take your privacy seriously. We are gathering these responses for our reporting and will contact you if we wish to publish any part of them.

Our team may not be able to respond to everyone personally, but we will read everything you submit. A reporter from ProPublica or the Tribune may reach out to learn more.

You can also contact reporter Lexi Churchill on Signal at 816-898-5462 if you have sensitive information to share.

by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Ellis Simani, 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.

For about eight years, a Houston private school has followed a unique pattern when appointing members to its governing board: It has selected only married couples.

Over 200 miles away, two private schools in Dallas have awarded more than $7 million in combined contracts to their board members.

And at least seven private schools across Texas have issued personal loans, often reaching $100,000 or more, to their school leaders under terms that are often hidden from public view.

Such practices would typically violate laws governing public and charter schools. But private schools operate largely outside those rules because they haven’t historically received direct taxpayer dollars. Now, as the state moves to spend at least $1 billion over the next two years on private education, lawmakers have imposed almost none of the accountability measures required of the public school system.

If held to the same standards, 27 private schools identified by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune through tax filings likely would have violated state law. The news organizations found, and three education law experts confirmed, more than 60 business transactions, board appointments and hiring decisions by those schools that would have run afoul of the state rules meant to prevent self-dealing and conflicts of interest if they were public.

“It’s frankly astonishing to me that anyone would propose the massive sort of spending that we’re talking about in these school voucher programs with, at best, minimal accountability,” said Mark Weber, a public school finance lecturer at New Jersey’s Rutgers University who opposes vouchers. “If I were a taxpayer in Texas, I’d be asking, who’s going to be looking out for me?”

Texas has long stood as a holdout in the national push for voucher programs, even as other conservative states embraced them. Gov. Greg Abbott gave school voucher proponents a major win this year, signing into law one of the largest and costliest programs in the country. In doing so, Abbott’s office has argued that the state has “strict financial requirements,” saying that “Texas taxpayers expect their money to be spent efficiently and effectively on their behalf, both in private and traditional public schools.”

The law, however, imposes no restrictions to prevent the kinds of entanglements that the newsrooms found.

The contrast is sharp. Public or charter school officials who violate these rules could be subject to removal from office, fines or even state jail felony charges.

Private schools face none of those consequences.

Supporters of the voucher program argue that oversight of private schools should come not from the state, but from their boards and the marketplace.

“If you transform the private schools into public schools by applying the same rules and regulations and procedural requirements on them, then you take the private out of the private school,” said Patrick Wolf, an education policy professor at the University of Arkansas. Wolf, who supports vouchers, said that if parents are unhappy with the schools, they will hold them accountable by leaving and taking their tuition dollars with them.

Typically, neither parents nor the state’s taxpayers have access to information that shows precisely how private schools spend money. Only those that are organized as nonprofits are required to file public tax forms that offer limited information. Of the state’s more than 1,000 accredited private schools, many are exempt from submitting such filings because they are religious or for-profit institutions, leaving their business conduct opaque. It is unclear if private schools that participate in Texas’ voucher-like program will have to detail publicly how they use taxpayer dollars.

“The public system is not always perfect, but when it’s not perfect, we see it,” said Joy Baskin, associate executive director for policy and legal services at the Texas Association of School Boards, which represents public districts across the state. “That kind of transparency doesn’t exist in private schools.”

The Chinese Baptist Church in Houston, where Trinity Classical School has a campus (Danielle Villasana for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) “Just Isn’t Right”

Conflicts of interest in education were on the minds of legislators this spring. At an education committee hearing in March, Texas state Rep. Ryan Guillen, a Republican from Rio Grande City, along the southern border with Mexico, introduced a bill that would bar businesses with close ties to board members from applying for school district contracts. Such deals were previously permitted as long as school leaders publicly disclosed conflicts and abstained from voting.

But Guillen, who did not respond to requests for comment, argued those rules were abused, pointing to recent scandals in two districts that led to state investigations and, in one case, resulted in federal charges.

He described his bill as a “commonsense” proposal that would ensure “no one in a position of power can exploit the system for financial benefit.” The Legislature passed the bill, which was signed into law by Abbott.

Notably, the measure excluded private schools. In public testimony, no one brought them up, and there was no debate about them even as lawmakers advanced a proposal that would direct state money to them.

The newsrooms found at least six private schools that awarded contracts to companies with ties to their board members.

Cristo Rey Dallas College Prep, a Catholic high school serving primarily low-income students of color, awarded more than $5 million to a construction firm owned by one of its board members for “interior finish” work between 2017 and 2021, tax filings show. The school did not respond to questions about the payments. Raul Estrada, who was on the school board when his firm received the payments, said he recused himself from any votes or decisions related to the contract. He added that the company’s work provided “substantial savings” to the school but did not provide specific figures.

Just 30 miles north, board members at the Shelton School, which specializes in teaching students with learning differences such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and dyslexia, have received hundreds of thousands of dollars in payments over the last decade. Tax records show one trustee was awarded over $465,000 for landscaping, and another collected more than $1.2 million for “printed education material.” The board members whose firms received the contracts did not respond to requests for comment. Suzanne Stell, the school’s executive director, said the board members who received contracts were not involved in the decisions. Stell also said that the contract for printed material included training for educators.

Our investigation also found dozens of instances of nepotism or relatives serving on boards together at private schools, some of which were started and are led by families.

Trinity Classical School in Houston, for example, has long maintained a family-led chain of governance on its school board exclusive to married couples, appointing a new pair each time one cycled off. The board deviated from that pattern only once, when it selected Neil Anderson, the school’s leader, according to tax filings. None of the current board members responded to interview requests, nor did Anderson or the school.

Such arrangements have been prohibited since 2012 in charter schools, which are restricted from appointing more than one family member to serve as a trustee at the same time. Anderson’s appointment would also not be allowed in traditional public schools, where employees are barred from serving on their school’s governing board.

At the elite Greenhill School in the Dallas area, where tuition can exceed $40,000 a year, the previous leader, Scott Griggs, hired his son to coach the boys’ volleyball team and teach middle school math. While allowed in private schools, state nepotism laws prevent public and charter schools from hiring close relatives of superintendents and trustees, with few exceptions. Griggs told the newsrooms that he’d already announced his retirement when he asked the board in 2017 to approve hiring his son, who did not respond to requests for comment.

The following year, the college prep academy provided a personal loan of nearly $100,000 to its current head of school, Lee Hark, for a down payment on a home. The school did not disclose the terms of the agreement in its tax filings, including whether it charged interest or what would happen should Hark default. Hark declined to comment.

Private schools are generally free to use money as they choose, but a 150-year-old provision of the Texas Constitution bars public schools from lending taxpayer dollars. The state does not require private schools to publicly disclose whether taxpayer money would be used for such arrangements under the voucher program.

In a written statement, a Greenhill spokesperson said the school operates with “sound financial principles” that meet or exceed “all standards of accountability for independent schools.” She said the school charged interest on the loan and it has since been paid off, but did not provide records.

Many of the private schools examined by the news organizations, including Greenhill, said that they are still deciding whether to participate in the voluntary voucher program.

The lack of accountability for private schools has sparked concern from public school parents like Sarah Powell, a mother of two near Dallas. She was among thousands who urged lawmakers to reject voucher legislation earlier this year.

“You’re either part of the system or you’re not,” Powell later told the newsrooms. “You can’t have the resources and not any of the regulations. It just isn’t right.”

The Greenhill School, where tuition can surpass $40,000 per student, in Addison, just outside of Dallas (Shelby Tauber for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune) Repeating History

State funds flowing to public and charter schools are monitored by the Texas Education Agency, which requires annual independent audits and assigns ratings that gauge each school’s fiscal health. Districts that repeatedly underperform risk sanctions, including forced closure.

The state, however, will not directly regulate private schools under the new voucher program, which will begin next year. Instead, supervision will largely fall to one of 20 private organizations, which schools must pay to obtain and maintain the accreditation required to receive public funds.

A review by the newsrooms of these organizations’ standards found they are generally far less rigorous than the state’s. Most do not require annual financial audits, which some accreditation organizations say can be too costly and time-consuming, and many do not mandate policies to prevent nepotism and conflicts of interest.

If a private school loses accreditation from one group, it can simply apply to another.

Texas lawmakers laid the groundwork for publicly funded schools with limited state oversight when they authorized charter schools in the 1990s as an alternative to traditional public education. At the time, they exempted charter schools from many regulations, betting that greater flexibility would lead to innovation and stronger academic performance.

But over the past three decades, the state has steadily increased restrictions on charter schools in response to concerns about financial mismanagement and academic performance. Charter schools, for example, were initially exempt from the state’s nepotism and conflict-of-interest laws, but lawmakers gradually changed that after reports exposed leaders enriching themselves and their families. The state implemented another round of stricter rules after newspapers uncovered lavish spending on perks such as Spurs tickets and lucrative land deals.

Even as oversight of charter schools has been strengthened, gaps remain. Earlier this year, a ProPublica and Tribune investigation found that a charter network with 1,000 students was paying its superintendent nearly $900,000 annually, making him among the highest-paid public school leaders in the nation. Yet the school did not disclose the superintendent’s full compensation to the state and later rebuffed calls to lower his salary from lawmakers and the advocacy group representing charters. The school board defended Cavazos’ salary, saying it was merited because of his duties and experience.

“Looking back on it today, I think it was necessary,” Bob Schulman, a longtime education attorney, said about many of the reforms.

Schulman, who has represented Texas charter schools for decades, said that some leaders abused the limited state oversight for years, making it more concerning that lawmakers launched a voucher program with even fewer regulations.

“I’m very disturbed,” Schulman said. “But I’m hopeful that it will be a quicker turnaround than it was for the charters.”

How We Reported This Story

For this story, reporters reviewed nonprofit tax filings for 90 of the 200 highest-enrollment private schools listed in the Texas Private Schools Accreditation Commission database. Those filings were not available for the other 110 schools, as for-profit schools or those tied to houses of worship are not typically required to make tax documents public. For the schools that filed these records, reporters reviewed available annual reports dating back to at least 2015.

Reporters identified more than 60 instances involving conflicts of interest, nepotism and financial transactions with related parties at 27 schools. Three education lawyers confirmed our findings.

That total, however, is likely an undercount even within the sample of schools the newsrooms reviewed. Reporters identified dozens more conflicts listed in tax forms, for example, but the schools provided sparse information about what they were. Because of that, there is no way to determine if the conduct would have violated state laws if it had occurred at a public or charter school. The newsrooms reached out to each school about the missing information, but none answered questions.

Help ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Report on Education

by Jake Pearson

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A task force appointed by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul is recommending that the state spend at least $15 million per year and create state-level oversight to bolster its troubled guardianship system, in which judges assign individuals or organizations to care for some 30,000 residents deemed incapable of looking after their own affairs.

If adopted, the plan would represent a major change in how the state government cares for some of its most vulnerable residents. New York currently budgets just $1 million to fund a guardianship hotline, and the legal arrangements receive little official oversight, with responsibility for people’s wellbeing spread among the courts, nonprofit organizations, private lawyers and companies.

The policy proposal, contained in the state’s Master Plan for Aging, comes three years after Hochul, a Democrat, issued an executive order creating a panel to map out the needs of New York’s aging population and suggest how best to serve older adults.

The plan concludes that improving the guardianship system would offer outsize benefits and would not be overly difficult to achieve.

The recommendations mark the first time Hochul’s administration has addressed problems with the state’s guardianship system since ProPublica investigated it extensively in a series of stories last year. Those stories revealed how some guardians neglected the vulnerable clients entrusted to their care. They also highlighted how few guardians the state has to serve the New Yorkers who require assistance — and how little oversight exists to ensure proper care. The problem is particularly acute for poor people who have no family able or willing to look after them, ProPublica found, a population known in industry circles as the “unbefriended.”

To fill the provider void, New York has long relied on a network of loosely regulated nonprofits and private companies, some of which have racked up hundreds of clients each but provided little or no services. That dynamic, ProPublica found, has resulted in claims of spectacular abuse and neglect, prompting the courts to appoint a special counsel to oversee guardianship reforms and Attorney General Letitia James to launch an investigation into some providers.

Advocates and judicial leaders have been calling for the guardianship system to be overhauled for years, but such an effort has remained elusive. It’s unclear whether Hochul’s task force will change that, even as the group’s report keeps guardianship in the political conversation in Albany.

The Legislature has barely funded guardianship services, allotting just enough in its budget the past two years to maintain a statewide hotline. And even the governor won’t say whether she plans to implement the reforms suggested by her own panel.

“The Governor appreciates the dedicated time and effort that many stakeholders put into producing the proposals included in the Master Plan for Aging and looks forward to working with these stakeholders and the legislature to collectively evaluate how best to utilize them to ensure New York remains a place where older New Yorkers can thrive,” a spokesperson for the governor said in a statement.

The spokesperson, Nicolette Simmonds, didn’t respond to an email and call asking for more specifics, including what Hochul’s position is on guardianship reform.

But Guardianship Access New York, a statewide coalition of nonprofit guardians and elder and disability justice advocates, said that it was encouraged by the governor’s plan since it acknowledged “a long-standing crisis.”

“New York’s guardianship system is past the point of crisis, and the Governor and Legislature must act now before it collapses,” Arthur Diamond, a former supervising judge of guardianship matters in Nassau County and a member of GANY, said in a statement. “We must stop ignoring the most vulnerable of the elder population and protect them now.”

But how, exactly, that will happen remains unclear. GANY has proposed the state fund a network of nonprofits with experience in government contracting and providing guardianship services.

Within the court system, a guardianship advisory committee recommended earlier this year that the state create a taxpayer-funded statewide organization to care for the unbefriended, records obtained by ProPublica show.

And some lawmakers have proposed changes, though none of them seek comprehensive reform.

One bill would require someone petitioning for a guardianship to identify all possible people who could manage the incapacitated person’s affairs, for example, while another would make it harder for a guardian to deny family members the right to visit a loved one under their care and control.

Assemblyman Charles Lavine, who chairs his chamber’s judiciary committee, said he supports a series of public roundtables to be hosted this fall by the courts and advocates “to gather local input and firsthand perspectives on guardianship access challenges” as a means of formulating a more comprehensive solution.

“These discussions will help inform statewide efforts to expand and improve guardianship services, including the creation of a comprehensive public guardianship system,” he said.

Still, any significant reform effort will require buy-in from the Legislature’s top leaders. Neither Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins nor Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie responded to requests for comment on Hochul’s Master Plan for Aging.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Alex Nguyen and Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune

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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.

Records released this week provide more details about campus safety concerns raised before the deadly 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and include some surviving teachers’ accounts that school leaders didn’t check on them after they were injured and traumatized.

The documents from Uvalde County and the school district also indicate that the 18-year-old shooter had behavioral and attendance issues before he dropped out of high school, and that his mother had told sheriff’s deputies that she was scared of him.

The county and Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District released the materials — nearly 12 gigabytes — as part of a settlement agreement in a yearslong lawsuit that news organizations, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, brought against state and local governments.

The records reinforce the failure of law enforcement agencies to more quickly confront the gunman, who killed 19 students and two teachers in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. ProPublica and the Tribune previously found that officers wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and waited 77 minutes to confront him. No officer took control of the response, which prevented coordination and communication between agencies.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which dispatched more than 90 officers to the school, has appealed a separate judge’s order to release hundreds of videos and investigative files to the news organizations that sued for access. The agency’s effort to slow the release of information continues to draw criticism from families of the victims, teachers and the former mayor, who is now a Republican state lawmaker.

“It’s important so that the families can begin to heal, so that the families can begin to trust, so they begin to have some sort of closure,” said Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece, Jackie Cazares, was killed during the May 24, 2022, massacre.

Rizo, now a school board member who voted to release the agency’s records, added, “It will never be complete closure, but some sort of closure, and rebuilding that trust in law enforcement.”

The news organizations will continue to fight for release of the DPS records, said Laura Prather, a media law chair for Haynes Boone who is representing the outlets.

Law enforcement experts largely regard the Uvalde shooting response as among the worst in American history. A U.S. Justice Department report in January 2024 affirmed many of the newsrooms’ initial findings and recommended that all officers in the country undergo at least eight hours of active shooter training annually.

“Three years is already too long to wait for truth and transparency that could prevent future tragedies,” Prather said.

Two former Uvalde schools police officers were indicted on child endangerment charges last summer over how they responded to the shooting. That includes Pete Arredondo, who was the district’s police chief during the shooting and has been widely faulted for the delay in confronting the gunman. Adrian Gonzales, a school police officer who responded to the shooting, also faces charges related to child endangerment. Both men have pleaded not guilty and did not respond to requests for comment this week.

This week, Gonzales’ attorney filed a request seeking a trial outside of Uvalde, saying “it would be impossible to gather a jury that would not view evidence through their own pain and grief.” In a text, the attorney, Nico LaHood, maintained that Gonzales is innocent and wrote that there is no evidence for why he should be held to account for collective failures of law enforcement agents from nearly two dozen agencies.

“It begs to question why he is accused of these charges out of nearly 400 officers present,” LaHood wrote.

Arredondo has also previously asserted that he did nothing wrong on the day of the shooting.

Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is leading the criminal investigation, did not return requests for comment. Spokespeople for the school district and county also did not immediately respond. DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen wrote in an email that the agency followed “its standard protocol in which it does not release records that will impact pending prosecutions.”

Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, now a GOP member of the state House, called it “ludicrous” that the news organizations had to launch a legal fight to obtain records. He added that DPS should also release its information so that the victims’ families could get much-needed answers.

“Maybe there’s something in there that we can keep this from happening again,” he said. “This was a costly mistake, and so I believe everybody should just release their records and give these families not closure, but at least another piece of what went on that day.”

ProPublica and the Tribune previously published 911 calls that showed the increasing desperation of children and teachers pleading to be saved and revealed how officers’ fear of the shooter’s AR-15 prevented them from acting more quickly. In a collaboration with FRONTLINE that included a documentary, the newsrooms showed that while the children in Uvalde were prepared, following what they had learned in their active shooter drills, many of the nearly 400 officers who responded were not.

The county documents include emails to and from Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco, but they reveal little about his office’s response. Nolasco’s inbox was inundated with media requests, offers of assistance from other law enforcement agencies and emails from the public criticizing law enforcement’s 77-minute delay in confronting the shooter, according to the documents released Tuesday.

Nolasco has faced criticism for his actions on the day of the shooting. He was the first officer to respond to the house of the shooter's grandmother, whom the gunman shot in the face before going to Robb Elementary. Law enforcement experts have questioned why Nolasco did not do more to identify the shooter immediately. Shortly after that, the sheriff arrived at the school but did not appear to take charge of the escalating situation. Several officers later told state investigators that they regarded the sheriff as the incident commander.

Nolasco could not be reached for comment on Tuesday and has declined multiple interview requests from the news organizations over the course of more than two years. In an interview Nolasco gave to DPS days after the shooting that was later obtained by the news organizations, he offered few details while defending his role that day.

A DOJ investigation into the flawed response last year mentioned Nolasco by name 37 times and noted that he specifically “should also have assisted with coordinating the law enforcement personnel present and establishing a command post and unified command.” Despite the controversy, Nolasco was easily reelected last year.

None of the school district police officers were wearing body cameras that day because the district had not issued them the equipment, so no new video or audio was released. The body cameras the county released had already been obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

“I Tried to Stay Calm for My Students”

Still, the records released this week showed further glimpses into the disarray that day.

In one school email sent three weeks after the shooting, a fourth grade teacher at Robb Elementary wrote to the district superintendent about how terrified she was during the shooting, as she tried to keep her students safe while bullets ricocheted around her.

According to a state House committee’s investigation into the shooting, the teacher was in a classroom across the hall from the adjoining classrooms where the gunaman killed all of his victims and was barricaded.

“I fell on the floor and began knocking desks over onto my legs so I wouldn’t make noise, but I couldn’t block the students from bullets,” she emailed the former district superintendent, who retired after the shooting. “I told my students I loved them. I told them to stay quiet, and I told them to pray.”

ProPublica and the Tribune could not immediately reach the teacher. In her email, she told the superintendent she was convinced she was going to die.

“I physically sat almost laying myself on my students and in front of them to be sure I could block them from bullets,” she wrote in an email. “I knew I would die that day. I had shrapnel in my back from when he shot in my window. I had blood all over the back of me, but I tried to stay calm for my students.”

The teacher wrote about how much she loved her students and working for the district. But she also noted that no school officials ever reached out to her immediately after the shooting. She wrote that she and other staff were asked not to talk to the media.

A month after the massacre, another fourth grade teacher who survived being shot finally felt ready to ask about what was happening to her classroom.

“Is it being packed up, if so what will happen with my personal belongings?” Elsa Avila wrote in an email to the school’s principal. “The students had piñatas they were working on, were those salvaged or did they get thrown away?”

Avila said in the email that it was hard to accept that she may never get answers to many of her questions about the shooting.

“So I guess I can start with answers about my classroom,” she said.

In a brief interview this week, Avila said school leaders did not reach out to her directly while she was in the hospital. She also said the district should have released records sooner and that she hopes other agencies will follow.

Still, she said, the government’s actions are lacking “any follow up.”

“There were hundreds of officers there, so, to me, it still does not make sense that they only charged two officers,” she said. “Will there ever be any true accountability from other agencies? Because more people would need to be held accountable, more agencies need to be held accountable than just the two officers that they charged.”

The new records also show that school administrators had been aware of long-standing issues with locks on campus doors. Multiple witnesses told the legislative panel that employees often left doors unlocked, while teachers would use rocks, wedges and magnets to prop open interior and exterior doors. The shooter was able to enter the school through an unlocked exterior door, according to the legislative investigation.

According to emails released this week, administrators had met with the owner of a lock company to discuss purchasing automatic locks for the district’s exterior doors a little less than a month before the shooting. Emails sent after the shooting showed cost estimates in the millions for installing new exterior doors, hardened windows, fencing and other security infrastructure.

Students have not returned to Robb Elementary since the 2022 attack. Local officials announced plans to demolish the school in the months following the shooting. A new campus, Legacy Elementary School, is expected to open this fall, and the site of the abandoned school has been turned into a living memorial.

Troubled History

The school district documents also include previously withheld information about the shooter, Salvador Ramos. They show district officials raising alarms about him hitting another student, using sexual language and drawing inappropriate pictures.

In an email, former Superintendent Hal Harrell noted that Ramos was routinely failing classes and barely attending school.

Academic intervention plans recommended one-on-one tutoring and parent conferences, however it is unclear what actions district officials or Ramos’ guardians ever took. Intervention plans from the 2016-17 school year largely list “behavior” as the reason for intervention. Ramos eventually dropped out.

Then, around three months before the shooting, a sheriff’s deputy visited the teenager’s home two days in a row following reports of physical and verbal disturbance between him and his family.

His mother, Adriana Reyes, could not immediately be reached for comment on Tuesday. But, according to the records, she told the deputy that Ramos became angry and kicked the Wi-Fi modem after she turned off the internet connection. The deputy wrote in a report that the mother said she was “scared of Salvador and wanted help.”

by Heather Vogell

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What Happened: Greystar, the nation’s largest landlord, has agreed to stop using algorithmic rent-setting software that federal prosecutors say could violate laws against price-fixing.

The agreement is part of a proposed settlement with the Justice Department to resolve claims by federal authorities that the company had colluded with other landlords to raise rents in cities across the country.

The deal was announced by the DOJ on Friday but still must be approved by a judge. If it is, it will bar Greystar, which is based in South Carolina and manages nearly 950,000 apartments nationwide, from using any “anti-competitive” algorithm that relies on rivals’ sensitive data to suggest rents, the department said in a statement.

Greystar was using rent-setting algorithms from RealPage, a Texas-based software-maker who was the subject of a ProPublica investigation in 2022 that showed the firm was helping landlords decide prices in a way that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior. The DOJ has also sued RealPage.

What They Said: The settlement drew praise from both Republicans and Democrats.

The lawsuit began under the Biden administration, but Trump-appointed Attorney General Pam Bondi touted the agreement with Greystar last week, saying “nowhere is competition more important than in making housing affordable again.”

Assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater, head of DOJ’s Antitrust Division, said that “whether in a smoke-filled room or through an algorithm, competitors cannot share competitively sensitive information or align prices to the detriment of American consumers.”

The settlement was praised by Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who urged the DOJ to investigate anticompetitive practices in the apartment market after ProPublica’s story in 2022.

“This settlement is good news for renters across the country,” Klobuchar said in a statement. “It’s critical the Justice Department continues to prosecute the case against RealPage and other major landlords to provide relief for all renters.”

Response: Greystar did not admit wrongdoing as part of the settlement and said in a statement that it “firmly believes that its use of RealPage’s revenue management software complies with all applicable laws.” The company said it will continue to defend itself against claims brought by regulators and cited what it called “unclear regulatory guidance around the use of revenue management tools.”

“We entered into these settlements to make clear the government’s interpretation of the law and to ensure we continue to do things the right way,” Greystar said.

Greystar also announced it had reached “an agreement in principle” to settle litigation brought by a nationwide group of renters making similar allegations.

A Greystar spokesperson declined to comment further.

RealPage declined to comment.

In January, a RealPage executive called the federal case “flawed” and said the company was committed to “vigorously defending ourselves.” RealPage had already changed its software to remove nonpublic data, she said, despite its view that its technology was legal and “pro-competitive,” adding the company was being made a scapegoat for housing affordability problems stemming from an undersupply of housing stock.

Background: The proposed settlement is the latest development to follow ProPublica’s 2022 investigation, which also mentioned Greystar. Dozens of tenants sued RealPage after the initial story. The Justice Department filed an antitrust complaint against RealPage in August 2024, and in January, it sued six of the nation’s landlords, including Greystar, accusing them of improperly working together to raise rents. In their complaint, prosecutors said one landlord told RealPage that it started increasing rents within a week of adopting the software and, within 11 months, had raised them more than 25%.

The suit was joined by at least 10 attorneys general, including the one for California, the country’s most populous state — home to roughly 17 million renters. One other landlord, Atlanta-based Cortland, has agreed to a settlement, as well.

Senators have also held hearings and introduced legislation seeking to ban the use of rent algorithms similar to RealPage’s. Cities around the country, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, moved to bar landlords from using similar algorithms to set rents.

Under the terms of the proposed settlement, Greystar has agreed to stop sharing its own “competitively sensitive” information with rival companies. And it won’t attend meetings of competitors hosted by RealPage.

Why It Matters: The DOJ’s moves against RealPage — and its landlord customers — for using shared data and technology were seen as an indication that authorities were willing to wade into a fraught corner of federal antitrust law. In the past, collusion happened with “a formal handshake in a clandestine meeting,” federal prosecutors wrote in one filing. “Algorithms are the new frontier.”

The proposed settlement is also significant as businesses watch to see how aggressively the Trump administration will pursue antitrust cases. Bondi said the agreement aligned with the president’s “pro-consumer agenda.”

Now, as part of the deal, Greystar has agreed to cooperate with the DOJ’s monopolization claims against RealPage. The case is ongoing. RealPage has sought to dismiss the suit, saying “it fails to plead anticompetitive effects in a relevant market,” among other things.

Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose, ProPublica, and Katherine Dailey, Medill Investigative Lab

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For more than a dozen years, the Food and Drug Administration quietly allowed substandard foreign factories to continue shipping medications to the United States even after the agency officially banned them from doing so because of dangerous manufacturing failures.

ProPublica exposed the little-known practice in June. The FDA said the decisions to exempt certain medications from import bans were made to fend off drug shortages and that guardrails were in place to ensure the products were safe, such as requiring the banned factories to do extra testing on the drugs before they were sent to Americans.

But the agency itself didn’t regularly test the drugs or proactively monitor reports filed by doctors and others that described drugs with a foul odor, abnormal taste or residue, or consumers who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems. The FDA cautions the outcomes described in the complaints may have no connection to the drugs or could be unexpected side effects. But drug safety experts say that without further study, it’s impossible to know whether people were harmed or how many.

The FDA kept the exemptions largely hidden from the public and has never released a comprehensive list of the drugs allowed into the United States from banned factories. ProPublica is publishing that list today.

The list provides the names of the drugs or ingredients that ProPublica has identified as having been exempted from an import ban since 2013 and the names of the manufacturers that made them. The product names are written as they appeared on the FDA’s import alert list. Most of the factories on this list are no longer banned, so their drugs are coming into the country through normal channels. The FDA lifts bans after facilities make all the necessary fixes.

Some of the factories are still banned — and are still allowed to send exempted drugs to the U.S. Those are highlighted in yellow.

Exempted Drugs Since 2013

See the full list and search for a drug here.

All told, ProPublica identified more than 150 exempted products, mostly from factories in India. One factory in China and one factory in Hungary also received exemptions. Several of the factories make ingredients for drugs, which are then sent to the manufacturers that produce pills, capsules, tablets or injectables.

To compile the list of exempted drugs and ingredients, reporters pulled historical records from the internet and used Redica Systems, a quality and regulatory intelligence company with a vast collection of agency documents.

In finalizing its analysis, ProPublica counted all the drugs and ingredients that were exempted from each banned factory. Sometimes, the same product was exempted from multiple factories and was added to each factory’s total. In a handful of cases, the FDA exempted several formulations — such as a tablet, capsule or injectable — of the same drug. ProPublica counted those different forms as distinct drugs.

For this list, ProPublica only included each drug once for each manufacturer.

Generic drugs can have many manufacturers, and it can be difficult to know based on information provided on medicine bottles where drugs were made or by whom. Sometimes bottles list the names of repackagers or distributors rather than the drugmaker itself. Pharmacists and possibly health care providers can provide additional information about the source of prescribed medications.

This list is current as of Aug. 4. The FDA can add or remove exempted drugs at any time.

Company Responses

ProPublica reached out to all the drugmakers listed here. Most did not respond.

Apotex did not respond to requests for comment. After the inspections that led to the import bans, the company told the FDA that it would launch corrective actions and bring on a third-party consultant, among other things. The factories are no longer banned.

Divi’s Laboratories did not respond to requests for comment. In its response to the FDA at the time, the company said it hired third-party consultants and other experts to resolve the FDA’s concerns. The company also said it had taken corrective actions at the facility. The factory is no longer banned.

Emcure Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. In its response to the FDA at the time, the company said it would revise procedures, provide training and engage consultants, among other things. The factory is still banned but no longer has exemptions.

Glenmark Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. At the time of the ban, the company said it would engage with the FDA to resolve the concerns. The factory is still banned but is no longer receiving any exemptions.

GPT Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. In its response to the FDA, the company defended the quality of its products and said it had brought on a consultant to audit the operation. The factory is no longer banned.

In a statement to ProPublica, Pfizer, which owns Hospira, said it submitted a comprehensive response to the FDA, paused production at the site and then sold the facility to another company in 2019. “We are committed to operating our manufacturing sites at the highest quality standards,” Pfizer said. The factory is no longer banned.

Intas Pharmaceuticals, whose U.S. subsidiary is Accord Healthcare, said in a statement that the company has invested millions of dollars in upgrades and new hires and launched a companywide program focused on quality. Exempted drugs were sent to the United States in a “phased manner,” the company said, with third-party oversight and safety testing. Intas also said that some exempted drugs were never shipped to the United States because the FDA found other suppliers. The company would not provide details. “Intas is well on its way towards full remediation of all manufacturing sites,” the company said. The two Intas factories are still banned and still receiving exemptions.

Ipca Laboratories did not respond to requests for comment. At the time, Ipca said it was working to resolve the issues at several factories. “The company is committed to its philosophy of highest quality in manufacturing, operations, systems, integrity and cGMP culture,” Ipca said, referring to “current good manufacturing practices,” a common phrase in the industry. The factories are no longer banned.

Jubilant Generics did not respond to requests for comment. At the time, the company said it would “engage with the agency to resolve the import alert at the earliest and ensure cGMP compliance.” The factory is no longer banned.

Shilpa Medicare did not respond to requests for comment. In a media statement at the time, the company said it planned to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “We uphold quality and compliance with utmost importance and are committed to maintaining cGMP and quality standards across all Shilpa facilities.” The factory is still banned and one of its medications is still exempt.

Sri Krishna Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. The company at the time told the FDA that it was using a consultant to audit operations and assist in meeting manufacturing requirements. The factory is still banned but is no longer receiving exemptions.

In a statement to ProPublica, Sun Pharma said that adherence to quality standards “is a top priority for Sun, and we maintain a relentless focus on quality and compliance to ensure the uninterrupted supply of medicines to our customers and patients worldwide. We continue to work proactively with the US FDA and remain committed to achieve full resolution of any FDA regulatory issues at our facilities.” The factory is still banned and still receiving exemptions.

Teva Pharmaceuticals did not respond to requests for comment. The company said in a statement at the time that it was working to avoid drug shortages “while we focus on resolving regulatory concerns, as patients are always highest priority.” The factory is still banned but no longer receiving exemptions.

Wockhardt did not respond to requests for comment. In a conference call with reporters at the time of the import ban, according to Reuters, the Wockhardt chairman said the company was “making all kinds of effort to satisfy” FDA good manufacturing standards at the factory. The factories are still banned, but in July, Wockhardt announced that it would no longer make generics for the U.S. market.

Zhejiang Hisun Pharmaceutical did not respond to requests for comment. According to a report in Bloomberg, Hisun said at the time that it takes quality seriously and has complied with requirements. The factory is no longer banned.

Mylan/Viatris said in a statement to ProPublica that it immediately worked to resolve the FDA’s concerns. “Patient safety remains our primary and unwavering focus,” the company said. The factory is still banned and still receiving exemptions.

A lawyer for Madhu Instruments told ProPublica in an email that the company has fixed all the problems identified by the FDA and is cooperating fully. The factory is still banned but no longer has an exemption.

Brandon Roberts and Irena Hwang contributed data reporting.

by Megan Rose and Debbie Cenziper

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The dispatches from one of India’s most troubled generic drug makers were contrite, filled with far-reaching promises to clean up its factory, stop contamination and send safe medication to Americans counting on the company’s drugs.

“We have started addressing FDA concerns very aggressively and comprehensively,” an executive from Sun Pharma wrote to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2015.

“Sun is ensuring the presence of a strong, independent quality unit,” the company repeatedly pledged.

An FDA inspection in 2014 had turned up dangerous violations at Sun’s factory in the Indian city of Halol, and the details were grim: Managers weren’t following basic rules to prevent the contamination of injectable drugs. They had failed to determine whether “unknown impurities” found in medication were toxic. The factory itself was in disrepair. The ceiling leaked and investigators observed dripping water, another dangerous contamination risk, collecting in buckets in a sterile manufacturing area.

Sun vowed bold reform at the factory, its flagship for the U.S. market. In a series of letters to the FDA after the inspection, executives described a long list of “enhancements” in facilities, in staffing, in quality standards, in training.

But for eight years, as inspectors returned and discovered again and again that Sun’s efforts were grossly inadequate, the FDA did little to warn the public or stop the drugs from coming to the United States.

The trove of Sun correspondence obtained by ProPublica provides a rare glimpse into private discussions between the global drugmaker and the U.S. regulator singularly responsible for protecting consumers from unsafe medication. The documents show how often the FDA tolerated Sun’s broken promises and substandard manufacturing, allowing an uninterrupted flow of generics to an American public clamoring for cheaper medication.

As Sun’s fixes fell short, the agency in 2015 even declared the factory’s products “adulterated” which, according to federal law, means they were produced in a way that could have compromised their strength, quality and purity.

A 2015 warning letter from the Food and Drug Administration to Sun Pharma stated that the agency “identified significant violations of current good manufacturing practice” and that “these violations cause your drugs products to be adulterated.” (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

Not until the final weeks of 2022 would the agency bar the factory from shipping its drugs to the U.S. Even then, regulators immediately excluded more than a dozen medications from the ban. The exemptions allowed Sun to continue sending those drugs — with few restrictions and no regular testing by the FDA.

In June, 11 years after that first alarming inspection, the agency went back to the factory and chronicled practically identical deficiencies. Equipment was still dirty. Injectable medications still had impurities. One worker wasn’t wearing clean gloves.

The failings convinced the FDA to keep the import ban in place, but the agency continued to allow Sun to send exempted drugs to the United States.

“Would you trust somebody who repeatedly lies to you?” said Dinesh Thakur, an industry whistleblower and drug-safety advocate. “I don’t know how you can justify your decision to try to give them a pass every time. … You are basically putting people at risk.”

More than 20 foreign factories banned from the U.S. market have received similar exemptions from the FDA since 2013 through a little-known practice used by the agency to prevent drug shortages. ProPublica reported in June that antibiotics, anti-seizure drugs and chemotherapy treatments were shipped from those plants even after inspectors identified critical violations in the way drugs were made. In all, more than 150 drugs or their ingredients received exemptions.

And, just like with Sun, the FDA never shared the details with the doctors prescribing the medications or the patients taking them. (ProPublica compiled a list of exempted drugs and ingredients since 2013.)

The agency did not respond to questions about the Sun factory, the decision to wait eight years to impose the ban or the exemptions that followed, saying only it could not discuss potential or ongoing compliance matters. The FDA referred further inquiries to Sun.

The FDA also did not answer directly whether it believed that drugs exempted from Sun’s Halol plant and the other factories were safe. To “help assure consumer safety,” the agency said, companies are required to subject exempted drugs to extra testing with third-party oversight before the medications are sent to the United States.

ProPublica’s review of the FDA’s own records, however, shows the potential weakness of such a system. Some of the companies were caught providing unreliable testing records to the FDA before they received exemptions. FDA inspectors have found managers at Sun’s Halol factory repeatedly disregarded the results of tests showing drugs were tainted with impurities. In 2019, inspectors also discovered that Sun employees could access computer systems without oversight and edit microbiological test results to potentially minimize troubling findings.

“All of the inspectors I know who do inspections in India were aware of the problems” at Sun, said one veteran FDA investigator who did not want to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “You just worry about the patients.”

A 2022 FDA inspection report on the Sun factory observed “increased unknown impurities” identified as “extraneous matter” in batches of medication. (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

Since the 2014 inspection, FDA records show, the agency has received thousands of reports from doctors and others noting concerns about the drugs that Sun makes at the Halol factory and at other plants. The complaints described potential contamination and other quality issues, or patients who had experienced sudden or unexplained health problems. The FDA cautions that the outcomes in the reports may have no connection to the drugs or could be unexpected side effects. Drug safety experts say there is no way to know for sure without further study.

Sun did not respond to detailed questions about its regulatory history. In an email, the company said it has upgraded the Halol facility and collaborated with manufacturing consultants and is testing to verify that drugs made there are safe and effective. Adherence to quality standards, the company said, “is a top priority for Sun, and we maintain a relentless focus on quality and compliance to ensure the uninterrupted supply of medicines to our customers and patients worldwide. We continue to work proactively with the US FDA and remain committed to achieve full resolution of any FDA regulatory issues at our facilities.”

Sun has been making that same promise for years.

Promises Made and Broken

Sun, one of the leading exporters of medications to the United States, began its campaign to win back the trust of the FDA shortly after three inspectors in September 2014 traveled to the Halol factory in western India and found the worrisome violations.

At the plant, the investigators zeroed in on the production of injectable medications. Delivered directly into the body, the drugs can be particularly dangerous, even lethal, when contaminated. But the factory, inspectors found, had no procedures to prevent the contamination of sterile drugs, according to the report.

One month later, Sun wrote to the FDA, saying it had brought on consultants to address quality issues, develop training programs and conduct audits of the factory.

“We take very seriously each of the issues that FDA has raised,” the company wrote. “Sun understands the concerns … and fully appreciates the need for a complete and comprehensive response and a robust compliance enhancement plan to address these matters.”

The letter was sent by two Sun vice presidents — one the head of quality, the other in charge of global manufacturing. They committed to sending a written update every other month, beginning in December that year, about changes for “long-term compliance.”

By February 2015, in its second update to the FDA, Sun touted more than 120 fixes at the factory. But based on its previous inspection, the FDA still issued a warning letter, which called the factory’s drugs “adulterated.”

“It is essential that executive management systematically improve their oversight of manufacturing quality,” the agency admonished in the December 2015 letter.

The company quickly responded, dispatching executives to FDA headquarters in Maryland to deliver personal assurances that the factory was falling in line. “We appreciated the opportunity to discuss Sun’s substantial progress,” two of the company’s quality managers wrote after the January 2016 visit. “Sun remains focused to deliver substantial improvements.”

Sun pledged to spend $218 million on facility improvements, according to one of its letters to the FDA. But inspectors in 2016 turned up more problems. Once again, Sun promised reform and detailed the steps it would take to fix violations.

This time, Sun sought to reassure the FDA about the production of a generic drug, carbidopa and levodopa, used to treat tremors and other effects of Parkinson’s disease. Some of the factory’s tablets were not dissolving properly when ingested, according to a Sun letter that year. That could have left patients with too little of the key ingredient needed to control the disease, or too much of it.

Sun told the FDA that an internal review was underway and the company would assess any other drugs with similar quality issues. Sun soon recalled 8,500 bottles of the drug in the United States.

More letters from Sun followed in 2017, some addressed directly to Carmelo Rosa, a longtime director of quality at the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, which oversees drug safety. The agency did not respond to a request for comment from Rosa, and Rosa did not respond to an email or LinkedIn message.

Inspectors went back to the factory in February and August 2018, unearthing more problems. In December that year, inspectors visited again — this time because Sun wanted to introduce three new injectable medications into the U.S. market. The inspectors noted that earlier problems had been corrected, records show.

But just one month later, Sun recalled 135,000 vials of vecuronium bromide, a muscle relaxer used during surgery, saying glass particles had been found and could cause life-threatening blood clots. The company at the time said it had not received any reports of harm.

Inspectors went back to the factory two more times in 2019, once in June and again in December, and found more problems with the way injectable medications were made. The December inspection was so alarming that the FDA held an urgent teleconference with the company, according to records obtained by ProPublica, which last year sued the agency in federal court to gain access to the information.

Despite the concerns, another FDA group — tasked with preventing drug shortages — reached out to Sun after the inspection to make sure that the factory would continue to produce the cancer drug doxorubicin. Sun promised it would.

The records show that for a series of important discussions with Sun, the FDA excluded the team that oversaw the inspections at the factory and were best informed about what was happening there.

“It would have been very helpful” to have the inspection division “plugged in from the beginning,” one team member emailed colleagues and his management in the months after the inspection.

Around that time, the company temporarily shut down the factory’s sterile manufacturing line, according to an email that Sun sent to Rosa. The plant was making 16 injectable drugs for the U.S. market.

Early the next year, Sun assured Rosa that it had done extensive reviews and submitted a strategy to again ship injectables to the United States.

That included testosterone, which is used to treat everything from low libido to bone health. But when patients got their bottles, some took to social media to describe the appearance of unusual crystals.

“They won’t go away, is it okay to use?” one person posted on Reddit in 2021. “I need to do my shot today.”

In 2021, a Reddit user posted a photo that appears to show crystals in a bottle of injectable testosterone manufactured by Sun Pharma at the Halol, India, factory. (Screenshot by ProPublica)

Crystals in testosterone vials are not unusual, and Sun and other manufacturers include instructions on the label to get rid of them by warming the product. FDA inspectors, however, went back to the factory in Halol in 2022 and found that Sun had received hundreds of complaints about the crystals, including two that noted it took more than five hours to dissolve them when it should normally only take minutes.

A 2022 FDA inspection report on the Sun factory in Halol, India, notes that “From Jan 2020 thru April 2022, your firm has received a total of 811 complaints for crystallization of” injectable vials of a medication whose name was redacted. The report says sample testing was performed by a sister company for which Sun “lacked documentation of their training and qualifications to perform these inspections.” (Obtained and highlighted by ProPublica)

Sun said it had investigated the concerns and concluded the testosterone was acceptable. But the company couldn’t provide documentation that showed workers were properly trained or qualified to run the tests and ultimately could not produce data confirming the crystals properly dissolved, the FDA found.

Inspectors issued another damning report. Six months later, in December 2022, the FDA assessed its toughest penalty: banning the Halol factory from shipping drugs to the United States. The move came eight years after Sun started pledging reforms. And the FDA then undercut its sanction by quickly exempting more than a dozen drugs from the ban.

In the latest inspection in June of this year, inspectors found the factory failed to investigate bacteria found in test vials, disinfect manufacturing areas and equipment or properly handle vials and stoppers meant for sterile medications, according to the report.

Though the FDA published on its website warning letters sent to the factory, it has never alerted the public about the problems in a comprehensive way or provided a list of the drugs made there. The names of Halol’s products are blacked out on inspection reports so consumers can’t check their medications and make informed decisions about whether to take them.

A portion of the FDA’s June 2025 inspection report redacted the names of potentially compromised drugs manufactured by Sun that continue to be released to the U.S. market. (Obtained by ProPublica)

“Your family members are taking these drugs, and are they safe? Well, maybe, well maybe not,” said former FDA inspector Patrick Stone, who now advises pharmaceutical companies. “The FDA turns a blind eye. If your market [share] is big enough, then you get leeway.”

Blind Faith

In 2023, Sun’s billionaire founder said the introduction of new products and gains in market share made the company well positioned to “exploit the growth opportunity in the U.S. market.”

Despite the long list of critical inspection reports, five drugs made at Sun’s Halol factory are still allowed into the U.S. 2 1/2 years after the FDA issued the import ban. The exempted medications are vecuronium bromide and doxorubicin, as well as: divalproex delayed release tablets, which are used to treat seizures and migraines; leuprolide injections, which are used by people with prostate cancer, endometriosis and other conditions; and temozolomide capsules, which treat brain cancer.

Current and former FDA inspectors and others said the agency should have acted faster, responding to the problems its inspectors uncovered rather than buying into Sun’s assurances.

One senior FDA employee familiar with the inspections said they feared the company didn’t have the know-how to make safe drugs.

“Is it that they’re trying to hide stuff? Is it that they’re trying to protect? Or is it that they have no clue how to be doing these things?” said the staffer, who declined to be identified because they were not authorized to speak publicly. “Why would you get on the phone with FDA and brag that you have all these systems in place and you didn’t?”

The adverse event reports about the company’s drugs submitted to the FDA over the years describe choking, vomiting and blistering, or say that the drugs potentially caused or contributed to “toxicity,” cardiac arrest and renal failure, among other reactions, government records show. Hundreds of the complaints describe medications with possible contaminants, drugs that didn’t dissolve properly and other quality and safety concerns.

Sun’s testosterone alone was the subject of more than 500 reports, including ones describing swelling, increased heart rate, burning sensations or pain, among other symptoms, records show.

Today, years after investigators first identified problems, the senior FDA employee said the threat of harm lingers.

“The people on the other end have faith that the products they are taking are safe and effective,” said the staffer. “I think of the faces. I think of my parents. … I think of the consumers who are basically taking these drugs on blind faith.”

Brandon Roberts contributed data reporting.