ProPublica won two George Polk Awards in Journalism on Wednesday, with work recognized in the international reporting and political reporting categories. Administered by Long Island University, the Polk Awards honor intrepid, bold and influential reporting, placing a premium on investigative work that is original, resourceful and thought-provoking.
Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy won in the international reporting category for “The End of Aid,” a series that investigated the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and its consequences around the world. Andy Kroll won the political reporting award for “The Shadow President,” a profile of Russell Vought, the little-known Trump administration official who used his perch at the Office of Management and Budget to help expand presidential power. The article was co-published with The New Yorker.
In “The End of Aid,” a series of quick-turn scoops and intercontinental investigations, reporters Barry-Jester and Murphy developed deep sourcing and reviewed previously unreported memos, correspondence and other documents to understand the most consequential decisions and the people behind them. They named the officials behind the decisions and connected the resulting harm, including deaths of people who depended on the aid, to the U.S. policymakers and political appointees responsible. The reporters then traveled to war-torn South Sudan to document the return of cholera after essential services stopped and to Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, where more than 300,000 people saw their food rations cut after the U.S. severed funding for the World Food Program.
The stories sparked immediate outcry. Experts, attorneys, nonprofits and lawmakers asked the Trump administration to change course, and ProPublica’s reporting was cited in legal filings and congressional inquiries challenging the dismantling of USAID. Rep. Gregory Meeks, ranking member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, sent multiple letters to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, citing the coverage and pressing him to explain his claim before Congress that no deaths had resulted from the administration’s actions.
After Barry-Jester and Murphy discovered that USAID staff were told to shred and burn classified documents, legal experts filed complaints with the National Archives, and Democracy Forward and the Public Citizen Litigation Group filed a motion for an emergency temporary restraining order to stop the destruction of federal records. And after ProPublica raised questions about an Agent Orange cleanup in Vietnam that had stalled due to funding cuts, putting hundreds of thousands at risk for poisoning, the project received some U.S. funds to continue operating.
For “The Shadow President,” Kroll spent almost a year chronicling Vought’s rise from the mailroom of the U.S. Senate to his position as one of the most influential players in the current administration. Vought spent four years preparing for a second Trump presidency, playing a central role in Project 2025, where he helped draft hundreds of executive orders, regulations and agency playbooks. As the director of the Office of Management and Budget, he has reshaped domestic and international policy, from mass layoffs and aid cuts to the expansion of presidential power.
Drawing on 50 hours of previously unreported recordings of Vought’s private speeches and briefings, thousands of pages of documents and dozens of interviews, Kroll’s profile took readers inside conference rooms as Vought brushed off warnings that his cuts in humanitarian aid would cost lives abroad and revealed that actions previously ascribed to the Department of Government Efficiency were often driven by Vought.
See a list of all of this year’s Polk Award winners.
