ProPublica

by McKenzie Funk

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The icebreaker Aiviq is a gas guzzler with a troubled history. The ship was built to operate in the Arctic, but it has a type of propulsion system susceptible to failure in ice. Its waste and discharge systems weren’t designed to meet polar code, its helicopter pad is in the wrong place to launch rescue operations and its rear deck is easily swamped by big waves.

On its maiden voyage to Alaska in 2012, the 360-foot vessel lost control of the Shell Oil drill rig it was towing, and Coast Guard helicopter crews braved a storm to pluck 18 men off the wildly lurching deck of the rig before it crashed into a rocky beach. An eventual Coast Guard investigation faulted bad decision-making by people in charge but also flagged problems with the Aiviq’s design.

But for all this, the same Coast Guard bought the Aiviq for $125 million late last year.

The United States urgently needs new icebreakers in an era when climate change is bringing increased traffic to the Arctic, including military patrols near U.S. waters by Russia and China. That the first of the revamped U.S. fleet is a secondhand vessel a top Coast Guard admiral once said “may, at best, marginally meet our requirements” is a sign of how long the country has tried and failed to build new ones.

It’s also a sign of how much sway political donors can have over Congress.

Edison Chouest, the Louisiana company that built the icebreaker, has contributed more than $7 million to state and national parties, to political action committees and super PACS, and to members of key House and Senate committees since 2012. Chouest spent most of that period looking to unload the vessel after Shell, its intended user, walked away.

Members who received money from Chouest pressured the Coast Guard to rent or buy the Aiviq from the company. One U.S. representative from Alaska, where the ship will be stationed, told an admiral in a 2016 hearing that his service’s objections were “bullshit.”

And there would be even tougher pressures to come.

It’s now been a dozen years since the Aiviq set out on its first mission to Alaska, long enough for its troubles to fade from public memory.

The ship, though owned and operated by Chouest, was part of Shell’s Arctic fleet, designed for a specific role: as a tugboat that could tow Shell’s 250-foot-tall polar drill rig, the Kulluk, around the coast of Alaska and help anchor it in the waters of the Far North. At its christening ceremony in Louisiana, attended by Shell executives, U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and U.S. Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, it was named after the Iñupiaq word for walrus.

As a journalist, I’d been following the oil company’s multibillion-dollar play in the warming Arctic with interest. One June morning in 2012, I got word that Shell was on the move near my Seattle home, so I sped to a narrow point in Puget Sound with a good view of passing traffic. It was sunny, the water calm. The Aiviq bobbed past with Kulluk in tow. The icebreaker’s paint — blue at the time — was fresh, its hull shiny. It looked capable.

The problems began once the Aiviq was out of view. A Coast Guard report said that while the ship towed the Kulluk northward through an Arctic storm, waves crashed over its rear deck and poured into interior spaces, which investigators determined may have caused it to list up to 20 degrees to one side. The water damaged cranes, heaters and firefighting equipment, and the vents to the fuel system were submerged.

On its way back from Alaska’s Beaufort Sea two months later, the Aiviq suffered an electrical blackout, and one of its engines failed, necessitating a repair in Dutch Harbor in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.

Then the Aiviq and Kulluk set out on a wintertime voyage back to Seattle. The National Weather Service issued a gale warning predicting 15-foot seas and 40-knot winds. The sailors aboard the Aiviq and Kulluk exchanged worried messages.

The cable with which the Aiviq was towing the Kulluk came free two days later when a shackle broke. The icebreaker’s captain made a U-turn in heavy swells to hook up an emergency tow line, and water again poured over its deck and into the fuel vents. The Aiviq’s four diesel engines soon began to fail, one after another.

Although a Chouest engineer later testified that an unknown fuel additive must have caused the failures, Coast Guard investigators believe the likely cause was “fuel contamination by seawater.” They said the fuel system’s design, which they described as substandard, made contamination more likely.

The Aiviq and Kulluk were reattached — but now, and for the next two days, adrift. Storms pushed them ever closer toward land.

First image: The Aiviq’s crew tries to tow Royal Dutch Shell’s drill rig Kulluk away from the rocky coastline of Alaska during a December 2012 storm. Second image: Waves crash over the Kulluk after it ran aground. Third image: A salvage team returns to the Coast Guard station in Kodiak after working aboard the Kulluk. (U.S. Coast Guard)

By the time the engines were repaired, it was too late. The Kulluk ran aground at an uninhabited island off Kodiak, Alaska, on New Year’s Eve. Shell’s Arctic dreams began to unravel. The oil company sold its drill rig off for scrap. (It did not respond to a request for comment.)

And the Aiviq? A month after the accident, I visited Kodiak to report on what went wrong. I saw it anchored in the safety of a protected bay, an expensive, purpose-built ship now stripped of its purpose.

Shell formally abandoned its Arctic efforts in 2015, after failing to find oil. The Aiviq eventually steamed back south. Chouest began looking around for someone to take the troubled icebreaker off its hands. The Coast Guard, which had criticized the ship’s role in the Kulluk accident, now became a potential customer.

For weeks after their accident at sea, the refloated drill rig Kulluk, background, and the icebreaker Aiviq, right, parked in the safety of a Kodiak Island bay. (McKenzie Funk/ProPublica)

Traffic in the warming Arctic has surged as countries eye the region’s natural resources, and it will grow all the more if the storied Northwest Passage melts enough to become a viable route for freight in the decades ahead. The number of ships in the High North increased by 37% from 2013 to 2023.

It’s the U.S. Coast Guard’s job to patrol these waters as part of an agreement with the Navy, projecting military strength while monitoring maritime traffic, enforcing fishing laws and rescuing vessels in distress. Although surface ice in the Arctic Ocean is shrinking on average, it can still form and move about the ocean unpredictably. A Coast Guard vessel needs to be able to cut through it to be a reliable presence.

But the U.S. icebreaker fleet is deteriorating. The Coast Guard began raising alarms about the problem decades ago, starting with a study published in 1984. Russia, with its extensive northern coastline, now has over 40 large icebreakers, and more under construction. The United States has barely been able to keep two or three in service.

The Yakutia, a Russian nuclear icebreaker capable of cutting through ice up to nearly 10 feet thick, during sea trials in St. Petersburg this month. (Artem Priakhin/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)

An urgent Coast Guard report to Congress in 2010 highlighted what has become known as the “icebreaker gap”: If we didn’t quickly start building new ships, our existing icebreakers could go out of commission before replacements were ready. The study called for at least six new icebreakers. Subsequent Coast Guard analysis has called for eight or nine. To date, the United States has built zero.

Congress dragged its feet for years on funding icebreaker construction. But the Coast Guard also slowed progress with overly optimistic timelines, fuzzy cost estimates and a tendency to keep fiddling with new designs, according to a 2023 Government Accountability Office report. More than a decade in, construction on the first of the new ships has finally just begun. The Coast Guard’s latest cost estimate is $1 billion per icebreaker, while the Congressional Budget Office last year put it at $1.6 billion to $1.9 billion.

Icebreakers have “been the penultimate studied-to-death subject for 40 years,” said Lawson Brigham, a former Coast Guard heavy icebreaker commander who has a doctorate from Cambridge University and has researched polar shipping since the 1980s.

The longer the Coast Guard failed to build the ships it did want, the more pressure it faced to settle for one it didn’t. Chouest seized the opportunity. The company invited Coast Guard officers to tour the Aiviq as early as 2016 and soon sent over a lease proposal.

Canada rejected similar overtures that year. A middleman for Chouest promised Canadian lawmakers a “fast-track polar icebreaker” — the Aiviq — “at less than one-third of the price of the permanent replacement.” Also on offer were three smaller, Norwegian-built icebreakers. Canada bought those instead.

The U.S. Coast Guard’s problem with the Aiviq, retired officers told ProPublica, was the ship’s design. Originally built for oil operations, it had a low, wet deck and a helipad near its bow, where it would be ill suited for launching rescue operations. Its direct-drive propulsion system was both less efficient and more likely to get jammed up in ice than the diesel-electric systems the Coast Guard used.

“I mean, on paper it’s an icebreaker,” Adm. Paul Zukunft, the then-commandant of the Coast Guard, told Congress in 2017. “But it hasn’t demonstrated an ability to break ice.” (Years later, in 2022 and 2023, the Aiviq would make two successful icebreaking trips to Antarctica under contract with the Australian government.)

The Aiviq completes a chartered refueling operation at Davis research station in Antarctica. Its 2022 and 2023 voyages for the Australian government were among the only times the 13-year-old icebreaker has encountered ice. (Kirk Yatras/Australian Antarctic Program)

The service estimated it would take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade the Aiviq’s features to near-standard for a Coast Guard icebreaker. Even then, it wouldn’t be able to move forward through ice thicker than about 4.5 feet. The Coast Guard’s most immediate need was for heavy icebreakers, burlier ships that can handle missions in the Arctic as well as supply runs to the U.S. research station at McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

So how would the U.S. Coast Guard use the Aiviq beyond flag-waving and general presence in the near Arctic? According to Brigham, the former icebreaker captain and polar-shipping expert, “No one that I know, no study that I’ve seen, no one I’ve talked to really knows.”

But it wasn’t for the Coast Guard alone to turn down Chouest’s bargain offer. Members of Congress had their own ideas.

The late U.S. Rep. Don Young represented Alaska, a state thousands of miles from Chouest’s home base in Louisiana. But as of 2016, when Chouest was looking to sell the Aiviq, Young had taken in hundreds of thousands of dollars in political contributions from the company — so many donations in one year that he had once faced a congressional ethics investigation concerning Chouest money. (He was cleared.)

Young became the most vocal of many congressional critics to publicly dress down the Coast Guard for resisting Chouest’s offering of the Aiviq.

At a House hearing that July, he began grilling the Coast Guard’s second-in-command, Adm. Charles Michel, about a “privately owned ship” with a “tremendous capability of icebreaking power.”

“I know you have the proposal on your desk,” he scolded Michel. “It is an automatic ‘no.’ Why?”

“Sir,” the admiral said, “that vessel is not suitable for military service without substantial refit.”

Michel’s response sparked derision from Young.

“That is what I call,” Young muttered, “a bullshit answer.”

Michel, now retired, declined to comment on his exchange with Young.

According to the representative’s former chief of staff Alex Ortiz, Young’s frustration stemmed from the fact that the Coast Guard lacked the money to build an icebreaker from scratch but showed “an unwillingness to accept the realities of that.” Young and many other lawmakers also supported getting new icebreakers, but perfect had become the enemy of the good the Aiviq had to offer right away. “I genuinely don’t think that he was advocating for leasing the vessel just because of Chouest’s support,” Ortiz said.

Chouest, Young’s benefactor, is based in Cut Off, Louisiana. It’s led by its founder’s billionaire son and has long provided ships for the oil and gas industry. At the time of the 2016 hearing, Chouest was relatively new to Coast Guard contracts. One of the company’s affiliates would later take over the contract to build new heavy icebreakers, in 2022, making Chouest the supplier of both a ship the Coast Guard desired and the one it resisted.

Chouest did not respond to questions for this article.

More than 95% of Chouest’s $7 million in political contributions since 2012 has gone to Republicans, according to OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that tracks money from family members, employees and corporate affiliates.

But when it comes to lawmakers who oversee the Coast Guard, Democrats also have been major recipients. The late Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, head of the House Subcommittee on Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation for five years, received $94,700 in the decade before his 2019 death. Rep. John Garamendi of California, a longtime committee member, started taking Chouest donations in 2021 and has since received a total of $40,500.

(Garamendi’s office acknowledged the recent donations but issued a statement saying he has for many years “pushed the Coast Guard to build icebreakers expeditiously, particularly given the aging fleet and the national security imperative.”)

Alaska politicians are particular beneficiaries of Chouest’s largesse, second only to those from Louisiana. Chouest’s interests in the 49th state, beyond icebreakers, have included a 10-year contract to escort oil tankers through Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Federal Elections Commission records show that Young, before his death in 2022, collected a career total of almost $300,000 from the company. Sen. Dan Sullivan has taken in at least $31,500, Sen. Lisa Murkowski $84,400.

From left: Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska; Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska; and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, at a news conference in 2015. The lawmakers played key roles getting the Coast Guard to buy an icebreaker whose previous owner, Edison Chouest, donated to their campaigns. (Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call via AP)

The year after Young swore at the Coast Guard admiral in public, Rep. Duncan D. Hunter of California brought up the issue once more at a different House hearing featuring a different admiral, Zukunft. Hunter’s total from Chouest would be $58,800 before he pleaded guilty to stealing campaign funds and stepped down in 2020.

“Icebreakers,” Hunter said. “Let’s talk icebreakers.”

Hunter was backed up by Rep. Garret Graves of Louisiana, whose Chouest contributions now total $240,500. “Admiral, I think every time you’ve come before this committee, this issue has come up,” Graves said. “We need to see some substantial progress.”

Weeks later at yet another hearing, Rep. John Carter of Texas, whose single biggest donor the previous election cycle was Edison Chouest at $33,700, pressed Zukunft again. “There’s this commercial ship that has been offered …” Carter began.

Rep. John Carter of Texas, right, asks Adm. Paul Zukunft about Coast Guard use of the Aiviq at a hearing in 2017. (House Appropriations Committee video, screenshots by ProPublica)

In the end, the advocates for Chouest’s ship prevailed. The Alaskans played a particular role.

In 2022, after Young’s death, Sullivan helped author the Don Young Coast Guard Authorization Act, which included an approval for the service to buy a “United States built available icebreaker.”

Sullivan, who would later be praised for leading a revolt against his Senate colleague Tommy Tuberville’s blockade on promotions of military officers, also engaged in some quiet hardball. Until the country can complete a long-delayed near-Arctic port, icebreakers have been based in Seattle, where there are working shipyards and experienced contractors to do maintenance. But as a recent press release describes it, Sullivan “put a hold on certain USCG promotions until the Coast Guard produced a long promised study on the homeporting of an icebreaker in Alaska.”

Last year, Sullivan, Murkowski and former Rep. Mary Peltola of Alaska announced that Congress had finally appropriated $125 million for the Aiviq. The Coast Guard took possession of the ship last month. (Murkowski and Peltola, along with Hunter, Graves and Carter, did not respond to requests for comment.)

In a statement to ProPublica, a Sullivan spokesperson wrote that the senator “has long advocated for the purchase of a commercially available icebreaker of the Coast Guard’s choosing but has never advocated for the purchase of the Aiviq specifically.” The way Congress wrote the specifications for a “United States built” icebreaker, however, ensured there was only one the Coast Guard could choose: the Aiviq.

The icebreaker's new home — based on the findings of the Coast Guard’s urgently completed port study — will be Alaska’s capital, Juneau. The city is facing what the Juneau Empire has called “a crisis-level housing shortage,” and it remains unclear how it will manage an influx of hundreds of sailors and family members. Juneau also lacks a shipyard. For repairs and upgrades, the Aiviq will have to travel hundreds or thousands of miles out of state.

Former Coast Guard icebreaker captains were reluctant to criticize the purchase of the Aiviq when contacted by ProPublica, in part because it has taken impossibly long for the service to build the new heavy icebreakers it says it needs.

“Is the Coast Guard getting the Aiviq a bad thing? No,” said Rear Adm. Jeff Garrett, a former captain of the Healy icebreaker. But “is it the ideal resource? No.”

To reach the Arctic from Juneau, Garrett noted, the Aiviq will have to regularly cross the same storm-swept stretch of the Gulf of Alaska where it once lost the Kulluk.

Lawson Brigham said he had questions about the Aiviq “since it’s our tax dollars at work,” but he granted that “it’s bringing some capability into the Coast Guard at a time when we’re awaiting whenever the shipbuilder can get the first ship out, which is still unknown.”

Zukunft, who retired in 2018, stands by his past opposition to the Aiviq.

“I remain unconvinced,” he wrote in response to questions from ProPublica, that it “meets the operational requirements and design of a polar icebreaker that have been thoroughly documented by the Coast Guard.” By acquiring the Aiviq, “the Coast Guard runs the risk that those requirements can be compromised.”

In a statement, the Coast Guard described the purchase of the Aiviq as a “bridging strategy” and said the ship “will be capable of projecting U.S. sovereignty in the Arctic and conducting select Coast Guard missions.”

The fuel vents that flooded during the Kulluk accident have since been raised, a Chouest engineer has testified. The Coast Guard did not respond to questions about the Aiviq’s fuel consumption or whether its waste systems will comply with polar code. It did not say whether its helicopter deck will be moved aft for safer search-and-rescue operations. It confirmed that there will be no changes to the propulsion system. “Initial modifications to the vessel will be minimal,” the statement reads. The Aiviq will be put into service more or less as is.

Last month, an amateur photographer spotted the Aiviq at a Chouest-owned shipyard in Tampa, Florida, and posted images online. It had been repainted, its hull now a gleaming Coast Guard icebreaker red.

Photographs posted to Reddit show the Aiviq — now Storis — in a tarp and then, several days later, with its new red Coast Guard paint job. (Courtesy of Wake Foster)

New lettering revealed that the ship has been renamed the Storis, after a celebrated World War II vessel that patrolled for 60 years in the Bering Sea and beyond. From a distance, the icebreaker looked ready to serve.

“The question is,” said Brigham, “What is this ship going to be used for? That’s been the question from Day 1. What the hell are we going to use it for?”

Clarification, Jan. 24, 2025: This story has been updated to clarify that $1 billion is the Coast Guard’s latest estimated cost for new icebreakers and that it differs from recent projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

by Gwen Dilworth, Mississippi Today

This article was produced by Mississippi Today, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2023-24. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Last year, Mississippi passed a new law aimed at decreasing the number of people being jailed solely because they need mental health treatment. Officials say it has led to fewer people with serious mental illness detained in jails.

But the data submitted by different entities is contradictory and incomplete, making it impossible to know if the numbers are really going down.

“It’s been inconsistent. It’s been sometimes just absent in different parts of the state,” said Rep. Sam Creekmore IV, a Republican from New Albany who chairs the Public Health and Human Services Committee and who sponsored legislation related to civil commitment during the last two sessions. “And so it’s really hard for us to evaluate how well or how bad we’re doing when the numbers aren’t consistent.”

The Legislature approved changes to the state’s civil commitment law last year after reporting by Mississippi Today and ProPublica revealed that hundreds of people with no criminal charges were held in Mississippi jails each year as they awaited involuntary mental health evaluation and treatment. They frequently received no mental health care in jail and were treated like criminal defendants. The investigation found that since 2006, at least 17 people have died after being jailed during this process; and a nationwide survey as part of that series found that Mississippi is unique among states in its heavy use of jails for people who are civilly committed.

Under the new law, which went into effect in July, a person cannot be held in jail unless all other options for care have been exhausted and unless they are “actively violent”; and they can never be held for more than 48 hours. The new law also requires that people in crisis see mental health professionals first, who can recommend commitment or suggest voluntary treatment options that are more suitable, avoiding the civil commitment process entirely.

In the first three months that the law was in effect, more than 1,300 people were screened statewide for possible civil commitment, and over 500 were diverted to a less-restrictive treatment option, according to community mental health center reports. But during the same period, from July to September 2024, a state agency, counties and community mental health centers all reported vastly different numbers of people who spent time in jail during the process.

Community mental health centers reported that 43 people were jailed in that period, less than half the number the Department of Mental Health reported: 102 people. And the department’s figure is likely an undercount because it only includes people who were admitted to a state hospital after their time in jail. Department of Mental Health spokesperson Adam Moore told Mississippi Today he couldn’t explain the discrepancy.

And only 43 of Mississippi’s 82 chancery court clerks submitted data during the same period, despite a law from 2023 that required the courts to report psychiatric commitment data to the state. Those counties reported a total of 25 people being held in jail from July to September 2024 while in the civil commitment process.

Creekmore said he plans to propose a bill this year that would ensure more counties submit mandatory data.

“It really makes it impossible to legislate changes to (the new civil commitment laws) when our data is not complete,” he said.

Last year, Creekmore said the Department of Mental Health would “police” counties to ensure compliance. But the agency itself said something different: Moore told Mississippi Today and ProPublica that it would educate county officials and mental health workers on the new law but wouldn’t enforce it.

The Department of Mental Health sends quarterly reminders to clerks about reporting deadlines, has provided access to training videos and written instructions, and established a help desk for technical questions, Moore said.

Most states do not regularly hold people in jail without charges during the psychiatric civil commitment process. At least 12 states and the District of Columbia prohibit the practice entirely. And only one Mississippi jail was certified by the state to house people awaiting court-ordered psychiatric treatment in 2023.

Sheriffs, who have long decried the burden of housing people with mental health concerns in jails as inappropriate and unsafe, have been largely supportive of changes to the law.

“It’s fantastic for the sheriffs, because the sheriffs don’t want people that are sick in the jail,” said Will Allen, the attorney for the Mississippi Sheriffs’ Association. “They certainly don’t want people who have not committed a crime in the jail.”

But implementing the law has proved challenging for areas of the state with limited resources, particularly those without nearby crisis stabilization units, which provide short-term treatment to people in psychiatric crises.

And even in well-resourced areas, limited crisis beds can force counties to transport patients or house them in a nearby private treatment facility at the counties’ expense.

The restrictions on housing people in jail have proved to be a “nightmare” for Calhoun County, which is more than 30 miles away from the nearest crisis stabilization unit, Chancery Clerk Kathy Poynor said.

“We don’t have anywhere else to put them,” she said. “We can’t afford a psychiatric cell. Rural counties just can’t meet the financial obligations.”

Some advocates say the law’s stipulations should be more stringently supervised by the state.

Greta Martin, the litigation director for Disability Rights Mississippi, said the lack of oversight in the law is concerning.

“If you are enacting legislation with a 48-hour cap on people being held in county jail and you do not provide any oversight ensuring that county jails are adhering to that, what’s the point of the legislation?” she said.

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.

The man tapped by President Donald Trump to be second-in-command of the federal agency that protects the public from environmental dangers is a lawyer who has represented companies accused of harming people and the environment through pollution.

David Fotouhi, a partner in the global law firm Gibson Dunn, played a key part in rolling back climate regulations and water protections while serving as a lawyer in the Environmental Protection Agency during Trump’s first administration.

Most recently, Fotouhi challenged the EPA’s recent ban of asbestos, which causes a deadly cancer called mesothelioma. In a brief filed in October on behalf of a group of car companies called the Alliance for Automotive Innovation, he argued that, for the specific uses that were banned, the “EPA failed to demonstrate that chrysotile asbestos presents an unreasonable risk of injury.”

The EPA banned the carcinogen in March, long after its dangers first became widely known. More than 50 other countries have outlawed use of the mineral. The agency had worked toward the ban for decades, and workers died while lobbyists pushed to delay action, as a 2022 ProPublica investigation showed.

Less than a day after Trump’s inauguration this week, the White House webpage that celebrated the historic ban was gone.

Fotouhi’s nomination to be the EPA deputy administrator must yet be approved by the Senate.

The asbestos rule is just one of several environmental issues at the heart of the EPA’s regulatory mission on which Fotouhi has represented companies accused of polluting. The 39-year-old lawyer, who is expected to play a critical role running the agency, represented International Paper in lawsuits accusing the firm of contamination from PFAS, or “forever chemicals”; a tire company that allegedly released a chemical known to kill endangered salmon (the firm disputed the claim and is fighting the lawsuit); and a coalition of businesses in Washington state that sued the EPA over its water quality standards for legacy pollutants known as PCBs.

Environmentalists are calling on Fotouhi to recuse himself from decisions regarding asbestos and other issues he’s recently worked on at Gibson Dunn. “Here’s a guy who wrote a very biased and one-sided attack on the EPA rule on asbestos. I would not want him to come anywhere near EPA decision-making on the asbestos rule,” said Robert Sussman, an attorney who represents the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization and served as EPA deputy administrator during the Clinton administration.

“I recused myself from everything involving former clients,” said Sussman.

Fotouhi declined to comment for this story. An EPA spokesperson said in a statement, “Every person President Trump nominates for the US EPA will work with the career employees in the EPA Ethics Office to ensure that all applicable ethics obligations are addressed.”

Government ethics law calls for attorneys to recuse themselves for a year from matters on which they provided services in the previous year.

The issue may be a mere formality in an administration that in its first day took steps to roll back environmental and health protections put in place by the previous administration. Within hours of his inauguration on Monday, Trump ordered the withdrawal of the U.S. from the Paris climate accords, halted the approval of leases for new offshore wind projects in federal waters and revoked several executive orders relating to climate change.

It is not unusual for political appointees to the EPA to have ties to industry, especially in Republican administrations. Among the people returning to the agency from Trump’s first term are Nancy Beck, a former lobbyist for the American Chemistry Council, the influential industry trade group; Aaron Szabo, a lobbyist who represented the American Petroleum Institute and contributed to the Project 2025 chapter on the EPA; and Lynn Dekleva, who also worked for the American Chemistry Council and DuPont.

In announcing his nomination of Fotouhi on Truth Social earlier this month, Trump wrote that “David will work with our incredible EPA Administrator, Lee Zeldin, to advance pro Growth policies, unleash America’s Energy Dominance, and prioritize Clean Air, Clean Water, and Clean Soil for ALL Americans.” His expertise could be essential for Zeldin, the former U.S. representative from Long Island whom Trump nominated to run the agency and who has little experience with environmental issues.

While working at the EPA in the first Trump administration, Fotouhi served as deputy general counsel and acting general counsel. He played a central role in a revision of the Waters of the U.S. rule that removed federal protections from wetlands and streams. He later described it as some of his most important work. His Gibson Dunn online biography says he also “played a critical role in developing the litigation strategy to defend” the agency’s decision not to impose financial requirements on companies that extract minerals and ore from rock. Environmentalists had pushed for the requirements to protect taxpayers from being held responsible for costly environmental cleanups.

Fotouhi also advocated for landfills and ponds that contain coal ash to be deemed “clean” even though they didn’t meet the agency’s usual standards — a position favorable to the coal industry, according to one waste expert who worked with him during the Trump administration. “Dave was adamant about that issue,” said the former colleague, who asked not to be named to avoid public involvement in political discussions. The former colleague described Fotouhi as a brilliant lawyer who knows the environmental statutes but “doesn’t hesitate to get creative” to find a way to use them to take industry-friendly positions.

A Harvard-educated attorney, Fotouhi led an office of hundreds of lawyers at Gibson Dunn and has defended clients and provided legal counsel under every major environmental law, according to his bio on the firm’s website. He represented International Paper in two suits over PFAS, persistent industrial chemicals that cause cancer and other diseases. The chemicals were at the heart of two cases in which the company was accused of spreading PFAS-containing biosolids in Maine. The biosolids, or sludge, have been found to contribute to PFAS contamination of food and water throughout the state. (Gibson Dunn is representing ProPublica pro bono in a case against the U.S. Navy.)

Nathan Saunders, a plaintiff in one of the suits, learned in 2021 that his well water in Fairfield, Maine, had extremely high levels of the chemicals. After he learned that PFAS were linked to kidney damage, the discovery made sense to the lifelong Maine resident, whose wife had developed kidney failure more than a decade earlier.

Fotouhi succeeded in getting his client dismissed from the Saunders suit by arguing that there wasn’t information to tie the company’s conduct to the water contamination. Saunders’ attorney, Elizabeth Bailey, described the legal strategy as common among companies facing PFAS contamination suits and difficult for plaintiffs to overcome without access to internal company information. “They say, ‘Yes, there’s contamination, but there’s no way for you to show whose contamination it was and — oh, by the way, if you can’t specifically identify how our contamination got from our location to your client’s location at the very beginning of the lawsuit, we shouldn’t be in this case at all,’” said Bailey.

Fotouhi also attempted to overturn EPA’s water quality standards for toxic chemicals known as PCBs, which have been linked to cancer. In December 2023, he filed a suit against the agency on behalf of Washington state business groups that claimed that the standards are impossible to meet.

If the EPA chooses not to continue fighting the case, those standards could be overturned. The loss would be devastating to waterways, according to Katelyn Scott, water protector at Spokane Riverkeeper, an advocacy organization devoted to protecting the river and its watershed. “Without the EPA at the helm fighting to protect them, our river would be vulnerable to higher levels of pollution that would really put our fish and our people at risk of harm,” she said.

Phillip Landrigan, a physician who has spent decades working to protect public health from environmental threats, said the potential consequences would be similarly dire should the EPA choose to overturn the asbestos ban.

“President Trump came into office saying that he was going to make life better for working Americans,” said Landrigan. Reversing the decades-in-the-making asbestos ban, he said, “would expose working American women and men to a known human carcinogen and fly in the face of that promise.”

Kirsten Berg contributed research.

Update, Jan. 22, 2025: This story was updated to include a statement that an EPA spokesperson provided after publication.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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.

A few weeks ago, the clerk of the South Carolina Senate called out each of the 46 members’ names, then directed them all to stand and raise their right hands. He needed to swear them in for the new session. Among the supermajority of Republicans, zero women stood.

Voters hadn’t elected a single one to the chamber in November.

Now, after more than a decade, the Senate’s Republican caucus is once again an all-men’s club, one that will make decisions about issues that directly affect women: abortion, in vitro fertilization and Medicaid coverage of lactation specialists, to name a few. November’s election ushered in only two women to serve in the entire chamber, and both are Democrats. Given Republicans control what legislation moves forward, neither will wield much power.

Women aren’t represented much more on the other side of the Statehouse. Female lawmakers make up just 10% of South Carolina House Republicans.

Similar postelection stories are playing out across the Southeast, a region long defined by traditional culture and conservative politics. All but one state that held legislative elections last fall in this region saw losses of Republican women, including Georgia, North Carolina, Arkansas and South Carolina. Tennessee was the lone exception — its voters added a single net Republican woman to their legislature.

Most of the region’s legislatures were woefully short of women’s representation even before the election, as ProPublica reported at this time last year. Women constitute fewer than 1 in 5 state legislators across much of the Southeast, where most states consistently rank at the bottom of virtually all measures of women’s health and well-being.

Across the country, 2024 again saw gains for female lawmakers. One-third of state legislators nationwide are women, the most in history. In all of the country’s statehouses — 7,386 legislative seats — women gained 43 seats in November’s elections. Only four were Democrats, although Democratic women still hold almost twice as many seats overall.

But the gains of Republican women weren’t mirrored in the Southeast. The losses weren’t huge, 1 to 3 Republican women per legislature. But with small numbers to begin with, losing just one can make a big difference.

“It has a much more significant effect on the potential for particular voices and lived experiences to be raised in debate and conversation,” said Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor and director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, a key group tracking women’s political participation.

Dittmar didn’t see this trend in other regions. “There’s not one story,” she said, “but rather a lot of unique state-based stories.”

As of the counts the center had finished in mid-December, South Dakota and New Hampshire elected far more new women. Wisconsin lost 6 Republican women and added 11 Democratic women. Connecticut lost 5 Republican women while Democrats held steady. Maine lost 5 Democrats but gained 4 Republicans. In California, women from both parties gained seats.

“We saw a lot of gains around the country for women in legislatures, but the Southeast continues to be a real struggle,” said Sabrina Shulman, chief political officer at Vote Run Lead, which trains women to run for office. Entrenched gender roles still influence voting decisions, she said, and more tradition-minded Republicans — men and women — tend to see men as stronger, more qualified and able to lead.

Dittmar added that President Donald Trump’s campaign emphasized masculinity, which had a trickle-down effect. Republican voters seemed to prefer candidates, including female ones, who were perceived as more masculine or at least not “anti-male,” she said.

Some Republican women who might have considered running also balked at campaigning in the hypermasculine politics of the moment. The Center for American Women and Politics found the number of female candidates for state legislative seats was down across the board — but the largest drop was among Republican women.

Unlike Democrats, Republicans “have largely rejected any attempts at targeted support, recruitment, training and funding of women candidates,” Dittmar said. “Conservatives are still dominantly white and male. The party is made up of people who don’t think it’s a problem” that so few lawmakers are women.

All three Republican incumbent women in South Carolina’s Senate lost their races after they joined with the two other women — one Democrat and one Independent — in the chamber to fight a strict abortion ban. National headlines spotlighted the bipartisan group dubbed the Sister Senators.

Sen. Katrina Shealy was the most senior of the three and the Senate’s only female chair of a standing committee. When she won her first Senate election in 2012, she arrived in Columbia, the state capital, to an all-male Senate. More than a decade later, she leaves it as such again.

Yet, when she was first elected, female leaders had ascended across state politics. Then-Gov. Nikki Haley was a key ally. The state Supreme Court’s chief justice was a woman. Now, the governor is, once again, a man. So is the Senate president. And the House speaker. And the chief justice. The state Supreme Court had no men when it upheld the current abortion law in 2023; it recently added a single female justice.

“I think if men could take the right to vote away from women, they would,” Shealy said. “Just look at South Carolina and what we’ve done. We don’t want women to have a say in anything. That’s obvious.”

At the South Carolina Statehouse, Shealy was widely known as the top legislative champion for children. She blames her loss in the primary on the paltry runoff turnout — but also the fact that Republican women in her home state still often adhere to traditional gender roles.

“Women in the Republican Party always put themselves in the position that we need to support our men,” Shealy said. “They let themselves be subservient to men, especially in the South.”

She wonders how much they realize that men are now exclusively making decisions about issues that specifically affect women, notably reproductive healthcare. South Carolina currently has a six-week abortion ban, but a conservative flank of House members have prefiled a bill that would ban abortions from conception, or basically what Shealy and the other female senators opposed. The bill is sponsored by three women — and 29 men. If it moves to the Senate, not a single Republican debating the restrictions — or voting on them — will be a woman.

by Molly Parker, Capitol News Illinois

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

Sixty percent of rural Americans live in child care deserts — regions with too few licensed slots for children. In rural Illinois, that number rises to nearly 70%.

Over the past decade, Illinois has experienced a 33% decline in licensed child care providers, losing nearly 4,300 facilities and about 38,000 licensed slots for children. This loss, driven by years of budget cuts, has outpaced the shrinking child population and hit rural areas the hardest. In 2019, during his first year in office, Gov. JB Pritzker acknowledged that rural providers were closing at an “alarming rate” and vowed to make Illinois the “best state in the nation for families raising young children.”

While the state has increased payments to providers in recent years, it hasn’t been enough to reverse the damage caused by years of budget cuts. The COVID-19 pandemic further destabilized the already fragile system. Despite additional state and federal funding, Illinois has lost about 1,300 providers since Pritzker took office.

But opening new facilities is hard, and the government itself makes things harder. Here are five reasons it’s difficult to open and operate new child care centers in Illinois:

1. Politics Delayed Federal Relief

Experts say that launching a child care center can cost upwards of $1 million, even in rural areas, where people tend to assume that it’s cheaper to start a small business. It’s true that properties may be less expensive than in urban areas, but they are often harder to find in regions with little new construction and many old buildings requiring costly repairs.

The largest source of child care funding in America comes from the federal Child Care and Development Block Grant funds administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. But most of it goes to offset child care payments for low-income parents; only a few exceptions allow spending federal funds on the buildings themselves.

Federal efforts to ease these startup costs for rural regions include a proposed expansion of loans and grants through the Department of Agriculture, but this measure remains tied up in Congress as part of the long-delayed new farm bill.

The Casners purchased and renovated a 1950s motel in order to open their child care center. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica) 2. State Efforts to Help Didn’t Go Very Far

Rebuild Illinois is a $45 billion, multiyear capital improvement plan that was passed in 2019, the state’s first such plan in nearly a decade. Through it, the state allocated $100 million for early childhood facilities. But in the first round of funding, only eight programs out of 238 applicants received a combined $55 million in January 2023, with most grants awarded in Chicago and suburban areas. No providers in the southern half of the state received funding. A second $45 million round is planned, but no timeline has been announced.

3. Licensing Delays and Staffing Shortages

The Illinois Department of Children and Family Services, which oversees child care licensing, is grappling with a staffing crisis. The agency has a 20% vacancy rate for licensing staff and 45% for supervisors, who must review and approve all applications for child care providers.

Navigating Illinois’ complex licensing rules can be hard, and providers say they can’t always get the information they need in a timely manner. Some say their applications have been caught in limbo for months or weeks without explanation. According to DCFS’ own report to the General Assembly, the agency misses its 90-day deadline to approve applications about a third of the time — and in regions with severe staffing shortages, that rate can rise above 50%. Although licensing will soon transfer to the newly created Department of Early Childhood, most changes won’t begin until mid-2026, and what impact they will have on providers is not yet clear.

While DCFS acknowledges the staffing shortages, the agency also attributes delays to provider paperwork errors and holdups from other agencies, like the state fire marshal or local officials.

Mary Pender, a teacher at OWL, pushes snow off an awning. (Julia Rendleman for ProPublica) 4. Outdated and Contradictory Regulations

Illinois’ child care regulations, though intended to protect children, include outdated and contradictory rules that frustrate providers. For instance, one regulation requires blankets in every crib, even though the state prohibits blanket use for sleeping infants to reduce the risk of sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. Another rule requires that providers carry coins on walks to use a payphone in emergencies — a relic from a pre-cellphone era.

Providers say that inconsistencies in the rules further complicate an already difficult process for opening and operating child care centers. A DCFS spokesperson told Capitol News Illinois that the agency is working to update some regulations.

5. Low Reimbursement Rates for Providers

The federal Child Care and Development Block Grant is the largest source of child care funding in the U.S. It is administered by states and helps eligible low-income families offset the high cost of child care. The money is paid directly to providers, and the federal government mandates that states reimburse providers at least 50% of market rates and recommends a higher benchmark of 75%. However, Illinois falls short of both targets. As of April 2023, the state reimbursed less than 45% of market rates for child care centers, one of the largest gaps nationwide. This underfunding violated federal equal access provisions, though state officials said that recent subsidy increases have brought Illinois into compliance in most categories.

Rural providers face additional hurdles beyond inadequate reimbursement rates. High startup costs and lower population density make it harder to fill classrooms quickly, prolonging financial strain. Even providers offering unsubsidized care struggle to set fees that reflect the true cost of operations, as many families who barely earn too much to receive a subsidy cannot afford to pay higher rates.

This persistent funding gap leaves providers, particularly those in rural areas, in a difficult financial position.

by Doug Bock Clark

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.

As a member of the Army National Guard in 2019 and 2020, Jefferson Griffin voted in North Carolina elections using military absentee ballots.

Now, as he seeks to overturn the results of a state Supreme Court election that went against him, Griffin is asking that same court to disqualify the votes of around 5,500 people who voted in the same manner as he had.

Since Democrat Allison Riggs won reelection to the state’s highest court last year by 734 votes, Griffin, now a Republican judge on the state’s Court of Appeals, has repeatedly tried to nullify her victory. Last week, the Republican majority on the state Supreme Court temporarily blocked the certification of Riggs’ win after Griffin filed a legal petition arguing that the election should be awarded to him.

In a briefing, Griffin’s lawyers argued that ballots cast by overseas and military voters should not be counted if they did not also provide photo identification, such as a photocopy of a driver’s license. His position contradicts that of the state election board, which had issued a rule before the election stating that such voters did not have to provide an ID.

Griffin’s use of these military ballots, which ProPublica confirmed using publicly available voting data and documents obtained via an open records request, has not been previously reported.

Two of Griffin’s absentee ballot requests came while he was deployed as a captain and a judge advocate general in the North Carolina Army National Guard. They were covered by a federal law called the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, more commonly known as UOCAVA.

In August 2019, for a municipal election, Griffin requested an absentee ballot, checking a box attesting that he was a “Member of the Uniformed Services or Merchant Marine on active duty and currently absent from county of residence.” Griffin listed his address as Fort Bliss, Texas, and the North Carolina Army National Guard’s 30th Armored Brigade Combat Team.

In January 2020, Griffin made a similar absentee ballot request for the March 2020 primary election, again checking a box that he was “on active duty in the Uniformed Services.”

At that time, North Carolina did not have a law in force requiring photo ID to be provided for in-person or absentee voters. (Though passed in 2018, the law did not take effect until late 2023.)

ProPublica sent Griffin a list of detailed questions, to which he replied: “I am not allowed to comment on pending litigation. It would be a violation of our NC Code of Judicial Conduct for me to do so.”

Embry Owen, the campaign manager for Riggs, criticized Griffin’s stance in the litigation. “Active-duty members of the military who are serving our country overseas count on their rights under UOCAVA to vote and make their voice heard. The same is true for members of the foreign service and missionaries in the field,” Owen said. “Any attempt to silence these voters is a shame on North Carolina’s democracy.”

As part of his legal fight, Griffin is challenging several categories of ballots, including over 60,000 that are missing driver’s license or Social Security data. But his theory that such information is necessary to legally vote has been repeatedly dismissed by the state election board, a federal judge appointed by President Donald Trump and even a right-wing activist who originally pushed it. In a virtual meeting, the activist called it “voter suppression” and said he was “100%” certain it would fail in court, as ProPublica has reported.

However, the issue of the 5,500 UOCAVA ballots has become increasingly important because Griffin has prioritized them in his latest legal briefing, asking the state Supreme Court to consider them first and, if nullifying those votes proves determinative, hand the election to him.

“In the Supreme Court contest, 5,509 such ballots were unlawfully cast,” Griffin’s lawyers wrote in their brief. “Judge Griffin anticipates that, if these unlawful ballots are excluded, he will win the election.”

Griffin is only trying to disqualify UOCAVA ballots in heavily Democratic counties, ignoring ballots from Republican areas, a ProPublica review of the contested ballots found. A data analysis by independent journalist Bryan Anderson found that Democratic ballots were disproportionately targeted, with Democrats being almost five times as likely as Republicans to have their ballots questioned by Griffin, though there are roughly equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans in North Carolina.

“Judge Griffin’s targeting of military and overseas voters from four heavily Democratic counties lays plain his goal: toss votes to retroactively win an election he already lost,” Owen said.

Griffin’s lawyers have argued to the state Supreme Court that since North Carolina law requires in-person voters to show a photo ID, UOCAVA voters should have to as well, such as by providing a picture of their driver’s license.

However, the state board of elections has repeatedly ruled that UOCAVA voters are not required to do so. When striking down Griffin’s challenges to the election results in December, the bipartisan panel unanimously rejected Griffin’s assertion that UOCAVA ballots submitted without photo IDs were unlawful, though it split along partisan lines for other challenges he made.

“We are not at liberty to change the election rules as they are established,” said Stacy Eggers IV, a Republican member of the board, when voting to reject Griffin’s challenges. “We have previously adopted a rule that says military and overseas voters are not required to show a voter ID” and “unless a court says otherwise, I’d find that we’re bound by that rule.”

Griffin has gone to extraordinary lengths to have this matter heard by the state Supreme Court, which has a Republican majority, filing his petition directly to the high court instead of working through lower courts first, as is the standard process laid out in state law. ProPublica has reported that the court’s Republican chief justice, Paul Newby, has been described by Griffin as a “good friend and mentor,” and most of the spouses of the Republican justices have donated to Griffin’s most recent or previous campaigns.

UOCAVA ballots are the primary method of voting for American service members stationed away from home and for other Americans living overseas. Voters request an absentee ballot by submitting the Federal Post Card Application to their election office, after which it checks their eligibility and provides them the ballot, which the voter then mails in either electronically or physically. Around 2.8 million Americans eligible to vote live overseas, and tens of thousands of them vote using this method, including thousands of North Carolinians.

Whether these ballots will count in the Griffin-Riggs race is currently being considered in parallel legal proceedings at the North Carolina Supreme Court and 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The state board and Riggs’ campaign have argued that the matter should be decided in federal court, as the issue pertains to federal law. Briefings and oral arguments are scheduled in both through the remainder of the month. Until the election is decided in court, Riggs will continue to hold her seat. It is the last unresolved election in the nation from 2024.

Claude Murray, a member of Common Defense, a veterans group that has had the ballots of some of its North Carolina members challenged, criticized Griffin’s actions. “The right to vote is something Americans often take for granted, but as veterans we know how precious it truly is. Judge Griffin knows this too and is choosing a different path,” Murray said. “It is shameful that he is now seeking to invalidate thousands of votes — including military members and their families — simply because he lost an election.”

A voting rights advocate has compiled a list of challenged ballots in this race; you can check whether your vote is among them here. If it is, reporter Doug Bock Clark is interested in hearing your story. Email him at doug.clark@propublica.org and briefly describe your experience and why you believe you were challenged. Also, please reach out if you have any information about the North Carolina Supreme Court or state court system that you think we should know. Clark can be reached securely via phone or on Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

by Jennifer Berry Hawes

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.

In South Carolina, where I live, rural towns often remain largely divided by race, especially those with larger Black communities. You’ll often hear people describe railroad tracks that run through these towns and how white people live on one side of the tracks, Black people on the other. That’s true. But I’ve often seen a different dividing line, a more impenetrable one. This one runs between schools: private and public ones.

While reporting in many of these small towns, I saw that Black children typically attend the local public schools while white kids head to private schools. Many of these private schools are known as “segregation academies” because they opened for white children while the federal courts were forcing districts across the South to desegregate. Hundreds of these academies still operate, and they continue to divide their communities.

When children don’t go to school together, they don’t interact much with peers of another race. Their parents don’t meet at the bus stop or at PTA meetings or on the sidelines of football games. Communities can remain almost as divided as they were before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled state-mandated school segregation was unconstitutional — 70 years ago.

I spent much of 2024 digging into “segregation academies” with my colleague, ProPublica research reporter Mollie Simon. Early on, we set out to compile a master list of segregation academies that are still operating, which we planned to use as a foundation for our reporting.

It’s difficult, impossible even, to identify these academies or even to understand local school segregation more broadly without knowing the racial makeup of each private school’s enrollment over time. And private schools aren’t always willing to hand over that information. Nor do they have to. But while putting together our list of segregation academies, we came across something incredibly useful — a 30-year trove of data kept by the U.S. Department of Education that lays out the story of racial segregation, school by school, across the country. It shows the racial breakdown of most private schools’ enrollments every other year since the early 1990s.

Outside of a handful of education researchers, the average person doesn’t know this data exists. Nor is most of it kept in an accessible format. Parents would need a high level of data literacy to use it to better understand education trends or to make their own school decisions.

ProPublica decided to create a Private School Demographics database, which we launched this week, that anyone, anywhere can use to look up a school and view the years of data we were relying on for our reporting.

The story behind this new tool began with our need to understand how many segregation academies still operate — and where. We wanted to focus only on those that continue to create segregating forces in their communities, not the ones whose student bodies had come to reflect their local areas.

We turned to the National Center for Education Statistics, which has demographic data about the students at most private schools in the country on its website. (Schools voluntarily reported their information to the center.) This was helpful, but it provided the racial breakdown of kids at each school only from the 2021-22 school year, the most recent data available.

We wanted to go back in time to see how the demographics of these schools have — or have not — changed over the years.

It turned out that this NCES data comes from something called the Private School Universe Survey, the dataset we came to rely on. It was practically hiding in plain sight.

While the most recent survey results are easily available on the NCES website, the rest are in formats that require experts to clean and organize into something usable. Luckily, we have those experts on our staff. Our colleagues Sergio Hernández and Nat Lash began digging into the older datasets, turning them into a searchable format. Then they compared each private school’s demographics to those of the public school district in which it is located.

This pointed us to illuminating stories about the effects of segregation academies in communities that weren’t on anyone’s radar, certainly not mine. In fact, the data could tell stories about myriad places all over the country where private schools educate millions of the nation’s children.

I used the database to point me to the segregation academies having the most dividing effects on their local communities. That led me first to a county in the rural shadow of Selma, Alabama, one of the most pivotal points on the Civil Rights movement’s map.

That community was 45 minutes to the south in Wilcox County, where I found people starkly divided by race, as they had been since the days when plantation operators hauled enslaved workers to the region to grow cotton. While Wilcox Academy was 98% white, the local county public schools were 98% Black. Local residents were dividing their scarce resources to operate two shrinking school systems, one private and one public — to the detriment of pretty much everyone there.

Wilcox Academy’s demographic breakdown as shown through ProPublica’s Private School Demographics database

The story of Wilcox County formed the backbone of the first story in our segregation academy series.

Our database also steered me toward the last story in our series, this one based in Mississippi’s Amite County, where we found segregation academies that had some of the most profoundly dividing effects yet. One of them had never reported enrolling more than a single Black student at a time. The other had just hit an all-time high — 3.5% Black enrollment in a county where almost 40% of residents are Black.

Perhaps the most telling detail didn’t come from the data or our master list. I found it at a Friday night football game. One night while I was in Amite, the public high school played a home game — and so did the nearby academy. While the public high school played, its stands full of Black families, I interviewed a Black man who had graduated from the public high school and coached its football team.

As halftime neared, he and I decided to head over to the private school, a segregation academy just over the tree line. Over all his years living and working in this community, he had never stepped foot on the campus. Almost everyone there — people from this very small community — was white. But he recognized only a few of them.

As we walked toward the stands, he described feeling a million eyes on him. Nobody was unfriendly. But this threshold felt far more impenetrable than any railroad tracks I had ever encountered.

by Renee Dudley

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On Thursday, in his final week in office, President Joe Biden issued an executive order intended to strengthen the nation’s cyber defenses, in part by requiring software providers like Microsoft to provide proof that they meet certain security standards before they can sell their products to the federal government.

The action follows an onslaught of cyberattacks in recent years in which hackers linked to Russia, China and other adversaries have exploited software vulnerabilities to steal sensitive documents from federal agencies.

In demanding more accountability from software makers, Biden pointed to instances in which contractors “commit to following cybersecurity practices, yet do not fix well-known exploitable vulnerabilities in their software, which puts the Government at risk of compromise.”

In June, ProPublica reported on such a case involving Microsoft, the largest IT vendor to the federal government. In the so-called SolarWinds attack, which was discovered shortly before Biden took office, Russian state-sponsored hackers exploited a weakness in a Microsoft product to steal sensitive data from the National Nuclear Security Administration and other agencies. ProPublica found that, for years, Microsoft leaders ignored warnings about the flaw from one of their own engineers because they feared that publicly acknowledging it would alienate the federal government and cause the company to lose ground to competitors.

That profit-over-security culture was driven in large part by the rush to gain ground in the multibillion-dollar cloud computing market, the news organization reported. One former Microsoft supervisor described the attitude as, “Do whatever it frickin’ takes to win because you have to win.”

Microsoft has defended its decision not to address the flaw, telling ProPublica in June that the company’s assessment at the time involved “multiple reviews” and that it considers several factors when making security decisions, including “potential customer disruption, exploitability, and available mitigations.” But in the months and years following the SolarWinds hack, Microsoft’s security lapses contributed to other attacks on the government, including one in 2023 in which hackers connected to the Chinese government gained access to top U.S. officials’ emails. The federal Cyber Safety Review Board later found that the company had deprioritized security investments and risk management, resulting in a “cascade of … avoidable errors.”

Microsoft has pledged to put security “above all else.”

To be sure, Microsoft is not the only company whose products have provided hackers entree to government networks. Russian hackers in the SolarWinds attack gained access to victim networks through tainted software updates provided by the Texas-based SolarWinds company before exploiting the flawed Microsoft product.

To help prevent future hacks, the government wants IT companies to provide proof that they use “secure software development practices to reduce the number and severity of vulnerabilities” in their products, according to the order. In addition, the government “needs to adopt more rigorous third-party risk management practices” to verify the use of such practices, Biden said. He asked for changes to the Federal Acquisition Regulation, the rules for government contracting, to implement his recommendations. If fully enacted, violators of the new requirements could be referred to the attorney general for legal action.

Biden also said that strengthening the security of federal “identity management systems” was “especially critical” to improving the nation’s cybersecurity. Indeed, the Microsoft product that was the focus of ProPublica’s June article was a so-called “identity” product that allowed users to access nearly every program used at work with a single logon. By exploiting the weakness in the identity product during the SolarWinds attack, the Russian hackers were able to swiftly vacuum up emails from victim networks.

In November, ProPublica reported that Microsoft capitalized on SolarWinds in the wake of the attack, offering federal agencies free trials of its cybersecurity products. The move effectively locked those agencies in to more expensive software licenses and vastly expanded Microsoft’s footprint across the federal government. The company told ProPublica that its offer was a direct response to “an urgent request by the Administration to enhance the security posture of federal agencies.” In his executive order, Biden addressed the fallout of that 2021 request, directing the federal government to mitigate the risks presented by the “concentration of IT vendors and services,” a veiled reference to Washington’s increased dependence on Microsoft, which some lawmakers have referred to as a “cybersecurity monoculture.”

Though the order marks a firmer stance with the technology companies supplying the government, enforcement will fall to the Trump administration. It’s unclear whether the incoming president will see the changes in the executive order through. President-elect Donald Trump has emphasized deregulation even as he has indicated that his administration will take a tough stance on China, one of the nation’s top cyber adversaries.

Neither Microsoft nor the Trump transition team responded to requests for comment on the order.

Thursday’s executive order was the latest in a series of regulatory efforts impacting Microsoft in the waning days of the Biden administration. Last month, ProPublica reported that the Federal Trade Commission is investigating the company in a probe that will examine whether the company’s business practices have run afoul of antitrust laws. FTC attorneys have been conducting interviews and setting up meetings with Microsoft competitors, and one key area of interest is how the company packages popular Office products together with cybersecurity and cloud computing services.

This so-called bundling was the subject of ProPublica’s November investigation, which detailed how, beginning in 2021, Microsoft used the practice to box competitors out of lucrative federal contracts. The FTC views the fact that Microsoft has won more federal business even as it left the government vulnerable to hacks as an example of the company’s problematic power over the market, a person familiar with the probe told ProPublica.

Microsoft has declined to comment on the specifics of the investigation but told the news organization last month that the FTC’s recent demand for information is “broad, wide ranging, and requests things that are out of the realm of possibility to even be logical.”

The commission’s new leadership, chosen by Trump, will decide the future of that investigation.

by Ziva Branstetter and Cassandra Jaramillo

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In advance of this year’s state legislative sessions, lawmakers are filing more than a dozen bills to expand abortion access in at least seven states, and a separate bill introduced in Texas seeks to examine the impact that the state’s abortion ban has had on maternal outcomes.

Some were filed in direct response to ProPublica’s reporting on the fatal consequences of such laws. Others were submitted for a second or third year in a row, but with new optimism that they will gain traction this time.

The difference now is the unavoidable reality: Multiple women, in multiple states with abortion bans, have died after they couldn’t get lifesaving care.

They all needed a procedure used to empty the uterus, either dilation and curettage or its second-trimester equivalent. Both are used for abortions, but they are also standard medical care for miscarriages, helping patients avoid complications like hemorrhage and sepsis. But ProPublica found that doctors, facing prison time if they violate state abortion restrictions, are hesitating to provide the procedures.

Three miscarrying Texas women, mourning the loss of their pregnancies, died without getting a procedure; one was a teenager. Two women in Georgia suffered complications after at-home abortions; one was afraid to seek care and the other died of sepsis after doctors did not provide a D&C for 20 hours.

Florida state Sen. Tina Polsky said the bill she filed Thursday was “100%” inspired by ProPublica’s reporting. It expands exceptions to the state’s abortion ban to make it easier for doctors and hospitals to treat patients having complications. “We’ve had lives lost in Texas and Georgia, and we don’t need to follow suit,” the Democrat said. “It’s a matter of time before it happens in Florida.”

Texas state Rep. Donna Howard, who is pushing to expand the list of medical conditions that would fall under her state’s exceptions, said she’s had encouraging conversations with her Republican colleagues about her bill. The revelations that women died after they did not receive critical care has "moved the needle here in Texas," Howard said, leading to more bipartisan support for change.

Republican lawmakers in other states told ProPublica they are similarly motivated.

Among them is Kentucky state Rep. Jim Gooch Jr., a Baptist great-grandfather who is trying for the second time to expand circumstances in which doctors can perform abortions, including for incomplete miscarriages and fatal fetal anomalies. He thinks the bill might get a better reception now that his colleagues know that women have lost their lives. “We don’t want that in Kentucky,” he said. “I would hope that my colleagues would agree.”

He said doctors need more clearly defined exceptions to allow them to do their jobs without fear. “They need to have some clarity and not be worried about being charged with some type of crime or malpractice.”

After a judge in North Dakota overturned the state’s total abortion ban, Republican state Rep. Eric James Murphy acted quickly to stave off any similar bans, drafting a bill that would allow abortions for any reason up to the 16th week and then up through about 26 weeks if doctors deem them medically necessary.

“We need other states to understand that there’s an approach that doesn’t have to be so controversial,” said Murphy, who is also an associate professor of pharmacology at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine and Health Sciences. “What if we get the discussion going and we get people to know that there are rational Republicans out there? Maybe others will come along.”

Under state rules, North Dakota lawmakers are required to give his bill a full hearing, he said, and he plans to introduce ProPublica’s stories as evidence. “Will it make it easier? I sure hope so,” he said. “The Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise, I sure hope so.”

So far, efforts to expand abortion access in more than a dozen states where bans were in effect have faced stiff opposition, and lawmakers introducing the bills said they don’t expect that to change. And some lawmakers, advocates and medical experts argue that even if exceptions are in place, doctors and hospitals will remain skittish about intervening.

As ProPublica reported, women died even in states whose bans allowed abortions to save the “life of the mother.” Doctors told ProPublica that because the laws’ language is often vague and not rooted in real-life medical scenarios, their colleagues are hesitating to act until patients are on the brink of death.

Experts also say it is essential to examine maternal deaths in states with bans to understand exactly how the laws are interfering with critical care. Yet Texas law forbids its state maternal mortality review committee from looking into the deaths of patients who received an abortive procedure or medication, even in cases of miscarriage. Under these restrictions, the circumstances surrounding two of the Texas deaths ProPublica documented will never be reviewed.

“I think that creates a problem for us if we don’t know what the hell is happening,” said Texas state Sen. José Menéndez.

In response to ProPublica’s reporting, the Democrat filed a bill that lifts the restrictions and directs the state committee to study deaths related to abortion access, including miscarriages. “Some of my colleagues have said that the only reason these women died was because of poor practice of medicine or medical malpractice,” he said. “Then what’s the harm in doing the research … into what actually happened?”

U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett agreed. The Texas Democrat and three other members of the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability on Dec. 19 sent a letter to Texas state officials demanding a briefing on the decision not to review deaths that occurred in 2022 and 2023.

Crockett said the state has not responded to the letter, sent to Texas Public Health Commissioner Jennifer Shuford.

“If you feel that your policies are right on the money, then show us the money, show us the goods,” she said. “This should be a wakeup call to Texans, and Texans should demand more. If you believe that these policies are good, then you should want to see the numbers too.”

Doctors are starting to hear about heightened concerns in conversations at their hospitals.

Dr. Austin Dennard, a Dallas OB-GYN, said her hospital recently convened a meeting with lawyers, administrators and various specialists that focused on “how to keep our pregnant patients safe in our hospital system and how to keep our doctors safe.” They discussed creating additional guidance for doctors.

Dennard, who noted she is speaking on her own behalf, said she is getting more in-depth questions from her patients. “We used to talk about vitamins and certain medications to get off of and vaccines to get,” she said. “Now we do all that and there’s a whole additional conversation about pregnancy in Texas, and we just talk about, ‘What’s the safest way we can do this?’”

In addition to being a doctor, Dennard was one of 20 women who joined a lawsuit against the state after they were denied abortions for miscarriages and high-risk pregnancy complications. When she learned her fetus had anencephaly — a condition in which the brain and skull do not fully develop — she had to travel out of state for an abortion. (The lawsuit asked state courts to clarify the law’s exceptions, but the state Supreme Court refused.)

Dennard said stories like ProPublica’s have crystallized a new level of awareness for patients there: “If you have the capacity to be pregnant, then you could easily be one of these women.”

Mariam Elba contributed research and Kavitha Surana contributed reporting.

by Vianna Davila, ProPublica and 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.

When President Donald Trump appeared in a New York courtroom last spring to face a slew of criminal charges, he was joined by a rotating cadre of lawyers, campaign aides, his family — and Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton.

Paxton had traveled to be with Trump for what he described on social media as a “sham of a trial” and a “travesty of justice.” Trump was facing 34 counts of falsifying records in the case, which focused on hush money paid to porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 presidential campaign to keep her from disclosing their sexual relationship.

“It’s just sad that we’re at this place in our country where the left uses the court system not to promote justice, not to enforce the rule of law, but to try to take out political opponents, and that’s exactly what they’re doing to him,” Paxton said on a conservative podcast at the time.

“They’ve done it to me.”

A year earlier, the Republican-led Texas House of Representatives voted to impeach Paxton over allegations, made by senior officials in his office, that he had misused his position to help a political donor. Trump was not physically by Paxton’s side but weighed in repeatedly on social media, calling the process unfair and warning lawmakers that they would have to contend with him if they persisted.

When the Texas Senate in September 2023 acquitted Paxton of the impeachment charges against him, Trump claimed credit. “Yes, it is true that my intervention through TRUTH SOCIAL saved Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton from going down at the hands of Democrats and some Republicans …” Trump posted on the social media platform he founded.

The acquittal, however, did not wholly absolve Paxton of the allegations brought by his former employees. The FBI has been investigating the same accusations since at least November 2020. And come Monday, when Trump is inaugurated for his second term, that investigation will be in the hands of his Department of Justice.

Paxton and Trump have forged a friendship over the years, one that has been cemented in their shared political and legal struggles and their willingness to come to each other’s aid at times of upheaval. Both have been the subjects of federal investigations, have been impeached by lawmakers and have faced lawsuits related to questions about their conduct.

“If there’s one thing both guys share in common, people have been after them for a while in a big way. They’ve been under the gun. They’ve shared duress in a political setting,” said Bill Miller, a longtime Austin lobbyist and Paxton friend. “They’ve both been through the wringer, if you will. And I think there’s a kinship there.”

Neither Trump nor Paxton responded to requests for comment or to written questions. Both men have repeatedly denied any wrongdoing, claiming that they have been the targets of witch hunts by their political enemies, including fellow Republicans.

Their relationship is so cozy that Trump said he’d consider naming Paxton as his U.S. attorney general pick. He ultimately chose another political ally, former Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi.

Although Trump did not select Paxton, the two men will get yet another opportunity to have each other’s backs now that he has returned to office, both when it comes to the federal investigation into Paxton and pushing forward the president’s agenda.

Before and during Trump’s first term, Paxton filed multiple lawsuits challenging policies passed under former President Barack Obama. He then aggressively pursued cases against President Joe Biden’s administration after Trump lost reelection. Such lawsuits included efforts to stop vaccine mandates, to expedite the deportation of migrants and to block federal protections for transgender workers.

Trump has supported Paxton over and over, not only as the Texas politician sought reelection but also as he faced various political and legal scandals. The president-elect’s promises to exert more control over the Justice Department, which has traditionally operated with greater independence from the White House, could mark an end to the long-running investigation into Paxton, several attorneys said.

Justice Department and FBI officials declined to comment on the story and the status of the investigation, but as recently as August, a former attorney general staffer testified before a grand jury about the case, Bloomberg Law reported. Paxton also referenced the FBI’s four-year investigation of him during a speech in late December without mentioning any resolution on the case. The fact that Paxton hasn’t been indicted could signal that investigators don’t have a smoking gun, one political science professor told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, but a former federal prosecutor said cases can take years and still result in charges being filed.

“As far as I’m aware, this is pretty unprecedented, this level of alliance and association between those two figures,” said Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University in Dallas.

Paxton walks onstage at a rally in Robstown, Texas, on Oct. 22, 2022. (Go Nakamura/REUTERS) “Don’t Count Me Out”

In 2020, when then-U.S. Attorney General William Barr found no evidence to support Trump’s claims that voter fraud turned the election results in his opponent’s favor, Paxton emerged to take up the argument.

He became the first state attorney general to challenge Biden’s win in court, claiming in a December 2020 lawsuit that the increased use of mail ballots in four battleground states had resulted in voter fraud and cost Trump the election.

Trump eagerly supported the move on social media, writing, “We will be INTERVENING in the Texas (plus many other states) case. This is the big one. Our Country needs a victory!”

The U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case, ruling that Texas had no legal interest in how other states conduct their elections. Trump, however, didn’t forget Paxton’s loyalty.

He offered Paxton his full-throated endorsement during the 2022 primary race for attorney general against then-Texas Land Commissioner George P. Bush. His decision to back Paxton, who was under federal criminal investigation at the time and had been indicted on state securities fraud charges, was a major blow to Bush, the grandson and nephew of two former Republican presidents. Bush had endorsed Trump for president even though Trump defeated his father, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, in the Republican primary and repeatedly disparaged his family.

Trump properties in Florida and New Jersey served as locations for at least two Paxton campaign fundraisers over the course of that campaign. And at a rally in Robstown in South Texas, Trump repeated debunked claims that the election was stolen and said he wished Paxton had been with him at the White House at the time. “He would’ve figured out that voter fraud in two minutes,” Trump said.

While Paxton pursued reelection, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort as part of an investigation into how his administration handled thousands of government documents, many of them classified. Paxton led 10 other Republican state attorneys general in intervening in court on Trump’s behalf, arguing in a legal filing that the Biden administration could not be trusted to act properly in the case.

Paxton won another term in office in November 2022, but the celebration was short-lived. Six months later, the Texas House of Representatives considered impeaching him over misconduct allegations including bribery, abuse of office and obstruction related to his dealings with Nate Paul, a real estate developer and political donor. Paxton has denied any wrongdoing.

Hours before the House voted on whether to impeach Paxton, Trump weighed in on social media.

“I love Texas, won it twice in landslides, and watched as many other friends, including Ken Paxton, came along with me,” he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social. “Hopefully Republicans in the Texas House will agree that this is a very unfair process that should not be allowed to happen or proceed — I will fight you if it does. It is the Radical Left Democrats, RINOS, and Criminals that never stop. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! Free Ken Paxton, let them wait for the next election!”

Despite Trump’s threat, the House voted 121-23 in May 2023 to impeach Paxton. The Senate then held a trial that September to determine Paxton’s fate. “Who would replace Paxton, one of the TOUGHEST & BEST Attorney Generals in the Country?” Trump posted before the Senate acquitted Paxton.

Trump is among the few people who understand what it’s like to be under the kind of scrutiny Paxton has faced and how to survive it, Miller said.

“There is that quality [they share] of, ‘Don’t count me out,’” he said. “‘If you’re counting me out, you’re making a mistake.’”

On Monday, Trump will become the first president also to be a convicted felon. A jury found Trump guilty on all counts of falsifying records in the hush money case. A judge, however, ruled that he will not serve jail time in light of his election to the nation’s highest office.

Trump has repeatedly decried the case, as well as the Justice Department’s investigations that resulted in him being charged in June 2023 with withholding classified documents and later with conspiring to overturn the 2020 election by knowingly pushing lies that the race was stolen. Jack Smith, the special counsel who led the DOJ investigations, dropped both cases after Trump’s reelection. A Justice Department policy forbids prosecutions against sitting presidents, but in a DOJ report about the 2020 election released days before the inauguration, Smith asserted that his investigators had enough evidence to convict Trump had the case gone to trial.

Not only have Paxton and Trump supported each other through turmoil that could have affected their political ambitions, they have taken similar tacks against those who have crossed them.

After surviving his impeachment trial in 2023, Paxton promised revenge against Republicans who did not stand by him. He had help from Trump, who last year endorsed a challenger to Republican Texas House Speaker Dade Phelan, calling Paxton’s impeachment “fraudulent” and an “absolute embarrassment.” Phelan, who has defended the House’s decision to impeach Paxton, won reelection but resigned from his speaker post.

For his part, Trump has tried a legal strategy that Paxton has employed many times, using consumer protection laws to go after perceived political adversaries. In October, Trump sued CBS News over a “60 Minutes” interview with Vice President Kamala Harris, saying the news organization’s edits “misled” the public. Instead of accusing CBS of defamation, which is harder to prove, his lawsuit argues that the media company violated Texas’ consumer protection act, which is supposed to protect people from fraud. The case is ongoing. In moving to dismiss the case, CBS’ attorneys have said the Texas law was designed to safeguard people from deceptive business practices, “not to police editorial decisions made by news organizations with which one disagrees.” (Marc Fuller, one of the CBS attorneys, is representing ProPublica and the Tribune in an unrelated business disparagement case.)

The move indicates a broader, more aggressive approach that the Justice Department may pursue under the Trump administration, said Paul Nolette, director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University, who researches attorneys general.

“It’s a signal to me that, yes, the federal DOJ is going to follow the path of Paxton, and perhaps some other like-minded Republican AGs who have been using their office to also go after perceived enemies,” Nolette said.

Paxton speaks during the AmericaFest 2024 conference, hosted by conservative group Turning Point, in Phoenix on Dec. 21. (Cheney Orr/REUTERS) Cleaning House

On Dec. 21, six weeks after Trump won reelection, Paxton stepped onstage in a Phoenix convention center at the AmericaFest conference, hosted by the conservative organization Turning Point USA.

The event followed Trump’s comeback win. It also represented a triumphant moment for Paxton: He’d not only survived impeachment, but prosecutors agreed earlier in the year to drop long-standing state securities fraud charges against him if he paid about $270,000 in restitution and performed community service.

But Paxton spent much of his 15-minute speech ticking off the grievances about what he claimed had been attacks on him throughout his career, including impeachment by “supposed Republicans” and the FBI case.

He praised Trump’s selection of Bondi to run the DOJ. It was time to clean house in a federal agency that had become focused on “political witch hunts and taking out people that they disagree with,” Paxton said.

Before taking office, Trump threatened to fire and punish those within the Justice Department who were involved in investigations that targeted him. FBI director Christopher Wray, a Republican whom Trump appointed during his first term in office, announced in December that he would resign after the president-elect signaled that he planned to fire him. After facing similar threats, Smith, the special prosecutor who led the DOJ investigations, stepped down this month.

In his speech, Paxton made no mention of the agency’s investigations into Trump, nor did he connect the DOJ to his own case. But a Justice Department that Trump oversees with a heavy-handed approach could benefit the embattled attorney general, several attorneys told ProPublica and the Tribune.

Trump could choose to pardon Paxton before the case is officially concluded. He used pardons during his first presidency, including issuing one to his longtime strategist Steve Bannon and to Charles Kushner, his son-in-law’s father. He’s been vocal about his plans to pardon many of the Jan. 6 rioters on his first day in office.

More concerning, however, is if Trump takes the unusual approach of personally intervening in the federal investigation, something presidents have historically avoided because it is not a political branch of government, said Mike Golden, who directs the Advocacy Program at the University of Texas School of Law.

Any Trump involvement would be more problematic because it would happen behind closed doors, while a pardon is public, Golden said.

“If the president pressures the Department of Justice to drop an investigation, a meritorious investigation against a political ally, that weakens the overall strength of the system of justice in the way a one-off pardon really doesn’t,” Golden said.

Michael McCrum, a former federal prosecutor in Texas who did not work on the Paxton case, said “we’d be fools to think that Mr. Paxton’s relationship with the Trump folks and Mr. Trump personally wouldn’t play some factor in it.”

“I think that the case is going to die on the vine,” McCrum said.

Miller, Paxton’s friend, agreed.

“I would expect his troubles are behind him.”

by Sharon Lerner, photography by Annie Flanagan for ProPublica

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Cynthia Robertson could be forgiven for feeling that the banner was aimed at her. Its white-on-black lettering — “FUCK BIDEN AND FUCK YOU FOR VOTING FOR HIM” — hung from the wooden house right across the street from her own.

Hostility toward the outgoing Democratic president is no surprise in Sulphur, Louisiana, a red town in a red state in a country that has handed the White House and Congress to Republicans. Yet the message felt like a poke in the eye at a time when Robertson was seeking funding through Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization could repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area — including her neighbor’s. Not even a fraying tarp, a tar patch or the piece of corrugated metal tacked on the roof could keep the rain from pouring inside.

Donald Trump has vowed to overturn the law that would provide the funding, the Inflation Reduction Act, which he has referred to as the “new green scam.”

If he follows through once he assumes office, Trump would be rolling back a law that has disproportionately benefited red areas like Sulphur that make up his base.

Though not a single Republican legislator voted for the law, an outsized portion of its historic $1 trillion in climate and energy provisions has benefited red congressional districts and states that voted for Trump, according to a report by E2, a group tracking the effects of the law. Red districts had the biggest growth in green jobs, the report said. Red states, including Nevada, Wyoming, Kentucky and Georgia, have seen the biggest jumps in clean energy investments, according to an August report from the Clean Investment Monitor, which tracks public and private investments in climate technology. Texas has received $69 billion in clean investments since the law passed, second only to California.

Not all of the money has been spent yet. And several provisions are vulnerable to rollbacks, among them tax credits for home energy improvements and certain alternative fueling sites. Billions hang in the balance, including, to Robertson’s chagrin, more than $100 million for disadvantaged communities, like Sulphur, to combat pollution and better weather the effects of climate change.

An ordained elder in the Presbyterian Church, Robertson, 66, wears her wavy white hair short, cusses freely and greets by name the homeless of Sulphur, a city of some 20,000 people. Miss Cindy, as she’s known in her neighborhood, named her nonprofit organization, Micah 6:8 Mission, after an old testament verse about caring for the poor.

Cynthia Robertson and her neighbor, Nate, at home with her goats in Portie Town. Robertson is seeking funding through President Joe Biden’s signature climate law so her nonprofit organization can repair and retrofit hurricane-battered houses in the area.

Last summer, she and other community leaders worked around the clock to submit the grant proposal seven weeks in advance of a fall deadline. Among her partners is Build Change, which specializes in creating housing that can withstand natural disasters in the developing world. The organizations have sought more than $19 million for their local improvement plan, which includes shoring up roofs, remediating mold and mildew, providing homes with solar-powered air conditioning and building a community center where residents can find refuge during emergencies.

But in mid-December, an email from the Environmental Protection Agency explained it didn’t have enough time to make a decision on her application before the inauguration.

It will be up to the Trump EPA to determine whether Sulphur and some 2,000 other communities get the grants they applied for.

Now, Robertson said, all she can do is pray that Republicans will see that the investment is in everyone’s best interest, including their own.

As her small staff gathered for a weekly meeting in December, she bowed her head. “Dear Lord,” she said, “if it’s your will, may we get this damn grant, please.”

Average life expectancy in Portie Town is 69, nine years short of the national average. A Storm-Battered Community

Sulphur is near the beating heart of the extremely profitable petrochemical industry. Huge multinational corporations — including Westlake Chemicals, Citgo Petroleum, LyondellBasell and Phillips 66 — have plants just a few miles from Robertson’s home and the office of her environmental nonprofit. But Portie Town, the crisscross of streets lined with low-slung homes on the north side of Sulphur where she lives, seems to have gained little for its proximity to these engines of wealth.

Named for a widow who moved to the area with her eight children in the early 1900s, Portie Town (pronounced Por-shay) remains a place of struggle. Median annual income is around $40,000 and life expectancy is 69, nine years short of the national average. Climate change has added another layer of challenge. The hurricane risk in Calcasieu, the parish where it is located, is in the top 3% in the country, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which rates the expected annual loss from storms in the area as high and the resiliency as low.

With its shore on the Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana has always been vulnerable to storms, but the threat has unquestionably worsened in recent years. Climate change has raised temperatures, causing the air and water to warm. Storms intensify as they travel across the warmed oceans, pulling in more water vapor and heat, which makes hurricanes stronger and more intense.

When Hurricane Laura hit in August 2020 — its eye passing directly over Sulphur — it was the strongest hurricane to make landfall in the state’s history, killing at least 30 people and knocking out the power in Portie Town for weeks. Many residents couldn’t afford generators or the fuel to run them and went without air conditioners and refrigerators even as the temperature soared above 90 degrees. Shortly after the power was restored, it was knocked out again by Hurricane Delta, which was followed by a deep freeze caused by Winter Storm Uri. The next year, Hurricane Ida tied Laura’s record for the strongest winds measured in Louisiana.

“The storms have been getting closer and closer together, more and more active,” said Jessica McGee, who lives with her adult son in a small, cream-colored house a few blocks from Robertson in Portie Town. The McGees haven’t had gas since Hurricane Laura; they have used electric space heaters and cooked their meals in a microwave oven for the past three years. Boards nailed over their windows before the 2020 storm remain there.

Jessica McGee hasn’t been able to repair damage to her home from Hurricane Laura in 2020.

McGee, who lives on disability benefits, said she has neither the strength nor the money to repair the hurricane damage. “It’s my water, it’s the pipes, it’s the floor…,” she said. “The next one, our roof is going to be gone.”

If Robertson’s nonprofit is awarded the grant it is seeking, McGee’s house may also benefit. She brightens at the thought that government funding could bring her home back from the brink of inhabitability, but remains skeptical of politics.

“I don’t vote,” McGee said, shrugging. “It’s not for me.”

A Political Lightning Rod

The sprawling Inflation Reduction Act had many goals, including funding the Internal Revenue Service and lowering health care costs, but its main aim was to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change through tax credits, customer incentives and grants. Despite its purpose, its authors conspicuously omitted the word “climate” from its name in an effort to get bipartisan support for it.

The benefits of the law were felt widely, spurring clean energy projects in almost 40% of the country’s congressional districts; 19 of the 20 that got the most funding were led by Republicans.

In August, as he was standing on a corn and bean farm next to the deputy administrator of the Biden EPA, Jim Pillen enthused about his state’s grant. Pillen, the Republican governor of Nebraska, called the agency’s $307 million IRA grant “a once-in-a-lifetime, extraordinary opportunity.” In Pocatello, Idaho — a town in a red county that is still recovering from the 2012 Charlotte Fire — “folks are pretty excited” about the planned greenway path that will decrease wildfire risks and allow residents to bike by the river, Hannah Sanger, the city’s science and environment administrator, told me. And in Alaska, where Trump also won handily, the recipients of a grant of more than $47 million to electrify two ports described themselves as “ecstatic” about the money.

Still the law remains a political lightning rod. Republicans in Congress have tried to repeal parts of it dozens of times, and Trump railed against it on the campaign trail. “My plan will terminate the Green New Deal,” Trump told a group assembled at the Economic Club of New York in September. “It actually sets us back, as opposed to moves us forward. And [I will] rescind all unspent funds under the misnamed Inflation Reduction Act.”

Robertson passes the Westlake Chemical plant in Sulphur.

Clay Higgins, the Republican who represents Sulphur in Congress, voted against the IRA, which he attacked as a “monstrosity of a bill” that “wastes hundreds of billions of dollars on Green New Deal subsidies.” Higgins, who receives campaign funds from the oil and gas industry, notes on his website that “fossil fuels are the lifeblood of our modern society.” He did not respond to questions about Robertson’s hope to use IRA money to shore up the houses in his district.

In November, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a report that attacked the EPA’s IRA grants as a “green group giveaway” and characterized some of the recipients as “extremist organizations.” The lawmakers criticized funding groups that educate the public about climate change, or “environmental activist organizations that work to influence public and elected officials to adopt their often-extreme views, such as completely eliminating the use of fossil fuels.”

Despite the fiery rhetoric, a full repeal of the law seems unlikely, in part because it would require a majority of the House and Senate to agree on it. In August, 18 House Republicans wrote to Speaker Mike Johnson urging him to preserve the IRA’s energy tax credits, which are already funding projects. And it will be extremely difficult for the new administration to claw back grant money that has already been awarded.

Even if he fails to get the congressional support necessary to repeal the law, Trump could reverse the executive order that grants the authority to implement it. He could also cut short its longer term provisions, some of which were supposed to extend through 2029 and beyond. He can interfere with the funding that now flows through more than 12 federal agencies. And he can put a halt to the two dozen proposed rules that would carry out the law’s goals, according to the Brookings Institution. Congress could also severely undermine the law by targeting the rules that have been issued since Aug. 1 — and can thus be overturned through the Congressional Review Act.

A Looming Decision

Soon after the IRA was signed into law in 2022, Robertson began looking for ways it could benefit Portie Town.

Robertson at home before heading to church. Her charity and several other organizations together received $407,000 in Inflation Reduction Act funds in 2023.

Her charity had already been distributing food, clothing and “hurricane buckets” filled with mosquito repellant, canned ham, batteries and other supplies to locals when it and several other organizations together received $407,000 in IRA funds in 2023. The grant pays for the groups to distribute “evidence-based materials” about pollution, climate change and public health, according to its application. It also paid for two air monitors, which regularly document dangerously elevated levels of particulate matter in the air, pollution that is associated with premature death and breathing problems.

The IRA’s Community Change Grants, designed to provide approximately $2 billion for climate-related projects in disadvantaged communities, offered more direct help.

Robertson despaired on the December day when she learned that the Trump administration, not Biden’s, would be deciding whether Portie Town will get the grant.

“This community needs this so badly,” she said through tears. “Damn it.”

Just that morning, she had visited with Janet Broussard, 82, who lives by herself a few blocks away. The two had stood outside Broussard’s trailer imagining how the grant might improve it. Broussard’s roof had come off more than four years ago during Hurricane Delta. It was replaced, but, within two years, the new one was damaged by a tornado. She had no insurance that would pay to repair the damage and catches the rain in a bucket that she empties after storms.

Broussard has not been able to repair the roof of her trailer that was damaged during a tornado.

But Robertson said that if the grant came through, Micah 6:8 Mission would be able to help fix the roof. “We’ll also be able to take the siding off, insulate, put new siding on, take the windows out, put in double-paned insulating windows,” Robertson had said.

Zealan Hoover, a senior adviser to the EPA administrator who oversaw the IRA grant programs, said the agency made a herculean effort and managed to distribute more than 95% of the money. But agency officials didn’t have time to give the proposals that were submitted in the final weeks of the application period the careful reads they deserved, he said, and so they decided to reserve some funds so the next administration can finish the process. “We are going to give those 2,000 applicants who came in at the very end, you know, some hope and chance of being selected,” said Hoover, who pointed out that, under any administration, “the agency’s mission is to protect human health and the environment.”

What it decides will matter to Tony Rodriguez, who hung the “FUCK BIDEN” banner outside his home in the fall. A slight man with a graying beard who goes by Burnout, Rodriguez said he hung the banner to raise awareness about “all the bad stuff” Biden did. He had heard on the news — he can’t remember the exact source — that the president was to blame for children being sex trafficked, repeating a false conspiracy theory, and had sold out our country.

Tony Rodriguez said he hung this banner outside his home to raise awareness about “all the bad stuff” Biden did. (Courtesy of Cynthia Robertson)

Still, he said he would be grateful if Miss Cindy would use some of the money she is hoping to get from the law championed by the outgoing president to stop the rain from coming into his bedroom.

“At least then he’d have done something good,” he said.

Correction

Jan. 22, 2025: This story originally misidentified the owner of an industrial plant near Sulphur, Louisiana. That plant is owned by Phillips 66, which was spun off from ConocoPhillips; it is not owned by ConocoPhillips.

by Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash and Ken Schwencke

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Join us Jan. 31 at 3 p.m. Eastern for a live demonstration of this database’s features.

Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter than public schools, with fewer Black, Hispanic or Latino students. This may not be a surprising statistic because private schools can often be expensive and exclusionary, but it’s not a simple one to pin down. There is no central list of private schools in the country, and the only demographic data about them comes from a little-known voluntary survey administered by the federal government.

While reporting our project on Segregation Academies in the South last year, we relied on that survey to find private schools founded during desegregation and analyzed their demographics compared to local public school districts. Our analysis of that survey revealed, among other things, Amite County, Mississippi, where about 900 children attend the local public schools — which, as of 2021, were 16% white. By comparison, the two private schools in the county, with more than 600 children, were 96% white.

In the course of our reporting, we realized that this data and analysis were illuminating and useful — even outside the South. We decided to create a database to allow anyone to look up a school and view years worth of data.

Today, we are releasing the Private School Demographics database. This is the first time anyone has taken past surveys and made them this easy to explore. Moreover, we’ve matched these schools to the surrounding public school districts, enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public systems.

Until now, much of this data was difficult to analyze: While the National Center for Education Statistics, which collects the data, provides a tool to view the most recent year of Private School Universe Survey data, there was no easy way to examine historical trends without wrangling large, unwieldy text files.

As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever. The information is self-reported, but we have attempted to flag or correct some obvious inaccuracies wherever possible.

How to Use the App

Searching: You can search for private schools or public school districts by name and drill down on results using several filter options.

For schools, you can filter results by state, religious affiliation, school type and enrollment range. For some schools, you can also filter by founding year. By default, we only show results for schools that have responded to the survey at least once in the last few years, but you can turn off this filter to also include older data in your search results.

For public school districts, users can filter by state and sort results to see where the most students are attending private schools, as well as the gap between the district’s largest racial group and the school’s share of those same students. Because private schools can draw students from different districts, comparing their racial composition to a single district’s public schools is imperfect. Still, these comparisons can offer valuable insights into broader patterns of segregation and access.

Looking up a private school: On each private school’s page, you’ll find basic information about the school (its name; location; the type of school and its religious affiliation, if any; and what grades it teaches), and we’ve also included a summary and visualization of how the school’s demographics compare to the public school district’s.

There’s also a compilation of the demographic data the school provided to the survey, which you can download for your own analysis:

Exploring a district or state: On district and state pages, you’ll find more general information about private schools in those areas. (Search for districts here, and see links for each state here.)

You can find areas where private schools aren’t out of step demographically with their nearby public schools. In Osceola County, Florida, south of Orlando, both the local public school district and the private schools are mostly Hispanic or Latino.

Both state and district pages include breakdowns of private schools by religious orientation and school type, and a list of all private schools in the state or district. State pages also show a list of all school districts in the state.

District pages include some additional features, such as:

• A searchable map of private schools in the district’s boundaries, color coded by the predominant race of each school’s student body. (Use the lookup tool next to the map to search for schools by name, or click on the “Use Your Current Location” button to zoom in on schools near you. Clicking on a school’s address will fly the map to its location, and clicking on a school’s name will take you to that school’s page.)

• An interactive line chart that shows how public and private school enrollment have changed over time for each race category. Use the dropdown to change race categories and explore trends for different groups.

If you find something notable, we’d love to hear about it. We’d also like to hear your ideas for improving the app, including new features or data you’d like to see. And if you spot something you believe is an error, each page has a button you can use to report that to us.

by Sergio Hernández, Nat Lash and Brandon Roberts

Private schools in the United States are, on the whole, whiter, less Black and less Hispanic or Latino than public schools.

With our new Private School Demographics database, we’re enabling parents, researchers and journalists to directly compare the makeup of private schools to local public schools.

As debates over school choice, vouchers and privatization of education intensify, making this repository of private school data accessible is more important than ever.

🔎 Look up private schools near you.

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 stories like this one as soon as they are published.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said it could make hydroelectric dams on Oregon’s Willamette River safe for endangered salmon by building gigantic mechanical traps and hauling baby fish downstream in tanker trucks. The Corps started pressing forward over objections from fish advocates and power users who said the plan was costly and untested.

That was until this month, when President Joe Biden signed legislation ordering the Corps to put its plans on hold and consider a simpler solution: Stop using the dams for electricity.

The new law, finalized on Jan. 4, follows reporting from Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica in 2023 that underscored risks and costs associated with the Corps’ plan. The agency is projected to lose $700 million over 30 years generating hydropower, and a scientific review found that the type of fixes the Corps is proposing would not stop the extinction of threatened salmon.

The mandate says the Corps needs to shelve designs for its fish collectors — essentially massive floating vacuums expected to cost $170 million to $450 million each — until it finishes studying what the river system would look like without hydropower. The Corps must then include that scenario in its long-term designs for the river.

The new direction from Congress has the potential to transform the river that sustains Oregon’s famously lush Willamette Valley. It is a step toward draining the reservoirs behind the dams and bringing water levels closer to those of an undammed river.

“There’s a very real, very viable solution, and we need to proceed with that as soon as possible,” said Kathleen George, a council member for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, which have fished the Willamette for thousands of years. They’ve urged the Corps to return the river closer to its natural flow.

George credited OPB and ProPublica’s reporting, and said she believes that without additional public pressure, the Corps would have continued to stall on already overdue studies.

“Our salmon heritage is literally on the line,” she said.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers biologist Doug Garletts carries an anesthetized Chinook salmon to a loading chute where it will slide into a holding tank before being drained into a tanker and trucked upstream to the other side of Oregon’s Cougar Dam. It’s one of many methods the Corps has tried to keep threatened fish from dying because of hydroelectric dams on the Willamette River system. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

Asked about how the Corps planned to respond to Congress, spokesperson Kerry Solan said in a statement that the agency was still reviewing the bill’s language.

The 13 dams on the Willamette and its tributaries were built for the main purpose of holding back floodwaters in Oregon’s most heavily populated valley, which includes the city of Portland. With high concrete walls, they have no dedicated pathways for migrating salmon.

Emptying the reservoirs to the river channel would let salmon pass much as they did before the dams. It would leave less water for recreational boating and irrigation during periods of normal rain and snow, but it would open up more capacity to hold back water when a large flood comes. And the power industry says that running hydropower turbines on the Willamette dams, unlike the moneymaking hydroelectric dams on the larger Columbia and Snake rivers in the Northwest, doesn’t make financial sense.

The dams generate less than 1% of the Northwest’s power, enough for about 100,000 homes. But lighting a home with electricity from Willamette dams costs about five times as much as dams on the Northwest’s larger rivers.

Congress asked the Corps in 2020 and 2022 to study the possibility of shutting down its hydroelectric turbines on the Willamette. The agency missed its deadlines for those studies while it proceeded with a 30-year plan for river operations that included hydropower.

Oregon Rep. Val Hoyle, a Democrat whose district includes much of the Willamette River Valley, said in an emailed statement it was “unacceptable” for the Corps to move ahead without first producing the thorough look at ending hydropower that lawmakers asked for.

“Congress must have the necessary information on-hand to decide the future of hydropower in the Willamette,” Hoyle said.

The bill also requires the Corps to study how it can lessen problems that draining reservoirs might cause downstream.

Because of a 2021 court order to protect endangered salmon, the Corps has tried making the river more free-flowing by draining reservoirs behind two dams each fall. The first time the reservoirs dropped, in 2023, they unleashed masses of mud that had been trapped behind the dams. Rivers turned brown and small cities’ drinking water plants worked around the clock to purify the supply.

Congress wants the Corps to study how to avoid causing those problems downstream. That could include engineering new drinking water systems for cities below the dams.

The Corps has the authority to engineer infrastructure for local communities and cover 75% of the cost for such improvements, but it has never used this provision in Oregon.

A week before Biden signed the new bill, biologists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration published their own 673-page report saying the Corps’ preferred solution for the Willamette — the one involving fish traps — would jeopardize threatened salmon and steelhead.

NOAA proposed more than two dozen changes for the Corps, ranging from better monitoring of the species to altering the river flow to better accommodate migrating salmon. Solan said the agency is still reviewing NOAA’s opinion and deciding what action to take.

George, who has served on the council of the Grand Ronde tribes since 2016, said she was encouraged that the latest developments on the Willamette pointed to a future where salmon and people could coexist.

“In those darkest days of our families living here on the Grand Ronde reservation, it was truly returning to the Willamette to get salmon that helped keep our people alive,” George said. “It is our time and our role to speak up for our relatives and to say that a future with people and Willamette salmon is essential.”

Correction

Jan. 23, 2025: A photo caption with this story originally misidentified a dam. It is the Detroit Dam on the North Santiam River, not the Lookout Point Dam on the Middle Fork of the Willamette River.

by Brett Murphy

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

In early November, a small group of senior U.S. human rights diplomats met with a top official in President Joe Biden’s State Department to make one final, emphatic plea: We must keep our word.

Weeks before, Secretary of State Antony Blinken and the administration delivered their most explicit ultimatum yet to Israel, demanding the Israel Defense Forces allow hundreds more trucksloads of food and medicine into Gaza every day — or else. American law and Biden’s own policies prohibit arms sales to countries that restrict humanitarian aid. Israel had 30 days to comply.

In the month that followed, the IDF was accused of roundly defying the U.S., its most important ally. The Israeli military tightened its grip, continued to restrict desperately needed aid trucks and displaced 100,000 Palestinians from North Gaza, humanitarian groups found, exacerbating what was already a dire crisis “to its worst point since the war began.”

Several attendees at the November meeting — officials who help lead the State Department’s efforts to promote racial equity, religious freedom and other high-minded principles of democracy — said the United States’ international credibility had been severely damaged by Biden’s unstinting support of Israel. If there was ever a time to hold Israel accountable, one ambassador at the meeting told Tom Sullivan, the State Department’s counselor and a senior policy adviser to Blinken, it was now.

But the decision had already been made. Sullivan said the deadline would likely pass without action and Biden would continue sending shipments of bombs uninterrupted, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Those in the room deflated. “Don’t our law, policy and morals demand it?” an attendee told me later, reflecting on the decision to once again capitulate. “What is the rationale of this approach? There is no explanation they can articulate.”

Soon after, when the 30-day deadline was up, Blinken made it official and said that Israelis had begun implementing most of the steps he had laid out in his letter — all thanks to the pressure the U.S. had applied.

That choice was immediately called into question. On Nov. 14, a U.N. committee said that Israel’s methods in Gaza, including its use of starvation as a weapon, was “consistent with genocide.” Amnesty International went further and concluded a genocide was underway. The International Criminal Court also issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister for the war crime of deliberately starving civilians, among other allegations. (The U.S. and Israeli governments have rejected the genocide determination as well as the warrants.)

The October red line was the last one Biden laid down, but it wasn’t the first. His administration issued multiple threats, warnings and admonishments to Israel about its conduct after Oct. 7, 2023, when the Palestinian militant group Hamas attacked Israel, killed some 1,200 people and took more than 250 hostages.

Government officials worry Biden’s record of empty threats have given the Israelis a sense of impunity.

Trump, who has made a raft of pro-Israel nominations, made it clear he wanted the war in Gaza to end before he took office and threatened that “all hell will break out” if Hamas did not release its hostages by then.

On Wednesday, after months of negotiations, Israel and Hamas reached a ceasefire deal. While it will become clear over the next days and months exactly what the contours of the agreement are, why it happened now and who deserves the most credit, it’s plausible that Trump’s imminent ascension to the White House was its own form of a red line. Early reports suggest the deal looks similar to what has been on the table for months, raising the possibility that if the Biden administration had followed through on its tough words, a deal could have been reached earlier, saving lives.

“Netanyahu’s conclusion was that Biden doesn’t have enough oomph to make him pay a price, so he was willing to ignore him,” said Ghaith al-Omari, a senior fellow at The Washington Institute who’s focused on U.S.-Israel relations and a former official with the Palestinian Authority who helped advise on prior peace talks. “Part of it is that Netanyahu learned there is no cost to saying ‘no’ to the current president.”

So-called red lines have long been a prominent foreign policy tool for the world’s most powerful nations. They are communicated publicly in pronouncements by senior officials and privately by emissaries. They amount to rules of the road for friends and adversaries — you can go this far but no further.

The failure to enforce those lines in recent years has had consequences, current and former U.S. officials said. One frequently cited example arose in 2012 when President Barack Obama told the Syrian government that using chemical weapons against its own people would change his calculus about directly intervening. When Syria’s then-President Bashar al-Assad launched rockets with chemical gas and killed hundreds of civilians anyway, Obama backpedaled and ultimately chose not to invade, a move critics say allowed the civil war to spiral further while extremist groups took advantage by recruiting locals.

Authorities in and outside government said the acquiescence to Israel as it prosecuted a brutal war will likely be regarded as one of the most consequential foreign policy decisions of the Biden presidency. They say it undermines America’s ability to influence events in the Middle East while “destroying the entire edifice of international law that was put into place after WWII,” as Omer Bartov, a renowned Israeli-American scholar of genocide, put it. Jeffrey Feltman, the former assistant secretary of the State Department’s Middle East bureau, told me he fears much of the Muslim world now sees the U.S. as “ineffective at best or complicit at worst in the large-scale civilian destruction and death.”

President Joe Biden Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu meet in the White House last July. By then, Biden’s administration had issued multiple public warnings to the Israeli but did not follow through. During his visit, Netanyahu gave a fiery defense of Israel’s prosecution of the war against Hamas. (Samuel Corum/Sipa/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Biden’s warnings over the past year have also been explicit. Last spring, the president vowed to stop supplying offensive bombs to Israel if it launched a major invasion into the southern city of Rafah. He also told Netanyahu the U.S. was going to rethink support for the war unless he took new steps to protect civilians and aid workers after the IDF blew up a World Central Kitchen caravan. And Blinken signaled that he would blacklist a notorious IDF unit for the death of a Palestinian-American in the West Bank if the soldiers involved were not brought to justice.

Time and again, Israel crossed the Biden administration’s red lines without changing course in a meaningful way, according to interviews with government officials and outside experts. Each time, the U.S. yielded and continued to send Israel’s military deadly weapons of war, approving more than $17.9 billion in military assistance since late 2023, by some estimates. The State Department recently told Congress about another $8 billion proposed deal to sell Israel munitions and artillery shells.

“It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the red lines have all just been a smokescreen,” said Stephen Walt, a professor of international affairs at Harvard Kennedy School and a preeminent authority on U.S. policy in the region. “The Biden administration decided to be all in and merely pretended that it was trying to do something about it.”

In a recent interview with The New York Times, Blinken disagreed and said Netanyahu has listened to him by softening Israel’s most aggressive tactics, including in Rafah. He also argued there was a cost to even questioning the IDF openly. “Whenever there has been public daylight between the United States and Israel and the perception that pressure was growing on Israel,” Blinken said, “Hamas has pulled back from agreeing to a ceasefire and the release of hostages.”

He acknowledged that not enough humanitarian assistance has been reaching civilians and said the Israelis initially resisted the idea of allowing any food and medicine into Gaza — which would be a war crime — but Netanyahu relented in response to U.S. pressure behind the scenes. Blinken backtracked later in the interview and suggested that the blocking of aid was not Israeli policy. “There’s a very different question about what was the intent,” he told the Times.

For this story, ProPublica spoke with scores of current and former officials throughout the year and read through government memos, cables and emails, many of which have not been reported previously. The records and interviews shed light on why Biden and his top advisers refused to adjust his policy even as new evidence of Israeli abuses emerged.

Throughout the contentious year inside the State Department, senior leaders repeatedly disregarded their own experts. They cracked down on leaks by threatening criminal investigations and classifying material that was critical of Israel. Some of the agency’s top Middle East diplomats complained in private that they were sidelined by Biden’s National Security Council. The council also distributed a list of banned phrases, including any version of “State of Palestine” that didn’t have the word “future” first. Two human rights officials said they were prevented from pursuing evidence of abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

The State Department did not make Blinken available for an interview, but the agency’s top spokesperson, Matthew Miller, said in a statement that Blinken welcomes internal dissent and has incorporated it into his policymaking. “The Department continues to encourage individuals to make their opinions known through appropriate channels,” he added. Miller denied that the agency has classified material for any reason other than national security.

Over the past year, reports have documented physical and sexual abuse in Israeli prisons, using Palestinians as human shields and razing residential buildings and hospitals. At one point early in the conflict, UNICEF said more than 10 children required amputations every day on average. Israeli soldiers have videotaped themselves burning food supplies and ransacking homes. One IDF group reportedly said, “Our job is to flatten Gaza.”

Israel’s defenders, including those on the National Security Council, acknowledge the devastating human toll but contend that American arms have helped Israel advance western interests in the region and protect itself from other enemies. Indeed, Netanyahu has significantly diminished Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, killing many of the groups’ leaders. Then Iran’s “axis of resistance” received its most consequential blow late last year when rebel groups ousted Assad from Syria.

U.S. Ambassador to Israel Jack Lew told the Times of Israel he worried that a generation of young Americans will harbor anti-Israel sentiments into the future. He said he wished that Israel had done a better job at communicating how carefully it undertook combat decisions and calling attention to its humanitarian successes to counter a narrative in the American press that he considers biased.

“The media that is presenting a pro-Hamas perspective is out instantaneously telling a story,” Lew said. “It tells a story that is, over time, shown not to be completely accurate. ‘Thirty-five children were killed.’ Well, it wasn’t 35 children. It was many fewer.”

“The children who were killed,” he added, “turned out to have been the children of Hamas fighters.”

The repercussions for the United States and the region will play out for years. Protests have erupted outside the American embassies in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, while polls show Arab Americans grew increasingly hostile to their own government stateside. Russia, before its black eye in Syria, and China have both sought to capitalize by entering business and defense deals with Arab nations. By the summer, State Department analysts in the Middle East sent cables to Washington expressing concerns that the IDF’s conduct would only inflame tensions in the West Bank and galvanize young Palestinians to take up arms against Israel. Intelligence officials warn that terrorist groups are recruiting on the anti-American sentiment throughout the region, which they say is at its highest levels in years.

The Israeli government did not answer detailed questions, but a spokesperson for the embassy in Washington, D.C., broadly defended Israel’s relationship with the U.S., “two allies who have been working together to push back against extremist, destabilizing actors.” Israel is a country of laws, the spokesperson added, and its actions over the past 15 months “benefit the interests of the free world and the United States, creating an opportunity for a better future for the Middle East amid the tragedy of the war started by Hamas.”

Next week, Trump will inherit a demoralized State Department, part of the federal bureaucracy from which he has pledged to cull disloyal employees. Grappling with the near-daily images of carnage in Gaza, many across the U.S. government have become disenchanted with the lofty ideas they thought they represented.

“This is the human rights atrocity of our time,” one senior diplomat told me. “I work for the department that’s responsible for this policy. I signed up for this. … I don’t deserve sympathy for it.”

The southern city of Rafah was supposed to be a safe haven for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who the IDF had forced from their homes in the north at the start of the war. When Biden learned that Netanyahu intended to invade the city this spring, he warned that the U.S. will stop sending offensive arms if the Israelis went through with it.

“It is a red line,” Biden had said, marking the first high-profile warning from the U.S.

Netanyahu invaded in May anyway. Israeli tanks rolled into the city and the IDF dropped bombs on Hamas targets, including a refugee camp, killing dozens of civilians. Biden responded by pausing a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs but otherwise resumed military support.

There were numerous civilian casualties during the Israeli military’s attack on the city of Rafah in the Gaza Strip. The Biden administration had said invading the city would cross a “red line.” (Jehad Alshrafi/Anadolu/Getty Images)

In late May, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to stop its assault on the city, citing the Geneva Conventions. Behind the scenes, State Department lawyers scrambled to come up with a legal basis on which Israel could continue smaller attacks in Rafah. “There is room to argue that more scaled back/targeted operations, combined with better humanitarian efforts, would not meet that threshold,” the lawyers said in a May 24 email. While it’s not unreasonable for government lawyers to defend a close ally, critics say the cable illustrates the extreme deference the U.S. affords Israel.

“The State Department has a whole raft of highly paid, very good lawyers to explain, ‘Actually this is not illegal,’ when in fact it is,” said Ari Tolany, an arms trade authority and director at the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think tank. “Rules for thee and not for me.”

The administration says that it restrained Israel’s attack in Rafah. In a recent interview, Lew told the Times of Israel the operation ultimately resulted in relatively few civilian casualties. “It was done in a way that limited or really eliminated the friction between the United States and Israel,” he added, “but also led to a much better outcome.”

Several experts told me international law is effectively discretionary for some countries. “American policy ignores it when it’s inconvenient and adheres to it when it is convenient,” said Aaron Miller, a career State Department diplomat who worked for decades under both Democratic and Republican presidents as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations. “The U.S. does not leverage or bring sustainable, credible, serious pressure to bear on any of its allies and partners,” he added, “not just Israel.”

Miller and others note that the barbarity of Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, galvanized domestic support for Israel and made it significantly easier for Biden to avoid holding the Israelis accountable as they retaliated.

There are other likely reasons for Biden’s unwillingness to impose any realistic limitations on Israel’s use of American weaponry since Oct. 7. For one, his career-long affinity for Israel — its security, people and the idea of a friendly democracy in the Middle East — is shared by many of the most powerful people in the country. (“If this Capitol crumbles to the ground, the one thing that would remain is our commitment to our aid — I don’t even call it aid, our cooperation — with Israel,” Nancy Pelosi said in 2018, weeks before resuming her role as House speaker.) That rationale aligned with the Democrats’ political goals during an election when they were wary of taking risks and upsetting large portions of the electorate, including the immensely powerful Israel lobby.

Humanitarian aid trucks wait on the Egyptian side of the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip last year. (Ali Moustafa/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Immediately after the ICJ’s order about the Rafah invasion, officials in the State Department’s Middle East and communications divisions drafted a list of proposed public statements to acknowledge the importance of the court and express concern over civilians in the city. But Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesperson, nixed almost all of them. He told the officials in a May 24 email that those on the White House’s National Security Council “aren’t going to clear” any recognition of the ruling or criticism of Israel.

That was an early sign that the State Department was taking a back seat in shaping war policy. In its place, the NSC — largely led by Jake Sullivan, Brett McGurk and Amos Hochstein — assumed a larger role. While the NSC has grown significantly in size and influence over the decades, State Department officials repeatedly told me they felt marginalized this past year.

“The NSC has final say over our messaging,” one diplomat said. “All any of us can do is what they’ll allow us to do.”

The NSC did not make its senior leaders available for an interview or respond to questions from ProPublica. Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser and brother to the State Department’s counselor, said recently it was difficult, for much of the past year, “to get the Israeli government to align with a lot of what President Biden publicly has been saying” about Gaza.

Sullivan said too many civilians have died there and the U.S. was frequently required to publicly and privately pressure Israel to improve the flow of humanitarian aid. “We believe Israel has a responsibility — as a democracy, as a country committed to the basic principle of the value of innocent life, and as a member of the international community that has obligations under international humanitarian law — that it do the utmost to protect and minimize harm to civilians.”

During another internal State Department meeting in March, top regional diplomats voiced their frustrations about messaging and appearances. Hady Amr, one of the government’s highest-ranking authorities on Palestinian affairs, said he was reluctant to address large groups about the administration’s Israel policy and he took issue with much of it, according to notes of the conversation. He warned colleagues that the sentiment in Muslim communities was turning. From a public diplomacy perspective, Amr told them, the war has been “catastrophically bad for the U.S.” (Amr did not respond to requests for comment.)

Another attendee at the meeting said they had been effectively sidelined by the NSC. A third said it was a huge amount of effort to even get permission to use the word “condemn” when talking about Israeli settlers demolishing Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank.

Palestinians rush out of their home after Jewish settlers set it on fire in the town of Turmusaya in the West Bank last June. About 400 Jewish settlers launched an attack on the town and burned homes, cars and property. Officials within the State Department said it was difficult to get permission to publicly condemn instances of settlers destroying Palestinians’ homes in the West Bank. (Nasser Ishtayeh/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images)

Such sanitizing language became common. Alex Smith, a former contractor with the U.S. Agency for International Development, said that at one point the State Department distributed NSC’s list of phrases that he and others weren’t allowed to use on internal presentations. Instead of “Palestinian residents of Jerusalem,” for example, they were meant to say “non-Israeli residents of Jerusalem.” Another official told Smith in an email, “I would recommend not discussing [international humanitarian law] at all without extensive clearances.”

A USAID spokesperson said in an email that the agency couldn’t discuss personnel matters, but the list of terms was given to the agency by the State Department as early as 2022, before the war in Gaza. The list, the spokesperson added, includes the “suggested terms that are in line with U.S. diplomatic protocol.”

Deference to Israel is not new. For decades, the U.S. has repeatedly looked the other way when Israel is accused of human rights abuses.

One of the most conspicuous paper tigers in American foreign policy is the Leahy Law, experts say. Passed more than 25 years ago, the law’s authors intended to force foreign governments to hold their own accountable for violations like torture or extrajudicial killings — or their military assistance would be restricted. The law allowed precision targeting of individual units that faced credible allegations, so that the U.S. didn’t need to cut off entire countries from U.S.-funded weapons and training. It’s essentially a blacklist.

Almost immediately, Israel got special treatment, records show. In March 1998, IDF soldiers fired on journalists covering demonstrations in the West Bank city of Hebron. Congress asked the State Department, then led by Madeleine Albright, to take action under the new law. “An Israeli official informed the U.S. Embassy that the soldiers were disciplined after the incident, but was unable to provide further information,” State Department officials responded in a letter — more than two years later — to Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the law’s namesake. “It is the Department's conclusion that there are insufficient grounds on which to conclude that the units involved committed gross violations of human rights.”

While the country took action across the globe in South America, the Pacific Rim and elsewhere, the U.S. government has never disqualified an Israeli military unit under the law — despite voluminous evidence presented to the State Department.

In 2020, the agency even set up a special council, called the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum, to assess accusations against the country’s military and police units. The forum is composed of State Department officials with expertise in human rights, arms transfers and the Middle East who review public allegations of human rights abuses before making referrals to the Secretary of State. While it had ambitious goals to finally hold Israeli units accountable, the forum became widely known as just another layer of bureaucracy that slowed down the process and protected Israel.

Current and former diplomats told me that U.S. leaders are fundamentally unwilling to follow through on the law and cut off units from American-funded weapons. Instead, they have created multiple processes that give the appearance of accountability while simultaneously undermining any potential results, the experts said.

“It’s like walking toward the horizon,” said Charles Blaha, a former director at the State Department who served on the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. “You can always walk toward it but you will never ever get there.”

“I really believed in the Israeli military justice system and I really believed that the State Department was acting in good faith,” he added. “But both of those things were wrong.”

A review of the vetting forum’s emails and meeting minutes from 2021 through 2022 shows even the most high-profile and seemingly egregious cases fall into a bureaucratic black hole.

After the IDF was accused of killing Palestinian American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in May 2022, videos circulated on the internet of Israeli police units beating pallbearers at her funeral. “It is indeed very difficult to watch,” a deputy assistant secretary wrote in an email to a member of the forum. Another member told colleagues, “I think this would be what is actionable for the funeral procession itself as we wait for more info on circumstances of death and whether this would trigger Leahy ineligibility.”

Neither Akleh’s killing, nor the funeral beatings, led to Leahy determinations against Israel.

Israeli security forces beat protesters and pallbearers at the funeral of Al Jazeera reporter Shireen Abu Akleh, who was killed during an Israeli raid in the West Bank in 2022. Neither her killing, nor the clashes at her funeral, resulted in discipline from the State Department under the Leahy Law, despite the recommendations from an internal panel of experts. (Muammar Awad/Xinhua/Getty Images)

For years, lawmakers pushed the U.S. government to take action on Akleh’s case. Tim Rieser, a senior foreign policy aide who helped draft the Leahy Law, recently held a meeting with State Department officials to discuss the case again. The officials in the meeting again punted. “We’re talking about an American journalist who was killed by an Israeli soldier and nothing happened,” he said. “They are walking out the door on Jan. 20th and they haven’t implemented the law.”

In another case considered by the forum, a 15-year-old boy from the West Bank said he was tortured and raped in the Israeli detention facility Al-Mascobiyya, or Russian Compound. For years, the State Department had been told about widespread abuses in that facility and others like it.

Military Court Watch, a local nonprofit organization of attorneys, collected testimony from more than 1,100 minors who had been detained between 2013 and 2023. Most said they were strip searched and many said they were beaten. Some teens tried to kill themselves in solitary confinement. IDF soldiers recalled children so scared that they peed themselves during arrests.

At the Russian Compound, a 14-year-old said his interrogator shocked and beat him in the legs with sticks to elicit information about a car fire. A 15-year-old said he was handcuffed with another boy. “An Israeli policeman then walked into the room and beat the hell out of me and the other boy,” he said. A 12-year-old girl said she was put into a small cell with cockroaches.

Military Court Watch routinely shared its information with the State Department, according to Gerard Horton, one of the group’s co-founders. But nothing ever came of it. “They receive all our reports and we name the facilities,” he told me. “It goes up the food chain and it gets political. Everyone knows what’s going on and obviously no action is taken.”

Even the State Department’s own public human rights reports acknowledge widespread allegations of abuse in Israeli prisons. Citing nonprofits, prisoner testimony and media reports, the agency wrote last year that “detainees held by Israel were subjected to physical and sexual violence, threats, intimidation, severely restricted access to food and water.”

In the summer of 2021, the State Department reached out to the Israeli government and asked about the 15-year-old who said he was raped at the Russian Compound. The next day, the Israeli government raided the nonprofit that had originally documented the allegation, Defense for Children International — Palestine, and then designated the group a terrorist organization.

As a result, U.S. human rights officials said they were prohibited from speaking to DCIP. “A large part of the frustration was that we were unable to access Palestinian civil society because most NGOs” — nongovernmental organizations — “were considered terrorist organizations,” said Mike Casey, a former U.S. diplomat in Jerusalem who resigned last year. “All these groups were essentially the premier human rights organizations, and we were not able to meet with them.”

Miller, the State Department spokesperson, said in his statement that the agency has not “blanketly prohibited” officials from speaking with groups that document allegations of human rights abuses and they continue to work with organizations in Israel and the West Bank.

After the raid on DCIP, a member of the forum emailed his superior at the State Department and said the U.S. should push to get an explanation for the raid from the Israelis and “re-raise our original request for info on the underlying allegation.”

But almost two years went by and there were no arrests, while those on the forum struggled to get basic information about the case. Then, in the early months of the Israel war on Hamas, another State Department official reached out to DCIP and tried to reengage, according to a recording of the conversation.

“As you can imagine, it’s been a bit touchy here,” the official said on the call, explaining the months without correspondence. “The Israeli government’s not going to dictate to me who I can talk to, but my superiors can.”

The IDF eventually told the State Department it did not find evidence of a sexual assault but reprimanded the guard for kicking a chair during the teenager’s interrogation. To date, the U.S. has not cut off the Russian Compound on Leahy grounds.

In late April, there was surprising news: Blinken was reportedly set to take action against Netzah Yehuda, a notorious ultraorthodox IDF battalion, under the Leahy law.

The Leahy forum had recommended several cases to him. But for months, he sat on the recommendations. One of them was the case of Omar Assad.

On a cold night in January 2022, Netzah Yehuda soldiers pulled over Assad, an elderly Palestinian American who was on his way home from playing cards in the West Bank. They bound, blindfolded and gagged him and led him into a construction site, according to local investigators. He was found dead shortly after.

After the killing, DAWN, an advocacy group founded by the slain Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, compiled a dossier of evidence on the case, including testimony from family and witnesses, as well as a medical examiner’s report. The report found Assad had traumatic injuries to the head and other injuries that caused a stress-induced heart attack. The group delivered the dossier to the State Department’s Leahy forum.

The dossier also included information about other incidents. For years, Netzah Yehuda has been accused of violent crimes in the West Bank, including killing unarmed Palestinians. They have also been convicted of torturing and abusing detainees in custody.

By late 2023, after the Oct. 7 attacks, the experts on the forum decided that Assad’s case met all the conditions of the Leahy law: a human rights violation had occurred and the soldiers responsible had not been adequately punished. The forum recommended that the battalion should no longer receive any American-funded weapons or training until the perpetrators are brought to justice.

ProPublica published an article in the spring of 2024 about Blinken sitting on the recommendations. But when he signaled his intention to take action shortly after, the Israelis responded with fury. “Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Netanyahu posted on X. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.”

The pressure campaign, which also reportedly came from Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La. and Lew, the ambassador, appears to have worked. For months, Blinken punted on an official decision. Then, in August, the State Department announced that Netzah Yehuda would not be cut off from military aid after all because the U.S. had received new information that the IDF had effectively “remediated” the case. Two soldiers involved were removed from active duty and made ineligible to serve in the reserve, but there is no indication that anyone was charged with a crime.

Miller, the spokesperson, said the IDF also took steps to avoid similar incidents in the future, like enhanced screening and a two-week educational seminar for Netzah Yehuda recruits.

Palestinian relatives mourn during the funeral of Omar Assad, who died while in custody of the IDF’s Netzah Yehuda battalion. The State Department was set to disqualify the unit from future military assistance but ultimately decided not to after Israeli leaders pressured the secretary of state to change course. (Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP via Getty Images)

“In seven and a half years as director of the State Department office that implements the Leahy law worldwide,” Blaha wrote shortly after the announcement, “I have never seen a single case in which mere administrative measures constituted sufficient remediation.”

In its statement to ProPublica, the Israeli government did not address individual cases, but said, “All of the incidents in question were thoroughly examined by the American administration, which concluded that Israel took remedial measures when necessary.”

Last summer, CNN documented how commanders in the battalion have been promoted to senior positions in the IDF, where they train ground troops and run operations in Gaza. A weapons expert told me the guns that Netzah Yehuda soldiers have been photographed holding were likely made in the U.S.

Later in the year, Younis Tirawi, a Palestinian journalist who runs a popular account on X, posted videos showing IDF soldiers who recorded themselves rummaging through children’s clothing inside a home and demolishing a mosque’s minaret. Tirawi said the soldiers were in Netzah Yehuda. (ProPublica could not independently verify the soldiers’ units.)

Hebrew text added to one of the videos said, “We won’t leave a trace of them.”

On Nov. 14, more than a year after the war started, Human Rights Watch released a report and said that Israel’s forced displacement of Palestinians is widespread, systematic and intentional. It accused the Israelis of a crime against humanity, writing, “Israel’s actions appear to also meet the definition of ethnic cleansing.” (A former Israeli defense minister has also made that allegation.)

During a news briefing later that day, reporters pressed a State Department spokesperson, Vedant Patel, on the report’s findings.

Patel said the U.S. government disagrees and has not seen evidence of forced displacement in Gaza.

“That,” he said, “certainly would be a red line.”

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Mariam Elba contributed research.

by Jake Pearson

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New York Attorney General Letitia James is investigating about a half dozen guardianship organizations and how they manage the health and financial affairs of hundreds of elderly and infirm New Yorkers deemed incapable of looking after themselves, according to people familiar with the matter.

The inquiry, which is being conducted by lawyers in the office’s charities bureau, follows a yearlong series by ProPublica that revealed how some guardians neglected the vulnerable clients entrusted to their care, while others used their court-appointed positions to enrich themselves at their wards’ expense.

Judges often rely on guardianship companies to care for the so-called unbefriended, people who don’t have friends or family able to look after them. Oversight of these guardians, however, is scant, with officials rarely visiting wards to check on their care. Meanwhile, the courts that appoint the guardians rely largely on financial paperwork to determine a person’s well-being. That dynamic, the news organization found, has resulted in fraud, abuse and neglect of the state’s most vulnerable.

Among the groups investigators are scrutinizing is New York Guardianship Services, which was featured in ProPublica’s work, said one of the people familiar with the state probe, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive law enforcement action.

ProPublica found NYGS had failed to meet the needs of more than a dozen people entrusted to its care, including an elderly woman whom the company placed in a dilapidated home with rats, bedbugs and a lack of heat. NYGS collected $450 a month in compensation from the woman’s limited income while stating in reports to the court that her living situation was “appropriate” — even as internal company records and her own emails showed that she’d repeatedly complained about the conditions.

After ProPublica’s first story was published, a judge ordered NYGS to pay back that ward $5,400, representing about a year’s worth of fees, writing that the company had provided “minimal services, if any” during that time.

In another instance, ProPublica reported that the company collected monthly fees from an elderly man even after he’d left the country — and also after he died.

Company executives have declined to answer questions about specific clients but previously told ProPublica that NYGS was accountable to the court and that its work was scrutinized by examiners, who are empowered to raise any issues.

But ProPublica’s investigation found that there are too few examiners in the system to provide timely and thorough oversight. There are just 157 examiners responsible for reviewing the reports of 17,411 New York City wards, according to the court’s most recent data. And there are roughly a dozen judges to check their work. As a result, ProPublica found that annual assessments detailing wards’ finances and care can take years to complete, depriving judges of critical information about people’s welfare.

The courts have similarly taken a light touch to vetting guardianship providers. ProPublica found that though NYGS presented itself as a nonprofit, it hadn’t registered as such with state and federal authorities.

The attorney general’s investigation is not the office’s first foray into the guardianship world. A decade ago, the same unit investigated a nonprofit guardian called Integral Guardianship Services, ultimately finding the group had improperly loaned its top officials hundreds of thousands of dollars while its wards unnecessarily sat in nursing homes, according to court records. To settle the case, Integral agreed to various reforms, paid back the loans and brought on a management consultant, the Harvard Business School Club of New York, to review its systems, operations and finances.

Even so, Integral shut down just a few years later, stranding hundreds of wards whose cases were absorbed by other nonprofit groups and private lawyers. Among them was NYGS, which was founded, in part, by Integral’s former director of judicial compliance, Sam Blau, who wasn’t named in the attorney general’s lawsuit. Other Integral employees also remained in the guardianship business, starting their own groups or working as court-appointed fiduciaries, court and tax records show.

Some of those successor businesses are now among the entities state investigators are examining, the people familiar with the attorney general’s investigation said.

NYGS executives Sam and David Blau did not respond to an email seeking comment. Neither did the attorney general’s office.

News of the attorney general’s investigation comes as court administrators and Albany legislators face increased pressure to fix the guardianship system. Court officials have said they need more money to address the problems and announced last fall that they were appointing a dedicated special counsel, as well as a statewide coordinating judge, to oversee reforms.

Advocacy groups have mounted their own lobbying campaign, pressing Gov. Kathy Hochul and legislative leaders to commit $15 million annually to support a statewide network of nonprofits experienced in handling government contracts to serve the unbefriended. Another proposal, put forth by an advisory committee to the state court system, has advocated for the creation of a $72 million independent statewide agency to serve as a public guardian.

It’s not clear what Hochul, a Democrat, foresees for guardianship ahead of the upcoming legislative session. She’ll present the executive budget later this month. Last year’s $229 billion spending plan included just $1 million to fund a statewide guardianship hotline. A spokesperson for her office did not respond to questions about her funding plans or for comment on the AG’s probe.

Guillermo Kiuhan, an attorney for the former NYGS ward who has since died, said he was encouraged to hear the company may have to answer for what he said was outright theft. He has been trying to get NYGS to reimburse the ward’s heirs for the thousands of dollars the company took as compensation while his family provided for his care in Colombia. So far, the efforts have been unsuccessful. The Blaus didn’t respond to questions about Kiuhan’s claims.

“We are very frustrated,” he said in an interview. “Hopefully this is an opportunity to get the authorities involved … and not have more people with the same problem.”

by Joel Jacobs and Megan O’Matz

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A decade ago, strange billboards started showing up, including in New York’s Times Square. They weren’t advertising a product. They were vilifying Connecticut’s then-governor, Dannel Malloy.

And they could be traced to that state’s unusual effort to stop an Oklahoma tribe from offering Connecticut residents short-term consumer loans at exorbitant interest rates.

“Gov. Malloy, Don’t take away my daddy’s job,” read one of the billboards, alongside a picture of a Native American child with braids and traditional garb.

But Malloy was not dissuaded by what he called a “scare tactic.” He said he felt the state’s banking regulations were on his side. The Oklahoma tribe was claiming sovereign immunity as it flouted Connecticut law — charging over 400% interest annually, though the state capped rates on such loans at 12%.

“We knew we could win,” Malloy said. “We knew they were harming people in Connecticut.”

He said he came to believe that the sums Native American tribes were making were paltry compared with the money flowing to the outside investment organizations that had linked themselves to the tribes because of the protections that can come with sovereign status.

Connecticut officials spent years fighting in court, but their eventual victory on behalf of the state’s citizens proved a crucial point about regulation at the local level.

Even as federal authorities have struggled to make an impact on this controversial form of lending, a handful of states have upended the notion that tribes’ sovereign immunity must keep state regulators on the sidelines. The lesson: a little pushback can go a long way.

In addition to Connecticut, five other states — Arkansas, New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia and West Virginia — have been remarkably effective at eliminating most tribal loans, which are made online. A ProPublica review of the fine print on more than 80 tribal lending websites shows that the vast majority of tribal lenders now don’t lend in those states.

And a sample of cases filed in federal bankruptcy court bolsters the findings, with few filers in those states listing tribal lenders as creditors. Complaints, too, funneled to the Federal Trade Commission were minuscule in number in these states in recent years.

The six states tend to have strong consumer protection laws overall. Arkansas’ Constitution, for example, limits consumer loans to 17% interest annually. But, more significantly, the states have had aggressive attorneys, working for public agencies or private law firms, who have stepped in to protect consumers from high rates.

“They’d rather stay out than offer a product at a lower rate,” Connecticut Sen. Matt Lesser said of tribal lenders.

“They saw that Connecticut was aggressive in enforcing the law,” said the senator, who helped pass a bill to make such high-interest loans uncollectable in the state.

Minnesota is the latest state to confront tribal lenders.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, Minnesota’s attorney general filed a consent agreement in federal court in which the president of Wisconsin’s Lac du Flambeau Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians promised that their tribal businesses would never again lend to Minnesotans at rates that violate the state’s usury — or lending — laws, which caps many consumer loans at 36% interest annually. The attorney general found LDF companies lending at annual rates between 200% and 800%.

The LDF tribe, which is a leading player in the industry, has said its lending business helps people without access to credit, while the profits provide critical funding for tribal government services. It also has defended a common industry practice of partnering with nontribal entities that conduct many of the day-to-day operations, likening it to outsourcing.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison succeeded in bringing two enforcement actions in 2024 against tribal lenders catering to Minnesota borrowers. Ellison is one of a handful of state officials bringing cases against usurious lenders. (Charles Krupa/AP Photo)

It was the second enforcement action Minnesota had secured against tribal loan executives in 2024. Earlier in the year, a Montana tribal lending operation agreed to the state’s demands to stop making loans in Minnesota.

Loans from tribal lenders can carry astronomical rates because the operations claim that the tribes’ sovereign immunity allows them to be governed by federal but not state laws. There is no federal interest rate limit, aside from a 36% cap on loans to active-duty military members and their families.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison’s office had watched case law develop around tribal lending to the point where the state felt assured that it could enforce its interest rate caps against a sovereign entity offering loans to Minnesota residents.

In a March interview with ProPublica, Ellison said his office would share its knowledge with other states looking to crack down on tribal lending. “If people want to talk, we would love to see more enforcement action around the country,” he said.

Yet there are limits to what states can accomplish. Courts have ruled that states can only obtain injunctions to stop collections and prevent future harm, but they cannot collect fines or claw back money already lost by consumers. Their enforcement actions do not prevent tribes from making loans in other states. And they are only able to sue tribal leaders, not the tribes themselves.

Tribal Lending Has Largely Ceased in Six States Note: States are categorized as “all or nearly all” if 85% or more of tribal lending websites indicated that they do not lend in that state as of October. “Most” is defined as 51-84% who do not lend there, “some” is 15-50% and “few or none” is less than 15%. Source: ProPublica review of 81 tribal lending websites that listed states they do not do business in. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

And these legal battles can be lengthy and contentious, as exemplified by what happened in Connecticut.

In October 2014, Connecticut’s banking regulator ordered websites associated with the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma to stop providing loans to Connecticut residents, citing the state’s cap on interest rates and deeming the loans illegal.

The following spring, the Institute for Liberty, a pro-business organization in Washington, D.C., announced a campaign against Malloy. In social media posts, ads and mailings, the institute alleged that Connecticut’s actions were an affront to tribal sovereignty.

It further argued that the enforcement effort against the Oklahoma-based tribe would deprive Native American families of income for health care, education and employment.

But leaders of two Connecticut tribes uninvolved in lending joined state leaders in a press conference to reject the institute’s claims and to call on tribal lenders to stop taking advantage of the state’s consumers. Only a few dozen of the nation’s 574 federally recognized tribes have engaged in online lending.

The Institute for Liberty posted appeals like these on Facebook as part of its campaign against Connecticut’s then-Gov. Dannel Malloy. “What Connecticut is trying to do is to ignore hundreds of years of legal precedent and threatening the basic human rights of tribal people — rights guaranteed by our Constitution,” the institute’s president said in a 2015 press release.

As a political entity organized as a nonprofit, the institute did not have to publicly disclose its donors and so was considered a dark-money group. IRS records available online show its tax-exempt status has lapsed. Andrew Langer, the institute’s president, declined ProPublica’s request for an interview. “I have absolutely no comment,” he said in a phone call.

John Shotton, chair of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians, said in an email to ProPublica: “We did not financially support the campaign, the Institute for Liberty, or their executive director in any way. We had no knowledge of the campaign before learning about it from media sources.”

The Oklahoma tribe stopped lending in Connecticut but initiated a long court battle. The state Supreme Court ruled in 2021 that the tribe’s chair could not face civil penalties but could be subject to an injunction preventing future lending. The state also issued cease and desist orders to three other tribally affiliated lenders, which exited the state as well.

Forceful actions by state officials in New York and Pennsylvania targeting short-term lending also pushed out tribal operations.

In 2013, the New York Department of Financial Services sent cease and desist letters to dozens of online payday lenders, including some tribal lenders, and warned banks to cut off access to lenders operating in violation of state law. Two tribes sued the state to stop the crackdown, but were unsuccessful.

In 2014, Pennsylvania’s attorney general brought an ambitious case against Think Finance Inc., a hedge-fund-backed financial technology firm that was allied with three tribes. The state alleged that the arrangement was designed to enable Think Finance to profit from abusive loans by evading state lending laws. In court papers, Think Finance denied wrongdoing and said that it was not the actual lender on the tribal loans, arguing that it was providing “perfectly lawful services” to the tribes.

The litigation spurred additional private lawsuits, ultimately leading Think Finance to declare bankruptcy and resulting in multimillion-dollar settlements with borrowers.

“This is a model of how aggressive enforcement by one state can lend itself to nationwide relief for consumers,” Gov. Josh Shapiro, then attorney general, said in a press release.

In a 2019 deposition in a consumer lawsuit, an attorney previously involved in the tribal lending industry provided insight into tribal lenders’ avoidance of states where they may draw attention. Asked why a tribe might be advised not to lend in certain states, he replied “to avoid the headache of having to deal with an AG that was being aggressive.”

The attorney, Daniel Gravel, noted that the companies in the case believed that they were “engaging in perfectly legal activities” but “it wasn’t worth the time and effort of having to deal with state regulators who disagreed with us.”

In certain states, it’s not attorneys general or banking officials who are forcing out tribal lenders. The feat has largely been accomplished by private attorneys bringing consumer lawsuits, including sweeping class-action claims.

Most settlements remain confidential, but ProPublica tallied at least $2.9 billion in canceled loans and more than $360 million in restitution from class-action suits since 2019. The major settlements were all filed in federal courts in Virginia and were largely driven by consumer attorneys there.

The class-action cases are highly complex because of the difficulty in unraveling the layers of entities and people involved, which is why the circle of private lawyers challenging the tribal lending industry is small. In addition, private attorneys can be stymied by arbitration clauses in loan agreements, which aim to prevent consumers from going to court.

“This is rocket science. This is among the most complicated litigation you can do,” said Margot Saunders, a senior attorney with the National Consumer Law Center who has served as an expert witness in cases.

Tribal lenders now largely steer clear of making loans in Virginia.

They also largely avoid neighboring West Virginia, ProPublica found. That state has strong consumer protection statutes, and private attorneys and a previous attorney general have used them effectively in lawsuits against tribally affiliated lenders.

Bren Pomponio, a West Virginia attorney for Mountain State Justice Inc., a nonprofit legal services firm that brought a lawsuit against a tribal lender and its business partners in 2020, said that the past decade of litigation has cut through the “myth” that sovereign immunity enables tribal lenders to charge excessive interest rates.

“They thought they had a model to avoid state law, but they don’t really,” he said.

by Anna Maria Barry-Jester

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Lifesaving HIV treatments. Cures for hepatitis C. New tuberculosis regimens and a vaccine for RSV.

These and other major medical breakthroughs exist in large part thanks to a major division of the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research on the planet.

For decades, researchers with funding from the NIH’s National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases have labored quietly in red and blue states across the country, conducting experiments, developing treatments and running clinical trials. With its $6.5 billion budget, NIAID has played a vital role in discoveries that have kept the nation at the forefront of infectious disease research and saved millions of lives.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic.

NIAID helped lead the federal response, and its director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, drew fire amid school closures nationwide and recommendations to wear face masks. Lawmakers were outraged to learn that the agency had funded an institute in China that had engaged in controversial research bioengineering viruses, and questioned whether there was sufficient oversight. Republicans in Congress have led numerous hearings and investigations into NIAID’s work, flattened NIH’s budget and proposed a total overhaul of the agency.

More recently, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to run the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the NIH, has said he wants to fire and replace 600 of the agency’s 20,000 employees and shift research away from infectious diseases and vaccines, which are at the core of NIAID’s mission to understand, treat and prevent infectious, immunologic and allergic diseases. He has said that half of NIH’s budget should focus on “preventive, alternative and holistic approaches to health.” He has a particular interest in improving diets.

Even the most staunch defenders of NIH agree the agency could benefit from reforms. Some would like to see fewer institutes, while others believe there should be term limits for directors. There are important debates over whether to fund and how to oversee controversial research methods, and concerns about the way the agency has handled transparency. Scientists inside and outside of the institute agree that work needs to be done to restore public trust in the agency.

But experts and patient advocates worry that an overhaul or dismantling of NIAID without a clear understanding of the critical work performed there could imperil not only the development of future lifesaving treatments but also the nation’s place at the helm of biomedical innovation.

“The importance of NIAID cannot be overstated,” said Greg Millett, vice president and director of public policy at amfAR, a nonprofit dedicated to AIDS research and advocacy. “The amount of expertise, the research, the breakthroughs that have come out of NIAID — It’s just incredible.”

To understand how NIAID works and what’s at stake with the new administration, ProPublica spoke with people who have worked for NIAID, received funding from it, or served on boards or panels that advise the institute.

Decisions on Research Funding and Grants

The director of NIAID is appointed by the head of the NIH, who must be approved by the Senate. Directors have broad discretion to determine what research to fund and where to award grants, although traditionally those decisions are informed by recommendations from panels of outside experts.

Fauci led NIAID for nearly 40 years. He’d navigated controversy in the past, particularly in the early years of the HIV epidemic when community activists criticized him for initially excluding them from the research agenda. But in general until the pandemic, he enjoyed relatively solid bipartisan support for his work, which included a strong focus on vaccine research and development. After he retired in 2022, he was replaced by Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, an HIV researcher who was formerly the director of the division of infectious diseases at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She has spent much of her time in the halls of Congress working to restore bipartisan support for the institution.

NIH directors typically span presidential administrations. But Donald Trump has nominated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya to lead NIH, and current director Dr. Monica Bertagnolli told staff this week that she would resign on Jan. 17. A Stanford professor, Bhattacharya has spent his career studying health policy issues like the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the efficacy of U.S. funding for HIV treatments internationally. He also researched the NIH, concluding that while the agency funds a lot of innovative or novel research, it should do even more.

In March 2020, Bhattacharya co-authored an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal arguing that the death toll from the pandemic would likely be far lower than predicted and called for lockdown policies to be reevaluated. That October, he helped write a declaration that recommended lifting COVID-19 restrictions for those “at minimal risk of death” until herd immunity could be reached. In an interview with the libertarian magazine Reason in June, he said he believes the COVID-19 epidemic most likely originated from a lab accident in China and that he can’t see Trump’s Operation Warp Speed, which led to the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines at unprecedented speed, as a total success because it was part of the same research agenda.

Bhattacharya declined an interview request from ProPublica about his priorities for the agency. A recent Wall Street Journal article said he is considering how to link “academic freedom” on college campuses to NIH grants, though it’s not clear how he would measure that or implement such a change. He’s also raised the idea of term limits for directors and said the pandemic “was just a disaster for American science and public health policy,” which is now in desperate need of reform.

Money to Support Jobs and Advance Medicine

Grants from NIAID flow to nearly every state and more than half of the congressional districts across the country, supporting thousands of jobs nationwide. Last year, nearly $5 billion of NIAID’s $6.5 billion budget went to U.S. organizations outside the institute, according to a ProPublica analysis of NIH’s RePORT, an online database of its expenditures.

In 2024, Duke University in North Carolina and Washington University in Missouri were NIAID’s largest grantees, receiving more than $190 and $173 million, respectively, to study, among other things, HIV, West Nile vaccines and biodefense.

Over the past five years, $10.6 billion, or about 40% of NIAID’s budget to external U.S. institutions, went to states that voted for Trump in the 2024 presidential election, the analysis found. Research suggests that every dollar spent by NIH generates from $2.50 to $8 in economic activity.

That money is key to advancing medicine as well as careers in science. Most students and postdoctoral researchers rely on the funding and prestige of NIH grants to launch into the profession.

New Drugs and Global Influence

The NIH pays for most of the basic research globally into new drugs. The private sector relies on this public funding; researchers at Bentley University found that NIH money was behind every new pharmaceutical approved from 2010 through 2019.

That includes therapies for kids with RSV, COVID-19 vaccines and Ebola treatments, all of which have key patents based on NIAID-funded research.

Research from NIAID has also improved treatment for chronic diseases. New understandings of inflammation from NIAID-funded research has led to cutting-edge research into cures for Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis, and a growing body of evidence shows how viruses can have long-term impacts, from multiple sclerosis to long COVID. When private companies turn that research into blockbuster drugs, the public benefits from new treatments, as well as jobs and economic growth.

The weight of NIAID’s funding also allows it to play quieter roles that have been essential to advancing science and the United States’ role in biomedicine, several people said.

The institute brings together scientists who are normally competitors to share findings and tackle big research questions. Having that neutral space is essential to pushing knowledge forward and ultimately spurring breakthroughs, said Matthew Rose of the Human Rights Campaign, who has served on multiple NIH advisory boards. “Academic bodies are very competitive with one another. Having NIH pull the grantees together is helpful to make sure they talk to one another and share research.”

NIAID also funds researchers internationally, ensuring the U.S. continues to have an influential voice in global conversations about biosecurity.

NIH has also been working to improve representation in clinical trials. Straight, white men are still overrepresented in clinical research, which has led to missed diagnoses for women and all people of color, as well as those in the LGBTQ+ community. Rose pointed to a long history of missing signs of heart conditions in women as an example. “These are the type of things commercial companies don’t care about,” he said, noting that NIH helps to set the agenda on these issues.

Nancy Sullivan, a former senior investigator at NIAID, said that NIAID’s power is its ability to invest in a broad understanding of human health. “It’s the basic research that allows us to develop treatments,” she said. “You never know which part of fundamental research is going to be the lynchpin for curing a disease or defining a disease so you know how to treat it,” she said.

Sullivan should know: It was her work at NIAID that led four years ago to the first approved treatment for Ebola.

by Dave Altimari, The Connecticut Mirror

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror and originally published in our Dispatches newsletter; sign up to receive notes from our journalists.

In the summer of 2022, a source called me with a tip about towing. “The details of how this works,” he said, “your head’s gonna spin.”

It turns out Connecticut has a more than 100-year-old law that allows tow truck companies to sell someone’s car 15 days after they haul it away, if they can convince the Department of Motor Vehicles that the vehicle is worth $1,500 or less.

The time frame, we learned by calling every state, is one of the shortest in the country.

So I set out to answer what I thought was a simple question: How many cars have towing companies sold?

I submitted a request to the DMV under the Connecticut Freedom of Information Act.

Two-and-a-half years later, it seems the DMV doesn’t even know the answer — and we’re still waiting for thousands of records.

In the fall of 2022, the DMV told me it would cost us $47,000 to get the documents. Not only did it sound like the sticker price for a new car, but I realized we were in for a long fight. (The DMV now says the estimate was an error.)

The Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles’ initial estimate for the cost of obtaining documents (Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

We had sought one-page forms called H-100s that tow truck companies must submit to the DMV to get permission to sell someone’s car. Those forms could help us find out a lot of information — which companies are trying to sell cars quickly and what the DMV does with those requests.

Getting the documents was key to learning about towing practices in Connecticut and the real impact they have on people’s lives.

After asking the DMV to produce an itemized accounting of the $47,000 bill, we asked our attorney to appeal to the Freedom of Information Commission. Our attorney negotiated a compromise in April 2023. We agreed to pay $1,900 to cover the agency’s costs of redacting thousands of documents our request entailed.

The next month, we got our first group of forms, and it finally felt like we were on our way, until I opened the first batch and saw this:

(Obtained by CT Mirror and ProPublica)

In addition to being heavily redacted, many forms were handwritten, and the DMV didn’t seem to have a database or a system for keeping track of them. Agency officials initially told us there were 11,700 documents. Then they told us there were more than 7,000 for 2022 alone. Now they say there are about 4,100 for that year. The DMV hasn’t been able to explain the discrepancies. Officials also said the request has taken time because they have to manually redact thousands of documents.

The DMV’s slow drip of providing the forms made us have to look for other ways to find people whose cars were towed and then sold without their consent.

My colleague Ginny Monk, who covers housing, had heard complaints from renters about tow truck companies that had contracts with their apartment complexes. People were getting towed for not backing into their parking spaces or failing to properly display their parking stickers. Many people couldn’t get to the tow lot, which was at least a half-hour away, and others just didn’t have the money to pay the fees.

Under the law, towing companies must notify the local police within two hours of removing a car. So we submitted public records requests to several police departments for their call logs.

We also requested incident reports from the police department where one tow lot was located and found dozens of complaints, most from people who said they either couldn’t get their cars back or were being overcharged.

The police records also referenced DMV investigations into some of the same incidents. So we submitted a FOIA request to the DMV in February for investigations into several towing companies. That took four months but gave us more insight into the problem.

“It may be just a car to some,” Melissa Anderson of Hamden, Connecticut, wrote in her complaint, “but for my family it was sanity, peace of mind stolen from us.”

As we got closer to publishing our story last fall, the DMV began to send us more forms. We now have roughly 4,200. But the agency’s lawyer has told us there are still thousands more it has yet to turn over.

Just days after our story was published, at least two bills were introduced in the state legislature to address some of the issues raised in our reporting. The DMV said it would undertake a “comprehensive review” of towing practices, and the speaker of the House promised that fixing the towing laws will be a “priority” this legislative session.

We hope the interest generated by our story will induce the DMV to release the remaining records soon. Meanwhile, if you’ve had your car towed in Connecticut, we hope you’ll take some time to fill out this questionnaire.

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

Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror, contributed reporting.

by Tim Golden

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In the last years before the fires that destroyed Pacific Palisades, California, the great civic debate in my hometown was over the meaning of a shopping mall.

Some residents feared that the Palisades Village, a 3-acre archipelago of posh boutiques and restaurants that opened in 2018, was driving a gleaming stake through the heart of the place where we grew up. That “Old Palisades” was a mythologized, upper-middle-class community where people knew one another, raised happy families and tempered even the old, analog status-seeking of Malibu and Beverly Hills.

The Village, with its Gucci and Saint Laurent stores and its nouveau-McMansion architectural style, marked our final conquest by overly tanned, overly toned immigrants from Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Who else would stroll into the Erewhon grocery and tap down $20 for a Hailey Bieber Strawberry Glaze Skin Smoothie?

But plenty of people did. They liked the “bespoke, walkable village,” as the developers advertised it, seeing it as an overdue upgrade from Mort’s Deli and the family-run stores that the developer (and later mayoral candidate) Rick Caruso bulldozed away. They seemed happy to pay $27 for a seat in the Bay Theatre, a luxury multiplex that pirated its name and iconic facade from the long-closed movie house on Sunset Boulevard where my friends and I snuck into films like “Billy Jack” and “Big Wednesday.”

On either side of the mall debate, people rarely paused to note that these were rich people’s problems.

Unlike neighboring Santa Monica, an incorporated city with a spirited government, the Palisades didn’t raise its own taxes or run its own services. We call it a town, but it’s really a neighborhood in the City of Los Angeles. Still, there is a community council and a couple of local newspapers, and none of them worried more than occasionally about the threat that catastrophic wildfires might sweep down on us as they had on so many other California towns.

We had been lucky, and we knew it.

Wildfire ravaged a building on Sunset Boulevard in Pacific Palisades. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

On New Year’s Day, a handful of my old friends from Paul Revere Junior High were texting to that effect. “We have it so good,” my lawyer friend Eric wrote. He was looking out at the Pacific from the deck of his new home, having moved triumphantly back to the Palisades after years away.

It went without saying that our blessings included having grown up in a place where we could spend blissful days at the beach, attend very good public schools, learn how to work at miserable after-school jobs and get into trouble with minimal consequences.

Homes in that bygone Palisades could still be had for less than $100,000. We didn’t want to be Malibu or Brentwood. There were many wealthy Palisadians even then, but our baroque teenage hierarchies had little to do with who had money and who had less. There were Reagan Republicans and liberal Democrats, but the prevailing political vibe was tolerant and democratic.

The Palisades was still very white. There were separate beach clubs for WASPs and Jews; for years, some did not admit Blacks. But about a third of our classmates at Palisades High were bused from heavily African American neighborhoods like Crenshaw and Baldwin Hills. Whatever its failings, that integration shared what was arguably the city’s best public high school with thousands of less-privileged students. It also taught the white kids something about living in a more diverse society.

An impressive proportion of my classmates from those varied backgrounds went on to build meaningful lives. There are professors and social workers and doctors and film people. A star defensive tackle on the football team, who also sang in the chorus, became the actor and director Forest Whitaker. The businesspeople include a couple of zillionaires. For some, the ultimate marker of success was to afford a home in the neighborhood and send their kids to our old schools.

The Palisades changed a lot after I left for college. Despite the dangers, wealthier people built bigger, fancier homes, pushing out over the canyons and higher into the hills. We had long understood that we were living our nice lives in defiance of some powerful forces. I can still see the terror on my mom’s face one afternoon in the fall of 1978, as a wildfire swept toward us from Mandeville Canyon and we frantically packed the car with the most precious possessions we could gather up.

Even as they leveled quaint, old bungalows to build lot-to-lot monstrosities, many of the Hollywood people who flocked to the Palisades came for the sort of things that had always brought us together — the 10K runs and the Fourth of July parade; the beaches and parks and schools; the great hiking trails that wove into the Santa Monica Mountains from almost every hillside in town.

On New Year’s Day, my friend Eric closed our text conversation with a photograph of the evening’s spectacular sunset. The next images in the chat came a week later, in a video shot from the other side of his deck. A wall of gray-black smoke was billowing behind the ridge, not far from the home where my family lived for almost 50 years.

Less than an hour after he took the picture, Eric, his wife and their son fled down Chautauqua Boulevard, named for the high-minded Methodist educational movement that established the Palisades in the 1920s. Their home, along with the one my parents built and those of many friends, soon burned to the ground.

In photographs, the remains of the Palisades now evoke the streets of Aleppo or Homs, in Syria. Unlike most of my hometown friends, I’ve seen streets like those before. In Mexico City and San Salvador after devastating earthquakes in the 1980s. In Gaza. In the wastelands of Kabul, where American largesse never quite bandaged the scars of the Soviet war.

The ruins of buildings on Sunset Boulevard are reflected in the window of a Saint Laurent store that is part of the largely undamaged Palisades Village mall. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Imagery might be the only valid comparison between our tragedy and those in which tens of thousands of people were killed. Many Palisades residents displaced by the fire have enviable resources; they are reported to be filling four- and five-star hotels from Montecito to Laguna Beach. Compared with Syrians or Gazans or refugees from the Ukraine, the Palisadians have a far better shot at rebuilding their lives.

But the trauma remains overwhelming. To have our past so violently erased makes me wonder what we can really rebuild. Big developers are likely to snap up the burned-out lots of people who were uninsured or underinsured. What takes their place will inevitably be bigger and more generic construction, much of it in the nouveaux-McMansion style.

Even my friends in their early 60s have been weighing whether they will have the time and fortitude to rebuild their homes. And whose Palisades, they wonder, will be rebuilt around them? For now, the only section of the town center that stands somewhat unscathed is the Palisades Village mall, where Caruso called in private firefighters and water trucks to protect his investment.

As a young foreign correspondent, I spent a lot of time in Managua, a city that had been leveled by an earthquake in 1972. After years of war and revolution, Nicaragua was destitute; there was no money for street signs. But the Nicaraguans had a powerful collective memory, and I came to understand it as one of their great strengths.

In those days, a typical Managua address might be, “Del arbolito, tres cuadras hacía el lago,” or, “From the old tree, three blocks toward the lake.” The old tree hadn’t existed for years. But everyone remembered.