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 FCC’s 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 FCC’s approval of the Paramount merger with Skydance, saying it “advances the public interest.”

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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.

“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.

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.

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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.

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.

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.”

The post For the Second Time, Lawmakers Failed to Fix California’s Warning System for Teacher Misconduct appeared first on ProPublica.

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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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 post As Trump’s Tariff War With Canada Drags On, This Border Community Suffers Without a Voice appeared first on ProPublica.

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 Kentucky’s 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.” 

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 didn’t 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.

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 we’ve 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.

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.

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.

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.

“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 you’re 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.

“They’re not profound and exotic, but they’re 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, we’re all looking to see how drastic of a change it will be.”

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 “don’t 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. It’s 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.

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.

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.

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 don’t think in the annals of the Department of Justice, in the history of jurisprudence in the United States, we’ve 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 Trump’s 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.

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.

“It’s 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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Sheriff’s 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.

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.

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!”

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.

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.

The post How Videos Helped Me Uncover Abuse at an Arkansas Private School appeared first on ProPublica.

I never thought I’d spend six months of my life investigating raw milk. But I did. 

In early June, ProPublica published a story I reported that features Mark McAfee, who runs America’s largest raw-milk dairy. The story came about after months of reporting on how the Trump administration’s policies were reshaping federal health agencies. My colleagues and I spoke with dozens of civil servants, many of whom described a climate of fear in which routine science had suddenly become politicized. 

One notable example they shared with me was raw milk, which most scientists and health experts agree has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its pasteurized counterpart and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness. 

But under the leadership of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., current and former government workers told me, the federal approach to raw milk was shifting to align with his priorities. In his new role, Kennedy said he was “advocating” for it and celebrated the release of a federal report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House.

McAfee, who counts Kennedy as a customer, has advocated for raw dairy for more than two decades. But only in recent years has raw milk, which once drew a fringe crowd, been thrust into the mainstream. More than 10 million Americans now drink it; national weekly sales rose by 65% from 2023 to 2024 alone.

McAfee’s farm is pulling in about $30 million a year. It has also attracted significant scrutiny: Federal and state regulators have linked his business to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that had left hundreds of people ill.

Raw milk’s success had confounded me: How had it gained such a foothold in this country, despite regular outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli? 

Speaking with McAfee seemed like a good place to start. The story I reported takes you through my extended tour of his farm, and I encourage you to read it. Below, I’ll take you through some of the highlights of my conversations and interactions with McAfee and contextualize them with my reporting. 

If you trust 150 years of bedrock science, there is little reason to consume raw milk. By definition, it has not been pasteurized, the simple process of heating milk to kill off harmful bacteria. Before the practice was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of babies died each year from illnesses linked to contaminated dairy. 

Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease, and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children. Despite stringent hygiene efforts, contamination from deadly bacteria remains an inherent, unavoidable risk in unpasteurized dairy.

Exhaustive reviews of the published science on raw milk have broadly been unable to substantiate claims of its benefits, and most experts agree that it is neither healthy nor safe to consume. But McAfee said his customers know better. To him, the stories of families who believe raw milk has transformed their health are their own form of evidence, revealing truths that institutions have failed to capture. “If raw milk was a fad or a lie, then why would people repeatedly buy raw milk and then tell the world how they love it,” he said. “Our consumers read their gut and watch their kids thrive.”

He also said the government hasn’t invested enough in research to assess its benefits.

In 2006, six people contracted E. coli during the first outbreak connected to McAfee’s farm, according to federal regulators; their median age was 8. While the outbreak’s specific strain of E. coli was not found in the products, some samples taken by investigators had high bacterial counts, indicating contamination. 

One of the children affected was 7-year-old Chris Martin. After about a month of drinking raw milk, he fell gravely ill with a dangerous strain of E. coli, known as O157:H7. Chris suffered permanent kidney damage. Now 27, he can’t drink alcohol and will spend the rest of his life under a nephrologist’s care because of his elevated risk of chronic kidney disease.

McAfee said the 2006 outbreak opened his eyes to the risk of his product and was part of the reason he developed standards for unpasteurized dairies. But more awareness and better practices didn’t stop McAfee’s customers from continuing to get sick — in 2007, 2011, 2012 and 2016 — and the farm had to issue recalls more than half a dozen times after pathogens were found in its products.

And then between 2023 and 2024, regulators linked the farm to one of the largest publicly known raw-dairy outbreaks in decades, with more than 170 people falling ill from salmonella. McAfee disputed his farm’s connection to many of the outbreaks, including this one. He maintained that regulators’ practices for tracking illnesses were not smoking-gun proof that his farm directly caused outbreaks.

At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have connected to McAfee’s farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized. The tally is almost certainly an undercount, experts and regulators told me. Many recover at home from foodborne illness and do not seek out testing.

Research has shown that raw cheese is not, in fact, resistant to pathogens; while aging can mitigate some risk, harmful bacteria can still survive the usual 60-day maturation process. 

So, when McAfee told me about his cheesemaking practice, it took me by surprise: The farm did what with that milk? I asked him about it again.

McAfee confirmed that milk with pathogens was used to make cheese, except for batches with salmonella, which he said were dumped or sent out for pasteurization.

I would later find out that the federal government knew that his farm was doing this. In 2024, the Food and Drug Administration discovered his farm had a “standard practice” of producing cheese from milk suspected or known to contain pathogens, according to court documents. It had told the farm to stop and destroy any cheese made with contaminated milk. That was two years ago.

The farm pushed back. It said it followed federal regulations by aging its cheese and said it tested all of it before sale. To force the farm to follow its orders and stop this practice, the government needed a judge’s ruling. But a backlog in the courts delayed the case well into 2025.

By then, political winds had shifted. The Trump administration had come in, with Kennedy at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services. (McAfee said the farm no longer diverted problematic milk to cheesemaking.)

While federal officials were gathering evidence against the farm, McAfee focused on the “education” of consumers. Online influencers were spreading his message to audiences of millions. 

In January, the government dropped its efforts to take action against the farm. A former federal employee with knowledge of the suit told me that cases involving raw milk were deprioritized in the new administration because of Kennedy’s stance on it. 

A Justice Department spokesperson didn’t respond to my questions about the decision, but said in an email that the administration will “always be concerned about risks to public health and will continue to take enforcement action as appropriate to protect American consumers.” 

The health department and the FDA did not respond to my attempts to seek comment. Kennedy, through his department, also did not respond to my questions.

McAfee called the withdrawal a “big win.” Drawing on ancient Chinese military leader and philosopher Sun Tzu’s teachings, he told me that he had learned to engage not in “their war,” but his own.

Just weeks after my visit to Raw Farm, federal regulators publicly linked its cheese to yet another E. coli outbreak. Nine people were infected across three states; more than half were younger than 5. It took 18 days for the farm to issue a recall, and when it did, it said it was doing so “under protest.” Raw Farm had tested its products, found no pathogens and wasn’t at fault, McAfee told me.

I asked McAfee whether the illnesses might be connected to his practice of using problematic milk to make cheese. But now, he told me a different story. “We would in the past divert to cheesemaking,” he said. “We no longer do.”

I brought up the fact that he’d made similar disclosures in podcasts in the last year and to me just weeks earlier. But he doubled down. 

“I think you have caught me in something where there’s an issue between practice and what I’m saying,” he said. “If I said it, I believed that at the time to be true, but I do know that now we do not use any questionable milk.” 

On April 30, the FDA closed its investigation into the recent E. coli outbreak in cheese without taking any enforcement action. McAfee told me his raw-cheese products were back in stores. Sprouts and H-E-B, two major retail chains that have carried his cheese, did not respond to my emailed questions about the outbreak.

The post 5 Raw Quotes From America’s Largest Raw-Milk Dairy Owner appeared first on ProPublica.

It’s been nearly two years since I started reporting on abuses of foreign farmworkers in Georgia. Some of the workers I tracked down had come to the U.S. legally through the H-2A visa program and were harmed and exploited by labor contractors — despite protections that were supposed to be guaranteed by the federal government. 

During those two years, I’ve thought a lot about how the government’s obligation to keep foreign workers safe has collided with another priority: to help U.S. farmers stay in business. 

Farmers have long pushed for fewer H-2A regulations. That’s in part because of the skyrocketing costs of the program, which sets minimum hourly wages and requires that farmers pay for workers’ housing and transportation. As one Georgia farmer wrote last year in a letter to the U.S. Department of Labor, “It has felt like every policy that pertained to the H2A program was made focusing solely on the benefit of the migrant worker.” 

All of that brings to mind a freezing cold weekend in January 2025, early on in my reporting, when I showed up at a farmers’ conference in Savannah, Georgia. What the farmers sought at that gathering — and what happened in the months that followed — exemplifies the tension between keeping workers safe and keeping farms solvent. 

Read more

My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed

After I made my way through a brightly lit convention hall — past the tractor salesman’s stall, the labor regulator’s booth, and tables of peach preserves and dried blueberries — I arrived in a room full of farmers eager to know what President Donald Trump’s second term would mean for an industry dependent on foreign labor and facing a rising number of bankruptcies. 

A small group of lawyers and lobbyists gave several presentations to the farmers. One of them vowed that Trump could “profoundly” change the program, in part by making it easier to hire H-2A workers and pay them less. And if the lobbyists’ plans were successful, farmers would save even more money by facing fewer labor protections for workers. 

“Everything is on the table,” said Braden Boucek, an attorney who has represented the farm industry in challenges to the H-2A program’s requirements. 

In the year to come, Trump’s immigration policies would drastically reduce the number of immigrants crossing the border and accelerate deportations of people without legal status living in the country. But one important pathway — the H-2A visa program — would remain wide open. And the administration, under pressure from the farm industry, would be quick to embrace the types of changes the lobbyists told the farmers about on that frigid January weekend.

To get the financial relief that farmers were seeking, three key things had to change with the H-2A program, the lawyers and lobbyists told the farmers at the conference.

The first was to overturn parts of a rule enacted by the Biden administration. The rule granted workers the right to pursue certain union protections, including ones that would shield them from unfair treatment by their employers. Farmers opposed the rule because they felt it would make it harder to run their businesses.  

At the conference, I listened as former U.S. Labor Department assistant secretary Leon Sequeira told farmers how several ongoing lawsuits could help “invalidate” parts of the rule. The previous June, a Georgia blueberry farm, along with 17 states, had sued the administration, alleging that the rule went beyond what Congress allowed. That lawsuit, along with two others, had led to injunctions that temporarily halted part of the rule. 

Sequeira, who is a lawyer in one of the three cases, later told me that the legal effort “isn’t about denying more protection for workers.” Rather, it’s intended to protect farmers from overreach by the U.S. Labor Department. 

“People can certainly differ on whether or not workers should receive more protection under the law,” he told me. “But as multiple courts have said, that is a decision for Congress to make in passing laws, not the agency.” 

Five months after Trump took office, his administration suspended enforcement of President Joe Biden’s rule. It then proposed to rescind parts of it. That proposal is pending.

The second change was to slow or stop wage increases for H-2A workers that had soared during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. After months of industry pressure, the Trump administration last year reduced the hourly pay rate, which it expects will save farmers more than $2 billion a year. Those savings are projected to cost H-2A workers up to 32% of their annual wages, according to the think tank the Economic Policy Institute.

The last thing I heard at the conference was an ambitious legal strategy to advance the interests of farmers even further.

One of the lawyers, Ann Margaret Pointer, explained that three recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings had together diminished the powers of the federal government. One decision limits the ability of federal agencies to create new regulations. Another makes it harder for agencies to fine companies that violate some federal laws. And a third makes it easier for employers to challenge federal regulations that had been on the books for many years.

Pointer said those decisions could pave the way for future lawsuits challenging the visa program — and could strengthen the odds of farmers winning those lawsuits. 

All three of those efforts were vital, she explained to the farmers at the conference, to “prevent some of the costs to comply with the H-2A program from falling on your shoulders.” 

I recently reached out to the lawyers and lobbyists who spoke at that conference to ask how they felt about their progress on the plan they’d described. 

Boucek, who is now a U.S. attorney in Tennessee, declined to comment for this story. 

Pointer and Sequeira both said that the Trump administration’s initial changes to the program improved the way it works for farmers. Sequeira also said that the changes are just the beginning of the wish list for the agriculture industry. 

Pointer and Sequeira said the larger changes the industry is seeking to the H-2A program will require action from Congress. They pointed to a recently filed bill that proposes to limit wage hikes, cut red tape for farmers and allow additional sectors of the farming industry to participate in H-2A. (Labor and immigrant advocacy organizations oppose the bill, saying it would harm farmworkers and would amount to executive overreach.)

Until Congress changes the statute, Sequeira said, the Labor Department “can only fiddle around the edges.”

The post How the Government’s Obligation to Keep Foreign Workers Safe Collided With Its Efforts to Keep Farms Afloat appeared first on ProPublica.

Over the past year, I’ve reported at length about crimes against farmworkers who have come to the U.S. legally from Mexico and Central America. 

I haven’t stopped thinking about how they suffered. Their wages were stolen, guns were pointed in their faces, and one woman I met was held captive, raped and nearly killed.

As I wrote those stories, there was something else I couldn’t stop thinking about — something I keep thinking about: Whenever I go to the grocery store, I have no easy way of knowing if the fruits and vegetables I put in my cart are part of the problem I’ve documented.

I eat a lot of blueberries, which happen to be the fruit grown most in the state where I live, Georgia, and the state where I tracked these abuses. During the long drives back and forth between my home in Atlanta and my reporting trips in the rural South, I had a lot of time to consider how little we know about the farms that feed us.

I struggled with the disconnect between the problems on America’s farms and the limited awareness of those problems in most American households. I felt that disconnect in my own kitchen, every time I reached for the berries in my fridge.

I wanted to know: With enough digging, would it be possible to determine if the blueberries I’m buying come from farms with a record of mistreating workers?

Federal regulators don’t require blueberry brands to disclose on their packaging any information about the individual farms they buy from. So I had to spend time — a lot of time — trying to figure that out.

I started by looking at labels on the blueberry pints in my grocery stores.

I snapped photos. I researched the brands. I read government records.

If you look closely, you’ll see that the pints often list the state where the berries are grown or the city they’re distributed from. But not the farm itself.

As it turns out, the pints sold by a specific brand aren’t always sourced to a single farm. To keep up with demand, and to help keep prices low, brands buy berries from a whole bunch of farms and sell them under a single label.

That makes it even harder to know if the berries you’re buying come from farms where workers were harmed.

I was able to trace one brand’s berries back from my grocery stores to an individual farm. I’m not going to name that brand, though, because its practices are hardly unique. 

Sure enough, I found that the brand did buy berries from a farm that had hired a labor contractor, and that contractor was responsible for some of the abuses in one of America’s largest labor trafficking prosecutions.

That case, which I wrote about at length, revealed that thousands of foreign farmworkers had been illegally charged fees by labor contractors to work in the U.S. Some were forced to pick crops for little to no pay in what prosecutors described as a form of modern-day slavery. 

This wasn’t the first case of the abuse of farmworkers at the hands of labor contractors. Or the last. Many of these harms might have been prevented if the workers had received the protections they were promised by the U.S. government. And there have been no substantial reforms to address the abuses, either.

The reason contractors exist in the first place is because farmers struggle to find workers in the U.S.

Many farmers speak only English. So they end up hiring contractors to bring foreign laborers to the U.S. and oversee their work.

That outsourcing can shield farmers from responsibility for — or even awareness of — harm against their workers.

Labor regulators have repeatedly failed to make sure that contractors do what the government requires them to do: keep workers safe and pay them what they’re promised.

Many farmers, brands and grocers were reluctant to talk to me about these abuses. 

I spoke with experts to see if there are ways for consumers to know if the people picking their blueberries are being mistreated.

Those experts, who study farm labor conditions and food supply chains, said the gold standard for preventing worker abuse is the Fair Food Program. Under the program, supermarkets and other corporate buyers commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, at a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices. 

For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. The stickers give consumers like me a clear indication that the workers who picked that produce were treated fairly. 

When I’ve found these tomatoes in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Dozens of farms have signed on to the Fair Food Program, and participation in it has been shown to prevent abuse in the fields.

But only a few small blueberry farms participate in the program.

Until that or something else changes, consumers will know virtually nothing about the farms their blueberries come from. And they won’t be able to make choices that could make a difference in the lives of the people who pick them.

The post My Maddening Quest to Find Out if Blueberries Come From Farms Where Workers Were Harmed appeared first on ProPublica.

For two sisters raised in a family of 11 children that moved back and forth between Washington state and South Dakota, danger didn’t come from outsiders like they’d been warned by their church.

It came from their brothers in the next bedroom.

Lynn said she was still in diapers when her abuse began. Two older sisters told her how they caught one of their brothers touching her. The sisters told their mother, but Lynn said her parents did nothing; the abuse continued until he was 16 and she was 10. Years later, Lynn’s sisters offered a devastating explanation for their brother’s behavior: They believed he had been sexually abused, though by a neighbor.

Read More

Young Girls Were Sexually Abused by a Church Member. They Were Told to Forgive and Forget.

Katherine, the family’s second-youngest child, said she was about 2 when it started for her. She was abused by a different brother. He, too, had been abused by an older cousin, she said in an interview.

Before long, the two sisters started to repeat the pattern. When she was 10, Lynn said, she took her younger brother out behind a shed and pulled his pants down. She’s blocked the memory of what she did next, but she remembers him running away. Katherine has a similar memory: She was 5 when she said she abused a nephew, who was 3 or 4.

Now 55 and 43 years old, Lynn and Katherine — whom ProPublica is identifying by their middle names because they are abuse victims — are still grappling with what happened. Each incident was met with a familiar, suffocating silence — minimized, forgiven and swept away. (Their mother and the brother who Lynn said abused her did not respond to a request for comment. Their father has died. One of the sisters who Lynn said witnessed the alleged abuse declined to comment, and the other is dead. The brother who allegedly abused Katherine has also died.)

The sisters left the church 20 years ago and have tried to address their trauma through therapy. They have chosen to raise their children outside the faith, hoping to break with a community that has shaped their family for generations and to protect them from repeating the same cycle.

“I can’t have my girls thinking that this kind of behavior is OK,” Lynn said.

Over the past year, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune have investigated child sexual abuse in the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. Reporters interviewed 20 former members who said they were sexually abused, along with parents of child victims, and examined police and court records. Collectively, they described a culture of normalized sexual abuse that spans across North America and multiple generations of church members.

Some child victims were encouraged to forgive their abusers, while church leaders who were told of the alleged abuse failed to report it to authorities — part of a religious doctrine some current and former members say has allowed that behavior to continue unchecked.

In many interviews, reporters found a common theme: Children who were victims of sexual misconduct went on to repeat the behavior. In remarkably similar terms, women from opposite sides of the country described being touched inappropriately by an older relative or acquaintance and then repeating the sexual conduct with their peers.

“This went way beyond just normal children’s curiosity,” said a woman who grew up in a church in Minnesota, and who said that she was first sexually abused by an older cousin as a young child.

In other cases, children who were preyed upon grew into adults who committed abuse. Both kinds of misconduct blur the line between a victim and perpetrator, experts in child protection said.

“If you’ve got a culture of child sexual abuse and looking the other way and brushing it off and forgiving quickly and not truly engaging in repentence, it certainly can contribute to sexual behavior problems of children, including kids sexually assaulting others,” said Victor Vieth, a former prosecutor who now trains child-abuse investigators nationwide.

Katherine said that since leaving the church she’s struggled with what to do with unresolved anger over what happened to her.

“This is in me; it has to come out,” she said. “But you’re just taught that that’s a sin, and so then as soon as you start to feel that anger coming up, you feel like shit, because you’re like, ‘I’m sinning, and this is the devil.’”

Even though they’ve tried to end the cycle of abuse, they worry they bear some responsibility for helping extend it.

Lynn said that, until recently, she’d never talked to her brother about what she did to him, worried that doing so years later could traumatize him.

“If he does remember, I really do want to take responsibility,” she said. “If I have to go to jail, I’ll go to jail, because what we’re all doing here is not working.”

Not everyone has broken the cycle.

Some people who were sexually abused as children went on to abuse others as adults. One was Clint Massie, who pleaded guilty to four counts of sexual conduct with victims under 13 in Duluth, Minnesota, in 2024, and is currently serving nearly eight years in prison. The police investigation into Massie offered a glimpse into his upbringing. Raised in an OALC family in western South Dakota, Massie told investigators in a videotaped interview that, by the time he was a teenager, he had already been touched in a sexual manner by relatives. He described it as a routine part of childhood.

“Kids our age, playing around, you know, being stupid,” he said in the videotape.

When investigators asked for more details, Massie described the conduct with other children as “stroking, getting stroked, sucking, getting sucked.” As officers pressed him about those experiences, he became visibly shaken, raising his voice.

“It does bother me,” Massie said. “It’s disgusting. It’s not fun to talk about.”

“Do you think that had an imprint on your brain?” asked one of the investigators.

“I imagine it probably did, yeah,” he said softly.

In another case in Minnesota, a church member went to police in January 2023 and confessed that he had inappropriately touched his daughter and fondled his young son in his bed, and forced them to perform sexual acts on him. The man told police he sought out the investigators because “he does not want it to happen anymore,” according to documents in his criminal case.

ProPublica is not naming the perpetrator to protect the identities of his victims.

The man pleaded guilty to sexual assault charges. At his sentencing, the judge noted that the man and his siblings, who grew up in the church, had also been victims of sexual abuse when they were children. The judge said it was “almost incomprehensible” that no adult knew what they were going through, adding that “faith didn’t help stop that.”

If he hadn’t turned himself in, the judge said, the pattern could have continued. “The kids would have just kept a secret, until it caused problems for them in their lives as adults.”

The accounts of Massie and the father in Duluth help explain the world Lynn and Katherine have spent years trying to make sense of. But the sisters’ lives took a different course. After leaving the church, they spent years confronting what had happened to them.

“Rather than teaching life skills and tools and coping mechanisms, it was always forgive and forget,” Lynn said. “So that forgive and forget thing was just like an umbrella forgiveness. Like it doesn’t matter what happens, if you forgive it.”

The use of Scripture is a common method to assert authority and prolong abusive relationships in religious communities, and it can also be a form of spiritual abuse, said Sandy Stevens, executive director of North East Wyoming Advocacy Resource Center, a nonprofit located near an OALC community. Far from being a resolution to moving past trauma, Stevens said, the forgive-and-forget doctrine likely harms victims more.

“Forgiveness without accountability is not healing,” she said. “And you can’t pray away a crime.”

Lynn has tried to warn people about the older brother who abused her. She said he teaches Sunday school at an OALC congregation. Eight years ago, another family member accused him of abusing her when he was an adult and she was a child. Lynn learned about the accusation from both her brother’s ex-wife and from the victim herself.

Lynn decided to help support that family member. She wrote a letter to the sheriff’s department in the county in Washington state where her brother lives. Copies went to two OALC churches where his family had been members and to the authorities in another jurisdiction where the abuse of both Lynn and the other family member occurred.

She said the letter was an attempt to force an intervention where the church had failed them as kids. The abuse she suffered at his hands, she wrote, had “greatly affected my life, my relationships, my physical and mental health.”

She wrote that she wanted to “make sure that you are aware of what has happened and try to do what I can to protect others from having to live this hell.”

She said she immediately got a call back from an investigator to acknowledge her letter. But the other family member withdrew her claim, the investigation stalled and she has not heard anything since. Lynn said it has been several years since she has spoken to the older brother.

Officials with the OALC church in the U.S. and Canada have said they do not believe sexual abuse is more prevalent within the church than in society at large, describing it as a serious and persistent problem that exists everywhere. They said they were not familiar with Lynn’s claims but said they were confident that local authorities would have “looked into this matter and that the local congregation will comply with their recommendations.”

Days before this story was published, Lynn called the younger brother whose flight years earlier to escape her abuse had haunted her ever since. He’s still a member of an OALC church; she asked if she could visit him at his home in another state.

“I told him that I had done something inappropriate to him when I was young,” she said. She told him, “‘I don’t know if you remember or not. I feel really bad, and I’m so sorry. It’s been been a heavy burden for me to carry.’”

When she arrived, she said, he hugged her and told her that her sins were forgiven.

“Par for the course,” she said. (Through Lynn, the brother declined to comment.)

Forgiveness wasn’t what she had come for. She wanted to acknowledge what had happened and say that if he ever wanted to talk about it — with her or with anyone else — she would support him.

“I don’t think we should forget,” she said. “That’s part of the problem. Forgetting is perpetuating the cycle.”

The post Children in This Church Were Sexually Abused. Then They Began Abusing Other Kids. Some Continued as Adults. appeared first on ProPublica.

On an island in the Bering Sea 1,200 miles from Anchorage, Alaska, sits an abandoned house on an abandoned Navy base. There is no furniture, and the wind blows through broken windows. The last people to live here moved away long ago. Yet a bright orange pipe with a black fiber-optic cable inside runs from the outer wall down into the surrounding soil.  

The cable was installed to connect the home to the internet after the base closed. It costs more than $340,000 per year to provide this building and hundreds of others — all but a few of them empty — with internet access no one says they use. 

The money being wasted is yours. 

It comes from a fee added to nearly every American’s phone bill as part of a Federal Communications Commission subsidy program intended to bring fast, affordable internet to remote towns.

Reporting this year by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found that the multibillion-dollar Universal Service Fund pays for what often amounts to slow internet access for customers who actually no longer use it. 

The FCC keeps the money flowing to telecom companies regardless of their owners’ track records. It kept paying a Fairbanks company to provide internet service while its owner served federal prison time for tax evasion. The government kept paying Alaska’s largest telecom, GCI, even after it signed a settlement for alleged fraud related to the subsidy. (The settlement said it was neither an admission of guilt by GCI nor a concession by the Justice Department that the claims were not well founded.)

Yet few places make the federal government’s failure to safeguard this money more obvious than Adak. 

Once home to thousands of sailors and their families, the island emptied after the base closed in 1997. While the state estimated the population to be 77 last year, residents themselves put it at closer to two dozen — meaning the federal internet subsidy to the local telecom amounts to about $14,000 a year per person. And, it turns out, there’s zero indication any of these people are benefiting from it. 

We know this because we flew to the island in June and visited every building the company itself told regulators it serves. We knocked on every door. Talked to every person we could find. 

Not a single one told us they subscribe to the island’s subsidized internet service.

Residents get online through Starlink, the Elon Musk satellite service that arrived in 2023 without any subsidy from the FCC. People here say it’s up to 40 times faster and costs $90 to $140 per month, compared with the hundreds of dollars a month that Adak Eagle, the local telecom, once collected from customers on top of its subsidy checks. (Adak Eagle’s website currently advertises internet plans for $99 to $550 per month.)

But the subsidies remain.

Like many Alaska telecoms, Adak Eagle was built on public money. It began in the early 2000s with FCC subsidies and federal loans to upgrade old telephone wires for fiber-optic lines that could support both voice and internet service. By 2011, the company was collecting $2.68 million a year from the Universal Service Fund.

A 2013 federal order determined company president Larry Mayes spent telecom subsidy money on a fleet of vehicles and a fishing boat that weren’t necessary for his business, and that the $237,455 salary Mayes paid himself one year was “unreasonable” and “disproportionate” given the size of the company and what’s typical for Anchorage, where he lives. 

(The company filed letters with the FCC at the time stating its salaries “should be evaluated in the context of a small company where each employee wears multiple hats” and citing the island’s “remoteness and harsh climate conditions.”) 

On top of the $3.6 million his company has received from the federal broadband subsidy since 2016, he also received $3.54 million from the FCC through a program that replaces revenue phone companies once earned connecting long-distance calls. The state kicked in an additional $3.75 million through its own subsidy program, the Alaska Universal Service Fund. (Some Adak residents said they continue to pay the company for landlines that they use as cellphone backup.)

When we first asked Mayes about the federal internet money, he hung up on us. He did not respond to questions emailed in May, a written interview request delivered to his Adak office in June or detailed questions emailed and hand-delivered to his Anchorage office in July. Reached again by phone on July 13, he declined to comment and ended the call.  

The one thing Mayes did say before hanging up on the first call: that he is playing by the rules of the FCC’s subsidy program, and if we had questions about it, we should ask the agency. 

We did. Repeatedly. About the publicly funded connections to demolished homes on Adak and other uses of internet subsidies in Alaska.

The FCC never responded.

Internet for Vacant Homes

Step outside Adak’s tiny airport terminal, and the scene is straight out of “The Walking Dead.” You can spend hours walking the city streets without seeing another human, the only sounds the dry scrape of tall grass and warbling seabirds. Stiffened copies of People magazine declare George Clooney the 2006 Sexiest Man Alive. A shuttered McDonald’s drive-thru still advertises 99-cent hamburgers. 

Subdivisions outside the city core sprawl like any in America, with neatly arranged ranch-style homes, powder-blue roofs, wide driveways and generous garages. After the Navy shipped out, hurricane-force Aleutian winds pried homes apart. The worst of it is in a beachfront neighborhood called “Officer’s Country” on old city maps. Bathroom mirrors and toilets and kitchen tables stand exposed to the rain in homes cleaved in half like dollhouses. 

Even in newer neighborhoods, we found rotted exterior walls with holes so wide you could drive a truck inside. Grass grew on living room floors. Bedrooms were filled with bird nests.

In the few homes the FCC paid Adak Eagle to connect that are habitable, the occupants have abandoned Adak Eagle.  

Henry Collins, 61, lives in one of those homes. He was partially blinded in a chemical accident years ago while cleaning a boat at the island docks. Now he and his wife spend their days caring for their newborn. Sometimes they FaceTime with his wife’s family in the Philippines and hold the baby up to the screen.

He accidentally cut Adak Eagle’s internet cable with a string trimmer. No matter. He never could afford the subsidized service anyway, and his rooftop Starlink receiver was untouched in the landscaping incident. 

One street over, 26-year-old Steven Ivanoff pays close attention to internet speeds because he plays Overwatch and Fortnite competitively online.

Before Starlink, residents said, Ivanoff’s former roommate and fellow gamer was notorious for using up the scant bandwidth Adak Eagle provided every time he went online to play. Neighbors hollered at him to get off the damn computer. Adak Eagle’s subsidized fiber offers download speeds of 1 to 10 megabits per second, according to the FCC National Broadband Map — far short of the FCC’s 100-megabit standard for broadband and, at the low end, barely fast enough to load a modern webpage. 

All that has changed. At our request, Ivanoff tested the speed of his Starlink connection using an online service called speedtest.net. He clocked it at a screaming (by Alaska standards) 447 megabits per second.

At another house, four dachshunds stood guard in a fenced yard while inside, an agent with the Transportation Security Administration who moved from Arkansas was playing a reality TV show on her widescreen — Starlink-powered, like everyone else’s internet.

Elizabeth Pryor has leaned into the isolation by starting a mini farm. In her solarium, a cardboard box trembled with teenage chicks, peeping under a heat lamp. No bears on the island, she said. So that’s nice. No foxes either. “But the rats ate my jalapeno peppers down to the stalk! Chomp chomp chomp.”

Her house rises across the street from a pile of rubble, the remains of a house fire. 

Both properties — the rubble pile and Pryor’s home, alive with puppies and chickens — are on the list of houses for which Adak Eagle received subsidies to connect to the internet. She doesn’t use it. 

Wiring an Empty Island

Adak was already a ghost town when Mayes’ company started wiring the island.

According to the U.S. Navy’s own Record of Decision on the base closure, published in 2000, “there was no established community on Adak” after the military’s departure. The Navy’s ongoing assessments documented houses being condemned and boarded up. 

Andilea Weaver, the company’s former vice president, said Adak Eagle began replacing rat-gnawed copper landline wires to Adak buildings in 2006 — nine years after the base closure. 

In 2016, Adak Eagle proposed a 10-year plan to receive new subsidies in exchange for connecting or maintaining lines to 346 locations, nearly every building left standing. The FCC agreed. The agency formally declared the new spending plan to be in the public interest.

The FCC in 2022 reduced the number of locations Adak Eagle was obligated to serve to 306 after the company reported some buildings were unlivable, but the agency left the subsidy amount unchanged. 

According to federal data published by the Universal Service Administrative Co., the most locations that Adak Eagle reported having broadband available was 283.

The buildings the FCC says Adak Eagle keeps wired for internet include duplexes, fourplexes and ranches where we found no sign of life. The agency shows connections at places where we found doors yawning open in the wind, hinges screaming with rust — no furniture inside, no appliances, yet in many cases, a single telephone still plugged into a wall.

Whether the abandoned structures Adak Eagle has prepped for low-speed internet can beckon new occupants is an open question.

Adak is so far west of the Alaska mainland that it’s in a different time zone. So far west that it’s almost in the Eastern Hemisphere.

The last vestige of industry departed with the closure of the island’s fish processing plant in 2020. Now the economy consists of a bit of hunting and bird-watching that lures a few hardy tourists aboard the two flights a week that serve the island. (Warning: Pack canned goods. The  grocery store and restaurant were closed our entire visit.)

Alaska’s Republican U.S. Sen. Dan Sullivan has argued the U.S. should open a new military base on Adak because of its strategic proximity to waters cruised by the Chinese and Russian navies. With $115 million set aside by Congress last year for “exploration and development of existing Arctic infrastructure,” a Pentagon-led task force is developing recommendations on how to proceed, a Sullivan spokesperson said.

After knocking on hundreds of doors and canvassing every subdivision, we spent our last hours in Adak checking to see if anyone was using the subsidized internet in the old commercial buildings and offices scattered around the center of the city. 

At one of the last addresses on the list crouched a cinder block building surrounded by pickup trucks and wide spools of orange piping — the same piping we’d seen leading up to demolished houses the day before. A rotary phone hung on the wall. 

This was the local office of the company we’d been examining. Even the people who work there have stopped relying on the internet service that you pay for. Above the front door, above the sign for Adak Eagle Enterprises, stood two Starlink dishes.

The post On This Nearly Deserted Alaska Island, You Pay to Keep Hundreds of Empty Buildings Wired for Internet appeared first on ProPublica.

Nearly a decade ago, a British court ordered a man named Sam Westrop to pay the equivalent of more than $173,000 in libel damages after he published an article on his website calling the founder of a London-based Islamic TV channel a “convicted terrorist.”

Westrop eventually admitted the underlying evidence for the claim was not reliable, according to court filings, and corrected the story on his website.

“There simply was no evidence to support the allegation of terrorism,” the judge in the case wrote.

Years after that ruling, Westrop made similar claims about a group of Islamic private schools in Texas that had applied to the state’s new voucher program. He alleged the school leaders had connections to Islamic extremist or terrorist groups, such as Hamas. Westrop shared his research as early as last fall with the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, which oversees the voucher program that awards eligible families taxpayer dollars for private education or homeschooling.

In December, acting Comptroller Kelly Hancock asked the state’s top lawyer if the agency could exclude from the voucher program an unnamed number of schools with supposed ties to the Chinese Communist government or that had hosted events for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Muslim civil-rights group. A month later, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ruled that it could.

Westrop’s allegations, along with claims made by several others, were among the primary reasons the comptroller’s office investigated the schools and delayed their admittance in the voucher program, according to new legal filings.

The scope of the investigations was also far broader than what was previously known, the filings show. The state used taxpayer money to contract with two investigators to dig into the histories of nearly 50 private schools across the state with alleged ties to radical Islamic organizations and the Chinese government — a number that far exceeds what has been reported.

The extent of the state’s probe and Westrop’s involvement are detailed as part of a new trove of legal filings in a lawsuit four Islamic private school campuses filed against the state comptroller in March after the agency initially kept them out of the program. It draws heavily on an eight-hour deposition of Murl Miller, the comptroller’s chief counsel for general litigation, taken in May as part of the lawsuit.

While the comptroller has since accepted all of the investigated schools into the voucher program, the schools that pursued the legal action are still asking the judge to certify a class-action lawsuit to ensure the comptroller can’t discriminate against certain private schools in the future.

“Religious liberty is not a temporary pass issued after a lawsuit,” said Eric Hudson, an attorney representing the Islamic schools. “We’re pressing on so equal treatment is the rule — not an exception granted under pressure.”

The comptroller’s office, which declined to comment for this story, has objected to certifying the lawsuit as a class action, saying it shouldn’t be allowed to continue since the four Islamic campuses were ultimately allowed into the voucher program. The state’s lawyers also maintain that a class-action claim is outside the jurisdiction of the current court and case.

“Plaintiffs received not only the initial approval they sought, but also the continuing ability to participate in the Program on the same footing as all other approved providers and families,” the state’s June 26 filing said.

The debate over whether to allow the schools into the voucher program has come amid a wave of anti-Muslim rhetoric among some elected officials and prominent political candidates in Texas and across the country. At the state Republican Party convention last month, members tried to remove Muslims as delegates. Dr. Rick Scarborough, a former Southern Baptist pastor, told a Muslim attendee he wanted him to leave the event. (Scarborough later clarified to The Texas Tribune he wanted him to leave the country and admitted he had some regrets about the interaction.) In November, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott designated CAIR a foreign terrorist organization. Florida’s governor soon followed with his own accusations. CAIR is part of a lawsuit against Abbott and Paxton challenging the enforcement of the governor’s designation, saying he issued it “without due process and in violation of federal law.” The case is ongoing.

In the months since the Islamic schools’ lawsuit was filed, the comptroller’s office has maintained that its leaders did not purposefully single out certain schools. Instead, agency officials said that the Islamic schools were swept up in a wider review of some 700 private schools that were accredited by Cognia, a nonprofit that vets tens of thousands of schools worldwide. The agency has said it did not know which schools had Islamic connections but instead set aside the entire group after discovering not all had up-to-date accreditations, which are mandated to qualify for the Texas voucher program. Cognia could not be immediately reached for comment.

Miller’s deposition, however, contradicts the state’s claim.

In the deposition, Miller said the agency began receiving information as far back as last summer that identified almost 50 schools with alleged links to the Chinese Communist Party or extremist groups. He also confirmed that the third-party researchers hired by the comptroller only examined those particular campuses out of the more than 2,600 private schools now approved for the voucher program.

The filing also said the comptroller initially approved at least one of the Islamic schools represented in the lawsuit for the voucher program, Bayaan Academy, then later removed it two hours after Westrop shared some of his research in January via email.

Miller’s deposition cited a range of sources that prompted the comptroller’s investigations into the schools, including Westrop, a regional Homeland Security Task Force launched last summer to “combat emerging threats from transnational criminal organizations in Southeast Texas,” congressional hearings probing potential terrorist activities in Texas and the RAIR Foundation, an activist and investigative journalism organization combating “the threats from Islamic supremacists, radical leftists and their allies.”

Miller spoke with Westrop on the phone at one point this year. He told lawyers Westrop appeared credible.

“Did you Google Mr. Westrop?” Hudson asked during the May deposition.

“I did not Google, no,” said Miller, who added that the investigators the state hired confirmed his credentials.

“Did they make you aware of a defamation judgment against him for falsely accusing someone of being a terrorist?” Hudson asked.

“No, they did not,” Miller replied.

Westrop, who could not be reached for comment, was hired this year by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, an influential conservative think tank based in Austin. He has continued raising allegations on at least one podcast that extremist groups will take advantage of the school voucher program funding.

Westrop later published his research, which he had shared with the comptroller, on Middle East Forum, a website founded in 1994 that “promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects the West from Middle Eastern threats.”

Miller said in his deposition that the comptroller’s office is “not readily prepared to do investigations and to do deep research into foreign terrorist organizations or any other accusation.”

The comptroller, instead, handed over the list of accused schools provided by Westrop and others to two third-party counterterrorism researchers, Reuben Katz and Lara Burns, a retired FBI agent who now works with George Washington University’s Program on Extremism.

Katz and Burns, who could not immediately be reached for comment, provided the agency with dossiers on each school. Their research included cross-referencing accused school leaders against government terrorism and extremist group databases.

The comptroller ultimately allowed in all of the schools alleged to have Islamic terrorist or Chinese Communist Party ties.

The Islamic school plaintiffs have said their inclusion in the program is still not guaranteed long term and they hope a class-action suit could help change the comptroller’s processes that allowed the agency to delay their admission in the first place.

The filing pointed to a March 24 letter Hancock sent the state attorney general, in which he continued pushing claims linking the Houston Quran Academy’s principal to the Muslim Brotherhood. In the letter, he says the school had been “temporarily” approved for the voucher program but called for its removal. (The school could not be immediately reached for comment; the Houston Chronicle previously reported that Principal Hamed Ghazali said the school has no ties to CAIR and is “purely academic.”) Hancock asked Paxton, whom the comptroller had been feuding with over the attorney general’s legal strategy in the investigation, to highlight what he called the school’s “terror ties.” He urged the attorney general to strip the school, “and any other school with documented ties to terrorism,” of its corporate charter. (Hancock has since announced he will step down from his position as acting comptroller at the end of this month.)

Of Hancock’s comments, Miller said in his deposition, “There’s a lot of mistakes and misstatements in this particular letter, but again, I’m not the acting comptroller.”

“We,” Miller said, had determined the accusations of terrorist ties were not accurate. “This letter came completely out of the blue, and — and so this was a surprise to all of us.”

An attorney for the plaintiffs asked whether the comptroller has the authority to remove a school from the approved list, overriding the agency’s own internal research. Miller opposed the notion multiple times before conceding at one point.

“It’s possible, yes,” Miller said.

The post How a Man Once Ordered to Pay Libel Damages Helped Launch an Investigation Into Islamic Private Schools appeared first on ProPublica.

For decades, the U.S. Department of State gave money to groups protecting free speech, human rights and persecuted minorities in poor and authoritarian countries. 

To decide what to fund, staffers with deep expertise typically pored over reams of information on abuses under the most repressive regimes and held an open competition to fund groups to work in those countries. 

This year, Trump administration officials presented State Department workers with their own list of organizations that should be funded. To the shock of many staffers and lawmakers, they proposed at least a dozen grants that would bypass the normal open bidding process. They also sought to give taxpayer dollars to groups aligned with conservative and anti-immigration movements in Europe as well as advocates for white South Africans, according to interviews and documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

Among the organizations appointees have considered funding in recent months are a British free-speech organization that has fought against bans on “gay conversion therapy” and an Afrikaner group run by a controversial figure who has called for self-governance of the white ethnic minority within South Africa. 

This type of giving would mark a stark departure from the traditional aid that helped torture victims and documented rapes, political violence and other abuses in some of the most oppressive countries in the world, according to more than a dozen former State Department employees. One new program with $4.9 million of competitive funding available to groups to develop “civilizational self-confidence in Europe” is slated for “research, conferences, cultural engagements, and support for civil society” in wealthy democracies. The call for proposals says recipients should “not attempt to reform the legislative processes,” but experts and lawmakers have expressed concern that the U.S. is seeking to influence politics in allied countries.

That emphasis on Western nations was evident in a grant the State Department has been working on for months to a fledgling British American think tank dedicated to “renewing our Judeo-Christian culture and civilisational mission.” After pushback from Congress, the State Department abandoned those plans in recent days.

“I’ve never before seen U.S. government funding for such groups,” said William Allchorn, a senior research fellow at Anglia Ruskin University and an expert on radical-right extremism in the United Kingdom. “It’s crossing the Rubicon, isn’t it?”

A review of proposed grants shows several are being directed to more traditional human rights purposes, but even some of those have raised concerns in and outside the State Department.

Strict agency rules have long required an open bidding process whenever possible to guard against waste, fraud and abuse. Generally, the State Department is allowed to offer awards directly to a single entity or to a small group of potential grantees in rare instances, such as when only one organization is capable of the work or an emergency necessitates providing money so quickly that open competition is impossible. It has also used such “sole-source” and “limited-source” awards, which are not publicly announced, in highly sensitive countries where openly working on human rights can be dangerous.

None of those justifications appear to apply here, according to contracting experts and former staffers consulted by ProPublica. The situation is all the more concerning, they said, because Trump officials handpicked the potential recipients, decisions previously made by a panel of government experts who evaluated applicants based on the organizations’ experience and qualifications. 

“It’s not good governance to have political appointees give grants to individuals for unknown reasons,” one former bureau staffer said.

Directing awards to organizations in high-income countries further complicates the funding. The practice is so unusual that an internal waiver justifying the choice is typically required. 

The State Department did not answer when asked whether it had sought waivers for the grants to high-income countries. 

During private briefings this month, members of Congress expressed concern over both the list of potential recipients and the plan to award no-bid or limited-bid grants, according to officials familiar with the closed-door meetings who weren’t authorized to publicly discuss them. 

In response to a detailed list of questions about this story, the State Department sent a short written response, noting 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.” A State Department official who declined to be named stressed that the process for awarding grants was ongoing and that multiple offices provide input. They also said the administration has serious concerns about the human rights situation in South Africa that need to be addressed. 

Asked about the potential grants, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat from New Hampshire and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, said Congress expects the State Department “to invest resources to advance human rights, democratic institutions, civil society, freedom of expression and worker rights” and that the proposals are “an appalling departure from that practice and an affront to our democratic allies.”

“These awards suggest that the Department intends to select awardees for federal funding based on their political ideology,” Shaheen said, “not in the interest of American taxpayers or national security.” 

Internal records and interviews show one of the key figures involved in the grants is Samuel Samson, a 27-year-old deputy assistant secretary of state who previously worked as a fundraiser for a group that aims to bring people with an “America first” worldview into government. 

On the day of President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Samson started work as a senior adviser to the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, also known as DRL, the State Department unit that selects and distributes the human rights grants. 

Over the past 18 months, he has courted far-right leaders in Europe, an area with which he believes the U.S. shares a “common civilizational struggle.” In recent weeks, Samson has defended the agency’s grantmaking plans during private meetings with lawmakers.

One group expected to receive a no-bid grant is the Free Speech Union, a British organization founded in 2020 to counter “cancel culture.” The group often steps in to defend people accused of being transphobic and has created a petition opposing the U.K.’s proposed ban on discredited therapy practices that attempt to convert gay people to heterosexuality. It’s unclear if the grant would go to the British-based organization or its international offshoot. The $5 million grant is to be used to combat “digital overregulation,” provide support for individuals facing “deplatforming” and advocate against “restrictive online safety and hate speech laws,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. Trump officials met with the group during a European tour late last year, according to Politico. 

Scholars said the U.S. government’s support for these groups could give them a layer of legitimacy they wouldn’t otherwise have. 

“We see them as intellectualizing or sanitizing radical-right ideas that are then taken up by the parties in power,” said Allchorn, the U.K. extremism expert.

The Free Speech Union’s website says it is nonpartisan and does not take government funds. In response to questions from ProPublica about the potential grant, the organization’s founder, Toby Young, said, “We have neither applied for nor been awarded a grant from the US State Department or any other branch of the US Government.” He did not respond to criticisms about the award or his organization.

The largest award the bureau has put forward this year, $40 million, is for the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was created by Congress and signed into law by President Bill Clinton. The foundation’s goal is to memorialize those killed by communist regimes and pursue freedom for people still living under totalitarian rule. 

The proposed sum is staggering to people familiar with the State Department’s allocation practices and would dwarf the organization’s budget. Victims of Communism has received a handful of government grants in the past, but for much smaller sums. Its most recent publicly available tax forms, from 2024, show its total assets come to about $12 million. Four sources familiar with the foundation’s previous U.S.-funded work questioned its ability to manage such a large award. 

Samson has a personal connection to the organization. The foundation’s board chair, Elizabeth Spalding, is a visiting fellow at a graduate school branch of Hillsdale College in Washington, D.C.; Samson was enrolled in the same small graduate program of the Christian conservative college as recently as this year, according to his LinkedIn profile (which is no longer publicly available). Spalding’s husband, Matthew, is that graduate school’s dean, and Samson has taken classes with one or both of them, according to a State Department official.

The State Department official who declined to be named said Samson’s relationship with the Spaldings had nothing to do with the grant.

The foundation’s proposed award is to “amplify the voices of dissidents and political prisoners while educating global audiences about the dangers of communist and authoritarian regimes,” according to a document reviewed by ProPublica. 

In response to questions from ProPublica about the award and concerns about its ability to manage it, the foundation said it was not aware of the proposed funding, but “if true, the 100 million victims murdered by communism in the past, and another 1.5 billion men, women, and children still enduring communism today will rejoice.”  

The State Department declined to comment on awards in process but noted that Victims of Communism has long worked with the State Department. “As President Trump has said, communism is a mortal threat to American liberty — and as Secretary Rubio has repeatedly emphasized, America will not allow radical extremists to undermine our sovereignty and national security,” the agency said in a statement. “Our foreign assistance programming is aligned to support our strategic priorities.” 

Trump officials are also planning to finance at least one organization to research crime and atrocities against minority populations in South Africa. This spring, DRL staff were initially told to begin the process of awarding funds to Lex Libertas, a South African organization founded by a prominent member of the nation’s white Afrikaner movement. The group, which claims that white South African farmers are victims of racial discrimination and violence, is fundraising to place 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall in remembrance of attacks on South African farmers. 

The proposed award to fund the South African crime research was later widened to allow other invited groups to apply for a $1 million grant, according to people with knowledge of the process. The State Department declined to say whether Lex Libertas will be among those invited to compete, saying the grant is still under deliberation.

Extensive research shows white South African farmers are not victims of crime at higher rates than other groups. But Trump has argued there is a genocide of white South Africans and is using claims that white people are subjected to disproportionate violence to justify cutting off South Africa’s funding for HIV treatment and research. 

Former diplomats told ProPublica that it makes little sense to focus on the victimization of white South Africans given the enormous suffering 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 told ProPublica.

Lex Libertas did not respond to questions.

One of the most controversial grants that officials singled out for funds was recently dropped, the State Department official told ProPublica. The decision came after Democratic lawmakers raised objections during briefings last week about the months-old organization and its agenda. That grant was to 878, a British American think tank created this year focused on “existential threats to Britain, to America, and to our shared Judeo-Christian civilisation,” according to its website. The sole-source $7 million grant aimed to advance “Anglo-American values” in the U.K., Europe and “allied partner countries,” according to a document ProPublica reviewed.

878 did not respond to questions.

Since creating a bureau to focus on human rights in 1977, the State Department has championed human rights and democracy in more than 100 countries. Its awards have sought to support documenting and investigating rapes committed during political violence in Burma; preventing torture in Tunisia and rehabilitating torture survivors in Syria; and combating pervasive sexual violence in Mauritania. 

Since at least 2011, as anti-LGBTQ+ laws and violence spread globally, the bureau added a specific focus on people persecuted for their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Throughout most of its existence, DRL has enjoyed bipartisan support. Democrats applauded its championing of international labor standards and marginalized communities, while Republicans favored its defense of democratic freedoms in China, North Korea, Cuba and other communist countries. As a senator, Marco Rubio was a strong supporter of the bureau and human rights broadly, once arguing from the Senate floor that safeguarding the freedoms of gay men who were persecuted in Chechnya — and all people — was in the national interest. In 2018, he urged the president to appoint an assistant secretary to oversee DRL, a post Trump had left vacant for over a year. 

But after Rubio became secretary of state in January 2025, the fate of DRL dramatically changed. Trump suspended all foreign aid in his first week in office. Within months, cuts by Trump’s newly installed Department of Government Efficiency decimated the bureau, and Rubio closed most of its offices. In April 2025, Rubio published a Substack post smearing the bureau he once championed as “a platform for left-wing activists to wage vendettas against ‘anti-woke’ leaders.”

Samson also sent shock waves through the bureau. In March, he traveled to the U.K., meeting an anti-abortion protester and the anti-immigration politician Nigel Farage. In his own essay on the State Department’s Substack, Samson lashed out at the U.K. for arresting anti-abortion protesters and at Germany for labeling its hard-right Alternative for Germany party “extremist,” likening the countries’ actions to the “censorship, demonization, and bureaucratic weaponization” used against Trump.

Meanwhile, DRL’s remaining skeleton crew was tasked with removing trigger words from documents. “We would try to talk about human rights defenders in talking points, only to have them struck,” said one former bureau employee, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution. 

“We went from having a real, dynamic appreciation for individuals and their human rights and fundamental freedoms to erasing that, especially if individuals were part of an underrepresented group or marginalized community,” the former employee said.

The bureau is working with a severely reduced budget — about $190 million compared with over $500 million in 2024. Now the administration is preparing to put money behind its new priorities.

“We’re just implementing the agenda of the president as we’ve been directed through the national security strategy and the White House,” the State Department official told ProPublica.

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The upstate New York city of Syracuse seems at odds with itself when it comes to a notorious miscarriage of justice. Nearly five years ago, the district attorney of Onondaga County, William Fitzpatrick, stood up in court and excoriated his county’s decision decades earlier to prosecute Anthony Broadwater for the rape of author Alice Sebold. With the DA’s support, the conviction was thrown out. Today, the same county government and that of its main city, Syracuse, continue to fight a lawsuit filed by Broadwater that seeks financial damages for the years he lost behind bars.

The conflicts, it seems, aren’t simply between criminal authorities, who view Broadwater as a wronged man, and civil authorities, who defend the original prosecution. A key expert for the city and county seems to be experiencing an internal conflict of his own — or, at minimum, a dramatic change in opinion.

Syracuse’s paid expert, a veteran Pace University law professor named Bennett Gershman, filed a report in the civil suit in December 2025 asserting that the city’s prosecutors “did not engage in misconduct” in the Broadwater case. But a little over a year before that, Gershman told me that prosecutors had “manufactured a case” against Broadwater, calling it “the most heinous kind of prosecutorial misconduct — when the prosecutor is creating guilt.” He went on to say, “‘Misconduct’ is kind of glib in this case. … It’s so much worse than plain misconduct. This is tyranny.”

In an interview for this article, Gershman said he changed his mind after delving deeper into the case. “The facts,” he said, are more “complex” and “nuanced” than how he initially understood them.

Lawyers on both sides of the Broadwater litigation declined to comment for this article.

Certainly, lawyers retain paid experts of every stripe for all sorts of actions. But it’s rare to see an expert take a position in court after expressing a different one to a reporter. “It’s not unethical to change your mind,” said Stephen Gillers, an emeritus professor and ethics expert at New York University School of Law. But, he added, Gershman’s reversal is “an embarrassment and it’s going to undermine his credibility going forward.” A potential jury in the case might wonder what he truly believes.

Rebecca Roiphe, a professor at New York Law School, who specializes in criminal law and ethics, offered a similar view. She called it “odd” that Gershman would “be willing to give such a strongly worded comment and then take a position as an expert on behalf of one of the parties. That in itself is problematic. It raises concerns.” She said she views the role of being a commentator for a news story as different from being an expert in a legal case. Commentators should approach the task from a starting point of neutrality, she said. Being an expert, by contrast, has an inherently partisan aspect. “I think it gets confused if you do both,” Roiphe said.

ProPublica recently published an in-depth narrative investigation of the original criminal case that examined multiple lapses in the prosecution of Broadwater and uncovered a broader failure in the criminal justice system in Syracuse at the time, which allowed one or more serial rapists to continue their assaults — many of which bore similarities to the one that Broadwater had been convicted of — for years.

The original case dates back to the early hours of May 8, 1981, when Sebold, then a Syracuse University freshman, was brutally raped in a park near campus. Initially, the police did not believe her, even though a medical examination and physical evidence supported her account. Five months later, Sebold spotted Broadwater on a busy street and believed him to be her rapist. She reported the sighting to police, and Broadwater was arrested.

From the beginning, the case hinged on Sebold’s testimony. But at a lineup, she identified a man other than Broadwater as her rapist. What happened right after that misindentification is at the heart of the current litigation.

In the view of the current DA, Fitzpatrick, the prosecution should have halted the moment Sebold picked somebody else: “You know, she didn’t pick out the wrong guy. She picked out the guy,” Fitzpatrick told me for the earlier article. “She picked out the guy that she thought had raped her. And it wasn’t Anthony. Case is over. Stop.”

But the prosecution continued. Sebold identified him as her rapist at trial. Broadwater was convicted and ultimately served 16 years in state prison, and lived as a registered sex offender for nearly 23 more.

How Sebold described what happened after the failed lineup identification has remained broadly consistent over the years. But there have been different shadings in the account presented in her 1999 memoir about the case and in her 2025 deposition testimony in the civil suit. Her memoir suggests she was influenced by police officers and a prosecutor. In “Lucky,” she wrote that after the lineup she “searched the eyes of the uniformed man for whether I had chosen the right one.” After that, she “felt a wave of nausea” and became convinced she had “chosen the wrong man.”

In her June 2025 deposition, Sebold testified that she knew before she spoke to officers or the prosecutor, Gail Uebelhoer, that she had gotten the lineup selection wrong. But she also testified that “there was no way for me to be sure at that time, and then certain things happened that kept reinforcing” that she had picked the wrong man, she said, including a look of disappointment from a detective and Uebelhoer’s remarks to her.

These distinctions matter because if police or prosecutors influenced Sebold, it could constitute misconduct. And what happened in those moments is particularly relevant because the prosecution made no attempt to pause the case or investigate further after the failed identification.

Uebelhoer had Sebold write an affidavit in which she explained that she picked the man who had been standing next to Broadwater because he was looking at her. They looked “almost identical,” she stated in the affidavit. Uebelhoer then told her, according to “Lucky,” that she had been duped by Broadwater, who had requested that another prisoner be included in the lineup because all the others differed from him noticeably in height or weight. “He uses that friend or that friend uses him, in every lineup they do,” Uebelhoer said. (Both men maintain they had never been in a lineup before. Uebelhoer declined to be interviewed by ProPublica. In a 2025 deposition, she testified that she had little memory of the Broadwater case.)

Sebold’s memoir later became a bestseller, and through a tangled series of events that began when producers decided to make a film version of the memoir, the book ultimately helped lead to Broadwater’s exoneration in 2021.

After his conviction was vacated, Broadwater sued the state of New York for wrongful imprisonment. The state agreed to pay $5.5 million in March 2023 to settle the case. The city of Syracuse and its surrounding county, by contrast, have so far resisted Broadwater’s claims in a separate lawsuit alleging that they violated his constitutional rights through a malicious prosecution.

Broadwater’s attorneys contend that the detective and prosecutor engaged in misconduct by making “false and highly suggestive statements to [Sebold] that led her to identify Mr. Broadwater in court,” and then kept those statements to themselves, which further undermined his defense.

That’s where Gershman comes in. As author of a textbook called “Prosecutorial Misconduct,” he is one of the nation’s foremost experts on the subject. The textbook catalogs the ways prosecutors can abuse their powers. He has also warned prosecutors to be wary of eyewitness identifications, citing them as “the largest single source of wrongful convictions.”

I had previously interviewed Gershman for a series I wrote on prosecutors who suffered no consequences when they withheld evidence or committed other transgressions. It seemed natural that he’d have insights on the Broadwater case.

When I spoke to Gershman in August 2024, I sent him the transcript of the original trial and the motions to vacate Broadwater’s conviction and asked if he could help me identify whether there were any elements of prosecutorial misconduct.

After he reviewed the materials (and also read a lengthy New Yorker story about the case), Gershman seemed beside himself. He told me that he had never seen anything quite like it in his 60-year legal career. “I can’t think of a case where a prosecutor has so clearly manipulated the witness into testifying against the person accused of a crime,” he said. “I haven’t seen anything so blatant; so grotesque as what I see here.”

That was 2024. Then came his assignment for the city and county and his 2025 report. (Gershman said he notified them at the outset that he had spoken to me.)

In his 2025 report, Gershman wrote that Uebelhoer had merely “expressed her opinions” about the lineup and was under no obligation to disclose what she said to the defense. She “behaved properly and professionally, and there is nothing in the record that could remotely be used to undermine her integrity and professionalism.”

When I called Gershman recently to ask about his reversal, he insisted that he knew “absolutely nothing about the case” when we first talked and had no recollection of reading the transcript. He noted that he had not yet read Sebold’s memoir at the time of our conversation.

His thinking, he said, had evolved as he studied the case more closely. Most important, he said, Sebold hadn’t yet testified in a deposition for Broadwater’s suit. “I don’t think it’s fair to say that I may have made contradictions between what we talked about way back then and what I later learned,” he said.

His new opinion fixates on the portion of Sebold’s 2025 testimony where she said she recognized her erroneous lineup pick on her own. In our most recent conversation, Gershman dismissed the account Sebold gave in her memoir and downplayed the parts of her testimony that were more ambiguous.

In Gershman’s view today, Uebelhoer’s remarks had no impact on Sebold or the verdict. Anything that the prosecutor or officers said after the lineup was “totally, almost, gratuitous. It didn’t have any bearing on her identification,” Gershman said. He noted that Sebold was asked at trial about her botched identification.

A few hours after our interview last week, Gershman called me again, unprompted. He offered what seemed like another zigzag. This time, he told me that Uebelhoer did, in fact, commit misconduct, but that it hadn’t affected the outcome.

When I pointed out that his report explicitly stated that the “prosecution engaged in no misconduct,” he said he now wanted to qualify that: “The prosecutors did not engage in misconduct, as I see it, which prejudiced the defendant’s constitutional rights. That’s what I intended to say.” As he summarized it, “She shouldn’t have said what she said, but it didn’t matter.” (Deeper in his report, he also referred to the statements from the detective and prosecutor as “irrelevant and incompetent.”)

Gershman emphasized that he had been asked to assess legality, not ethics. His assignment, he said, was to ascertain whether Uebelhoer should’ve disclosed her remarks to Broadwater’s lawyers before trial, not to render a judgment on whether it was appropriate to make them.

“I took a legal position that they didn’t have to be disclosed because they didn’t constitute Brady evidence,” he said, referring to the landmark Supreme Court ruling Brady v. Maryland, which requires prosecutors to disclose favorable evidence to the accused.

“I don’t do this for the money,” Gershman testified in his deposition, explaining that he was paid $10,000 for the assignment. “I do this because I’m interested in this kind of work. I’m an educator.”

Should Broadwater’s civil suit ever reach trial, Gershman will likely be questioned about his evolving positions. If that happens, one challenge will be to convince a jury that his current view is more believable than his previous one.

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