Crooked Bough News Round-up

— House Democrats Demand Answers From Trump’s VA on Vets Struggling to Access Mental Healthcare

 

at 8/7/26 4:00am

Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins received a letter signed by more than 60 lawmakers citing a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how the agency has failed to provide veterans with adequate mental healthcare. Samuel Corum/Getty Images What Happened: More than 60 House Democrats are pressing Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins for answers about how the agencys mental healthcare has been increasingly strained under President Donald Trump’s second administration. The lawmakers sent the secretary a letter last week asking questions about the state of VA care, citing a ProPublica investigation from this spring that revealed the agency’s mental health workforce has been plummeting and veterans have been left in the lurch. What They Said: The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Judy Chu, who is a psychologist and represents a district in Southern California. “Caring for our nations Veterans is a fundamental responsibility,” the letter says. “That includes ensuring access to high-quality mental health care.” The lawmakers demanded that the VA disclose details about its shortage of mental health providers and the impact on veterans. It also pushed the agency to lay out how long veterans have to wait for care. As ProPublica has detailed, while the VA has long had a shortfall of mental health providers, the situation has gotten far worse under the current Trump administration. Hundreds of mental health staffers have left the VA and not been replaced. Background: ProPublica’s investigation recounted the troubling experiences of both mental health providers and of veterans seeking care. With so many staffers leaving and not being replaced, the remaining providers have often been stretched remarkably thin. A psychologist who worked for a VA in Arizona recounted how some of her one-on-one sessions were replaced with online group sessions that included as many as 35 veterans. The therapist said their remaining individual sessions were sometimes limited to as little as 16 minutes. “It was always bad,” said the psychologist. “And now it’s at a breaking point.” In VA exit surveys that ProPublica obtained, mental health staffers who quit often wrote that they were no longer able to provide high-quality care. “Mental Health is understaffed, burned out,” wrote one New York-based staffer who was leaving. “There is not enough mental health care for the Veterans who need the services.” Veterans, meanwhile, have started to fall through the cracks. Jason Beaman, a Navy and Army vet, was shuffled among therapists who later left until he finally had enough. “I just quit. I don’t want to mess with the therapist anymore,” Beaman told us this spring. Why It Matters: After Trump returned to office last year, his administration promised to deliver veterans “the highest quality care.” The VA is the country’s largest healthcare system, serving 9 million veterans. Those men and women face many mental health issues at a higher rate than the general population. They die by suicide at roughly twice the rate. VA mental health staff have developed deep expertise in addressing the particular needs of vets. Indeed, studies have shown that vets get better care at the VA than through private providers. “VA psychologists are best in class,” said Russell Lemle, former chief psychologist for the San Francisco VA Health Care System and now a senior policy analyst at the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute. “When you lose them, the veterans are the ones who pay the price.” ProPublica reported that in January, the department had around 500 fewer psychologists and psychiatrists than it had at the same time last year. Recent VA data shows those head counts continue to decline. Response: In response to questions from ProPublica, VA spokesperson Quinn Slaven defended the agency. “The Trump Administration is solely focused on measuring VA’s success by how well it serves Veterans,” Slaven wrote in an email. “This commonsense approach has led to dramatic improvements for Veterans, families, caregivers, and survivors across the country.” Slaven said that the VA completed a record number of mental healthcare appointments in the past fiscal year while also lowering veterans’ wait times. The VA previously declined our request for an interview. Instead, spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz accused ProPublica of attempting to mislead the public by “cherry picking issues that are limited to a handful of sites and in many cases were worse under the Biden Administration.” After ProPublica shared the findings of its investigation and the names of veterans who would appear in it, the agency reached out to several to inquire about their care and offer help. The congressional letter gives the VA until Aug. 14 to respond. Read the Investigation Veterans Who Depend on Mental Health Care Keep Losing Their Therapists Under Trump The post House Democrats Demand Answers From Trump’s VA on Vets Struggling to Access Mental Healthcare appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Health Care, Military]

— What Is the Trump Administration Doing With Foreign Aid Money?

 

at 8/7/26 3:00am

In a 2025 meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump held up a printed article from American Thinker while accusing South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa of state-sanctioned violence against white farmers in South Africa. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Since he returned to office, President Donald Trump’s administration has upended foreign aid. It’s labeled well-established, long-running programs as “not aligned with American interests” and slashed their budgets.  Still, the billions of taxpayer dollars Congress has allocated for foreign aid programs must be spent; lawmakers have insisted the government continue to fund humanitarian aid, global health and pro-democracy causes around the world. With most of the old programs now gone, however, we wanted to know: What is the Trump administration doing with that money now? Recently, we published our investigation that found one answer to that question in a little-known bureau of the State Department that has dramatically transformed under Trump. For decades, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, known as DRL, has supported  human rights in some of the most oppressive countries in the world. Now, our reporting found,  it’s planning to direct funds to controversial groups supporting right-wing causes in Europe and elsewhere.  Our full story lays out some of the groups the government has considered funding, which include a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and a British American think tank created this year to focus on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation.” (Administration officials dropped that grant after significant pushback from Congress.)  One proposed grant particularly caught our attention: Trump administration officials suggested funding research on crime against minority populations in South Africa.  It’s clear from sources we spoke with that the key targeted minority population in question is the white ethnic group known as Afrikaners. Afrikaners were responsible for creating the nation’s infamous and brutal racially segregated apartheid system. Previously, DRL staff had been told to begin the process of awarding funds to a group called Lex Libertas, which was founded by a controversial figure who has called for Afrikaner self-governance. The group is currently fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers. The proposed grant was later opened up to allow a broader set of invited groups to apply for $1 million of funding, though it is still intended for the same purpose, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, citing ongoing deliberations, but said the Trump administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. Lex Libertas did not respond to questions about the organization or the proposed grant. Former diplomats who have worked extensively on human rights told us they were shocked that the victimization of white South Africans would be prioritized over the serious issues elsewhere in the region.  “It’s laughable to suggest that on the African continent, the prime issue of human rights concern is whites in South Africa,” one former agency official said when we asked him about the grant. South Africa is plagued by violence, but extensive research has found that white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. Read More Trump Officials Want to Use Human Rights Aid to Advocate for White South Africans and Right-Wing Causes in Europe Experts also described the proposed grant to fund research into violence against Afrikaners as keeping with the Trump administration’s overall stance toward South Africa. For decades, the U.S. relationship with the country has been symbolized by our massive support for HIV care, Mattie Webb, a professor at the Virginia Military Institute who studies South Africa and U.S. foreign policy, told us.  Since Trump returned to office, there’s been a stark shift as the administration has strengthened ties with borderline white nationalist groups that are considered fringe in South Africa.  “The U.S. is very clearly shifting its priorities away from aid that would benefit far more people in South Africa to this narrow focus on the white minority,” Webb said. In the last 18 months, Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and used claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off U.S. funding for HIV treatment and research. And even as he’s barred nearly all new refugees from the United States, he’s welcomed white South Africans, fast-tracking their entry.   There have long been tensions between South Africa and the U.S., former diplomats told us, but the aid the U.S. provided saved lives and helped sustain a working relationship that is vital to U.S. national security and economic interests. Now, by seeking to fund a movement antagonistic to the South African government, the U.S. risks driving a wedge between the two nations. Other grants also raised red flags for experts and lawmakers. Political appointees at the State Department are considering funding a British free-speech organization that has fought bans on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. That proposed $5 million grant would provide support for people facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document we reviewed. (The organization’s founder said it had “neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government” but did not respond to our other questions.) And a call for proposals recently released by the bureau would fund research, conferences and cultural engagements in wealthy democracies to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe.”  Not all the proposed funding is directed to controversial groups, our reporting found. But even some of the grants slated to fund more traditional human rights projects skirt federal requirements for competitive bidding that are meant to deter waste, fraud and abuse. Instead, officials are trying to direct millions to handpicked organizations, according to sources and documents.  In response to questions about our reporting, the State Department stressed that the process of awarding grants is ongoing and that multiple offices provide input, writing that “programs are still in active deliberation and receipt of a grant is not guaranteed to any organization that does not meet all requirement and standards for federal grants.”  We are continuing to report on foreign aid and the Trump administration’s policies in South Africa. If you have tips or information we should know about either of these issues, please feel free to get in touch with us! Reach out via phone or Signal to Anna Maria Barry-Jester at 408-504-8131 or Sharon Lerner at 718-877-5236. The post What Is the Trump Administration Doing With Foreign Aid Money? appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Trump Administration]

— He’s Eligible for Up to $480,000 After Being Wrongly Imprisoned for 42 Years. The State Says No.

 

at 8/6/26 3:00am

After Elvis Brooks spent 42 years in prison, a court threw out his conviction for murder. But he has struggled to get compensation from Louisiana for his wrongful conviction. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America Elvis Brooks thought he had an airtight case when he applied for compensation from the state of Louisiana after he was wrongfully convicted in a fatal bar shooting that kept him in prison for more than four decades. The 69-year-old New Orleans native has never wavered in his claims of innocence, insisting since his 1977 arrest that the cops had the wrong guy. But it would take nearly 45 years and a prosecutor admitting he failed to turn over key fingerprint evidence before the courts threw out Brooks’ conviction. That decision made Brooks eligible for up to $480,000 under a program created by Louisiana lawmakers to pay those wrongfully convicted in a state with one of the highest rates of overturned guilty verdicts. But Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill, the top prosecutor in the state, has vigorously fought Brooks’ compensation claim, asserting in court filings that he is still guilty and therefore should not receive any money at all. And it isn’t just Brooks: Since taking office two years ago, Murrill has opposed all but one of 23 compensation claims brought by people whose convictions have been vacated by the courts. These include cases in which the men were exonerated through DNA or blood evidence and others in which police are accused of fabricating evidence. Once, Murrill even threatened to block an exoneree’s ability to obtain a license to practice law if he didn’t drop his claim. Civil rights attorneys say Brooks’ case is one of the most egregious examples of a wrongful conviction in recent years. Murrill has been pushing the court since September 2024 to reject his compensation claim and also to reinstate a manslaughter charge against him. The case is pending before a district court judge in New Orleans; attorneys are scheduled to appear for the next hearing Monday. When Brooks heard what Murrill was trying to do, five months after he’d filed his claim, he said he was flooded with anger and disbelief. Once again, he said, the state was trying to rip away his good name and falsely brand him a killer. “She knows people are innocent but she doesn’t care,” Brooks said of Murrill during a recent interview, his voice rising with frustration. “She wouldn’t want nobody to do this to one of her loved ones.” Some states that have more recently created compensation funds have experienced startup problems. In Michigan, narrow criteria and confusion over eligibility have prevented exonerees from getting paid. But in Louisiana, conservative politicians who oppose the very existence of a compensation fund and therefore fight nearly every claim have proven to be the biggest obstacle. Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican who served as attorney general for eight years, during which time he hired Murrill as the state’s solicitor general, opposed 10 of 12 compensation claims during his tenure. Both have staked their political careers on a tough-on-crime agenda. By contrast, Murrill’s more moderate Republican predecessor, Buddy Caldwell, who served as attorney general from 2008 to 2015, opposed just 33% of all claims. Louisiana Attorney General Liz Murrill has taken a hard line against compensating the wrongfully convicted in Louisiana, maintaining they haven’t proven their innocence. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America Murrill’s hard-line tactics, particularly in Brooks’ case, stand out among her peers in other states, said Jeffrey Gutman, a professor emeritus at the George Washington University Law School and a national expert on compensation funds. “I can’t think of an attorney general who has been quite as aggressive in trying to prevent people from getting compensation,” Gutman said. Murrill, through her spokesperson, declined interview requests and did not answer questions regarding her opposition to the compensation fund. Both she and Landry have made their views on the fund clear during recent legislative sessions. Murrill told lawmakers last year that defending the state against these claims consumes an enormous amount of time and resources and that the fund should be abolished altogether. And in June, Landry vetoed a bill passed unanimously by the Republican-controlled Legislature that would have increased the amount paid to the wrongfully convicted. In his veto statement, Landry painted many of the exonerees as “convicted criminals” whose only interest is money. Murrill’s opposition doesn’t necessarily mean that Brooks and other exonerees won’t eventually be compensated. The claims are ultimately decided by one of a number of district court judges, whose approach to this issue may vary. But it ensures that a process the law says should take no more than five months could instead drag on for years, exacting financial hardship and emotional pain on people who have already endured decades of both, said Herbert Larson, an attorney representing exonerees and a senior professor at the Tulane University Law School. “If they’ve got DNA evidence that points at somebody else, if they’ve got fingerprints that point at somebody else, if it looks like sloppy police work, then we should pay the money and not spend the next two years litigating it,” Larson said. “That’s not a very effective use of time and money on the part of the attorney general.” Brooks filed his application in 2024, but more than two years later, his case has yet to be heard by a district court judge. After having 42 years of his life stolen — missing his son’s childhood and losing his parents and three siblings while he was behind bars — Brooks said he shouldn’t continue to suffer at the hands of the state. “It’s miserable and it’s frustrating, the games they play,” he said. “But if they think I’m going to give up, wave the white flag, they got me wrong.” Conflicting Evidence and a One-Day Trial On most days, Brooks can be found riding his bicycle down to Tricou and Douglas streets in New Orleans’ Lower 9th Ward, where he was raised, or through the French Quarter, where as teens, he and his friends would go to meet girls. But there is one place he avoids: a vacant lot at the intersection of Dauphine and Alabo streets. That’s where the Welcome Inn once stood, and where a murder took place that would change his life. In July 1977, a man named Cecil Lloyd was seated at the bar in the local dive when he was shot to death during an armed robbery. Less than three weeks later, police arrested 19-year-old Brooks. There was no physical evidence tying him to the killing, and a dozen people testified that Brooks was at a family party at the time of the shooting. But three white witnesses said they saw the perpetrators in the dimly lit room and picked Brooks, who is Black, out of a photographic lineup. Although studies have shown that witnesses often have difficulty correctly identifying suspects of another race, and despite the fact that the three witnesses gave conflicting descriptions, the jury found him guilty of first-degree murder after a one-day trial. What the jurors weren’t told is that fingerprints lifted from beer cans held by the robbers did not match Brooks’, or that police suspected the same men had robbed several people less than a block away just before the Welcome Inn robbery, according to prosecutor records discovered by Brooks’ attorneys 40 years later. The victims of the earlier crime were shown a photo of Brooks and ruled him out as a suspect. After his conviction, Brooks was sent to the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola at a time when the maximum-security prison was considered one of the most violent in the country. Three years after Brooks arrived, his brother Errol, who was serving a 99-year sentence there for armed robbery, was stabbed to death. “Angola was a madhouse,” Brooks said. “A hellhole.” A man was shot and killed in 1977 at the Welcome Inn bar, which used to sit on this corner in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans. Brooks was convicted for the murder in a one-day trial, despite evidence he was elsewhere at the time. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America While Brooks served his life sentence, the criminal justice system was being revolutionized through the introduction of DNA evidence and, with it, proof that innocent people had been convicted. This led to a deeper look into other factors contributing to wrongful convictions, including prosecutorial misconduct and mistaken eyewitness identifications, especially those made by witnesses with different racial backgrounds from the suspects. As a result, the number of exonerations nationwide increased from 25 in 1989 to 259 in 2022, according to the National Registry of Exonerations, a project operated by universities in Michigan and California. By 2025, Orleans Parish, where Brooks was convicted, had the highest rate of exonerations among U.S. counties with more than 300,000 residents, according to the registry. Many states reacted to the rise in exonerations by creating funds to compensate those who were wrongly convicted. Louisiana established its fund in 2005 and today is one of 39 states, in addition to the District of Columbia, that compensate the wrongfully incarcerated. But it is far from a rubber-stamp process. “It’s miserable and it’s frustrating, the games they play. But if they think I’m going to give up, wave the white flag, they got me wrong.” Elvis Brooks, exoneree To be eligible, a person has to have been imprisoned as a result of a conviction that was later vacated by a court. Applicants, like in all states with these funds, must then prove their innocence. Having a conviction thrown out is not enough to do so: A court can vacate someone’s conviction for a number of reasons, including an ineffective attorney or significant errors committed by the judge or prosecution. But that only means there were problems with the original trial. It is up to the person applying for compensation to present evidence that they did not commit the crime. In many states, innocence in the compensation process is proven by a “preponderance of evidence,” which attorneys understand to mean that there is more than a 50% chance that the person is innocent. This is the standard used in civil cases. The threshold is higher in Louisiana and some other states, where applicants are required to prove they are innocent by “clear and convincing” evidence. This is supposed to leave little doubt in the judge’s eyes that they did not commit the crime. That’s the hurdle Brooks must clear to receive any money from the state. Exonerated but Not Paid Brooks filed for compensation in April 2024, just a few months after Murrill and Landry took office. He didn’t know much about the process, he said, except that it was meant to help people like himself get back on their feet after a wrongful conviction. Brooks assumed it wouldn’t take long at all, maybe a few months. But like nearly all the others, his request was met with fierce opposition from the attorney general’s office. Murrill, seen by many as a future candidate for governor, has earned the reputation as a fighter unapologetic about the methods she is willing to use to enact a conservative agenda, both in the political world and the courtroom. Verite News and ProPublica interviewed the attorneys of 17 of the people whose compensation claims Murrill opposed. The majority expressed shock at her tactics. When Landry was attorney general, his office regularly spoke with defense attorneys and assured them that the attorney general would not stand in the way of compensation in the rare times the office agreed that a former prisoner was innocent, according to two of the attorneys. Landry did not respond to a request for comment. Those conversations no longer happen under Murrill, the attorneys said. In nearly every case, Murrill’s office has insisted that the exoneree either is guilty or has failed to sufficiently prove his innocence. Of the 23 people who have had active claims under Murrill, four so far have been awarded compensation. The rest are pending. Of the successful claims, two of the men were cleared by DNA evidence, while blood serum evidence was used to prove innocence in the third. Yet Murrill opposed all three, delaying their compensation for nearly two years. (In the fourth case, Murrill dropped her opposition to Patrick Brown’s claim after the victim testified that the exoneree was innocent). Malcolm Alexander was exonerated through DNA evidence in 2018 after 38 years in prison. Jeff Landry, who was the attorney general then and is now the governor, opposed his compensation claim, but a court later ruled in his favor. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America Jarvis Ballard is one of the four. He spent 23 years in prison before his 1999 rape conviction was vacated after his DNA was not detected in any of the blood or semen samples found at the scene. In addition, the victim reported two men committed the crime; however, three men, including Ballard, were prosecuted and convicted. The other two men testified that Ballard was not involved. The St. Bernard Parish district attorney’s office admitted in a 2021 statement that the office had made a mistake in prosecuting him. “DNA evidence, witnesses recanting their prior statements and polygraph testing all supported the ‘actual innocence’ claims of Jarvis Ballard,” district attorney Perry Nicosia wrote. In another case, Darrill Henry was sentenced to life in prison in 2011 for a double homicide. Nine years later, New Orleans Criminal District Court Judge Dennis Waldron threw out his conviction after DNA evidence found under the fingernails of one of the victims cleared him, saying there was “clear and convincing evidence that he is indeed factually innocent of the crime.” And in a third case, Sullivan Walter was sentenced to 40 years in prison in 1986 for burglary and rape, among other charges. He was only 17 at the time but was tried as an adult. His conviction was overturned in 2022 when blood evidence ruled him out as the perpetrator. This is horrible, Criminal District Judge Darryl Derbigny said to Walter as he ordered his release from prison, according to news reports. “I’m at a loss of words to express the sorrow and the anger I have at the treatment you’ve been dealt by the system.” But in all three cases, Murrill told the courts that despite the DNA or blood evidence, the men did not sufficiently prove their innocence. “They’re taking a position that is inconsistent with what many prosecutors argue every day in seeking conviction,” Zac Crawford, staff attorney at Innocence & Justice Louisiana, a nonprofit law firm specializing in wrongful convictions, said about Murrill’s office. “Prosecutors frequently use DNA testing to match someone to a crime as a means of getting a guilty verdict, and they are not willing to concede that that same evidence also proves innocence.” Murrill hasn’t confined her fight against compensation claims to the courts, having used threats to prevent at least one exoneree, Calvin Duncan, from even pursuing a claim. After serving 28 years of a life sentence for murder, he accepted a plea deal to secure his release in 2011. Ten years later, a district court judge ruled that he was factually innocent and threw out his conviction, citing the suppression of exonerating evidence by police, among other factors. When Duncan filed for compensation in 2023, Murrill issued a threat, Duncan said during a recent legislative hearing: drop the claim or she would charge him with perjury for falsely saying he was exonerated. At the time, Duncan was pursuing a law license. He said Murrill added a second warning: If he didn’t drop the claim, she would report him to the bar association to prevent him from getting his license. Duncan said he reluctantly agreed to withdraw his compensation application, with the understanding that Murrill would then drop the matter. But she didn’t keep her word, Duncan told legislators. During Duncan’s campaign last year for New Orleans criminal court clerk, Murrill sent him a letter threatening “further action from this office” if he didn’t stop referring to himself as being exonerated. “You have not proven you were actually innocent,” she told him. She then used his plea deal against him, saying, “You knowingly and voluntarily pled guilty to manslaughter and armed robbery.” Duncan, who declined to comment, won his election but was stripped of his office after legislators, with Landry’s support, eliminated his position. His campaign manager said Duncan has paused his pursuit of a law license in part because of his race for court clerk and Murrill’s persistent threats. Malcolm Alexander spent nearly 38 years in prison before being exonerated through DNA evidence in 2018. Despite the opposition of Landry, then attorney general, Alexander was later awarded compensation, though he said these claims aren’t all about money. Even more important is that when a judge awards an exoneree compensation, it comes with a definitive ruling that the person is, in fact, innocent. So while Murrill’s desire to deprive exonerees of money is terrible, Alexander said, her efforts to prevent them from having their names officially cleared are truly reprehensible. “It Wasn’t Right From Day One” Brooks was 60 years old and had been in Angola prison for nearly two-thirds of his life when his legal team discovered a wealth of new evidence that appeared to conclusively prove his innocence. Among these items were fingerprints lifted from beer cans held by the shooters during the Welcome Inn bar robbery and fatal shooting. And those fingerprints did not match Brooks’. In January 2019, Brooks’ legal team filed a motion to overturn his murder conviction. Leon Cannizzaro, the New Orleans district attorney at the time, objected, telling the court that his office did not purposefully withhold any evidence. Brooks said he was ready to wage a lengthy legal battle to prove he was not a murderer. But five months later, Cannizzaro approached Brooks with an unexpected offer: If he agreed to plead guilty to manslaughter, his life sentence would be reduced to 42 years and he would be allowed to walk out of Angola prison. Brooks agonized over the decision. The idea of standing up in court and saying he had killed someone was unimaginable. But he also didn’t want to die an old man on a rusted prison cot. So he took the deal. Two years later, as Brooks was struggling to adjust to life outside of prison and still strapped with a felony record, his legal team found a memo in a pile of records they had requested from the district attorney’s office that detailed a 2019 internal meeting with one of the prosecutors at Brooks’ murder trial. He admitted that they didn’t turn over the fingerprint evidence and that it would have been helpful to Brooks’ case, according to the memo. The meeting had occurred just two weeks before Cannizzaro offered Brooks the plea deal. If Brooks had known about the prosecutor’s admission, he said, he never would have accepted the plea. “It wasn’t right from day one,” Brooks said. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America Brooks on his bike in New Orleans this year A photo of Brooks’ parents and his great-niece hangs in the apartment at a senior center he moved into since his release from prison. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America In 2022, when presented with this new information, the district court agreed. It ruled that the district attorney withheld crucial evidence when offering the plea deal and threw it out along with Brooks’ conviction. Current New Orleans District Attorney Jason Williams declined to retry the case, clearing the way for Brooks to file his compensation claim two years later. Cannizzaro could not be reached for comment. In a statement issued after Brooks’ 2019 release from prison, the former district attorney said he offered Brooks the plea deal because his office believed he was “rehabilitated and will not go out and reoffend.” Cannizzaro rejected the idea that Brooks was wrongfully convicted, saying at the time that if he were innocent, Brooks and his attorneys would have turned down the deal. “Notably, they did not,” he said. Murrill is now using that discredited plea deal against Brooks, just as she did in Duncan’s case, in an attempt to quash his compensation claim. In a September 2024 motion, Murrill claimed that by vacating Brooks’ manslaughter conviction while he was a free man and not a prisoner, the court essentially pardoned him. And under the state constitution, only the governor has the power to issue pardons. As a result, she has asked that the court reinstate the manslaughter charge against Brooks. Murrill did not, however, address the fact that the court vacated the deal because prosecutors intentionally withheld key information, according to court records. In her motion, Murrill said she only learned the plea deal had been thrown out when Brooks filed his claim. And that, said attorney Harry Daniels, who represents Brooks, is when she started the effort to reinstate charges against him. “It’s only when he started demanding what he’s entitled to for being wrongfully convicted that this even became an issue,” Daniels said. Brooks has described applying for compensation as torturous, a barricade that is constantly preventing him from being able to move forward. And life has been difficult: His only source of income is his $994-a-month Social Security payment, enough to rent a one-bedroom apartment in a low-income senior center. There are moments, though, he said, when he allows himself to dream about what he would do with the money. The first would be to buy a bigger headstone for his family gravesite, where his parents, four siblings and a nephew are buried in a single plot in the Green Street Cemetery. All but one died while he was wrongfully imprisoned. There is room on the headstone for only three of the seven names. “I want to put all our names on there,” he said. “Give them some respect, especially my momma.” Seven of Brooks’ family members are buried in a single plot in the Green Street Cemetery, but there is room on the headstone for only three names. If he receives compensation money, he plans to use some of it to buy a bigger headstone. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America The post He’s Eligible for Up to $480,000 After Being Wrongly Imprisoned for 42 Years. The State Says No. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Criminal Justice, Prison]

— James Talarico Accused Ken Paxton of Voter Fraud. His Own Voter Registration Is Raising Questions.

 

at 8/5/26 4:00am

State Rep. James Talarico accused his U.S. Senate opponent, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, of voter fraud after a ProPublica-Texas Tribune report. Last week, Paxton hit back with similar accusations. Aiden Gonzalez/The Texas Tribune Texas state Rep. James Talarico voted in five elections using his parents’ address after purchasing a home for himself nearby, a practice that may have violated state voting laws, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found. This comes weeks after Talarico accused Attorney General Ken Paxton, his opponent in the race for U.S. Senate, of voter fraud for similar actions. The news organizations reported in July that Paxton voted using an address where his estranged wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, said he hasn’t lived for two years. Paxton has made eradicating voter fraud a cornerstone of his time in office by advocating strict enforcement of the law, including in cases against voters who allegedly used false addresses when casting ballots. Paxton’s campaign has said he is a “lawful, registered Texas voter” but has repeatedly declined to answer detailed questions about his residency and voting history. Piecing together Talarico’s voting history is more difficult than it is for Paxton. Talarico, unlike the attorney general, redacts his address on the Travis County voter rolls under a state law that allows some public officials to shield personal information for safety reasons. But unredacted records Talarico’s campaign provided the newsrooms show that he listed his parents’ address on his voter registration in November 2021. He purchased a home in June 2022 but did not change his voter registration address until September 2024, the news organizations’ review of Travis County records shows. The new address is redacted, but Talarico’s campaign previously told the newsrooms that he currently lives and is registered to vote at the north Austin home he owns. Talarico’s campaign declined to answer questions about his residency and voting history, including when he began living at the home he owns. Campaign spokesperson JT Ennis said “right-wing actors” had made “credible threats” about trying to locate Talarico and his family. Texas law requires that residents register to vote where they live. This ensures they are voting for those who actually represent them. The provisions of the law, however, are “broad and vague,” said Andrew Cates, a Texas ethics attorney. Courts have previously ruled that there is no single way to determine a voter’s residence, and prosecuting such cases requires proof that a voter “knowingly” or “intentionally” broke the law. Given this, Cates said he doubts that either Talarico or Paxton committed voter fraud, but he said Paxton should be held to a higher standard. As the state’s top lawyer, Paxton is responsible for enforcing election laws and has aggressively pursued alleged violators. “When the top officials go looking for people to skewer for it, and then do it themselves, it really smacks of hypocrisy,” Cates said. In 2024, Paxton helped oust judges on Texas’ highest criminal court who prevented him from unilaterally prosecuting election crimes. And, two weeks before this year’s primary election, Paxton announced the creation of an election fraud tip line. His office warned Texans that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records or to establish a residence for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election.” Paxton’s unyielding stance on election crimes fueled charges from Talarico and other critics that he considers himself above the law. “Our Republican secretary of state here in Texas has already said that our elections are safe and secure,” Talarico said at a Houston campaign event last month. “But as our state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton has gone on a voter fraud witch hunt. Turns out, he was committing voter fraud the whole time.” Last week, Paxton hit back. In a news release and on social media, Paxton said Talarico broke state law, citing reports from conservative news outlets suggesting the Democrat had not lived in the district for at least a year when he was elected to the Texas House in 2022. Talarico, Paxton said, “blatantly committed election fraud showing a complete disregard for Texas residency requirements.” Records provided by Talarico’s campaign appear to show that he did comply with residency requirements during the period scrutinized by the conservative outlets. In October 2021, Talarico announced he would move to the area where he grew up after Republicans redrew his Texas House district to favor their party. Talarico updated his address to his parents’ home in the new House district on his voter registration, on his driver’s license and with the U.S. Postal Service on Nov. 5, 2021, according to records his campaign provided. Those include a photo of his voter registration application and screenshots of receipts from the Texas Department of Public Safety and USPS. Talarico also rented a 10-foot U-Haul moving truck for six hours that day, according to a screenshot of a receipt. The changes happened three days before the one-year cutoff, making him eligible to run for that seat. The records also contradict a claim by one of the conservative outlets that there was no evidence Talarico moved to his parents’ house when he registered to vote there. Paxton seized on that report to accuse Talarico of voter fraud during the 2022 election. The newsrooms’ findings about Talarico are different because they analyzed the period after the lawmaker purchased a home and found that he continued to vote using his parents’ address. Talarico’s house is in the same county as his parents’ home, which is about 6 miles away. It is in the state House district he represents but in different jurisdictions for some local elections. Asked about the apparent discrepancy in Talarico’s voter registration and residency, his campaign shifted blame onto the attorney general. “This is a lame attempt by Ken Paxton to deflect from his own hypocrisy and career of corruption,” Ennis said in a statement, nodding to Paxton’s legal troubles. Paxton was impeached by the Texas House in 2023 and investigated by the Department of Justice over corruption charges. The state Senate acquitted him, and the federal government dropped its case. Paxton also spent nearly nine years under indictment for felony securities fraud charges that were dropped in 2024. For his part, Paxton and his campaign on Monday again did not answer questions about the news organizations’ finding that he voted six times over a two-year period while registered at a Collin County home where he appeared to no longer live. It is unclear where Paxton lived during that time, but the publications’ reporting has linked him, and a woman believed to be his girlfriend, to a home in neighboring Denton County since February. As the home is in a different county, voters there select an entirely different slate of local officials than in Collin County. Paxton spokesperson Madison Cercy doubled down on accusations that Talarico was ineligible to be elected to his seat and also committed voter fraud. “The only person who has committed voter fraud in the Texas Senate race is James Talarico,” she said. She did not provide evidence of Talarico’s alleged lawbreaking beyond the reports from the conservative outlets. Matthew Wilson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University, argued Paxton’s and Talarico’s cases highlight how easy it can be to “run afoul of the letter of the law,” even as Republican lawmakers push for more stringent enforcement of voting restrictions. “I think it could be reasonably used as a charge of hypocrisy against either of them because both of them have condemned the other for an action quite similar to what they themselves appear to have done,” Wilson said. The post James Talarico Accused Ken Paxton of Voter Fraud. His Own Voter Registration Is Raising Questions. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Politics]

— Lead Contamination Is Still a Problem in Omaha. Why Is the City Cleaning Up Some Yards and Not Others?

 

at 8/5/26 3:00am

Camila Ortiz González, 7, holds her 8-month-old brother, Isaías, at home in Omaha, Nebraska, in June. Although the Environmental Protection Agency cleaned up their family’s yard in 2012, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tests found levels of lead that are higher than before the agency remediated it. The agency denied their mother’s request to resample the yard. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica In the last 10 months, residents in neighborhoods across Omaha, Nebraska, have contacted the city and federal government after tests by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica showed they had enough of the toxic metal in their yards for the dirt to be dug up and replaced under Environmental Protection Agency rules. But the responses they’ve received have been inconsistent. Three of them received new testing and were promised additional cleanup. Yet others were denied a new cleanup or told the news organizations they never heard back.  One resident said the city tested her yard, found it exceeded the EPA’s lead contamination level and sent her a letter saying cleanup was necessary. Months later the city backtracked, saying she did not qualify because she lived outside the primary cleanup zone. Another said she called 14 times before the city told her it would not retest because she hadn’t built or demolished anything in her yard since the EPA replaced the soil in 2012.  The EPA and the city have spent decades cleaning up residential properties in east Omaha after a century of pollution from a lead smelter and other factories downtown. The EPA had set a lead level that it uses to determine which properties to clean up, and the news organizations’ tests found these residents’ yards were over the limit. But the city said that according to EPA rules, it can’t rely on testing by the newsrooms or any other groups to drive testing and cleanup decisions. Peter Olson thought he was one of the lucky ones. His yard was one of thousands that the federal government had dug up and replaced since cleanup began in 1999. But a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica soil test conducted in September showed he had too much of the toxic metal in the yard. When his wife contacted the EPA, Olson hoped a federal employee would offer another test and cleanup. Instead, all the agency could do was examine a small area in the backyard where a deck once stood, according to an email Olson shared from an EPA project manager for the site. The rest of the yard, including an area that was high for lead in the news organizations’ tests, was ineligible, the agency said without explaining why. The city told Mary Royers it could test her soil because a shed had been demolished and a garage had been built in her backyard, which could have disturbed or uncovered contaminated soil. Unlike with Olson, the city analyzed the whole yard and agreed to clean up several areas around her house.  Olson said he and his wife agreed to the more limited testing the EPA offered them, though they worry about what might be in the rest of their yard. They’re currently waiting for the testing. Do You Live in Council Bluffs or Carter Lake, Iowa? Sign Up for Free Lead Testing of Your Soil. An Omaha lead smelter spread dust that seeped into the soil and bodies of many residents. The EPA spent decades cleaning up the surrounding area — but not Council Bluffs, Carter Lake or Bellevue. Sign Up for a Free Soil Test Omahans’ dirt generally qualifies for cleanup if it has more than 400 parts per million of lead in it — about the equivalent of a marble dispersed in a 10-gallon bucket of soil. The EPA adopted that standard in 2009. To date, contractors have dug up and replaced nearly 14,000 yards, mostly in a 27-square-mile area on the city’s east side, which has been declared a federal Superfund site. In 2015, the agency handed over remaining remediation work to Omaha. Asked about the different responses residents have received, EPA spokesperson Kellen Ashford said in an email that each property is unique, and new sampling depends heavily on whether site conditions have changed because of construction or demolition that might have disturbed or exposed the soil. “EPA strives to be fair and equitable in its decision-making process while adjusting to changes in agency policies, funding, and cleanup approaches,” he said. Steve Zivny, who leads Omaha’s Lead Information Office, also said these decisions are made on a case-by-case basis. The city is able to test and clean up within the site but must seek approval from the EPA before doing any work outside those boundaries. The city is paid with settlement money from the smelter and other polluters. Recently, the city sent letters to some residents outside the boundaries of the Superfund site saying they needed cleanup but reversed course after the EPA said the homes would not qualify, Zivny said. Amy Haney lives about a half-mile outside the site’s western edge, a boundary the EPA drew by estimating where only a small percentage of homes were likely to have high lead levels. As a result, Haney’s home was never tested. But a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica test found it had nearly 1.5 times the level that would qualify for a lead cleanup.  The result felt like a “kick in the gut,” she said. The news organizations tested 35 properties within a three-quarter-mile radius of Haney’s home. Four, including Haney’s house, were above the cleanup level. Haney contacted the city, which told her the EPA would retest her home this summer. While the EPA has cleaned up homes outside the site in the past, Ashford said any sampling beyond the site’s bounds right now is for investigative purposes only, and those homeowners may not be eligible for remediation.  Read More The EPA Heralds Its Omaha Cleanup as a Success. But We Found Many Yards Still Have Toxic Levels of Lead. The agency’s priority is cleaning up within the Superfund site as well as properties that impact children, he said. Even when kids test high for lead, however, the city and the EPA don’t always retest yards. Sabrina, a north Omaha resident whose soil we tested, said doctors found lead in three of her children. (She asked that her last name not be published to protect their identities.) In 2020, after her daughter’s blood-lead test, the city and a nonprofit replaced windows that contained lead-based paint. But they didn’t test the yard. The only information Sabrina said she received about the dirt was the EPA test results from 2003 that showed the yard didn’t qualify for cleanup. “I felt like that was kind of a lazy response,” Sabrina said. Despite the window replacements, doctors have found lead in her other kids’ blood. The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tested her soil in May and found the lead was over the cleanup level and twice as high as the EPA’s 2003 test records showed.  Sabrina requested a new test, but the city denied it, saying no work had been done on the property and it couldn’t rely on the newsrooms’ results.  Zivny said the city has asked the EPA to revisit that decision in light of her children’s blood test results. Is My Soil Contaminated With Lead? How Can I Get My Soil Tested? If you live in the Omaha Superfund site, you can check the Omaha Lead Registry to see the highest level of lead found in your yard through soil sampling by either the EPA or the city. If your soil hasn’t been tested and you live within or near the boundaries of the Superfund site, you can contact the city’s Lead Information Office. Midwest Laboratories in Omaha also provides heavy metal screening for a fee through its garden and lawn soil testing program. Learn more about lead in Omaha. The post Lead Contamination Is Still a Problem in Omaha. Why Is the City Cleaning Up Some Yards and Not Others? appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Climate and Environment]

— Greg Abbott Blasted Corpus Christi for Its Water Crisis. A River Authority He Has Power Over Is Falling Apart.

 

at 8/4/26 4:00am

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott appointed a 21-person board to oversee water in a broad area surrounding the Nueces River, which runs through Corpus Christi, Texas. Brenda Bazán for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded with fury after Corpus Christi officials announced in March that this Gulf Coast region of more than 500,000 people could face unprecedented restrictions as its water supply dried up. The state had already committed over $750 million in low-interest loans to the citys plans for a desalination plant, a project that would add 30 million gallons a day to the region’s water supply. But the project had gone nowhere. “You know what they did? They squandered it, and then they changed their plan and then they were indecisive about what to do,” Abbott said of city officials in a heated response to a reporter’s question at an unrelated March press conference. “What Corpus Christi leaders have to do is make a decision,” Abbott said. “We can only give them a little time more before the state of Texas has to take over and micromanage that city and run that city to make sure that every resident who goes to the water tap and turns it on, they are going to be getting water out of their faucet, not because of what local leaders are doing but because of what the state of Texas will do.” Even as Abbott was demanding that Corpus Christi get its act together, another agency, whose entire board Abbott appoints, was also coming undone. In late June, board members of the Nueces River Authority learned that funding for a desalination plant the agency hopes to build, separate from the city’s, is months from running out. Additionally, the agency was spending more than it was taking in, and other contracts that had kept the authority financially afloat had been canceled. Although the river authority’s project is a critical part of efforts to expand the region’s water supply, so far, the governor hasn’t threatened to take over the agency’s day-to-day operations. He’s consistently placed the burden of responsibility on the NRA board. But Abbott has previously demonstrated that he can use his authority to compel other agencies to act: In March, he instructed a different river authority not to reduce Corpus Christi’s water allocation from Lake Texana. He also had the state’s environmental agency waive regulations so the city could move groundwater from Nueces County, which includes Corpus Christi, to its water treatment plant. As far back as October 2022, while he was campaigning for reelection, Abbott said in an interview with KRIS 6 News that the state was working with the city and Nueces County on a desalination plan. If the city did not pursue the project, “then the state of Texas will do it for them,” the governor said. But the state is not currently involved in the city’s desalination project. The governor appoints all 21 members of the NRA’s board and designates its president. With a majority vote of the river authority board, Abbott also can remove any board member for inefficiency, neglect of duty or misconduct. He has no such control over the Corpus Christi City Council. Political scientists and water policy researchers who reviewed the situation told KRIS 6 News that Abbott’s decision to pressure Corpus Christi while leaving the NRA to address its problems largely on its own reflects a selective use of power. While recent rains have helped delay, though not prevent, an immediate water emergency for Corpus Christi, experts say the region still needs to develop new infrastructure projects to secure its long-term water supply. Should water supplies drop below certain levels, Corpus Christi residents and businesses — including oil refineries and petrochemical plans — would be required to cut water use by 25 % under the city’s current Level 1 water emergency plan. Households would be capped at using 6,000 gallons of water per month, landscape watering would be banned and there would be surcharges imposed on those who exceed their allotments. “The city of Corpus Christi needs a lot of help, it doesn’t need threats, and the Nueces River Authority is in way over its head,” said Cal Jillson, a political science professor at Southern Methodist University. “The water crisis in Corpus Christi and beyond in Southeast Texas is serious, and it’s not clear that anyone has the breadth of authority and resources to deal with it.” Gov. Greg Abbott has threatened Corpus Christi’s leadership over the city’s failure to move forward with a planned desalination plant, but he has largely refrained from publicly criticizing the leadership of the Nueces River Authority, even though he appointed its board. The NRA has also faced struggles in getting its planned desalination project up and running. Brenda Bazán for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune What Power Does Abbott Have? The public troubles for the NRA bubbled up as far back as March, when the agency’s then-chief operating officer sent a letter to board members accusing Executive Director John Byrum of making “materially inaccurate” statements about the authority’s finances related to the planned desalination project. KRIS 6 reached out to the governor’s office in the spring about the accusations. “Every member of a Texas board or commission should uphold the highest standards of integrity, transparency, and accountability in service of the people of Texas,” Abbott press secretary Andrew Mahaleris wrote in a statement. “Governor Abbott expects a thorough investigation into the allegations brought forth and for the Board to act swiftly once the investigation is complete.” The board eventually cleared Byrum of “intentional wrongdoing,” but the NRA declined to release a copy of the investigation to KRIS 6 in response to a public information request; the Texas office of the attorney general has not yet ruled on whether the report can be withheld. The news organization asked the governor’s office for his response to the investigation and the board’s decision, but he did not respond. The river authority’s unstable finances became even more apparent at a board meeting in late June, when the agency’s chief financial officer confirmed the NRA could be out of money for the desalination project by the end of August if certain contracts didn’t materialize. Since then, three of the agency’s desalination contracts, which the authority was depending on to stay afloat, expired and have not yet been renewed. KRIS 6 News asked the governors office whether it was aware of the agency’s continuing problems. Mahaleris again referred the news organization back to board members. “The NRA Board oversees the agency’s operations and finances,” Mahaleris wrote June 27. “The Governor appoints board members to the state’s water authorities but does not manage their day-to-day operations. The Governor expects accountability from appointed boards.” While Abbott has no direct legal authority over the NRA’s policy decisions, he can use the power of his office to publicly pressure them, Ron Beal, a retired Baylor University School of Law professor whose work on Texas administrative procedure has been routinely cited by the Texas Supreme Court, wrote in a response to KRIS 6 News. “He can say that when each members term ends, if the water project is not on its way, they will absolutely NOT be re-appointed to the job!” Beal wrote. “In other words, he cannot force them legally to follow his orders, but there is no doubt he has the bully pulpit and if anyone can pressure everyone to work together NOW and get it done ASAP, it is the Governor!!!!” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott at a press conference in June Brenda Bazán for The Texas Tribune In a written statement to KRIS 6 News for this story, Abbott again placed responsibility on both the Corpus Christi City Council and the NRA board but did not address most of the specific questions asked. “Despite the temporary reprieve granted by recent rain, the Governor’s expectations for the region have not changed. … The Corpus Christi City Council created this crisis through repeated failure to act on desalination,” Mahaleris wrote. “The Council remains responsible for securing reliable water for their citizens. The Nueces River Authority Board is responsible for the agency’s finances” and the desalination project. The governor’s office did not answer questions about whether Abbott has taken steps to coordinate among the city, the NRA and other stakeholders, or about what “accountability from appointed boards” looks like in practice. Even as the governors office has publicly distanced itself from the NRAs operations, it has fought to keep from releasing its own communications with the river authority’s leadership. KRIS 6 News filed a public information request on July 2 seeking emails, text messages, meeting notes and correspondence between the governor and members of his staff and Byrum, the NRA executive director, and NRA board President Eric Burnett. The request covered the river authority’s desalination project and any state funding, grants or loan guarantees related to those efforts. The governors office confirmed on July 17 that it had records that met the parameters of the request. It did not release them. Instead, the office asked the attorney general’s office for permission to withhold the documents. The office argued that the records relate to a proposed water facility project for which state funding may be sought and that releasing them would seriously disadvantage Texas, but did not explain how. Abbott’s office also said the records reflect policy advice between the governors office and representatives of another state agency; this type of communication can sometimes be withheld under the state’s public information law. The river authority has struggled to keep up with the demands of the desalination project, which is estimated to cost $6.4 billion. Design work on the pipeline that’s supposed to deliver the desalinated water stalled because the river authority hasn’t offered the company building it a new contract. Byrum, the executive director, has claimed President Donald Trump promised funding for the project, but the river authority has never actually made a formal request to the White House. Jillson pointed to a fundamental mismatch between the NRA and the scale of the desalination project its trying to complete. The NRA staff is small, with an annual budget of up to about $5 million. It’s governed by unpaid, part-time board members who historically meet quarterly to provide broad direction. He said the governor should direct someone in his office to determine whether the NRA has the personnel and expertise to execute a project of this scale and, if it doesn’t, to act on that finding. Without that kind of direct link between the governor’s office and the agency, Jillson said, “what you’re saying is, ‘We expect these guys to oversee themselves.’” Byrum wrote in a response to KRIS 6 News that the authority “has the experience to oversee” the project and the option to hire additional staff if required. The river authority did recently secure one large contract for the project: In May, the NRA selected Israel-based IDE Technologies as its development partner for the desalination plant. Abbott toured a desalination facility in Israel run by IDE in January 2016. At the time, IDE said Abbott “expressed his intention to partner with Israeli technology companies such as IDE to develop and deploy water solutions for Texas,” as reported by Wastewater Digest. KRIS 6 News asked if the governor, or anyone in his office, was involved in the NRAs selection of IDE. Byrum wrote that the “Governor’s office was not involved.” KRIS 6 News asked the governor the same question, but his spokesperson did not respond. The Nueces River Authority has proposed constructing a desalination plant on Harbor Island, a flood tidal delta on the outskirts of Corpus Christi. Brenda Bazán for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune The Takeover Question Abbott has a record of curbing the power of Texas cities like Corpus Christi to govern themselves. In 2015, he signed a bill that overrode a voter-approved fracking ban in Denton in North Texas and blocked cities from banning or restricting oil and gas drilling. In 2023, he signed the so-called “Death Star” bill, which preempted city authority over eight policy areas, including labor, natural resources, insurance and property. Republican state Rep. Denise Villalobos, who represents the Corpus Christi region, previously told KRIS 6 that Abbott directed her to draft a bill that would create a state-level water infrastructure authority, something she compared to the state’s highway department. If adopted by the Legislature when it meets next year, such an authority would take many decisions about future water supplies away from locals. Villalobos did not comment for this story. Abbott’s office did not answer questions about the proposed legislation. Corpus Christi City Manager Peter Zanoni told KRIS 6 this summer that his office had looked into how a takeover would work and found no examples in Texas of the state stepping in to run a water operation or water corporation. The closest parallel, he said, is the state’s ability to take over ailing school districts. Abbott’s threat to take over Corpus Christi’s desalination project runs into other unsettled legal territory the governors office has not addressed publicly, said Gabriel Collins, a lawyer and research fellow at Rice Universitys Baker Institute for Public Policy who studies water and energy policy. Under Texas law, surface water, meaning rivers and lakes, is public property, giving the state a clear line of authority. Water pumped from the ground is considered private property, belonging to the person who owns the land above it, and is regulated locally. Desalinated seawater fits into neither category. Collins said a legal case could theoretically be made that water drawn from within 3 miles of shore falls under state jurisdiction, but he said he isn’t aware of anyone making that argument in this context. “That would be a massive shift in water policy in the state of Texas,” Collins said. But the legal question may be less important than a practical one, Collins said. Would a state takeover of Corpus Christi water regulators, even if it could be done, actually make a difference? “Or would you be better off resolving those fundamental problems by having the state be a catalyst and a facilitator financially that helps the local political authorities solve a problem?” Collins said. The post Greg Abbott Blasted Corpus Christi for Its Water Crisis. A River Authority He Has Power Over Is Falling Apart. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Climate and Environment, Politics]

— The EPA Doesn’t Typically Retest Homes in the Country’s Largest Residential Lead Superfund Site. So We Did.

 

at 8/4/26 3:05am

Flatwater Free Press reporters Chris Bowling, pictured, and Leah Keinama and ProPublica reporter Cassandra Garibay led the collection of soil samples to test 620 homes in Omaha for lead contamination. Lily Smith/Flatwater Free Press Decades after the last plume of lead-laced smoke rose from a smelting plant in Omaha, Nebraska, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found lead in concentrations that pose a threat to people’s health in soil throughout east Omaha.  Our investigation began more than two years ago, when Leah Keinama, who previously worked for a food security nonprofit, could not find up-to-date information about lead contamination for gardeners in Omaha. Keinama, now the director of civic journalism at the Nebraska Journalism Trust, and reporters at the Flatwater Free Press knew about the city’s refining history, so they teamed up to find out whether concerns about lead exposure were still warranted all these years later.   The Environmental Protection Agency declared a 27-square-mile area within the city a hazardous waste zone, known as a Superfund site, after the American Smelting and Refining Company closed in the 1990s. That prompted a lengthy period of testing and remediation. Today, unless Omaha residents pay for private testing, there aren’t many avenues to find out how much lead is in their soil if their property had been tested by the city and EPA in the past. Do You Live in Council Bluffs or Carter Lake, Iowa? Sign Up for Free Lead Testing of Your Soil. An Omaha lead smelter spread dust that seeped into the soil and bodies of many residents. The EPA spent decades cleaning up the surrounding area — but not Council Bluffs, Carter Lake or Bellevue. Sign Up for a Free Soil Test A Community-Informed Investigation  Throughout our reporting, we heard from hundreds of Omaha residents who said they didn’t know about the city’s lead history. Some said they believed that because the EPA had already cleaned up thousands of properties that had high concentrations of lead in the soil, there was nothing to worry about.  Our goal was to reach people in every neighborhood in and around the Superfund site. So we knocked on doors, hung up flyers around town, visited a community health center, attended multiple events, partnered with local libraries, and spoke to a college classroom to invite people to sign up for free soil testing. We also posted our online form in various social media channels and shared the news with other local media. We made our reporting available in Spanish, as roughly 10% of residents living within the Superfund site don’t speak English. Flatwater Free Press initially partnered with local libraries and a community-based organization to distribute do-it-yourself kits with instructions on how to collect a soil sample. We received fewer than 100 samples using this method before switching to a sign-up system in which residents indicated they wanted our team to collect soil from their yard. After a resident signed up for testing, a member of the reporting team (usually Keinama or Flatwater Free Press reporter Chris Bowling) went to their home, put on latex gloves, wiped down a stainless steel spoon with an unscented wipe and scooped about 3 to 4 tablespoons of soil from the middle of the yard into a sealable vial. We made sure not to collect samples too close to the house or too close to the road, which the EPA has found can be overly contaminated by paint or the remnants of leaded gasoline, respectively. When demand for testing increased, we hired two part-time soil collectors. We sent labeled samples to Accurate Analytical Testing, an EPA-accredited lab, for $10 per test. Once we received the results from the lab, we informed residents (unless they had opted out of receiving their result) and put together a guide to answer some of their top questions.  Our soil collection process differed from the EPA’s method of taking multiple composite samples from five sections of the yard. We chose to take a single sample from one area of each yard to reach more people and keep costs reasonable. In a few cases, we took multiple samples from the same yard and tested each sample individually but used only the highest result for our analysis. The EPA said sampling a single area “can be strongly biased high or low” compared to composite sampling. However, several of the nine environmental contamination experts we spoke to said single samples can offer broad conclusions about contamination in an area when enough are collected, which several experts felt we had achieved. Some said our sampling would likely underestimate contamination on a property.  Other experts said our testing method would not accurately depict lead levels across a particular yard because of how variable the contamination can be. At the same time, experts also told us the EPA’s method of gathering multiple composite samples can still miss hot spots or underestimate contamination.  What We Found Over the past two years, we used the EPA’s sampling protocol as guidance to collect soil from 620 homes in and just outside of the Omaha Superfund site. (We’re continuing to collect samples from the nearby cities of Bellevue, Nebraska; Carter Lake, Iowa; and Council Bluffs, Iowa.) We matched each home at which we took a soil sample with Omaha’s lead registry, which includes details like the address’ remediation status and results of the EPA’s testing, and compared our test results with historic data. Some homes that had previously undergone the EPA’s remediation process had high levels of lead contamination, our analysis found.   We tested 150 previously remediated yards. One in 10 of those yards’ results came back with a concentration greater than 400 parts per million, the level the EPA used to decide which yards to clean up. Nearly all of the previously remediated yards that tested above 400 parts per million are within 100 yards of another property that originally tested above the EPA cleanup threshold but was never remediated. A third had two such neighboring properties. That proximity could mean that the previously cleaned-up yards we tested were recontaminated by properties where the soil was never replaced, one expert said. Many of the 241 homes we tested within the Superfund site that had never been remediated also showed high levels of lead. Of those homes, 1 in 20 had a concentration higher than 400 parts per million, according to our test results. Across Omaha, 41% of the 620 yards we tested had more than 100 parts per million in their soil sample, a level that an EPA model shows could cause high blood-lead levels in children. Within the Superfund site, more than half of the almost 390 yards we tested had more than 100 parts per million.  Our testing shows that lead contamination at levels that pose a risk to residents’ health is fairly widespread — even in sites that the EPA previously addressed. Throughout our reporting, we spoke to nine experts in environmental and lead contamination to make sense of our findings. Several said the EPA should do more testing and possibly cleanup in Omaha. We asked the EPA about our findings. The agency said it will work with the city of Omaha to “investigate the outcomes you have noted” and work with the city and property owners to take corrective action if needed in accordance with 2009 cleanup guidelines. The post The EPA Doesn’t Typically Retest Homes in the Country’s Largest Residential Lead Superfund Site. So We Did. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Climate and Environment]

— The EPA Spent Millions Cleaning Up a Massive Superfund Site. Our Tests Found Toxic Levels of Lead in Many Yards.

 

at 8/4/26 3:00am

From left, Brenda González Rocha holds her 8-month-old, Isaías, as González’s daughters Carolina, 6, and Camila, 8, play on the trampoline in their backyard in June. González’s front yard tested high for lead, and she is concerned how the contamination could “affect their quality of life.” Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica Shortly after buying her house in 2022, Mary Royers learned from a man across the street that her Omaha, Nebraska, neighborhood was contaminated with lead. But her yard, like thousands of others, had been cleaned up, the neighbor said. Royers wanted to be sure. So the 36-year-old educator checked a website where the city tracks the soil test results of every home in a 27-square-mile area surrounding the site of an old lead smelter. She saw “remediated” written in bright green letters. The federal government had completed the work two decades ago. An expert must have tested the dirt and determined the problem was solved, she thought. Relieved, Royers set about sowing the garden of her dreams. Hours disappeared as she thrust her hands into the soil, tearing up the grass and planting purple coneflower for bees to harvest and prairie grass to sway in the breeze. “You have the green light from the city. That means everything’s safe,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Thank God I don’t have to worry about that.’” But a soil test conducted last fall by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found otherwise: Royers’ yard still has more than 1.5 times the level of lead that the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup was supposed to have eliminated. Reading the emailed results, she felt “gut-wrenching disbelief,” she said. “All I could think about was the dirt under my nails and all over my face,” said Royers, who has largely given up gardening for now. She explained later, “It felt like a betrayal of that trust.” Since 1999, the EPA has spent $273 million digging up and backfilling nearly 14,000 yards across east Omaha to address contamination left from the smelter and other factories downtown. It’s the largest residential lead cleanup in the country. And the agency’s Superfund program has repeatedly heralded it as a success. But, it turns out, Omaha’s soil might not be as safe as officials have advertised. The news organizations tested soil from more than 600 properties, including 150 that the EPA said had been cleaned up. In those tests, 1 in 10 yards marked as remediated still had enough lead to qualify for cleanup under the original guidelines. And nearly a quarter of the properties we tested in east Omaha could qualify for further study under new guidance released by the Trump administration last fall. How We Tested Omaha’s Soil The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica used the EPA’s protocol as guidance for taking samples and used an EPA-accredited lab. But our testing method differed from the EPA’s approach in that we typically took one sample per yard, while the EPA collected multiple samples and averaged them. The EPA said our approach may underestimate or overestimate the average contamination. Experts said it is likely to underestimate contamination. Learn more. The results suggest the EPA has more work to do, said Howard Mielke, a longtime researcher of lead-contaminated soil who’s considered one of the field’s foremost experts. Not only should the agency clean up the areas that tested above the remediation level, he said, but it also should test other homes. “If you find a couple of high results, chances are many high results will be nearby,” said Mielke, an adjunct professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine. Some experts and environmental advocates said our findings reflect weaknesses in the EPA’s approach to cleaning up residential lead sites, which can leave a lot of lead behind. Jeff Tittel, former director of the Sierra Club in New Jersey, the state with the most Superfund sites, said he repeatedly watched the EPA declare its work done after wrongly assuming everything had been cleaned up. “On paper, everything’s wonderful,” he said, “but at the sites, there’s still chaos.” Mary Royers washes her hands in her kitchen after being outside in her garden. She has largely stopped gardening after a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica soil test found high levels of lead contamination. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica The EPA declined an interview request with senior officials overseeing the Omaha cleanup. In an emailed response, spokesperson Kellen Ashford said the EPA is committed to cleaning up contaminated sites to protect residents and the environment. “The diligent cleanup efforts have led to a dramatic decrease in elevated blood lead levels” in Omaha, he said. (While the percentage of kids testing high for lead has dropped significantly, as it has nationally, kids in the Omaha site still test high for lead at rates above the national average.) Ashford said the EPA could not assess the news organizations’ results without further investigation, but property owners can reach out to the EPA or the city of Omaha, which now manages the site for the federal government, if they have concerns. How to Contact the EPA and the City of Omaha If you live in or near the Omaha Lead Superfund Site and have concerns about the lead in your yard, contact the city’s lead office by email or phone (402-731-3045) and/or EPA site manager Peyton Witham by email or phone (816-947-0470). “Because it would not be possible to completely remove all lead,” Ashford said, the EPA and the city also try to educate the community about lead risks and precautions. The city is already responding to the news organization’s findings. The day after receiving her results, Royers forwarded them to the city’s lead office, asking if anything could be done. An employee tested her dirt and found even higher levels than the news organizations did. The city plans to clean the yard up again in August, Royers said. But the EPA and the city have refused to clean up or test properties of others who have reached out about their high lead results. The agency has also not said what it plans to do about properties that are below the current cleanup level but above President Donald Trump’s new screening level, which could prompt further action. Any update would come after a new site study the agency plans to release in October 2027, Ashford said. Royers and her partner, Stephen Matthews, are thankful for the new cleanup, but they wonder: How many other Omahans may be misled or unaware about lead contamination in their yards? “We’re one house out of thousands,” Matthews said. Stephen Matthews, Royers’ partner, in their wildflower garden. Though the soil outside their home was remediated years ago, a recent test by Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica indicated a high level of lead. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica What Might Have Gone Wrong It’s difficult to identify why some cleaned-up properties still test high for lead. That’s in part because Omaha’s lead problem is almost as old as the city itself. The American Smelting and Refining Company produced lead to make batteries, cover cables and enrich gasoline for more than a century. After the smelter closed in 1997, the EPA estimated the plant and other factories had dumped 200,000 tons of lead dust — enough to fill at least 1,600 rail cars — across Omaha’s east side. At the time, the Superfund program, which had started only a decade before, was still trying to figure out how to clean up residential sites like Omaha’s, then home to 125,000 people. Old factory sites could be bulldozed and excavated, the contaminated material carted away. But the Omaha site involved people’s homes and yards. The agency tested nearly every yard in east Omaha and came up with a plan: It would dig up and replace parts of yards that had a concentration of more than 400 parts per million of lead — the equivalent of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt. But that meant that some properties were cleaned up while neighboring ones that had only slightly lower levels of lead were not. Hewing to that kind of strict standard doesn’t make sense, said Gabriel Filippelli, an Indiana University earth sciences professor and longtime lead researcher. “From a scientific standpoint, a 390 is the same as a 410,” Filippelli said. “It’s the same as a 400. They’re all about the same value.” Failing to clean up neighboring properties can also lead to recontamination over time. When it’s windy and the ground is dry, tiny lead particles in the dirt — generally about one-hundredth the width of a human hair — become airborne and spread, Filippelli said. When the Superfund program started, the agency cleaned an entire yard if its average lead level among multiple samples was over the limit. But by the time the Omaha cleanup started, the method had changed. In Omaha, it divided yards into five sections: two in the backyard, two in the front yard and a thin ring around the home’s perimeter called the dripline, which often contains the most contaminated dirt but can also contain remnants of lead paint. The agency took multiple samples per section of yard and replaced a section’s soil only if the average was over 400 parts per million. This approach could lead them to miss hot spots or leave behind areas that have high lead levels but are just under the cleanup threshold. Contractors also did not dig up the driplines if another part of the yard wasn’t over the limit. This could explain why the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica’s testing found that about 1 in 20 homes that didn’t qualify for cleanup originally now tested above the cleanup threshold. In addition, the news outlets found several properties outside the Superfund site that were over the limit. Royers saves seeds from flowers in her garden before the soil is scraped away for remediation. Royers considered gardening to be something healing, so she was frustrated to learn it might actually have been harmful. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica In the early days of the cleanup, Don Preister, a longtime Omaha lead advocate and former state senator, argued for the EPA to clean up entire yards and to lower the level of lead that would qualify for remediation, calling the agency’s solution a half-measure. But the EPA decided that its approach made the most of limited money and prioritized the highest-risk areas. One EPA manager told Omahans in 2004 that the choice to remove only sections of yards was “economical,” according to meeting records. “It brought out feelings of hurt,” Preister said of the EPA’s choice. “Children are likely to still be impacted, and their health affected.” The EPA’s national guidelines did advise against “‘patchwork clean-up’ patterns which are prone to recontamination” when adjacent sections are high. But the agency didn’t give clear guidance on how to implement that, several former site managers said, and some felt they had to follow the rules strictly or risk violating federal law or agreements with companies paying to clean up their pollution. Ashford acknowledged that the agency has to adhere strictly to its cleanup plans but said in some cases, like an industrial site near a residential area, the EPA may clean up to a lower level to prevent recontamination. Another problem was that east Omaha was full of older homes that contained lead paint that could recontaminate cleaned soil over time. Following local pressure, the EPA agreed to test homes’ paint. If it contained lead, the agency repainted the outside. But the EPA did not repaint houses whose soil did not also qualify for cleanup. Studies in urban areas have found homes with deteriorating paint have contaminated nearby gardens. Ashford said an EPA study found most lead-based paint contamination in Omaha was within 6 feet of the house. Brenda González Rocha, who has lived in her south Omaha home since 2020, thinks both soil and paint are to blame for the lead that doctors found in her 4-year-old daughter’s blood. Her basement had lead paint, which she hired a company to fix. But although the EPA cleaned up her yard in 2012, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tests found levels of lead that are higher than before the agency remediated it. González is surrounded by properties with lingering lead. A yard down the street that had high lead levels was never remediated. The banks of the nearby highway were never dug up and replaced. The house next door has lead paint on it, according to the city lead website. Ashford said it’s unlikely that wind-blown dust from one house to another would recontaminate cleaned areas with enough lead to surpass the cleanup level. But nearly all the remediated properties the newsrooms tested that were over the cleanup threshold are within 100 yards of a property that originally qualified for remediation but wasn’t cleaned up. A third had two such neighboring properties. González’s eight kids, between 8 months and 22 years old, love to play outside. They jump on the trampoline, ride bikes and play soccer. Now González is anxious whenever they’re in the yard. “I worry that this could affect their quality of life,” she said. “I would feel bad if something happened to them during their development. I would feel responsible.” González and her daughter Camila help feed soup to Isaías at home. González’s front yard tested high for lead, and she is worried about letting her children play outside. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica “Benign Neglect” Once the EPA chooses a fix for a Superfund site, it is generally required to review the site every five years to update the public on the progress of the cleanup. But the ways those reviews are done leave unanswered questions about whether the solution is working and how much lead is in Omaha today, said experts who examined the reports for the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. In their reviews, government officials in Omaha track how intact the grass is on top of the new soil. If it is exposed or has been disturbed, it could be a sign that any remaining lead is no longer safely underground and could blow around. But they don’t retest a representative sample of properties. Do You Live in Council Bluffs or Carter Lake, Iowa? Sign Up for Free Lead Testing of Your Soil. An Omaha lead smelter spread dust that seeped into the soil and bodies of many residents. The EPA spent decades cleaning up the surrounding area — but not Council Bluffs, Carter Lake or Bellevue. Sign Up for a Free Soil Test Cleanups often take several tries to get right, said Tittel, the former New Jersey Sierra Club director, and recontamination or missed contamination can be a huge problem. Tittel said he has seen similar patterns in New Jersey. In 1979, Tittel helped show EPA employees where the Ford Motor Company dumped industrial waste into abandoned mine pits. Since then, he has seen the mess declared a Superfund site, marked safe, become a Superfund site again and spawn a lawsuit that Ford settled in 2009 as locals continued discovering more hazards. “It’s sort of a benign neglect when it comes to these sites,” Tittel said. “Government just wants to get it over with because it’s taking so long. They end up cutting corners or looking the other way.” A Ford spokesperson said the company takes its environmental responsibility seriously and has been working with state and federal officials to clean up the site. Retesting soil does not appear to be standard at other sites, according to reviews examined by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. But it should be, said Debbie Chizewer, a managing attorney with the environmental law group Earthjustice. Without ongoing testing, the EPA can’t really know if its solution is working, she said, and residents won’t know how toxins in the environment are impacting their health. “I think for the five-year review to be meaningful, you need to do testing,” she said. Ashford said the EPA retests properties on a case-by-case basis, such as when construction disturbs the soil. The periodic reviews, which in Omaha have led to an ongoing reevaluation of the site’s cleanup level, allow the EPA to ensure these unique, complex sites protect people and the environment over time, he said. Steve Zivny, who leads Omaha’s Lead Information Office, also said new testing and cleanup decisions depend on factors such as whether kids live at the home and whether they have tested for a high lead exposure. Camila, Carolina and Isaías play together at home. Their mother keeps indoor toys inside and outdoor toys outside to avoid lead contamination inside the house. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica The EPA’s reviews of the Omaha site do point to some potential problems. In 2024, inspectors found 98% of the lawns had been disturbed, indicating a risk that buried lead could be exposed. That includes having weeds, bare soil or demolished buildings. But the EPA tested only 32 sites where homes had been demolished and found six exceeded the cleanup level. To them, that indicated the solution was “generally protective; however, more data should be collected to support this conclusion,” according to the report. Those figures, however, trouble Ian von Lindern, who oversaw lead cleanup at an Idaho Superfund site for more than 30 years. He doesn’t doubt the federal government did a good job hauling away tons of toxins in Omaha. But he’s sure they couldn’t get all of it. At the Idaho site, the EPA requires people to request permits from a local health district before digging in their yards. Local health employees can also test residents’ dirt, and, if it’s above the cleanup level, it may qualify for further remediation. Without someone keeping a close eye on the fixes, recontamination can occur as people dig up lead-contaminated soil or unremediated soil is allowed to blow around. “Those remedies are, I don’t want to use the word failing, but they’re becoming less effective,” he said. Royers worries many homes in Omaha fit that description. This summer, the educator is letting the weeds grow freely in her garden. Pretty soon, the city is going to replace it anyway. The thought makes her feel guilty. More people should know about potential lead in their yard and have access to tests and cleanups. But that would require acknowledging that after decades and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, there are cracks in the cleanup. Royers isn’t sure that will happen. “The priority is pretending like things are OK,” she said. “Clearly it’s not.” Royers walks to her garage. She and Matthews wonder how many other Omahans may be misled or unaware about lead contamination in their yards. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica The post The EPA Spent Millions Cleaning Up a Massive Superfund Site. Our Tests Found Toxic Levels of Lead in Many Yards. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Climate and Environment]

— The EPA Heralds Its Omaha Cleanup as a Success. But We Found Many Yards Still Have Toxic Levels of Lead.

 

at 8/4/26 3:00am

From left, Brenda González Rocha holds her 8-month-old, Isaías, as González’s daughters Carolina, 6, and Camila, 8, play on the trampoline in their backyard in June. González’s front yard tested high for lead, and she is concerned how the contamination could “affect their quality of life.” Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica Shortly after buying her house in 2022, Mary Royers learned from a man across the street that her Omaha, Nebraska, neighborhood was contaminated with lead. But her yard, like thousands of others, had been cleaned up, the neighbor said. Royers wanted to be sure. So the 36-year-old educator checked a website where the city tracks the soil test results of every home in a 27-square-mile area surrounding the site of an old lead smelter. She saw “remediated” written in bright green letters. The federal government had completed the work two decades ago. An expert must have tested the dirt and determined the problem was solved, she thought. Relieved, Royers set about sowing the garden of her dreams. Hours disappeared as she thrust her hands into the soil, tearing up the grass and planting purple coneflower for bees to harvest and prairie grass to sway in the breeze. “You have the green light from the city. That means everything’s safe,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘Thank God I don’t have to worry about that.’” But a soil test conducted last fall by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica found otherwise: Royers’ yard still has more than 1.5 times the level of lead that the Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup was supposed to have eliminated. Reading the emailed results, she felt “gut-wrenching disbelief,” she said. “All I could think about was the dirt under my nails and all over my face,” said Royers, who has largely given up gardening for now. She explained later, “It felt like a betrayal of that trust.” Since 1999, the EPA has spent $273 million digging up and backfilling nearly 14,000 yards across east Omaha to address contamination left from the smelter and other factories downtown. It’s the largest residential lead cleanup in the country. And the agency’s Superfund program has repeatedly heralded it as a success. But, it turns out, Omaha’s soil might not be as safe as officials have advertised. The news organizations tested soil from more than 600 properties, including 150 that the EPA said had been cleaned up. In those tests, 1 in 10 yards marked as remediated still had enough lead to qualify for cleanup under the original guidelines. And nearly a quarter of the properties we tested in east Omaha could qualify for further study under new guidance released by the Trump administration last fall. How We Tested Omaha’s Soil The Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica used the EPA’s protocol as guidance for taking samples and used an EPA-accredited lab. But our testing method differed from the EPA’s approach in that we typically took one sample per yard, while the EPA collected multiple samples and averaged them. The EPA said our approach may underestimate or overestimate the average contamination. Experts said it is likely to underestimate contamination. Learn more. The results suggest the EPA has more work to do, said Howard Mielke, a longtime researcher of lead-contaminated soil who’s considered one of the field’s foremost experts. Not only should the agency clean up the areas that tested above the remediation level, he said, but it also should test other homes. “If you find a couple of high results, chances are many high results will be nearby,” said Mielke, an adjunct professor at the Tulane University School of Medicine. Some experts and environmental advocates said our findings reflect weaknesses in the EPA’s approach to cleaning up residential lead sites, which can leave a lot of lead behind. Jeff Tittel, former director of the Sierra Club in New Jersey, the state with the most Superfund sites, said he repeatedly watched the EPA declare its work done after wrongly assuming everything had been cleaned up. “On paper, everything’s wonderful,” he said, “but at the sites, there’s still chaos.” Mary Royers washes her hands in her kitchen after being outside in her garden. She has largely stopped gardening after a Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica soil test found high levels of lead contamination. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica The EPA declined an interview request with senior officials overseeing the Omaha cleanup. In an emailed response, spokesperson Kellen Ashford said the EPA is committed to cleaning up contaminated sites to protect residents and the environment. “The diligent cleanup efforts have led to a dramatic decrease in elevated blood lead levels” in Omaha, he said. (While the percentage of kids testing high for lead has dropped significantly, as it has nationally, kids in the Omaha site still test high for lead at rates above the national average.) Ashford said the EPA could not assess the news organizations’ results without further investigation, but property owners can reach out to the EPA or the city of Omaha, which now manages the site for the federal government, if they have concerns. How to Contact the EPA and the City of Omaha If you live in or near the Omaha Lead Superfund Site and have concerns about the lead in your yard, contact the city’s lead office by email or phone (402-731-3045) and/or EPA site manager Peyton Witham by email or phone (816-947-0470). “Because it would not be possible to completely remove all lead,” Ashford said, the EPA and the city also try to educate the community about lead risks and precautions. The city is already responding to the news organization’s findings. The day after receiving her results, Royers forwarded them to the city’s lead office, asking if anything could be done. An employee tested her dirt and found even higher levels than the news organizations did. The city plans to clean the yard up again in August, Royers said. But the EPA and the city have refused to clean up or test properties of others who have reached out about their high lead results. The agency has also not said what it plans to do about properties that are below the current cleanup level but above President Donald Trump’s new screening level, which could prompt further action. Any update would come after a new site study the agency plans to release in October 2027, Ashford said. Royers and her partner, Stephen Matthews, are thankful for the new cleanup, but they wonder: How many other Omahans may be misled or unaware about lead contamination in their yards? “We’re one house out of thousands,” Matthews said. Stephen Matthews, Royers’ partner, in their wildflower garden. Though the soil outside their home was remediated years ago, a recent test by Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica indicated a high level of lead. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica What Might Have Gone Wrong It’s difficult to identify why some cleaned-up properties still test high for lead. That’s in part because Omaha’s lead problem is almost as old as the city itself. The American Smelting and Refining Company produced lead to make batteries, cover cables and enrich gasoline for more than a century. After the smelter closed in 1997, the EPA estimated the plant and other factories had dumped 200,000 tons of lead dust — enough to fill at least 1,600 rail cars — across Omaha’s east side. At the time, the Superfund program, which had started only a decade before, was still trying to figure out how to clean up residential sites like Omaha’s, then home to 125,000 people. Old factory sites could be bulldozed and excavated, the contaminated material carted away. But the Omaha site involved people’s homes and yards. The agency tested nearly every yard in east Omaha and came up with a plan: It would dig up and replace parts of yards that had a concentration of more than 400 parts per million of lead — the equivalent of a marble in a 10-pound bucket of dirt. But that meant that some properties were cleaned up while neighboring ones that had only slightly lower levels of lead were not. Hewing to that kind of strict standard doesn’t make sense, said Gabriel Filippelli, an Indiana University earth sciences professor and longtime lead researcher. “From a scientific standpoint, a 390 is the same as a 410,” Filippelli said. “It’s the same as a 400. They’re all about the same value.” Failing to clean up neighboring properties can also lead to recontamination over time. When it’s windy and the ground is dry, tiny lead particles in the dirt — generally about one-hundredth the width of a human hair — become airborne and spread, Filippelli said. When the Superfund program started, the agency cleaned an entire yard if its average lead level among multiple samples was over the limit. But by the time the Omaha cleanup started, the method had changed. In Omaha, it divided yards into five sections: two in the backyard, two in the front yard and a thin ring around the home’s perimeter called the dripline, which often contains the most contaminated dirt but can also contain remnants of lead paint. The agency took multiple samples per section of yard and replaced a section’s soil only if the average was over 400 parts per million. This approach could lead them to miss hot spots or leave behind areas that have high lead levels but are just under the cleanup threshold. Contractors also did not dig up the driplines if another part of the yard wasn’t over the limit. This could explain why the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica’s testing found that about 1 in 20 homes that didn’t qualify for cleanup originally now tested above the cleanup threshold. In addition, the news outlets found several properties outside the Superfund site that were over the limit. Royers saves seeds from flowers in her garden before the soil is scraped away for remediation. Royers considered gardening to be something healing, so she was frustrated to learn it might actually have been harmful. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica In the early days of the cleanup, Don Preister, a longtime Omaha lead advocate and former state senator, argued for the EPA to clean up entire yards and to lower the level of lead that would qualify for remediation, calling the agency’s solution a half-measure. But the EPA decided that its approach made the most of limited money and prioritized the highest-risk areas. One EPA manager told Omahans in 2004 that the choice to remove only sections of yards was “economical,” according to meeting records. “It brought out feelings of hurt,” Preister said of the EPA’s choice. “Children are likely to still be impacted, and their health affected.” The EPA’s national guidelines did advise against “‘patchwork clean-up’ patterns which are prone to recontamination” when adjacent sections are high. But the agency didn’t give clear guidance on how to implement that, several former site managers said, and some felt they had to follow the rules strictly or risk violating federal law or agreements with companies paying to clean up their pollution. Ashford acknowledged that the agency has to adhere strictly to its cleanup plans but said in some cases, like an industrial site near a residential area, the EPA may clean up to a lower level to prevent recontamination. Another problem was that east Omaha was full of older homes that contained lead paint that could recontaminate cleaned soil over time. Following local pressure, the EPA agreed to test homes’ paint. If it contained lead, the agency repainted the outside. But the EPA did not repaint houses whose soil did not also qualify for cleanup. Studies in urban areas have found homes with deteriorating paint have contaminated nearby gardens. Ashford said an EPA study found most lead-based paint contamination in Omaha was within 6 feet of the house. Brenda González Rocha, who has lived in her south Omaha home since 2020, thinks both soil and paint are to blame for the lead that doctors found in her 4-year-old daughter’s blood. Her basement had lead paint, which she hired a company to fix. But although the EPA cleaned up her yard in 2012, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tests found levels of lead that are higher than before the agency remediated it. González is surrounded by properties with lingering lead. A yard down the street that had high lead levels was never remediated. The banks of the nearby highway were never dug up and replaced. The house next door has lead paint on it, according to the city lead website. Ashford said it’s unlikely that wind-blown dust from one house to another would recontaminate cleaned areas with enough lead to surpass the cleanup level. But nearly all the remediated properties the newsrooms tested that were over the cleanup threshold are within 100 yards of a property that originally qualified for remediation but wasn’t cleaned up. A third had two such neighboring properties. González’s eight kids, between 8 months and 22 years old, love to play outside. They jump on the trampoline, ride bikes and play soccer. Now González is anxious whenever they’re in the yard. “I worry that this could affect their quality of life,” she said. “I would feel bad if something happened to them during their development. I would feel responsible.” González and her daughter Camila help feed soup to Isaías at home. González’s front yard tested high for lead, and she is worried about letting her children play outside. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica “Benign Neglect” Once the EPA chooses a fix for a Superfund site, it is generally required to review the site every five years to update the public on the progress of the cleanup. But the ways those reviews are done leave unanswered questions about whether the solution is working and how much lead is in Omaha today, said experts who examined the reports for the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. In their reviews, government officials in Omaha track how intact the grass is on top of the new soil. If it is exposed or has been disturbed, it could be a sign that any remaining lead is no longer safely underground and could blow around. But they don’t retest a representative sample of properties. Do You Live in Council Bluffs or Carter Lake, Iowa? Sign Up for Free Lead Testing of Your Soil. An Omaha lead smelter spread dust that seeped into the soil and bodies of many residents. The EPA spent decades cleaning up the surrounding area — but not Council Bluffs, Carter Lake or Bellevue. Sign Up for a Free Soil Test Cleanups often take several tries to get right, said Tittel, the former New Jersey Sierra Club director, and recontamination or missed contamination can be a huge problem. Tittel said he has seen similar patterns in New Jersey. In 1979, Tittel helped show EPA employees where the Ford Motor Company dumped industrial waste into abandoned mine pits. Since then, he has seen the mess declared a Superfund site, marked safe, become a Superfund site again and spawn a lawsuit that Ford settled in 2009 as locals continued discovering more hazards. “It’s sort of a benign neglect when it comes to these sites,” Tittel said. “Government just wants to get it over with because it’s taking so long. They end up cutting corners or looking the other way.” A Ford spokesperson said the company takes its environmental responsibility seriously and has been working with state and federal officials to clean up the site. Retesting soil does not appear to be standard at other sites, according to reviews examined by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. But it should be, said Debbie Chizewer, a managing attorney with the environmental law group Earthjustice. Without ongoing testing, the EPA can’t really know if its solution is working, she said, and residents won’t know how toxins in the environment are impacting their health. “I think for the five-year review to be meaningful, you need to do testing,” she said. Ashford said the EPA retests properties on a case-by-case basis, such as when construction disturbs the soil. The periodic reviews, which in Omaha have led to an ongoing reevaluation of the site’s cleanup level, allow the EPA to ensure these unique, complex sites protect people and the environment over time, he said. Steve Zivny, who leads Omaha’s Lead Information Office, also said new testing and cleanup decisions depend on factors such as whether kids live at the home and whether they have tested for a high lead exposure. Camila, Carolina and Isaías play together at home. Their mother keeps indoor toys inside and outdoor toys outside to avoid lead contamination inside the house. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica The EPA’s reviews of the Omaha site do point to some potential problems. In 2024, inspectors found 98% of the lawns had been disturbed, indicating a risk that buried lead could be exposed. That includes having weeds, bare soil or demolished buildings. But the EPA tested only 32 sites where homes had been demolished and found six exceeded the cleanup level. To them, that indicated the solution was “generally protective; however, more data should be collected to support this conclusion,” according to the report. Those figures, however, trouble Ian von Lindern, who oversaw lead cleanup at an Idaho Superfund site for more than 30 years. He doesn’t doubt the federal government did a good job hauling away tons of toxins in Omaha. But he’s sure they couldn’t get all of it. At the Idaho site, the EPA requires people to request permits from a local health district before digging in their yards. Local health employees can also test residents’ dirt, and, if it’s above the cleanup level, it may qualify for further remediation. Without someone keeping a close eye on the fixes, recontamination can occur as people dig up lead-contaminated soil or unremediated soil is allowed to blow around. “Those remedies are, I don’t want to use the word failing, but they’re becoming less effective,” he said. Royers worries many homes in Omaha fit that description. This summer, the educator is letting the weeds grow freely in her garden. Pretty soon, the city is going to replace it anyway. The thought makes her feel guilty. More people should know about potential lead in their yard and have access to tests and cleanups. But that would require acknowledging that after decades and hundreds of millions of dollars spent, there are cracks in the cleanup. Royers isn’t sure that will happen. “The priority is pretending like things are OK,” she said. “Clearly it’s not.” Royers walks to her garage. She and Matthews wonder how many other Omahans may be misled or unaware about lead contamination in their yards. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica The post The EPA Heralds Its Omaha Cleanup as a Success. But We Found Many Yards Still Have Toxic Levels of Lead. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Climate and Environment]

— FCC Commissioners Face Ethics Complaints for Taking Luxury Gifts From Paramount

 

at 8/3/26 4:00am

Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr, rear, attends a hearing with commissioners Anna Gomez, right, and Olivia Trusty. Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg/Getty Images Two government watchdog groups have demanded investigations into whether Federal Communications Commission members violated ethics requirements by accepting luxury gala tickets from Paramount as the company sought government approval for its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. The complaints filed by Democracy Defenders Fund and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington cite a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how CBS or its parent company, now Paramount, have for years given FCC commissioners tickets to the Kennedy Center honors gala, which the television network sponsors. The commissioners accepted the gifts even as the FCC was reviewing or about to review major Paramount business decisions, including two megamergers. Commissioner Olivia Trusty’s most recent financial disclosure said Paramount gave her two tickets to the December 2025 honors gala that together were worth more than $12,000. Trusty was one of two commissioners who voted last year to approve Paramount’s merger with another media company, Skydance. ProPublica’s investigation found FCC members had long enjoyed a night out at the Kennedy Center courtesy of CBS or its parent company. Seven of the 10 commissioners who served since 2016 accepted tickets worth more than $260,000, according to a ProPublica analysis of ethics disclosures. FCC Chair Brendan Carr’s financial statements show he has reported accepting honors gala tickets from CBS or its parent company eight times since his 2017 appointment to the commission, totaling over $75,000 in gifts. Carr, who also voted in favor of the Paramount-Skydance merger last year, sat with his wife in a private skybox at the December gala with Paramount CEO David Ellison and other executives from Paramount and CBS. Such seats sold for $125,000 a ticket, according to Kennedy Center guidelines. Carr disclosed on his latest financial statement that he accepted tickets from Paramount for himself and a guest to the 2025 gala and reception worth $12,390. Carr did not respond to a request from ProPublica to clarify the apparent difference in value between those tickets and the skybox seats.  The FCC only released Carr’s disclosure late on Friday, more than a month after ProPublica had first requested it. The document says the agency certified it on June 22.  Federal ethics rules ban employees from taking gifts from any entity that does business with, is regulated by or seeks official action from their agency. “The federal gift regulations and the gratuities statute exist to ensure that government decisions are made on the merits, free from the influence of private benefits,” the Democracy Defenders Fund said in its complaint. “The public must have confidence that the FCCs merger review process is not compromised by self-dealing or the appearance of impropriety.” Carr, Trusty and the FCC did not respond to requests for comment. The agency’s inspector general declined to comment. An FCC spokesperson previously told ProPublica that agency ethics officers have for years cleared commissioners to accept the tickets, finding it consistent with ethics law. And Paramount’s chief of communications said it was a decades-long “CBS practice to invite government officials from both parties” to the Kennedy Center show. Carr last year defended the FCCs approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.” Read More FCC Officials Took Pricey Gifts From Paramount as the Company Needed Approval for Billion-Dollar Deals The FCC’s review of the Paramount-Warner Bros. merger is one of the final federal hurdles facing a historic consolidation of two of the five largest film studios in Hollywood. The deal would unite Paramount Skydance with Warner Bros., bringing under the control of one company Paramount+ and HBO Max streaming services; CBS and CNN; and scores of other major broadcast channels, cable networks and digital platforms. Four ethics experts told ProPublica that by accepting the tickets, Trusty and Carr had compromised the FCC’s impartiality and should not take part in any upcoming decision on Paramount’s proposed merger. The Democracy Defenders Fund — led by Norman Eisen, former ambassador to the Czech Republic and White House ethics czar under President Barack Obama — filed its grievance on Thursday with the federal Office of Government Ethics, the FCC’s inspector general and the FCC’s ethics office. The group said the investigation should examine whether Carr and Trusty broke rules on accepting gifts or broke criminal laws prohibiting federal officials from accepting illegal gratuities. Carr and Trusty should be required to repay Paramount the “fair market value” of any improper gifts and the federal ethics agency should refrain from certifying Carr’s annual disclosure report until he can prove that he has complied with ethics laws, Democracy Defenders Fund wrote. Its letter to the FCC and the Office of Government Ethics also requests that Carr be disqualified from further participation in the commission’s decision on the Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The nonprofit organization noted that hours after last year’s honors gala ended, Paramount announced it was launching its hostile takeover bid of Warner Bros. Discovery, a move that would later result in a merger agreement that requires FCC approval. About three months later, Carr publicly endorsed the deal on CNBC, promising swift approval. “The facts that have been reported raise serious questions about the integrity and impartiality of FCC Chairman Carr in particular matters involving Paramount,” including the attempted merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, the letter said. Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, the other group that filed a written protest, requested an FCC inspector general probe of the luxury gifts. “The reported gifts to FCC officials from businesses that are not only subject to agency regulation but presently engaged in billion-dollar mergers and acquisitions that must be approved by the commissioners themselves are extremely concerning threats to the integrity of FCC operations,” the CREW letter stated. CREW, founded in 2003 as a nonpartisan organization dedicated to government accountability and ethics, is headed by Donald K. Sherman, a former House Ethics Committee attorney and special assistant to President Joseph Biden. Federal Communications Commission member Olivia Trusty. Jose Luis Magana/AP Images “Government officials have the power to make decisions that impact huge swaths of the American people,” Sherman said in a statement about the organization’s demand for an inspector general investigation. “With this tremendous power comes a higher ethical standard that apparently wasn’t met. The IG can and must get answers for the public.” The proposed merger between Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery has drawn a flurry of legal opposition. California, New York and 10 other states filed a lawsuit seeking to block the merger under federal and state antimonopoly laws. The Writers Guild of America, the Freedom of the Press Foundation and the Public Interest Project filed similar court challenges in recent weeks. Paramount has recently agreed to pause its merger until the litigation is resolved or until June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. The post FCC Commissioners Face Ethics Complaints for Taking Luxury Gifts From Paramount appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Regulation, Trump Administration]

— Solar Developer Cancels Washington State Project on Sacred Indigenous Land

 

at 8/3/26 3:00am

Members of the Wenatchi-P’squosa, one of the 12 Confederated Colville Tribes, and their supporters demonstrate in East Wenatchee, Washington, in 2024 against an Avangrid solar project on Badger Mountain. Emree Weaver A renewable energy developer has pulled its controversial permit application to build an industrial-scale solar facility on an Eastern Washington mountain sacred to Indigenous nations. Avangrid, a powerful player in the Northwest’s push for green energy development, sought for at least five years to build a solar plant on Badger Mountain. The project site straddled private as well as public lands. The Confederated Tribes of the Colville Reservation and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation have protected rights to practice cultural traditions, such as food gathering and ceremonies, on Badger Mountain and other ancestral public lands. A 2024 investigation by High Country News and ProPublica found that Avangrid and a consultant it retained, Tetra Tech, had omitted key archaeological and cultural information from a state-mandated review of the site, which would have been used for a solar farm. Avangrid continued pushing the project despite a state archaeologist’s warning that the planned development would threaten significant historic sites and current ceremonial activity. An elected member of the Colville Tribal Business Council told the newsrooms at the time that the project would destroy roughly half the root vegetable harvest in the area. An Avangrid spokesperson said then that the company had followed “all relevant law and regulation” with regard to the Badger Mountain solar project and had “taken additional steps to accommodate stakeholder feedback where possible.” It’s unclear whether the company’s decision to cancel the project had anything to do with Indigenous rights. Avangrid declined to clarify its reasoning to HCN. The Colville Tribes chair, Cindy Marchand, praised the decision in a statement last week. “While the Colville Tribes certainly appreciates the value of renewable energy such as solar power, sacred sites must remain pristine to pass down to future generations.” After the publication of HCN and ProPublica’s investigation, some members of the Wenatchi-P’squosa, one of the 12 Confederated Colville Tribes, held a demonstration on Badger Mountain, saying that while they support renewable energy, they’re against facilities being built on important cultural sites. Following the demonstration, Avangrid announced that it would pause development to reconsider tribal input and public response. The public comment process is one of the only avenues available for tribal nations to advocate for their rights regarding land development. At a meeting of the state’s permitting authority council in July, an Avangrid senior director sought a continued pause of the permitting work, pointing to anticipated construction delays affecting the power grid. At the same meeting, the council chair, Kurt Beckett, characterized concerns over the project’s environmental and cultural impacts as “noise,” but he also said tribal objections should be considered in the state’s permitting decision. Read More Washington State Is Leaving Tribal Cultural Resources at the Mercy of Solar Developers Five days later, Avangrid filed a request to completely withdraw its proposal. And last week, the permitting council formally announced the withdrawal and said it was “closing out existing financial arrangements and notifying interested and agency partners.” It did not provide further comment, referring questions to the developer. The state Department of Natural Resources, which owns the public parcel on Badger Mountain, said it had not received any other requests to develop it for clean energy projects at this time, and a spokesperson did not have additional information about future plans for the site. No matter the reason for the project’s cancellation at Badger Mountain, the outcome is a good one, said Steven Wynecoop, vice chair of the Wenatchi Advisory Group, an independent body that advises the Colville Tribal Business Council and that organized the 2024 Badger Mountain demonstration. The mountain is a “very sacred site to us,” said Wynecoop, grandson of the Wenatchi Advisory Group founder Matthew Dick. “Generations, we’ve been going to that mountain for plenty of reasons: medicines, foods like roots and berries.” The post Solar Developer Cancels Washington State Project on Sacred Indigenous Land appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Climate and Environment]

— For the Second Time, Lawmakers Failed to Fix California’s Warning System for Teacher Misconduct

 

at 7/31/26 5:00am

Anna Vignet/KQED A last-ditch legislative attempt to help California school districts keep problematic teachers out of the classroom has collapsed following opposition from unions and the state teacher licensing agency that a proposed searchable database would violate privacy and subject educators to unfair treatment.  The proposed database, introduced by a Democratic member of the State Assembly in June, would have allowed schools to see if applicants for public school teaching positions had been reported to the state after they were fired or resigned over claims of misconduct.  The California Federation of Teachers pushed back, warning that teachers could land in the database even if schools had not determined they committed serious misconduct.  “We would support legislation that targets substantiated reports of egregious misconduct,” said Tristan Brown, a lobbyist with the California Federation of Teachers. “We live in a state with Silicon Valley. The state should be able to support a system that is up to date and tracking substantiated reports of misconduct.”  Democratic Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi had proposed to make it easier for schools to screen teacher applicants after a KQED-ProPublica investigation published in May. The news outlets revealed how delays and inaction, combined with a lack of transparency, allowed educators to get new jobs after school districts reported them to the state teacher licensing agency for sexual harassment or other misconduct.   A similar effort by Republican lawmakers to address the issue also hit roadblocks earlier this year.  When the safety of a child does not meet a legislative priority, that’s a head-scratcher for me, said Republican Assemblymember Tom Lackey, who co-authored the first attempt to create the teacher database. “I think being sympathetic to the offender is on the wrong side of this issue.” Both bills were modeled on a law the Legislature passed in 2025 mandating the creation of a database by next summer that will allow employers to search the names of school support staff, such as bus drivers, custodians and teaching assistants, who are under investigation by their schools or have substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct.  The database for school support staff passed after months of tense negotiations. Under that system, employees’ names would be removed from the database if school investigations fail to substantiate claims of egregious misconduct. The bill passed despite opposition from unions, but the system that will be put in place is still being refined.  But that law explicitly does not apply to public school teachers.  The system currently in place for public school educators is a patchwork with a fair number of gaps. School districts have long been required to report to the state any teacher who is fired or who resigns due to misconduct. But the state’s teacher licensing agency, which collects all of those reports, is restricted by state law in what information the agency can share while it investigates. The state’s disciplinary process typically takes one year, and teachers could be hired during the investigation period without schools knowing about the claims against them. California’s publicly accessible online database of credentialed educators does indicate, with a red-flag icon, whether those public school teachers have been disciplined by the state. But it does not explain the reason for the sanction or provide a link to any documents. It is only after the state licensing agency recommends an educator be disciplined that prospective employers can request a summary of the case and the agency’s findings. Without such details, California school administrators must rely on teachers themselves or their previous employers to provide key information. A law passed in 2024 requires teacher candidates to share their complete job history in education and mandates that school districts ask every previous employer whether a candidate had been reported to the credentialing agency for credible or substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct. If so, previous schools must share the relevant information. But that law keeps bad actors out of schools only if teachers and schools keep — and provide — accurate records. For more than a year, California school administrators have lobbied lawmakers for a better way to protect students from those with a history of misconduct. “A database is needed to provide more complete, timely information so that schools can fulfill their responsibility to put trusted adults in positions that work with students,” said Dorothy Johnson, a lobbyist with the Association of California School Administrators, whose members include superintendents, principals and human resources officials.  Under the original bill authored by Muratsuchi and sponsored by the school administrators association, teachers would be added to a new database if their school districts have reported them to the state for misconduct. Before making job offers, schools would be required to check the database, accessible only to employers, for names of teachers with substantiated and credible complaints of egregious misconduct. Then, schools would be required to request records about misconduct from the districts that reported them. California Assemblymember Al Muratsuchi, a Democrat who introduced the teacher accountability bill, said his office was “confronted with a lot of resistance” over whether it would lead to unfair treatment of the accused. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Muratsuchi said his office was “immediately confronted with a lot of resistance,” with teachers unions raising concerns over fair treatment of the accused.  Brown, the lobbyist for the California Federation of Teachers, said the language in the measure was too broad. He said the union would not object to a database that identifies only teachers with substantiated complaints of egregious misconduct, but the bill also states that reports of “possible misconduct” would be included.  “Our opposition is really focused on making sure we’re looking at dangerous conduct that we can definitively say happened,” Brown said.Muratsuchi, who pulled language for his bill directly from the previous effort by Republican Assemblymember Kate Sanchez, said his intent was for the database to focus on egregious misconduct reports that were substantiated and credible. Had he had more time, he said, he would have clarified the language through the legislative process and addressed the unions’ concerns.  But he introduced the bill with just weeks left in the legislative session.  Seth Bramble, a lobbyist for the California Teachers Association, the state’s most powerful teachers union, wrote in a statement that the proposed database would lead to “employment consequences for innocent teachers based on allegations later determined to be unfounded.”  “CTA unequivocally supports protecting students, ensuring that credible misconduct information is shared with prospective school employers, and preventing individuals who commit egregious misconduct from moving from school to school,” Bramble wrote. The Trump administration singled out teachers unions as obstructions to legislative reforms to protect children when it announced a national crackdown in July on how school districts handle accusations of sexual misconduct by teachers. “Teachers’ unions’ demonstrated commitment to shield their members from disciplinary action for gross misconduct cannot trump basic moral and legal responsibilities to students and families,” Secretary of Education Linda McMahon wrote in the open letter to state school chiefs.  McMahon cited KQED and ProPublica’s finding that California’s teacher licensing agency has not revoked the professional credentials of at least 67 educators who school districts determined had sexually harassed students or committed other sexual misconduct. At least 14 of those educators were rehired by other schools. That included San Francisco Bay Area math teacher Jason Agan, who was hired by two schools despite having been fired after an independent panel determined he sexually harassed female students and massaged their shoulders after he’d been warned to stop. Agan was removed from the classroom the day after the story was published. He was replaced by a substitute for the remainder of the school year.  Agan has denied any sexual motivation in touching students and said during his dismissal hearing at his first school that he touched students only to offer them support. The Commission on Teacher Credentialing, California’s educator licensing agency, joined the unions in objecting to the bill to add teachers to the misconduct database. Jonathon Howard, the government relations manager for the credentialing agency, told Muratsuchi in a June 19 email obtained by KQED and ProPublica that complying with the proposed legislation would “require Commission staff to commit crimes.” Howard cited state laws restricting what information the teacher licensing agency is allowed to share.  Muratsuchi’s bill, Howard warned, would expose the agency to “significant liability.” “The Commission does not oppose the goal of ensuring that credentialed educators with substantiated histories of serious misconduct cannot move undetected between schools,” Howard wrote. “However, achieving that goal requires legislation that is legally sound, operationally workable, and fair to the educators whose livelihoods and professional reputations are at stake.”   Anita Fitzhugh, a spokesperson for the Commission on Teacher Credentialing, previously told KQED and ProPublica that the agency “stands ready to implement any additional public protections that the Legislature authorizes.”  Within weeks of introducing the bill and following opposition, Muratsuchi scrapped the idea of adding teachers reported to the state for egregious misconduct to the database and instead amended the bill to clarify that the teacher licensing agency may penalize administrators who don’t thoroughly vet applicants. The school administrators association withdrew its sponsorship. Muratsuchi, whose term expires in December, said he still supports more access to information about educators disciplined for serious misconduct. But with the legislative session ending Aug. 31, time is running out. “I tried,” Muratsuchi said. “I hope future Legislatures pick up the ball.” Help Us Report on Teacher Misconduct in California If you have experience with the state’s opaque teacher disciplinary process, KQED and ProPublica want to hear from you. Share Your Experience The post For the Second Time, Lawmakers Failed to Fix California’s Warning System for Teacher Misconduct appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Education]

— As Trump’s Tariff War With Canada Drags On, This Border Community Suffers Without a Voice

 

at 7/31/26 3:00am

A semitruck drives across the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge from Canada into the United States.    On the northeast edge of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, nearly 1,100 people gathered in late June for the International Bridge Walk across the long span that links two cities with the same name: Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, and Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. Both the sun and the sentiments were bright. “We don’t like to say there’s a border there, because we’re twin cities. We’re one family, the countries of Canada and the United States,” Don Gerrie, mayor of the Michigan Sault (pronounced “Soo”), told the crowd ahead of the annual walk. He sported a black ballcap that he said was given to him by his counterpart in the Ontario Sault. It featured flags from both nations with the words “Stronger Together” and “Allies and Friends.” Canadians in cheerful patriotic attire joined the bridge walk, with maple leaves tagging their scarves and socks, shirts and shorts. Americans came out in star-spangled T-shirts heralding the nation’s 250th birthday. But this lively tradition is clouded by an increasingly hostile relationship between the U.S. and Canada. Traffic over the bridge is way down. And, in recent weeks, President Donald Trump threatened new tariffs in retaliation for thick wildfire smoke wafting into the U.S. When his administration announced an additional 50% tariff on an array of Canadian products, the White House cited “Canada’s discriminatory treatment of American products.” Then, using a separate mechanism, it hit Canada with a further 10% in tariffs. Following pressure from the Trump administration that delayed it, a new publicly owned bridge, the Gordie Howe, opened Monday between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario. Canada hosted a Canada-only opening ceremony. Trump wasn’t present for the bridge’s ribbon-cutting, even though he used to cheer the project. Up at the Sault bridge, there was no sign of the region’s congressional representative at the celebration of international friendship, even though, during Trump’s first term, Rep. Jack Bergman, a Republican, hailed relations with Canada. In 2020, when Bergman was appointed to an interparliamentary group that provides a forum for exchange between Canadian and American legislators, he boasted of the Sault bridge as a point where “millions” cross every year “to conduct business, shop, work and enjoy what each country has to offer.” Yet Bergman, who is endorsed by Trump in an upcoming contested primary, has been virtually silent on the new tariffs and their blowback in local communities, even as he’s prodded to speak out by many of his constituents. The only references to Sault Ste. Marie in the news items on his website during Trump’s second term are a mention of an infrastructure project and a February 2025 letter to the president about a purported member of a Venezuelan gang crossing the border. As Canada responds to Trump’s moves with emergency interventions and “buy local” boosterism, significantly fewer Canadians are crossing the border for once-ordinary activities: shopping, eating, fueling vehicles, vacationing or visiting family and friends. The Sault area lost at least $82.9 million last year in local spending because of decreased crossings, according to an estimate from the International Bridge Administration, which manages the span: $62.7 million on the Michigan side and $20.2 million on the Ontario side. There were 270,000 fewer total crossings last year at the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge — nearly a 24% drop from 2024, exceeding similar declines at Michigan’s other border crossings. Based on the currency used to pay bridge fares and information from the Canadian prime minister’s office, the drop is largely due to the loss of Canadian travelers. Halfway into 2026, auto traffic has lingered at the same lower volume, according to the bridge director, while commercial traffic has fallen nearly 15% further.  Nationwide, the total number of Canadians returning from the United States last year dropped by more than 25%, according to data from the Canadian government. “What Canadians have done, of course, is they’re boycotting the U.S.,” said Michael Broadway, a geographer and professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University who has researched the travel trends (and joined the bridge walk). Ordinary people can only do so much about federal politics, he said, “but what they can do is they can vote with their feet.” These bridge and tunnel crossings connect Michigan and the Canadian province of Ontario. Cengiz Yar/ProPublica The Sault bridge spans the St. Mary’s River, just west of the historic Soo Locks that serve as a hinge between two of the largest Great Lakes, Lake Superior and Lake Huron. Soaring high above the water to clear the thousand-foot freighters, it’s a critical gateway for commerce. And it’s the only vehicular border crossing for hundreds of miles in either direction. The drop in traffic reversed a post-pandemic uptick, said Peter Petainen, bridge director and an Ontario Sault native. Just as the numbers were recovering, he told ProPublica, “the federal tariff dispute occurred and we’ve fallen off.” Others noted that the turn in how the U.S. approaches noncitizens may have also chilled travel. Stories of Canadians detained in the U.S. are recurring headlines up north. And the Canadian dollar also doesn’t go as far as it once did in the U.S. Altogether, it’s a problem for Michigan’s rural Upper Peninsula — and also for the publicly owned bridge, which depends on tolls for maintenance and operations. As the bridge authority put it in its five-year plan, issued in December: “Border challenges negatively affecting bridge traffic, trade and tourism may significantly reduce bridge revenue or increase expenditures beyond operational sustainability.” Participants make their way across the Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge during the 36th International Bridge Walk on June 27. The cross-border bridge walk is supposed to represent unity among the twin communities, which locals refer to as one family. Wilda Hopper, co-owner of Bird’s Eye Outfitters in the Michigan Sault, feels the change. She said that the drop-off in Canadian visitors was most noticeable in the off-season, when her gear shop and cafe relies on the local community — including those from the Ontario Sault — to carry it through the snowy months. Between fewer Canadian customers and rising costs, Hopper said, business is down about 27% compared with what it was last summer. “I can tell you that I’ve spoken to business after business up in the Sault Ste. Marie area, and in the eastern Upper Peninsula, and they’re all feeling the pressure from this,” said Michigan state Sen. John Damoose, a Republican who represents the community in Lansing. “Mackinac Island’s feeling the pressure, everybody is feeling the heat from this deterioration in our relationship with Canada.” It’s a bewildering fallout, he said. After a brutal ice storm last year, he remembered Canadians crossing the Sault bridge to help Michiganders repair the electrical grid. “This is our best friend in the entire world,” Damoose said. Only so much can be done about it from the statehouse, though, when it’s Republicans in Washington in the power position. Two of Michigan’s voices in Washington are the Democratic Sens. Gary Peters and Elissa Slotkin. They don’t flatly oppose tariffs, but they have challenged Trump’s approach, calling it, respectively, “chaotic” and “sloppy.” Slotkin has said that, constitutionally, only Congress can levy tariffs or raise taxes. Peters introduced bipartisan legislation that seeks more tariff transparency. Bergman, who has represented a district that encompasses the Upper Peninsula and an additional northern swath of the state’s “mitten” since 2017, once stressed the critical role Canada plays in Michigan’s economy. He vowed to work with the Canadian Parliament to “expand market access between both our nations” during Trump’s first term. And he championed the president’s new North American trade deal with Canada and Mexico, citing the benefits for Michigan’s farmers, small businesses and consumers. But Trump’s trade policies have made it hard on many Republicans who once touted free trade. Pete Hoekstra, the U.S. ambassador to Canada and a former Michigan congressman, pivoted dramatically on trade in the Trump era, as ProPublica reported. U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman of Michigan has been virtually silent during President Donald Trump’s second term about how tariffs are impacting his constituents. Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images Since Trump started his second term, there’s been no mention of tariffs in the press releases, articles and op-eds on Bergman’s website. Along with three of his colleagues in Congress, he criticized Canada’s handling of wildfires that sent thick smoke into Michigan in a recent letter to the prime minister. ProPublica reached out to Bergman, his office and his campaign multiple times for comment on what’s happening in his district and received no response. Besides Trump’s endorsement, his reelection is supported by the Michigan and U.S. chambers of commerce. He’s facing two challengers in the Republican primary on Aug. 4. Both of them told ProPublica that the district benefits from sustainable trading relationships. They also echoed what many of Bergman’s constituents told ProPublica: that residents have had scarce opportunities to connect with the congressman in person. Bergman doesn’t appear to have hosted a public town hall in the district since his first year in office. Bergman, who has a house in Louisiana, has faced long-standing allegations that he doesn’t even make Michigan his true home. Julie Hoffmeyer, a former member of Bergman’s staff who supports one of his primary challengers, told ProPublica that the congressman refers to his property in the western Upper Peninsula as a “cabin” or a “camp.” Bergman, responding to past challenges to his Michigan residency, has called his home there his primary residence and noted that he’s a registered voter in the state. Michael Broadway, a geographer and professor emeritus at Northern Michigan University, says many Canadians have, in effect, boycotted the U.S. over Trump’s policies. Businesses like Bird’s Eye Outfitters in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, have seen a noticeable drop-off in Canadian visitors. The director of the international bridge estimates that the Sault area, encompassing the two cities on opposite sides of the border, lost at least $82.9 million last year in local spending. Trump’s quick-shifting trade policies are especially difficult for Michigan’s agriculture industry, the state’s second-largest sector, according to a recent report from the state’s agriculture department. The report, which hasn’t yet been publicly released, said that exports to Canada fell 12.3% last year, “signalling severe strain with a country that is our strongest trading partner.” Meanwhile, the relationship between the U.S. and Canada is fraying ever further. A White House fact sheet on the new 50% tariff acknowledged the ways that Canadians have changed how they do business. The White House said that Canadian imports of U.S. motor vehicles dropped by about 22% between April 2025 and March 2026, compared with the same period the year before. And, it said, due to provincial restrictions, Canadian imports of U.S. alcoholic beverages have plummeted. Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister, said in a letter posted on social media that the series of tariffs imposed by the U.S. began with ones that were “in direct violation” of the standing North American trade deal — the deal from Trump’s first term that he once celebrated, and that Bergman described as a great economic victory for Michigan. With the deal up for review this year, the Trump administration declined a long-term extension of the pact. Carney has also widely signaled that Canada is looking beyond its near neighbor for trading partners. Carney said, in an April video posted on his YouTube channel: “Many of our former strengths, based on our close ties to America, have become our weaknesses — weaknesses that we must correct.” The Sault Ste. Marie International Bridge is the only vehicular border crossing between the countries for hundreds of miles in either direction. The post As Trump’s Tariff War With Canada Drags On, This Border Community Suffers Without a Voice appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Politics, Trump Administration]

— Andy Beshear Set Out to Make Drug Treatment Widely Available in Kentucky. Fraud and Abuse Followed.

 

at 7/30/26 3:00am

Experts disagree with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s belief that loosening Medicaid guardrails helped alleviate the state’s drug crisis. Ryan Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader By the end of 2020, Kentucky’s newly elected Gov. Andy Beshear had one goal above all others: Keep people alive. The state was battling two merciless threats. COVID-19 was killing hundreds of people each month, and deadly drug overdoses were among the highest in the nation. Calling addiction a disease that breeds in isolation, Beshear worried people would stop seeking treatment for fear of contracting COVID-19.  So Beshear set out to make drug treatment easier to access. Kentucky joined more than 40 other states in lifting some restrictions on Medicaid, which served most of the Kentuckians enrolled in substance abuse programs: Recovery centers were allowed to offer expensive treatment to clients without seeking approval from state Medicaid insurers.   By 2023, as the pandemic waned, other states restored Medicaid requirements that treatment centers gain prior approval before providing addiction treatment. Kentucky stayed the course. That year, providers offered more than 1,100 spots for people seeking long-term treatment that allows them to live in a facility, a state record and more slots per capita than any other state. But as the Medicaid bills for all that treatment started piling up, so did the warnings.  In 2024 letters to Beshear’s administration and in at least three public meetings, experts across the health industry said that as a result of the 2020 changes, drug treatment providers were billing too much for subpar care that was leading to worse outcomes. By December 2025, the Kentucky attorney general’s office said Medicaid fraud in drug treatment had become a primary “area of concern.” Despite the warnings, the Beshear administration did little to rein in the skyrocketing state spending.  Almost all those warnings came true. In a February 2025 meeting about soaring Medicaid costs, Kentucky Medicaid Commissioner Lisa Lee said the previous year’s spending on behavioral health and addiction treatment had reached an unprecedented $2.3 billion. Stuart Owen, who works for a Kentucky Medicaid insurer, told a state advisory committee months earlier that much of that spending was driven by the drug treatment industry, including “unscrupulous providers who are exploiting the heck out of that for money.”  The payout was especially lucrative for one company, Addiction Recovery Care. ARC was Kentuckys largest drug treatment provider and the largest recipient of state funds between 2019 and 2025. This spring, the Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported on how ARC exploited Kentucky’s loosened spending controls and may have falsified billing. Beshear has been unapologetic about state spending on drug treatment. In an interview in early June with ProPublica and the Lexington Herald-Leader, he pointed to the continued decline in drug overdose deaths as proof that he made the right choice when he did not force treatment centers to show that costly drug recovery services were medically necessary before treating people for addiction. “If we’d gone back in time too early and changed things too drastically, how many more people would have died that we’ve saved? With four straight years of drug overdose decreases, they can throw blame at me, Beshear said. “We’ll talk about dollars, but there are people’s kids that are still alive today because they were able to get addiction treatment services and get them quickly.” While Kentucky’s overdose deaths declined significantly between 2020 and 2025, experts said the drop was not unique. Other states hit hard by the opioid epidemic also saw year-over-year decreases in fatal overdoses, including states that didn’t loosen Medicaid billing rules, like Tennessee and West Virginia.  Academic studies mostly agree that the drop in the death rate around the country had more to do with declining opioid prescriptions, an increase in the use of the drug naloxone to reverse overdoses, and less fentanyl in the drug supply. Medicaid and behavioral health experts in Kentucky have said in state hearings that some of the services drug treatment companies billed the most for were not directly associated with a decline in overdose deaths. Nonetheless, Kentucky’s policies allowed ARC and other companies to bill more and more for services like peer support groups rather than those led by a licensed doctor or therapist. At one time ARC treated about one-third of the Kentuckians seeking drug treatment in the state; more than half of the services it billed for were the same lower-level services that Medicaid experts warned were being abused, according to state data.  The FBI has been investigating ARC for two years, and more recently, the company’s troubles have intensified. This week the Department of Justice announced it had reached a $16 million settlement with ARC over Medicaid fraud allegations. The company directed employees to falsely bill Medicaid for services like peer support, according to the allegations, which stem from a 2023 whistleblower lawsuit filed by three former ARC employees.  The settlement resolved the allegations, the Department of Justice said, and there has been no determination of liability. In another investigation, the DOJ last month indicted ARC’s leader, Tim Robinson, for wire fraud and money laundering for a separate alleged scheme to defraud multiple lenders. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges. The company said in April it “has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes.”  The Department of Justice recently indicted Tim Robinson, right, founder of Addiction Recovery Care, for wire fraud and money laundering. Ryan Hermens/Lexington Herald-Leader ARC has over the last two years been forced to close most of its facilities, resulting in a 56% decrease in long-term residential treatment beds statewide, according to the most recent data available. By 2025, Republicans had seen enough and passed a bill requiring treatment centers to seek approval from insurers before providing treatment services. Beshear vetoed the bill, saying it “will put up barriers to and delay healthcare for Kentuckians.” Republicans overrode the veto, citing waste, fraud and abuse.  A Raft of Warnings At public meetings and in letters throughout 2023 and 2024, Medicaid insurers and actuaries warned that Beshear’s decision not to reinstate the spending guardrails sooner had allowed billing abuse by drug treatment providers to proliferate.  Some of those Medicaid insurers sent warning letters to providers, some who were suspected of  overbilling, on how to appropriately bill. At least one also tried to limit excessive billing by setting its own guidelines for services deemed “intensive, high cost and/or have the potential for overutilization,” according to a memo from Passport by Molina Healthcare, one of Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers, referring to peer support services. Peer support is similar to a 12-step program.  In August 2024, the Kentucky Association of Health Plans, which represents the state’s Medicaid insurers, sent a letter telling the state Cabinet for Health and Family Services that weak oversight had allowed “unnecessary” spending on treatment and that the services treatment centers were billing the most for weren’t leading to better health outcomes for patients. The letter warned that addiction treatment providers were overbilling for services that weren’t based on evidence or provided by a licensed doctor or therapist.  Part of the solution, the association said in subsequent public hearings, was to reinstate the spending guardrails, known as prior authorization, that Beshear had removed during the pandemic. The prior authorization process is supposed to prevent providers from billing fraudulently or excessively for medically unnecessary services by forcing providers to get permission from insurance companies before administering care. Tom Stephens, president of the group representing Kentucky’s five Medicaid insurers and the letter’s author, said in an interview that it was not the first time Medicaid insurers had shared concerns with the Beshear administration; it was “simply one example of concerns that had been raised over time.”  Asked about this letter, Beshear spokesperson Scottie Ellis wrote that the governor “monitored the concerns expressed publicly and those shared with his administration” and that the state health agency worked with Medicaid insurers to address them. Ellis declined to answer follow-up questions about what specific measures the administration took during that time.  More warnings followed. The next month, Somerset Mayor Alan Keck also wrote to the Beshear administration asking it to reinstate Medicaid spending controls. Keck, whose rural southeastern Kentucky county was hit hard by opioids, told the state health secretary  that treatment centers across his region were recruiting patients from out of state and using company addresses to establish residency for them in order to bill Kentucky Medicaid. He also said some companies were fraudulently billing Medicaid by misrepresenting the services they provided. “Our communities are seeing an influx of sober living facilities that are taking advantage of Kentucky’s Medicaid system and the lax requirements that linger from the Covid-19 pandemic,” Keck wrote to then-health Secretary Eric Friedlander. Keck, who lost a Republican primary for governor in 2023, said recently that Friedlander never responded to his letter. He believes Beshear’s administration should’ve done more to rein in the drug treatment industry’s “explosive growth.” Beshear’s spokesperson didnt address questions about whether the administration responded to Keck.  In November and December 2024, officials from Anthem and WellCare, two Medicaid insurers, reinforced their concerns in meetings with legislators and Medicaid officials. Tell Us About Your Experience With Kentucky’s Addiction Recovery Care We’re taking a closer look at how ARC treated the people who came to the organization seeking help with their sobriety. If you’re a current or former client or employee, we want to hear from you. Share Your Experience The state’s own data from that period supports the insurers’ claim that the state was paying heavily for services that required little or no time from licensed doctors and therapists: Kentucky behavioral health providers were paid more than $147 million for peer support services in 2023 and 2024, Lee, the state Medicaid commissioner, told lawmakers in February 2025. During that time, Medicaid payments for psychoeducation jumped from $40.4 million to more than $168 million.  Psychoeducation is normally a part of regular appointment when a clinician explains a diagnosis and treatment plan to a patient. Most of the money spent in Kentucky on psychoeducation went to ARC. Medicaid insurers warned Kentucky was one of the only states that allowed this service to be billed for separately, and providers were abusing it. At the heart of all of this was the suspension of prior authorization, which had served as the only check on the overuse and overbilling for low-quality care. Without it, Kentucky’s treatment landscape became a Medicaid free-for-all, said Shelby Steuart, a professor who studies health policy at the University of Maryland.  “It just became an opportunity for people to make money,” she said.   When asked about these warnings and the reasons Beshear didn’t reinstate Medicaid spending guardrails sooner, the governor’s office said his decision “helped save lives.” Ellis, the spokesperson for Beshear, said in an email that amid the public warnings, the Cabinet for Health and Family Services, the state’s health agency, met with Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers “to discuss concerns” about the spike in spending on drug treatment.  She said that the administration sent a letter in November 2024 to clarify when and how to bill for certain services Medicaid insurers had flagged, which resulted in a more than $100 million decline in billing from 2025 to 2026. But, as the attorney general’s Office of Medicaid Fraud and Abuse Control told lawmakers in December 2025, billing increased by $40 million for other services that experts warned were being abused. Ellis said the policies should be measured by lives saved. “In the end, actions taken by Gov. Beshear and his administration have decreased overdose deaths for four straight years,” she said. “Willfully Ignorant, Derelict in Their Duties” In 2024, ARC disclosed what it called billing errors that resulted in overpayments from the state, according to emails obtained through Kentucky’s open records laws.  About that time, Kentucky’s Medicaid insurers began to raise questions about excessive billing and started to sever contracts with the company. ARC turned to the state’s health agency for help, asking the health secretary to delay reinstating spending controls and to enact a system that would force Medicaid insurers to continue working with ARC. “Time is of the essence,” ARC founder Robinson wrote in a September 2024 email to Friedlander. Beshear’s administration balked at forcing insurers to work with the company, but ultimately declined to reinstate tighter spending controls. That year ARC was paid a record $103 million by Kentucky Medicaid, mostly for services Medicaid insurers warned were being abused. In a June interview, Beshear defended that decision and denied that his 2020 order led to a rise in Medicaid fraud or abuse. Beshear said that by the time Kentucky’s Republican-controlled legislature reinstated spending controls in July 2025, he was in the process of coordinating with the state’s health agency to enact some spending guardrails, but acknowledged that “admittedly, the Cabinet was probably taking too long,” he said. Read More They Needed Treatment for Drug Addiction. The Company They Turned to May Have Used Them to Commit Fraud. Republicans have accused Beshear of mismanaging the state’s Medicaid program. During the 2025 legislative session, they revoked the governor’s power to make changes to Kentucky Medicaid without their permission. Beshear vetoed that bill, which included a provision to reinstate tighter spending controls, but the legislature overrode his veto.  Republican Sen. Chris McDaniel, who championed the bill, said in March 2025 that Beshear’s administration “had to be one of three things: willfully ignorant, derelict in their duties, or complicit. It was just too much money in one space for them not to have known better.” Beshear in June said he’ll take the hit; at the end of the day, he said, the tide of addiction in Kentucky has receded, and it was worth it.  “If we continue at this pace, there’s a chance we end an epidemic that started in our lifetime,” Beshear said. “Opening up services through Medicaid in general to more people has been one of, if not the, most important things weve done to get people back on track.” The post Andy Beshear Set Out to Make Drug Treatment Widely Available in Kentucky. Fraud and Abuse Followed. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Health Care]

— Senators Push Federal Regulator to Prove School Bus Safety Data Is Accurate

 

at 7/29/26 2:35pm

After a ProPublica and WBUR investigation, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., co-wrote a letter asking the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration how the department ensures the accuracy of school bus safety data. Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images Two leading Democrats on the U.S. Senate committee that oversees transportation safety pressed the nation’s regulator of buses on Wednesday to provide proof it can detect troubled private companies that provide services to schools and municipalities.  The letter, from Sens. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., and Ed Markey, D-Mass., of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, adds weight to concerns voiced by elected officials about federal regulations and Transdev. A WBUR and ProPublica investigation found that dozens of deadly collisions were missing from the safety record of the company, which is one of the nation’s largest operators of public transit.  The letter was sent to the head of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration. The lawmakers asked the agency for documents showing how they ensure school bus safety data is accurate, what guidance it provides to law enforcement on how to report which organizations or companies are involved in a crash, and why FMCSA data shows the number of “enforcement actions” against companies has dropped dramatically under the Trump administration. The senators also asked FMCSA, which is part of the Department of Transportation, for records specific to the company Transdev, the focus of WBUR and ProPublica’s investigation. The newsrooms began their reporting after the April 2025 death of a Boston kindergartner who was run over by his own school bus; the publications found no sign in federal safety records that Transdev, which operated the bus, was involved in the crash.  The Department of Transportation did not answer WBUR and ProPublica’s questions about the letter or its reporting, but a spokesperson wrote in a statement Wednesday that the agency “shares the Senators’ commitment to the safe transportation of America’s children.”  “We have received the Senators’ letter, take the safety concerns raised very seriously, and are currently investigating the matter to provide a comprehensive response,” the statement continued. Transdev said in a statement responding to the senators’ letter that the company takes safety seriously and that “all incidents are thoroughly investigated.”  “Transdev complies with all applicable laws and regulatory requirements in every jurisdiction in which we operate, including federally mandated reporting standards,” the statement said. “It is important to emphasize that we have always followed federal regulations, as prescribed, and will continue to adhere to all requirements for reporting incidents.” The news investigation uncovered dozens of other deadly crashes associated with Transdev that were not part of its record. Lens Joseph’s death and at least two others resulted in criminal charges against the bus drivers. The driver in Lens’ case has pleaded not guilty in an ongoing felony involuntary manslaughter case. In a 2017 crash in Taunton, Massachusetts, that left a woman dead, the bus driver pleaded guilty to misdemeanor negligent operation of a motor vehicle. And another Transdev bus driver pleaded guilty to misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter after the bus she was driving struck and killed a man in Las Vegas in 2023.   The two senators seek by Aug. 12 a list of all the inspections and crashes related to the French company and records explaining why the federal agency’s records did not include at least 42 fatal crashes connected to the company over the past decade. “Without accurate and complete data, it is impossible for FMCSA to properly target enforcement on unsafe companies, because the agency lacks the critical data needed to conclude they are unsafe,” the senators said in the letter.  “It’s clear U.S. DOT failed in its responsibility to hold unsafe truck and bus companies accountable,” Markey said. “That’s why Senator Cantwell and I are demanding answers from Trump’s DOT about its lack of oversight of truck and bus companies with dangerous, alarming, and unknown track records.” WBUR and ProPublica sought comment from the Republican leadership of both the House and Senate committees responsible for transportation safety after the June story was published, but did not receive responses. U.S. Rep. Rick Larsen, the top Democrat on the U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, has said accurate data is key to making good policy.   “We can’t save lives if we don’t have accurate data — which is why the recent reporting from ProPublica and WBUR about the gaps in our database was so disturbing,” Larsen said. Read More A School Bus Killed a 5-Year-Old. The Crash Is Among Dozens Missing From the Bus Company’s Federal Safety Record. On July 17, Boston City Councilor Erin Murphy sent a written request to the state’s schools regulator for an independent review of Boston Public Schools’ transportation safety. She said she was concerned that Boston Public Schools may not have revealed the full extent of Transdev’s crash problems.   U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat who represents the Boston neighborhood where 5-year-old Lens was killed, has also called for FMCSA to investigate Transdev.  “We should not have any company or contractor operating without a full accounting of their safety record,” Pressley said in a written statement. “The safety of our children must be the top priority.” The post Senators Push Federal Regulator to Prove School Bus Safety Data Is Accurate appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Regulation]

— Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough.

 

at 7/29/26 3:00am

Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing. The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The AI behemoth Anthropic, which developed Mythos, had given access to select organizations that make software used by regular people, companies and governments across the world. The goal was to find and fix the vulnerabilities before hackers and adversarial governments like China began using similar tools to find and exploit them for espionage and sabotage. As the group settled in, one engineer asked the question that loomed over the meeting: Did Mythos “live up to the hype that Anthropic claimed it would have had?” “Yes,” a manager responded, according to a recording of the meeting viewed by ProPublica. The version being used by Microsoft, Claude Mythos Preview, was surfacing bugs faster than the tech giant could patch them, and engineers, the manager said, were now in a mad dash to close the gap. One slide in that day’s presentation showed that in April alone, Mythos had uncovered 90 “critical” bugs and 141 “important” ones in SharePoint, Microsoft’s widely used collaboration software. In the first half of May it found even more. “Please, please, please if your org has any April bugs, drive those down,” engineering manager Hans Andersen implored the group. They had roughly two weeks “to find as many things and do as much good as we can with this access.” May 31, he explained, “is considered the day when the rest of the world will have caught up.” The engineers on the call poked at that assertion, with one of them summing up the predicament: “So basically you’re saying if it’s released on June 1, then on June 2 the adversaries will have our bugs?” Yep, one person responded. Yep, another echoed. Do You Know More About the AI Arms Race? We’re still reporting. If you know more about AI and the tech industry, please contact our reporting team. Renee Dudley I’m interested in the intersection of Big Tech and national security. If you’ve worked in tech or government, or otherwise have tips about this area, please get in touch. Contact Me Ever since Anthropic kick-started a national conversation about the bug-hunting power of AI in April, when Project Glasswing was made public, national security experts predicted that the U.S. would have a window of opportunity to fix flaws before adversaries would have similar models capable of discovering the same weaknesses. In late June, the international alliance of intelligence agencies known as the Five Eyes — whose members are the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the U.K. — warned in an unusual joint statement that in a matter of months, that window would be closing. But the recording of the Microsoft meeting, along with internal documents reviewed by ProPublica, suggest the day of cyber reckoning may already be here. Given the deluge of flaws Mythos has identified, Microsoft so far has focused on patching those it considers most dangerous, which are classified critical or important, according to the presentation as well as the company’s own public patch updates. The internal records indicate that Microsoft plans to eventually address “moderate”-severity flaws uncovered by Mythos. The documents made no mention of “low”-severity bugs. The company’s approach reflects the triage system that is typical in the industry. Just as the sickest patients are the first to be treated in the emergency room, vulnerability triage prioritizes issues that are likely to cause the most damage if exploited by hackers. But that strategy carries its own risk in this AI-powered bug-finding era, in which new tools are unearthing a record-breaking volume of weaknesses in the products we use every day. Mythos, for example, is able to chain together a string of bugs that build on one another, meaning that the low- and moderate-severity vulnerabilities that remain unpatched could create an opening to carry out devastating attacks. “Paper Trail” Podcast Listen to Renee Dudley discuss her Microsoft reporting on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.” “The problem now is that you can chain four low-level flaws, and that can equal a high severity,” said Vinh Nguyen, a senior technical adviser to Anthropic and a senior fellow for AI at the Council on Foreign Relations who formerly served as chief AI officer and chief data scientist at the National Security Agency. “If youre Microsoft, the current triage strategy may be underpricing risks.” In emailed responses to ProPublica’s questions, Microsoft stood by its approach, saying its triaging decisions are based on a number of factors, including exploitability and the impact on customers. The company presentation did not mention chaining, but a spokesperson told ProPublica that the technique has long been considered as part of vulnerability assessment and risk analysis.” Asked about the internal presentation and the then-looming May 31 deadline, the spokesperson downplayed its significance, saying that accelerated targeting and exploitation of new vulnerabilities is not a new phenomenon.” That said, he added, the comments made during the meeting reflect how the company “feels a sense of urgency to help our customers at this time.” “What was heard on that call and is true today is that security is Microsoft’s most important priority and teams across the company are prioritizing using AI to discover and remediate vulnerabilities as quickly as possible.” Microsoft declined to answer questions about how many bugs engineers had patched since the presentation. Anthropic declined to comment. The internal Microsoft presentation and accompanying slides predicted that the group of staffers working on SharePoint, which is used by governments and businesses worldwide to manage data and documents, “will be busy for months,” first working through the highest-priority critical bugs then tackling the important ones in August. Microsoft says vulnerabilities it categorizes as critical include so-called worms that can crash systems and spread malware as they race across computer networks. Important ones could result in “compromise of the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of user data” as well as the “availability of processing resources.” After those categories were cleared, the group would begin work on roughly 300 “moderate” bugs, according to the presentation. While the internal documents reviewed by ProPublica do not include updates on the entire breadth of Microsoft’s offerings, they do give a sense of the scale of the problem. One document noted that, since the company started using Mythos earlier this year, it had collectively found hundreds of bugs that Microsoft categorized as either critical or important in popular products such as Microsoft 365, the Teams conferencing platform and the Copilot AI tool. As of mid-May, most of them had yet to be patched. “Theyre not profound and exotic, but theyre real,” Andersen, the engineering manager, said during the meeting. “And a lot of them are exploitable. It’s unclear whether hackers have exploited any specific bug identified by Mythos, but some  have tapped AI to automate attacks and appear to be using Mythos-like tech to find and exploit weaknesses. There have been outward signs of Microsoft’s internal struggle to deal with the growing list of bugs to be patched. Each month, the company publicly releases fixes for its software vulnerabilities in what’s known as “Patch Tuesday.” In June, it released patches for more than 200 bugs, which industry experts then said was an all-time high. But on July 14, the company blew through that record and released patches for more than 600 bugs. Only seven were categorized as low- or moderate-severity, one of which hackers were actively exploiting, according to Dustin Childs, leader of the Zero Day Initiative bug bounty program, which is part of cybersecurity company TrendAI. The rest were important or critical. “Well folks. Here we are. The bug apocalypse has fully descended upon us,” Childs wrote in a blog post on July 14. Microsoft told ProPublica that the overall volume of bugs will not be plateauing for a bit, but a spokesperson said the company has “invested heavily in both people as well as AI-powered triage solutions that scale quickly to handle the growing number of vulnerabilities.” Given the new realities of the AI age, including the chaining capabilities, companies like Microsoft might need to rethink their entire approach to triage, said Nguyen, the NSA’s former AI chief. Rather than shunting what are now considered low-risk flaws aside, companies should be dedicating staff to developing and testing patches for the entire spectrum of vulnerabilities, he said. In other words, the cyber ER needs more doctors and nurses treating illnesses that are life-threatening as well as the minor wounds that could later turn deadly. “There’s no alternative,” Nguyen said. “The patients are coming in fast and furious.” Microsoft told ProPublica it’s “always going to be reevaluating and considering whether things that were previously lows or moderates be upgraded or thought about differently. With these AI systems, it makes us rethink some of these things. Across the industry, were all looking to see how drastic of a change it will be.” “The bug apocalypse has fully descended upon us.” Dustin Childs, leader of the Zero Day Initiative bug bounty program Microsoft’s users may be particularly vulnerable. The popularity of its offerings, used the world over, makes it a frequent and lucrative target for hackers. In addition, many of its products contain “legacy” code. Developed decades ago using now-outdated technology, this code contains unaddressed flaws and contributes to what is known in the industry as “technical debt.” But the challenge of fixing the flood of newly found bugs also extends to the rest of the software industry, and to open-source software code that is typically free to use and largely maintained by volunteers. Open-source software underpins internet infrastructure and is incorporated into much of the world’s modern technology, including products offered by major tech companies such as Microsoft. “Nobody has really figured out how to deal with this, and everybody is casting around for what they need to do,” said J. Michael Daniel, a former cybersecurity adviser to President Barack Obama and the president of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit organization focused on cybersecurity. “Our tech debt is coming due.” Ben Edwards, a data scientist who specializes in managing software vulnerabilities, said the software industry was handling an “intense volume even before AI.” “It was like drinking from a garden hose on the jet setting before, and now it’s like drinking from a fire hose,” Edwards said. “They might have had the teams that could handle that garden hose. Whether they can handle the fire hose is something else.” Although the volume of vulnerabilities has grown over the years, Microsoft’s internal group responsible for fielding them, the Microsoft Security Response Center, has been perennially understaffed. Even before the crush of AI-identified bugs, the center fielded hundreds or even thousands of reports a month, pushing the group to its limits, ProPublica has reported. The size of the center reflects Microsoft’s corporate philosophy: Plugging security holes is a cost center, while making new products is a profit center, former employees said. The company is loath to tie up its best engineers with making security patches — a cost center — instead of developing new products and features that will generate profits, ProPublica has reported. Microsoft told ProPublica that it does not discuss internal staffing decisions but has made investments in recent years to “focus our teams on keeping our customers secure.” The company “continuously evaluates the staffing, processes, and technologies required to support security response and vulnerability management,” a spokesperson said. According to the slides that accompanied the May internal presentation, Anthropic provided Mythos access to roughly 50 full-time Microsoft employees, with a goal to “harden critical services before publicly available models catch up.” A slide titled “What’s Next” predicted that the Microsoft Security Response Center would see continued case volume “as public tools catch up” to Mythos. During the May meeting, one staffer appeared to take comfort in the belief that adversaries dont have the source code” that such an AI tool would scan for weaknesses. His colleagues, however, quickly corrected him. Portions of Microsoft’s code have, in fact, fallen into hackers’ hands over the years. “It might not be this week’s source code,” one person said. “But they’ve got source code. Its out there.” In a statement to ProPublica, Microsoft downplayed the comment, saying engineers “design our security processes on the expectation that determined adversaries may gain access to code.” The post Anthropic’s New AI Model Can Identify More Software Bugs Than Ever. Microsoft Is Struggling to Fix Them Fast Enough. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Technology]

— This MAGA Influencer Runs a Charity to Teach Kids Civics. Much of the Money Goes to Him Instead.

 

at 7/28/26 4:00am

Nick Adams in 2024 Philip Cheung/The Washington Post/Getty Images In a private ceremony on Sept. 17, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth stood at a podium inside the National Archives building in Washington, D.C., and praised a Florida nonprofit for what he called a singular achievement in American education. The attendees were celebrating the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness, which announced that it had reached 2 million children with civics education since its founding in 2016. “I hope you understand how important this is,” Hegseth told the room. “What we pour into the next generation will determine whether we keep our republic or not.” FLAG’s founder, Nick Adams, had spent nearly a decade building toward this moment. An Australian-born conservative commentator and MAGA influencer, Adams had created the nonprofit, raised $7.7 million for it over 10 years, and garnered repeated praise from President Donald Trump. In March, Trump appointed Adams as the special presidential envoy for American tourism, exceptionalism and values — a position created for him after his nomination as ambassador to Malaysia stalled the previous year. But a review of FLAG’s finances, donor operations and online donation network reveals a less celebratory picture. There is little evidence that the nonprofit has provided the civics education it claims. And Adams and his nonprofit have engaged in a pattern of questionable financial arrangements, including paying Adams and his mother more than half its recent annual revenue, while raising much of its money through a sweepstakes operation that has promised donors a chance to win $1,000,000 — a prize FLAG’s records show no evidence of ever paying. Adams moved to the United States from Australia in 2012 and has since become an outspoken champion of the American political and economic system. Now 41, he has built a following as a conservative commentator and self-described “alpha male” influencer, making frequent media appearances and amassing roughly 2.1 million followers on Facebook and 640,000 followers on X on his personal pages. Adams authored books including “Retaking America: Crushing Political Correctness” and “Trump and Churchill: Defenders of Western Civilization.”  In 2016, Adams founded FLAG, registering it as a nonprofit with the mission to bring high-quality civics education to K-12 students across America. FLAG has produced civics materials like the Student’s Constitution, the Student’s Declaration of Independence and the Student’s Federalist Papers — kid-friendly editions of the country’s founding documents. By 2023, FLAG was reporting annual revenue of nearly $1.5 million, consisting of donations and merchandise sales. “Thanks to the support of 40,000+ grassroots patriots,” the organization’s website states, “over 1 million FLAG resources have been distributed in classrooms all across America.” To give FLAG credibility in conservative circles, Adams assembled an advisory council of movement leaders including Hegseth, then a Fox News host; the late Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA; the late Edwin J. Feulner, founder of the Heritage Foundation; and Dennis Prager, the conservative radio host and co-founder of PragerU, a nonprofit that produces conservative educational materials. (The council has since been replaced with a board of directors.)  Adams did not respond to a detailed list of questions about FLAG’s financial practices, sweepstakes operation and educational programming. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to respond to questions but reiterated Hegseth’s support for FLAG. Civics education has become a rallying cause across the Make America Great Again movement, whose slogan invokes a return to a specific vision of the country’s founding principles. PragerU is an approved curriculum provider in at least eight states. Turning Point USA pursued a similar goal through Turning Point Academy, a network of private schools. Along with those organizations, FLAG is now part of the America 250 Civics Education Coalition, a partnership of the U.S. Department of Education formed with over 40 conservative groups. Trump’s return to office has been a boon for Adams. The president has called Adams one of his favorite authors, and a foreword in Adams’ 2024 book, “Alpha Kings,” credited to Trump calls Adams someone whose “work ethic equals his moral responsibility and faith in God.” Although Trump wasn’t able to attend FLAG’s 2023 annual gala, he sent a video praising the nonprofit and Adams, telling attendees that “tens of thousands of teachers are being trained and hundreds of thousands of parents and grandparents are now standing up for our kids.” “It takes Nick from Australia to come and teach us about American greatness and to help us fight for our country,” Trump added. “He’s an American now, and we’re very lucky to have him.” The White House press office declined to comment. Adams’ book event for the D.C. Young Republicans in 2024 Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post/Getty Images FLAG’s website invites teachers to request free classroom presentations, delivered by “certified FLAG Ambassadors,” including Adams himself, alongside guest speakers described as entrepreneurs, business leaders and immigrants. In 2016 and early 2017, FLAG regularly posted photos documenting visits to schools. After that period, however, ProPublica could not find similar documentation of FLAG representatives visiting schools.  Since 2016, as FLAG’s annual revenues grew from $68,000 to $1.1 million in 2024, there is almost no indication in the organization’s annual federal tax filings that it was spending money on its stated mission. No line item in FLAG’s federal tax filing identifies a payment to a school, a teacher or an educational distributor. Only two lines, in a 2017 federal filing, indicate $26,925 for “Student’s Constitutions, Printing” and $5,670 for “Book Donations, Shipping & Supplies.” In the last six years, while FLAG operated under Adams, the only documented instance of FLAG activity that appears to fit the definition of “educational” is a 2020 video showing Adams speaking at what is described as a teachers’ conference.  But the nonprofit has been lucrative for the Adams family. In 2024, Adams, who was born Nicholas Adamopoulos, and his mother, Angelika Adamopoulos, collected a combined $587,279 in compensation and benefits from FLAG — 53% of the organization’s revenue that year, according to the nonprofit’s federal filing.  Adamopoulos was paid $201,861, including benefits, as FLAG’s secretary. In the same filing, FLAG answered no when asked by the IRS whether any officer or director shared a family relationship with another director or officer. Adamopoulos did not respond to requests for comment. Experts were troubled that the organization spent so much on Adams and his mother. “The amount being paid, both in absolute dollar terms and as a percentage of the organization’s revenues and expenses, is very high,” said Lloyd Mayer, a nonprofit law professor at Notre Dame Law School and a leading authority on tax-exempt organizations. Mayer said Adams’ salary increases since FLAG’s founding are more of “a yellow flag,” than a clear violation. For FLAG’s first three years, Adams received no salary. He first took compensation in 2019 of just $20,400. Then his annual pay rose steadily to reach $411,209, or about 30% of the group’s total revenue, in 2023. Adamopoulos was the first employee outside of Adams to be paid a significant salary, in 2024. No other employee was paid more than $5,000 from 2016 to 2024, according to FLAG’s federal filings, obtained through ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer. The legal test, Mayer said, is whether the board was clear that it was making up for early years of low or no pay: “Were they explicit in saying, ‘We’re not just paying you for this year; we’re paying you for your past service, which you were not fairly compensated for’?” The IRS asks nonprofits whether their executive compensation was reviewed by independent people and if they used comparisons to other similar organizations — a standard safeguard against self-dealing. In all filings from 2017 to 2024, FLAG answered no to both questions. Philip Hackney, a nonprofit law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and former IRS official, said the absence of an independent review creates its own legal exposure. “Technically, that can be an excess benefit transaction on its own,” Hackney said, referring to the IRS category that triggers taxes on compensation paid to nonprofit insiders above fair market value. FLAG claims that 66% of revenue goes toward program service expenses, according to a separate financial report filed with the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services in Florida, where the organization is now based. But the salaries of Adams and his mother, social media spending and travel expenses account for $755,541, or 86%, of the $878,208 allocated to program services.  Mayer said the classification is not automatically improper under federal law. “Education as a charitable purpose is a very broad category,” he said. “Spending money on staff, online communications and even fundraising appeals that have informational content can all be considered programmatic.”  “What [the IRS is] looking for is not inflated spending,” Mayer said. “They’re looking for disguised personal spending.” In Australia, Adams was accused of spending taxpayer dollars on personal expenses. In 2006, when Adams was 22 years old, he served as a councillor in Ashfield, Australia. He was formally condemned by fellow councillors for running up thousands of dollars in phone calls and taxi charges for personal use while claiming them as council expenses. He repaid the charges after a formal investigation, according to a 2006 article in the Inner-West Weekly, an Australian newspaper. FLAG’s online store sells Adams’ personal books — including “Alpha Kings” and “From Mar-a-Lago to Mars,” several marketed as signed copies for as much as $40 — alongside its own educational materials. One of Adams’ personal books, “Trump and Churchill,” is on the front page of FLAG’s online store, accompanied with language that says, “Proceeds from all sales go directly to promoting our mission and providing students and teachers with high-quality educational resources.” It is the only book with language that distinguishes which purchases fund FLAG’s mission or pay Adams directly. In September, FLAG posted a photo from a conservative women’s convention showing Adams standing behind a table stacked with copies of his personal books displayed alongside FLAG-branded resources with the organization’s banner behind him. Adams’ books have also been advertised for sale on FLAG’s Facebook page, with links going directly to Adams’ personal website for the books rather than FLAG’s shopify page. “He’s free to market his books,” Mayer said, “but if he has a charity do it, that means it’s not really a charity anymore, in that respect. It’s not about public benefit — the private benefit to him overrides the public benefit.” In addition to the disclosure discrepancies, FLAG appears to have violated rules for conducting sweepstakes. Nearly all of FLAG’s revenue originates from individual donors, and most of that money is raised through a direct-mail sweepstakes operation that offers the chance to win prizes, in one case $1,000,000. For years, FLAG has run a direct-mail sweepstakes campaign under names like “Payout Decision” and “Winner Search Swps.” Sweepstakes are regulated primarily at the state level, and organizations that run them are often required to register and report to state officials. Not every state requires this, but Florida, where FLAG is registered as a charity, does. FLAG does not disclose a sweepstakes program in its federal filings, and ProPublica could not locate any official sweepstakes registration for the organization in any state. Nine years of FLAG’s federal filings contain no transaction consistent with a $1,000,000 payment. Hackney said any such payout would be expected to appear on the organization’s tax filings. “It should be an amount paid out at some point, and that would show up in a 990,” he said, referencing the name of the tax return filed by nonprofits, which is public. At its financial peak in 2023, FLAG held roughly $512,000 in total assets — about half the value of the prize it has offered to donors. Mayer said the absence of a documented prize payment raises further legal questions. “If the promise is that someone will win $1,000,000 and no one ever does, that’s fraud,” he said. “That’s lying to induce people to support you.” Internal records from a mailing list exchange database, which details how often and for what purpose organizations use mailing lists of potential donors, shows a shift in FLAG’s emphasis. Notes in FLAG’s record state that as of July 2020, FLAG was “not mailing much” through conventional fundraising channels and was “focusing on the sweeps side.” In April 2024, someone filed a Better Business Bureau complaint against FLAG, alleging that its sweepstakes drawing deadlines had been repeatedly postponed — along with those of more than a dozen other charities the complainant said used the same practice. In a follow-up filing, the complainant cited FLAG’s timeline: a drawing originally set to run from January 2022 through December 2024 that had, by then, been pushed to run from December 2023 through January 2025.  “I just want them to pay me back my hard earned money,” the complainant wrote, “since I am a retired senior citizen who happened to love this country.” FLAG told the BBB on May 6, 2024, that it had responded to the complainant. FLAG marks its 10th anniversary on Wednesday, and is throwing itself a gala with tickets for the occasion priced at $1,000; $5,000; and $10,000. Adams is still listed on the website as FLAG’s founder but ceded the role of CEO in March to Cooper Rodenburg, a recent graduate of Stetson University, around the time he accepted his State Department role to promote tourism to the United States.  Reached by phone, Rodenburg requested that questions be sent by email but did not respond to them. Rodenburg has since increased FLAG’s public activity, launching a TikTok account and a Substack newsletter, meeting with educational representatives and speaking to groups like the Shelby County Republican Women’s Club in Tennessee. A Substack post in April described FLAG, represented by Rodenburg and Adamopoulos, delivering founding documents to schools in Mississippi. This was one of the only specific program activities the organization has documented in recent years.  The post This MAGA Influencer Runs a Charity to Teach Kids Civics. Much of the Money Goes to Him Instead. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Nonprofits, Regulation]

— Federal Judges Chastise Trump’s Justice Department for “Unlawful,” “Unethical” and “Unseemly” Conduct

 

at 7/28/26 3:00am

Timo Lenzen for ProPublica Across the country, federal judges are calling out Department of Justice lawyers, questioning in unprecedented ways whether they can be trusted to tell the truth or uphold centuries-old legal norms. From Washington, D.C., to Rhode Island to Oregon, federal judges nominated by presidents from both parties, including Donald Trump, have zeroed in on what’s called “the presumption of regularity.” It essentially means that judges must presume that the government — whether it be federal prosecutors, an IRS auditor or an FBI agent — did their jobs according to the rules and in good faith. Until Trump’s second term, which has seen an exodus of veteran DOJ lawyers and a transformative shift in priorities from issues like enforcing civil rights to instead defending a mass deportation agenda, this foundational tenet had rarely been discussed in federal courtrooms, former judges, lawyers and scholars say. But as Trump’s DOJ exhibits behavior that judges have called “unlawful,” “unethical,” “unseemly” or otherwise dishonest, adherence to that bedrock standard is now being questioned. ProPublica reviewed hundreds of cases since Trump retook the White House in which judges criticized the actions of DOJ lawyers and found more than 40 in which they explicitly referenced the presumption of regularity. In many cases, judges have expressed frustration that they can no longer take the government at its word. “Judges simply don’t believe the representations that are being made by United States attorneys, assistant United States attorneys and the like,” said John E. Jones, a former federal judge for the District of Pennsylvania, appointed by President George W. Bush. “I dont think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, weve ever seen anything close to this.” In Rhode Island in May, Trump-appointed federal Judge Mary McElroy rebuked federal prosecutors’ conduct — saying they withheld information and misrepresented facts — as she quashed their requests for a subpoena in their investigation into a hospital’s care of transgender children. The judge alleged the DOJ had inappropriately claimed its investigation was operating out of Texas to secure subpoenas targeting sensitive medical records of patients in another state and that it falsely claimed the Rhode Island hospital hadn’t communicated with the department. “The discrepancy between the honorable conduct expected of federal prosecutors and DOJ’s tactics in this case is unsettling,” McElroy wrote. “The Court cannot help but share the sentiment that ‘[t]he presumption of regularity that has previously been extended to [DOJ] that it could be taken at its word — with little doubt about its intentions and stated purposes — no longer holds.’” Judges have emitted a chorus of condemnations against the legal basis for some of Trumps political agenda, including the mass firings of federal workers, an immigration dragnet that has imprisoned hundreds of U.S. citizens and retribution campaigns against the president’s political enemies. In doing so, federal judges are imbuing forceful language into their orders in a way that scholars say signals to the Trump administration that the third branch of government is losing trust in the Justice Department. “I don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, weve ever seen anything close to this.” Former federal Judge John E. Jones, a George W. Bush appointee Federal judges rarely grant interviews, and none of the judges who criticized the Justice Department in their orders granted interviews to ProPublica. In a statement, a spokesperson for the DOJ said its attorneys are “dedicated public servants who represent the United States with integrity, in accordance with their ethical obligations and the law.” “The Department stands firmly behind the professionalism and good faith of its attorneys,” said spokesperson Kiersten Pels. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Federal judges have found that the government filed statements generated by artificial intelligence that referenced nonexistent case law, wrote briefs that ignored facts and filed declarations with inaccurate dates, the ProPublica review shows. In one case, the government included documentation claiming a detainee had been convicted of marijuana possession in 2009. That detainee, the judge noted, citing what she called the government’s persistent “sloppiness,” would have been 4 years old. “This Court will no longer blindly accept statements of fact from [the U.S. government] unless they are made under oath by an individual with personal knowledge,” Judge Christine O’Hearn, a President Joe Biden appointee, wrote in New Jersey while reviewing a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by a man who claimed he was unlawfully imprisoned by immigration officers. O’Hearn accused the government of defying her orders when, instead of releasing the man, Immigration and Customs Enforcement transferred him to a different facility in New York. In Minnesota, the state’s top political leaders had publicly clashed with the administration following the violent ICE raids that led to the deaths of two U.S. citizens. Then the administration filed a flurry of subpoenas against them. Last month, Judge Patrick J. Schiltz, who was appointed by George W. Bush and clerked for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, slammed the government’s actions and “spurious claims,” saying the presumption of regularity was being abused. “Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action — particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take — is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use [of] the grand-jury process,” the judge wrote. “Breakdown” of a Presumption The presumption of regularity creates a high bar for those suing the government or defending themselves against it in criminal cases. They often must provide evidence that the government willfully violated a policy or otherwise deviated from its charge — that is, did something irregular — to overcome the standard. It’s a shield the government wields often, with little notice, and one that is almost always successful. But overcoming that presumption has become increasingly common under Trump’s second term, according to court watchers. About half of the cases ProPublica identified as questioning the presumption come from districts, including D.C., Maryland and Virginia, where by proximity and jurisdiction many of Trump’s actions are challenged and often heard by Democratic-nominated judges. The Southern District of New York, which has issued repeated rebukes of Trump administration actions, and the Northern District of California, another Democratic stronghold, are other hotbeds of judicial scrutiny. Last September, D.C. District Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui accused the administration of working around the federal grand jury process, getting an indictment from a state court after prosecutors had failed to get one in his court, which he called “unseemly,” if not “unlawful.” He fired off one of the earliest signs that the presumption itself could come into question. “This only deepens the growing mistrust of the actions of prosecutors,” the judge wrote. “That is a sentiment that was once unthinkable, but the irregular is now the regular.” While the case was largely managed by assistant U.S. attorney Caelainn Carney, according to court transcripts, Faruqui was aiming his frustration at her bosses, including senior prosecutor Jonathan R. Hornok, and the leadership at DOJ. Neither attorney responded to requests for comment. Pels, the DOJ spokesperson, told ProPublica that Faruqui “was wrong on the law” and noted that after the government appealed to the district’s chief judge, his order was overruled. “Judge Faruqui has a long-standing documented pattern of editorializing from the bench beyond the scope of the cases before him,” Pels added. But in recent months, skepticism about the presumption has also come from judges appointed by Republicans, such as McElroy, or in GOP strongholds. In Indiana, Trump-appointed federal Judge James Patrick Hanlon ordered the release of Salah Sarsour, president of the Islamic Society of Milwaukee and a lawful U.S. resident, from ICE custody in March. Sarsour’s lawyers argued the government had targeted him to suppress his First Amendment right to free speech. The DOJ invoked the presumption of regularity and argued his arrest was part of an anti-terrorism dragnet, which the judge threw out. In the Southern District of Ohio, Judge Michael R. Barrett, appointed by George W. Bush, ordered ICE to release a detainee after concluding the presumption had been overcome because the government hadn’t presented a reasonable argument that the man was a flight risk. News outlets, including CNN, have documented federal judges’ ire with Trump’s DOJ, and some of the cases under question have been well-publicized, such as the government’s illegal deportation of Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador. In that case, Judge Paula Xinis, a President Barack Obama appointee, criticized the government, saying, “You have taken the presumption of regularity, and you’ve destroyed it.” Many of the rulings challenged one of Trump’s hallmark efforts: immigration enforcement and deportations. “The presumption of regularity and integrity previously and routinely afforded to the Executive branch and the United States Attorney’s Office has been undeniably eroded in this jurisdiction and across the country,” O’Hearn wrote in February, noting that the federal government had repeatedly violated court orders in her district and others related to immigration operations. In another immigration detention case, this one in Washington state, Biden-appointed Judge Lauren King said, “[t]he ‘presumption of regularity’ is dislodged here by the numerous factual errors in Respondents’ filings and by their conflicting representations.” Jeremy Fogel, executive director of the Berkeley Judicial Institute and a former federal judge from California, said what’s happening in the courts feels more like a “political conflict” than the normal ebb and flow of the justice system. “Its really one branch that is really sort of questioning the legitimacy of the other one,” Fogel said. “I think the judges are trying to stand up for the legitimacy of their branch.” Just Security, an online law and policy journal, has been tracking cases in which federal judges have admonished Trump’s prosecutors, including those involving the presumption. “We’re witnessing a breakdown in the ways in which any administration ordinarily carries out its responsibilities, through the Justice Department in particular,” said Ryan Goodman, Just Security’s co-editor-in-chief. Erosion of Trust, Ethics Inquiries The erosion of trust from the federal bench comes as Trump has profoundly shifted priorities at the DOJ to align with his political platform: ending civil rights and diversity programs, deporting immigrants and stripping away environmental protections. Those who deal with DOJ lawyers have noticed the difference in court. Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council, has faced off on environmental issues with the DOJ many times. Although they may disagree, he said, he always expected his opponents to be “fair and above board.” That dynamic is gone, he said. “I would call it a transformation of the role of the Justice Department,” he said. “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.” The result, Bernard said, is that “the government will lose more cases as a result of the way the Justice Department is behaving.” “There are many different judges in different jurisdictions not only ruling against the government but calling the government out for dishonesty and dissembling, and that’s an extraordinary thing.” Mitch Bernard, chief counsel at the Natural Resources Defense Council Meanwhile, groups such as his are benefitting from the government brain drain. “We hired 10 litigating attorneys last year,” he said. Of those, eight came from the DOJ. Judges aren’t just losing faith in the DOJ. Some are pushing to sanction Justice Department lawyers. This month, Miami federal Judge Kathleen M. Williams ruled that Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS was an improper exercise in self-enrichment, citing the president’s lawyers for a series of misstatements in the case. The Obama appointee referred the lawyer who brought the president’s case against the IRS, Alejandro Brito, to the Florida Bar for potential disciplinary proceedings. She also forwarded her ruling to disciplinary officials in New York, who had earlier received an ethics complaint about acting Attorney General Todd Blanche. A DOJ spokesperson called the Blanche case “nothing more than a politically motivated bar complaint, filed by partisan activists who disagree with this Administration’s policies.” Brito did not respond to a request for comment. In Rhode Island, McElroy referred DOJ lawyers to a review board for possible discipline for their handling of the hospital investigation. “As citizens, we trust that federal prosecutors, when wielding this awesome power against a state, a company, or certainly against vulnerable children, will play fair and be honest with its counterparts and the judiciary,” McElroy wrote. “DOJ has proven unworthy of this trust at every point in this case.” The post Federal Judges Chastise Trump’s Justice Department for “Unlawful,” “Unethical” and “Unseemly” Conduct appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Courts, Trump Administration]

— How Trump’s “America First” Administration Could Shut U.S. Scientists Out of the Next Nobel-Worthy Discovery

 

at 7/27/26 3:00am

Collage by Alex Bandoni. Source images: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images. For decades, physicists wrestled with a fundamental mystery of the universe. They wanted to know why certain particles — like the protons in atoms — have mass, while particles of light do not. Whatever the reason was, it was crucial to understanding the origins of planets, galaxies and life itself. The leading theory stated that particles got their mass from interacting with an invisible field, later dubbed the Higgs field, but no one had ever been able to prove it existed. Doing so would require one of the most ambitious international collaborations in scientific history. Starting decades ago, thousands of scientists from dozens of countries worked side by side, even though some of their nations considered one another adversaries. The United States contributed a quarter of the workforce and hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars. The investment paid off in 2012, when the team detected the so-called “God particle” or Higgs boson, confirming the half-century-old Higgs field theory. The achievement was so significant that two of the physicists behind the theory won the Nobel Prize. Under a new rule proposed by the Trump administration, American scientists might be forced to watch similar discoveries from the sidelines. The proposal would restrict international collaboration and give political appointees the ability to decide the most important research to fund, and the power to pull the plug at any time, for any reason. As soon as he learned about the proposal, one of the U.S. scientists who took part in the landmark project rushed to file his objection with the federal government. “These experiments take decades to build and require sustained, cooperative international investment,” University of Chicago physics professor David W. Miller wrote in a public comment. “The experiments will continue, without American leadership. … The United States will not just fall behind. It will step aside.” The rule’s implications reach far beyond physics. Proposed by the Office of Management and Budget, a little-known but powerful part of the White House that guides federal spending, it would give the administration’s political appointees across dozens of federal agencies significant discretion over how grants are awarded and terminated. The appointees don’t have to know anything about science or the subjects of the grants they’re reviewing. Russell Vought, who runs the office and has made expanding presidential control over federal spending one of his signature goals, has put the philosophy into practice over the past two years, helping to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and, in another controversial move, blocking funds already allocated by Congress. Vought’s decision last year to cancel 284 Department of Energy grants drew renewed criticism after an agency lawyer recently admitted in court records that the terminations were “based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state” — in other words, blue states. The rule would cover at least hundreds of billions of dollars in federal grants, touching everything from food stamp benefits and housing assistance to small business loans and funding for the arts. Many cities, states and nonprofits rely on federal grants in their annual budgets. Representatives of domestic violence organizations and museums and the attorneys general of 22 states are among those who have objected to the rule. Vought’s office wants the final version of the rule to take effect on Oct. 1. Before that happens, the OMB must consider the nearly 500,000 public comments that have flooded in since the rule was announced in late May and address or respond to substantive critiques. White House Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought Andrew Harnik/Getty Images An OMB spokesperson told ProPublica that the “proposed rule will ensure spending is aligned with current law, Executive Orders, and agency priorities.” This is “fundamentally about accountability to the American people and ensuring that taxpayer dollars are spent wisely. It will not disrupt major scientific research or supplant the peer review process — any claims to the contrary are based on spurious assumptions.” But thousands of public comments come from scientists, who warn that the rule, as written, would severely curtail their work treating pediatric cancers, improving maternal health and advancing fundamental research. The United States’ world-renowned system of funding science entrusts decisions to subject-matter experts who choose grantees based on a rigorous, merit-based peer-review process, with minimum political interference. Physicists vet proposals from other physicists; oncologists, those of other oncologists. Larger projects get steady funding through multiple years, so that researchers can hire staff, design and purchase equipment, and make commitments to other involved institutions or people, such as patients undergoing treatments. Few discoveries better illustrate what that system made possible than that of the Higgs boson, considered one of the most significant scientific triumphs of the 21st century. Miller took ProPublica inside the endeavor, highlighting ways the new rule could imperil similar projects in the future. “The United States built the greatest scientific enterprise in human history on a simple idea: fund the best ideas, chosen by the best experts, and get out of the way,” he said in his public comment. “This proposed rule dismantles that principle entirely, and it does so in ways that will cause immediate, concrete, and in many cases irreversible harm to American science.” Miller, 43, said he owes his entire career to government investments in research and education. He grew up in Chicago and went to public schools. Neither of his parents went to college. His mother was the first female paramedic hired by the Chicago Fire Department. His father, a firefighter, did construction work on his days off. Miller liked building stuff in his dad’s workroom. He made shelves for his bunk bed and etched his own circuit board in high school. At the University of Chicago, where Miller enrolled after winning a full-ride scholarship for students whose parents worked as police officers or firefighters, he chose to study physics and soon became interested in questions such as: Why do things with mass behave differently from light? Why is there more matter than anti-matter in the universe? Miller said his dad used to sit in his firehouse, clipping newspaper stories on dark matter and black holes to send to his son. As an undergrad, Miller began doing research at CERN, an international physics laboratory near Geneva that was founded after World War II to facilitate ambitious experiments and build bridges between countries that had recently been adversaries. He took a job there after graduation as a research technician. Working in a cavern 300 feet underground, he crawled through tunnels, connecting power cables and screwing pieces of steel together. He was helping build the machinery needed to test a theory scientists had been chasing since the 1960s. Physicists had long theorized that an invisible field of energy gives mass to particles like protons while leaving particles of light — photons — massless. To test the theory, the world’s largest particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, would smash hundreds of billions of protons together at nearly the speed of light. Miller had been building one of the massive, intricate cameras needed to detect the Higgs boson created by colliding protons. Later, he worked to disentangle the messy data. David Miller in 2006, while working as a research technician at CERN. He helped build one of the two particle detectors that later revealed the existence of the Higgs boson. Courtesy of David Miller Miller was one of nearly 2,000 scientists from the U.S. who worked on the initiative. Three U.S. national labs built components for the collider in-house before shipping them to CERN. Federal agencies invested $531 million into construction and other services. Additional grants went to individual scientists. Miller’s technician role and support for his research when he earned a doctorate in physics from Stanford University were both funded by the National Science Foundation, one of the main government agencies that supports basic scientific research. Federal grants can’t be canceled without cause, and the reliability of that funding was crucial, Miller said. But the new OMB rule would allow termination with minimal explanation or opportunities for appeal. That threat “is a tool for political coercion,” Miller wrote in his opposition to the rule. “It tells every scientist in America: your funding is safe only as long as your work, your institution, or your public statements remain acceptable to the current administration.” An additional threat comes from the rule’s prohibition of researchers using federal funds to “support certain foreign collaborations involving covered foreign countries or covered foreign entities.” The rule accounts for limited exceptions, including collaborations allowed by federal statute and those in which an agency head “determines that the activity does not pose a risk to national security.” An OMB spokesperson did not provide a list of covered countries or respond to ProPublica’s questions about how the provision would be enforced. More than 60 nations contributed to the Higgs boson discovery. Engineers from India tested superconducting magnets used in the collider. Russian scientists collected spent artillery shells from World War II to source the huge amounts of brass needed for one of the particle detectors. Various countries are contributing to ongoing upgrades for the collider, including special magnets from China, crystals from Italy and cast-iron shielding from Pakistan. Some of the scientists working at CERN come from countries like China that the Trump administration has already restricted researchers from collaborating with. And it’s unclear how easily others might find themselves listed as adversaries. Since the beginning of his second term, President Donald Trump has picked public fights with a long list of leaders from U.S. allies, such as the United Kingdom, Italy, Denmark, France, Germany, Spain and Canada. Strict limits on international partnerships fly in the face of how science has worked for centuries, said Chris Llewellyn Smith, a former CERN director who is an emeritus professor of physics at the University of Oxford. The Royal Society of London, a scientific academy founded in the 1600s, appointed a foreign secretary to correspond with scientists from other countries nearly 60 years before the British government appointed a foreign secretary to oversee international relations, he noted. Global conflict has already degraded the collaborative atmosphere at CERN, Llewellyn Smith said. After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, CERN’s governing body voted to ban scientists affiliated with Russian labs — a move that has harmed the careers of Russian scientists and deprived CERN of the hardware and labor Russia could contribute to future experiments, he said. If the U.S. also retreats due to limits on working with foreign scientists, Llewellyn Smith warned, it “could jeopardize the whole future of high-energy physics.” That may feel abstract to many Americans. But the technological developments required to study particle physics lead to unexpected discoveries. A CERN engineer pioneered a touch screen in the 1970s while building research instrumentation. The World World Web was invented by a scientist at CERN who was trying to share data between different institutions. Smaller particle accelerators are used for manufacturing and cancer therapies. The practical applications may take generations to surface. Take the GPS technology that powers the maps on our phones, Miller said. It depends on century-old equations formulated by Albert Einstein. “I guarantee you that Einstein wasn’t thinking about your ability to find Starbucks this morning when he wrote down the special theory of relativity and the general theory of relativity.” The OMB says the rule is necessary to prevent waste, fraud and ideological bias. The Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank whose work the OMB cites, praised the proposed changes in a recent column. Empowering political appointees establishes the “kind of adult supervision” that ensures “the taxpayer is funding the activity that he votes for at election time,” the columnist wrote. But critics say the changes aim to solve problems that either don’t exist or don’t require such a blunt-force tool. The rule repeatedly cites “woke” funding decisions under President Joe Biden’s tenure as a reason for reform. “Federal grants were politicized by the last administration to promote a far-left DEI agenda,” an agency spokesperson told ProPublica in an email, referring to initiatives promoting diversity, equity and inclusion. The rule links to a 2024 report from Senate Republicans that summarized — based on a keyword search of terms like “women,” “diversify,” “segregation” and “Hispanic culture” — $2 billion in National Science Foundation grants they said were supporting “radical political perspectives.” ProPublica’s reporting found that many of the projects simply referenced existing social inequities or involved unrelated terms flagged by the committee’s crude methodology. One was a study of the evolution of mint plants. Fraud in federal science funding does exist, but it’s relatively rare. Investigators at the National Science Foundation have recovered about $54 million from fraud cases involving universities, nonprofits and small businesses over the past 10 years, according to a spokesperson from the agency’s Office of Inspector General. That’s an average of $5.4 million a year — a tiny fraction of the billions of dollars the NSF gives out in grants every year. Even if the administration believes those problems warrant reform, legal experts question whether the OMB has the authority to impose this solution. The final rule will almost certainly be subject to litigation, they say. Lawsuits will challenge the OMB’s ability to prescribe the content of individual grants, said Kali Murray, a law professor at Marquette University who specializes in the intersection of administrative and intellectual property law. “This is a hall of famer move by Russ Vought” to expand the power of that office, as the proposal allows the OMB to override existing congressional statutes that govern agency spending, she said. For instance, the proposed rule’s prohibition of DEI appears to conflict with a statute that directs the National Science Foundation to broaden “participation of underrepresented populations,” especially women, Black and Hispanic researchers, in science, technology, engineering and math, Murray said. Federal physics funding has been less of a political target than grants related to health disparities, racial inequities and LGBTQ+ communities — areas the administration derides as “woke” or “illegal DEI.” But at least several grants designed to support early-career physicists from underrepresented backgrounds have been terminated. Any change through litigation could take time; lawsuits can’t be filed until the final text of the rule is published. The next presidential administration could undo it through a formal rulemaking process. That process, too, could take years. Pressure from congressional leaders, particularly Republicans, might be the only way to compel the OMB to make serious revisions before it releases the final version of the rule this fall. Democrats in Congress have registered their opposition. So has Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, who sent a letter to Vought asking the OMB to withdraw parts of the rule “that would unduly burden scientific and biomedical research and small communities.” Collins took particular issue with the provision that would allow political appointees to review grant proposals, noting that it would undermine the goal of awarding funds “based on scientific merit and value, rather than political ideology.” The post How Trump’s “America First” Administration Could Shut U.S. Scientists Out of the Next Nobel-Worthy Discovery appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Trump Administration]

— Ken Paxton Touts His Efforts to Fight Voter Fraud. His Senate Opponent Is Now Accusing Him of Committing It.

 

at 7/24/26 9:00am

Texas state Rep. James Talarico is challenging Attorney General Ken Paxton in a U.S. Senate race. Sergio Flores for The Texas Tribune The Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas is trying to turn a key talking point of his Republican opponent against him — alleging Attorney General Ken Paxton is guilty of the same type of voter fraud he has spent years trying to eliminate. “As our state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton has gone on a voter fraud witch hunt,” state Rep. James Talarico, who is challenging Paxton in the race to replace U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, said during a campaign event in Houston. “Turns out, he was committing voter fraud the whole time, voting illegally in six elections in a row from the wrong address.” Talarico’s comments come after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed that Paxton moved out of the home he shared with his wife, state Sen. Angela Paxton, in 2024 but continued to vote using that address, including during the March Republican primary in which he beat Cornyn. Three election experts told the news organizations that Paxton may have broken state law.  Last week, the Collin County Democratic Party filed a complaint with the Texas secretary of state, urging that office to investigate Paxton for election fraud. Paxton has repeatedly declined to answer the newsrooms’ questions about his voter registration and residency. On Tuesday, he held a rare news conference to tout the endorsement of nearly two dozen sheriffs and attacked Talarico as soft on crime. Talarico denied the charge at his own news conference Wednesday, saying he’d voted for billions of dollars in law enforcement funding as a member of the Legislature.  When a Dallas Morning News political writer asked Paxton why he voted in Collin County, the attorney general shook his head as a campaign aide interceded.  “We’re just going to answer questions on law enforcement today,” the aide said. Paxton’s office and campaign did not respond to similar questions on Thursday from ProPublica and the Tribune. They also did not answer questions about Talarico’s comments. The fact that Paxton voted in six elections from an address at which he appears not to live may resonate with voters because it reinforces longstanding accusations by critics that he has used his office for personal gain, said Southern Methodist University political science professor Cal Jillson. That was the central theme of the Texas Legislature’s impeachment of Paxton in 2023 on charges of bribery and corruption. The state Senate voted to acquit Paxton. “There’s been a whole series of legal challenges he’s been able to slip out of, but voters are at least vaguely aware of them,” Jillson said. The latest reporting about his voting practices “is just another example of playing fast and loose with a law you must be familiar with as attorney general,” Jillson said. Texas law permits voters to temporarily cast ballots using an address where they do not reside, so long as they intend to return. Election lawyers told the newsrooms that it is unlikely Paxton could make such an argument given his ongoing public and acrimonious divorce. (Examples of reasons considered valid include attending an out-of-area college or serving in the military.) It is unclear what will happen with the complaint filed against Paxton.   State law requires the secretary to “promptly” refer complaints to the attorney general if “there is reasonable cause to suspect that criminal conduct occurred.”  Secretary of State Jane Nelson’s last day in office was Friday, three days after the complaint was filed. Gov. Greg Abbott appointed one of his senior advisers, Robert Howden, to replace her. The office continues to decline to answer questions from reporters, but Collin County Democratic Party Vice Chair Mary Higbe said the secretary of state told her in an email Thursday that the complaint “remains under review by one of our staff attorneys.”  The attorney general’s office has not responded to questions about whether it received the complaint or whether it would hire a special prosecutor to investigate it, given that it involves the attorney general himself. The silence from the Republican-led state government suggests an effort to slow-walk investigating Paxton, said Jon Taylor, a political science professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He said that’s difficult to square with rhetoric by Paxton and the secretary of state’s office that securing Texas elections is a top priority. “You push the idea that you’re going to be really tough on election wrongdoing, and yet here you are with allegations in which you seem to be uninterested in pursuing,” Taylor said. “That smacks of rank hypocrisy.” The post Ken Paxton Touts His Efforts to Fight Voter Fraud. His Senate Opponent Is Now Accusing Him of Committing It. appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Politics]

— How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School

 

at 7/24/26 3:00am

Mary “Tracy” Morrison, moments before she hits a student with a plastic object similar to a pipe. The still is from a video that reporter Jennifer Smith Richards obtained as part of a ProPublica investigation into child mistreatment at Morrison’s school. Obtained by ProPublica. Faces blurred in original video. Vignette added by ProPublica to spotlight Morrison. The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain was set back off a country road in a white colonial house — such an atypical location that I first drove right by it, unsure that it was a school. I turned around, went to the door, introduced myself as a reporter and asked for a tour. I knew a student had been assaulted in this Arkansas school a year earlier because of some news reports based on a detective’s description. Once inside, I noted the preteens tucked into hammock chairs or sitting on the floor. I noted the cameras mounted in the foyer and classrooms, a reminder that, in order to fully understand what had happened, I’d need to see the video that had captured the assault.  But since this happened at the Delta Institute, a private school, I didn’t have access to the types of public records — incident reports, emails and video — that might have existed at a public school. The only reason we knew that something awful had happened here was that law enforcement got involved. I would have to keep reporting for weeks until the criminal case was closed. Then I could start pursuing the video evidence. I had come to Northeast Arkansas, just outside of Jonesboro, to report on private schools that have been opening in response to state legislatures increasingly setting aside public money for parents to spend on private education. Our reporting shows that more public money doesn’t necessarily translate to more transparency. In most of the states that ProPublica studied, private schools operate with little oversight. Unlike public schools, where everything from test scores to school lunches and staff credentials is regulated, most of what happens in private schools is not open to public scrutiny. In Arkansas, the focus of my recent story with Jodi S. Cohen, there are no rules about who can open a private school, and they can operate just about anywhere. The state only requires that private schools conduct regular fire drills, keep immunization records and have an American flag and a flagpole. It doesn’t review schools’ curriculum or the backgrounds and capabilities of their operators. There are no records showing that the Arkansas Department of Education investigated the Delta Institute or visited the school, even after police arrested its founder. When asked if the department had gone to the school, officials did not answer, but said when the department is made aware of issues, that “often results in a site visit.” Eventually, I was able to obtain video evidence recorded from inside the school. With the help of Arkansas Times reporter Milo Strain, I submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for video footage to the Craighead County Sheriffs Office and to the prosecutor who brought the charges on behalf of the state.  Now I want to share some of that footage with you. It’s sourced mostly from my open records requests, plus one video that was shared with me by a parent who consented to its publication. While the videos are difficult to watch, they are important in that they show not only the mistreatment of students at one particular private school but also the systemic lack of oversight that allows private schools to operate with few regulations and little monitoring. Private School Owner Mary “Tracy” Morrison Orders Students to Scrub Floors The owner of an Arkansas private school sent a video to a student’s mother last year to explain why the boy, a 10-year-old with autism, was being kept after school. Obtained and redacted by ProPublica. Two of the children’s names and faces are redacted to protect their identities. Early in my reporting about the Delta Institute, a parent showed me a video of her son’s experience at the school. It was taken by the school’s owner, Mary “Tracy” Morrison. She had texted the video to Renee Johns, whose 10-year-old son with autism was a student, as an explanation for why he was being kept after school that day. That video shows three boys scrubbing the floor and walls of a room in the school with rags as Morrison shouts commands and admonishments. You can see the boys startle and react as she raises her voice to them. It’s clear they’re being punished. Morrison was an occupational therapist and had never run a school before. But she sold herself to parents as an expert on autism and neurodivergence. Johns filed a report about the floor-scrubbing video with the Craighead County Sheriff’s Office. She saw it as child abuse. About three weeks later, in April 2025, a second parent came to the sheriff’s office to report another incident at the Delta Institute — this one also captured on video. Morrison Encourages Students to Assault Classmate Mary “Tracy” Morrison, an occupational therapist who founded an Arkansas private school in 2024, conducted a “group discussion” in which she encouraged other students to assault a 13-year-old boy. The incident led to criminal charges and jail time for Morrison. Excerpts of video from The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain obtained by ProPublica. Faces blurred in original video. A detective went to the school in April 2025 with a warrant and retrieved a roughly 40-minute clip of footage recorded by a camera in the classroom. I obtained that through a Freedom of Information Act request, and it’s really the only unfiltered view we have into the methods Morrison was using at her school. The video shows Morrison directing a boy to sit in the middle of a circle of 12- and 13-year-old students on the floor. Morrison then told the students to put their hands on the boy in the center however they wanted. One boy loops his arm around the student’s neck and chokes him. Afterward, Morrison gives the boy a high-five. Other students join in by hitting, punching and pinching the boy. Morrison encourages one, who strikes the boy hard enough that you can hear another student say, “That had to hurt!” Morrison Strikes the Student, Too Mary “Tracy” Morrison instructs a student to hit a peer while she watches. She hits the same 13-year-old student with a plastic cylinder, then berates him. Excerpts of video from The Delta Institute for the Developing Brain obtained by ProPublica. Faces blurred in original video. A few moments later, Morrison thwacks the boy in the center with a footlong plastic cylinder. She’s trying to get him to admit to being unkind to another student. Morrison was charged with 11 felony counts of permitting child abuse and other related crimes. She took a deal pleading guilty to one count of permitting child abuse and four counts of contributing to the delinquency of a juvenile. The deal allowed her to avoid a trial, which means the video was never played in open court. She was sentenced to 30 days in jail. I’ve been writing about schools for the better part of 25 years, often extensively about discipline and how schools react to student behavior. But what I saw in the video looked nothing like anything I’d seen before. I’d never seen a school administrator — the owner of the school, no less — shout at a child that he’s a liar or invite other students to put their hands on him. Morrison declined to speak to the detective who investigated the case or to the prosecutor. She didn’t respond to our requests for interviews and comments. Our only real insight into her perspective came in other videos we obtained: recordings of calls with her family, friends and school employees made while she was in jail. From Jail, Morrison Tells a Different Story In a video call from jail with documentary filmmaker Alysia Sofios, Morrison explained her goal in conducting the “restorative” group discussion with students. Obtained by ProPublica We got recordings of more than 500 phone and video calls that Morrison made or received while she was incarcerated in May. In a call with a filmmaker who has produced true crime documentaries and who spoke with Morrison about telling her story, we hear her explanation of what happened. Morrison describes leading a “sophisticated” intervention method in which she guides students at risk of becoming criminals in a “restorative” group discussion. “It was never about, like, ‘Go hit him,’ right?” she said to the filmmaker, referring to the 13-year-old boy she’d had sit in the center of the circle.  Morrison was released from jail June 1. The school’s new administrator said Morrison has “zero involvement” with the school right now. “I think she should be prevented from teaching anywhere in the United States of America and having children around if she’s going to try to influence them the way she did,” David Bailey, the detective on the case, said. “If we can’t protect our kids, who can we protect?” The incidents at the Delta Institute show how one publicly funded private school has operated with little scrutiny, even after a criminal investigation into student abuse. But our reporting has uncovered several other such schools, and I encourage you to sign up for updates as we publish more about what we’ve discovered across the country.  The school is still operating and is still eligible to get public funding from the state. This spring, though, it changed its name. It’s now called North Star Academy. Help ProPublica Report on Education Have you had trouble finding a school or using a voucher-style program? Do you have concerns about schools — public or private — in your area? Help us understand how families across the country are navigating their school options. Share Your Experience The post How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School appeared first on ProPublica.

[Category: Education]

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