Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s vision for education was finally coming together. 

This year, the state launched a voucher program that allowed roughly 110,000 of Texas’ more than 5 million schoolchildren to get a private education using taxpayer dollars. Abbott’s loyal appointee at the Texas Education Agency, Commissioner Mike Morath, was leading the state’s largest takeover of public schools in recent history. And the Texas State Board of Education, with Abbott’s support, helped pass a controversial new social studies curriculum that required teaching Bible stories and shifted away from world history to focus on Texas and the United States.

On Tuesday night, as Democrats clinched nearly every office in the state, it all began to unravel. 

In a speech after denying Abbott a fourth term, Texas Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa called for a reversal of his education agenda. She pledged to fire Morath and to end the public school takeovers. 

Perhaps most significantly, she doubled down on a campaign promise to erase one of Abbott’s biggest accomplishments: school vouchers. 

“We will work tirelessly to repair the damage of the Texas voucher scam,” said Hinojosa, who did not respond to requests for an interview.

It is not clear how Hinojosa will deliver on that promise. While Democrats have the ability to restrict parts of the program, eliminating it would require legislative action.  

But Hinojosa will have help. 

Democrat Sarah Eckhardt, a former state senator who voted against vouchers and will now lead the state office charged with running the program, has said she will push changes to increase accountability and transparency.

Eckhardt, however, acknowledged the limitations of her office, saying that any big overhaul must come from lawmakers.

Democrats won back the Texas House for the first time in 24 years, but Republicans retained a majority in the Senate. 

Rep. Diego Bernal, the Democratic vice chair of the House education committee, seemed confident that there is a path toward killing the program, at least as it now exists. 

Bernal, whose district is in San Antonio, said some Republican colleagues previously told him privately that they had reservations about the voucher program, but were limited in what they could do because of pressure from leaders who have now been ousted. 

“I guarantee that program is not going to be untouched, and it will be probably unrecognizable, if not extinct, by the time we’re done with it,” he said.

Rural Texas Pushes Back

Abbott spent years trying to pass a statewide voucher program. By 2024, he’d grown angry at rural Republicans who repeatedly blocked such legislation because, they argued, public schools were a vital part of their communities. So Abbott shelled out millions of dollars to oust them from office and elect pro-voucher Republicans instead. 

He succeeded. And the following year, those Republicans helped pass the $1 billion state voucher program. This week, at least 13 Republicans who Abbott had previously endorsed or helped fund as part of his voucher push lost to Democrats or were trailing in close races. 

Abbott’s office declined an interview request, referring ProPublica and The Texas Tribune to his campaign office, which did not respond. 

His bullishness on vouchers turned off some Republican voters in rural communities that have historically been strongholds for his party, education experts and politicians said.

A Texas Tribune analysis found Democrats made striking gains in rural and semirural parts of the state, where concern over vouchers, along with issues like data centers, ran high. In rural counties, Abbott’s margin over Hinojosa fell 16 percentage points from his 2022 margin over former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, and it fell 20 percentage points in exurban counties. 

Former state Rep. Dewayne Burns, an anti-voucher Republican from a mostly rural district south of Fort Worth who was defeated by an Abbott-backed primary challenger in 2024, said many of his constituents felt betrayed by the governor’s push for vouchers. “That’s the first time that I think rural Texans really kind of stepped back and said, ‘Are you guys really supporting us?’” he said. “I think they overestimated the loyalty that Texans, especially rural Texans, had to the governor.” 

Former state Rep. Steve Allison, who represented a suburban San Antonio district before he was unseated in the 2024 primary, said he remains convinced his constituents never wanted the voucher system. Pro-voucher groups targeted him in a series of ads that attacked him for issues like border security and property taxes but said little about school choice. Polls at the time showed Texans held complicated views on school choice, with one University of Houston poll showing that while two-thirds of Texans supported voucher legislation, an equal number believed that vouchers would funnel money away from already struggling public schools. 

“I know what I saw when my staff took very careful notice of what phone calls were coming in and what emails and texts and visits were coming in,” he said in an interview. “It was clear that the overall district was opposed to vouchers.”

Concerns about vouchers became key in several rural and suburban Texas districts this year where Abbott’s selected candidates had won two years ago. One of those races was for Allison’s old seat, which pro-voucher candidate Marc LaHood won in 2024 after Abbott spent at least $700,000 supporting him.

Another was in Bell County in Central Texas. There, the Abbott-backed incumbent, Rep. Hillary Hickland, conceded a close race Wednesday morning. She did not respond to a request for an interview. Her Democratic opponent, Amelia Rabroker, a former teacher, said the Republicans’ heavy-handed push for vouchers spurred her to challenge Hickland.

“A lot of money was pushed into her campaign to make that happen, and she delivered on those vouchers, and it was very upsetting to the people of Central Texas,” Rabroker said. “I think it was a huge concern. The biggest.”

Similarly, LaHood, who did not respond to requests for comment, faced a flurry of questions over his support of vouchers at a candidate forum for the District 121 race in October. His opponent, Democrat Zack Dunn, said vouchers and public education were second only to affordability in the minds of voters he met. On Tuesday night, Dunn defeated LaHood with 54% of vote.

“Across the board, overwhelmingly the sentiment was, ‘We need to fully fund our public schools,’” Dunn said in an interview. “The voucher scam, the voucher scheme, the voucher vote that was taken is hurting us. It’s hurting us definitely across the state, but it’s hurting us in 121. Yes, we heard that over and over and over again.”

What’s Next?

Dunn said he would support measures that ensure more transparency in how taxpayer dollars are used for private schools.

Ultimately, though, he wants to see the program repealed.

Some changes can come through administrative actions by Eckhardt, the new state comptroller. In a news conference the day after her election, Eckhardt said she planned to rigorously audit how taxpayer money is spent and to release more information about the program to the public.

Under her Republican predecessors, the comptroller’s office shielded information that included data detailing how much state funding certain private schools received and how many students most public schools lost to the program. The office argued that it was protecting student privacy.

“As the comptroller, my job is to vigorously follow the money and report back to the Legislature if their investment is not panning out,” Eckhardt said. She added, “That is part of the vigorous audit and performance evaluation of this program that any comptroller should be doing, and I certainly will be doing.”

One key supporter of vouchers in the Senate, the last Republican bulwark in the state, is taking a more measured approach on the program’s future.

Houston Republican Sen. Paul Bettencourt, who led the effort to approve vouchers that had failed in prior years, said the Legislature will need to review the outcomes from the 2026-27 school year and assess the benefits and families’ concerns. He pointed to the fact that vouchers were returned by some parents whose children required special education services.

“I think that it has helped students in many other states,” Bettencourt said. “We need to look at what’s happened here with this first cohort, and we need to make sure that we’re debating not the emotionality prior to passage of a bill, but the facts of what happened after the passage of a bill.”

Scott Schneider, an attorney who represents private schools participating in the voucher program, said the midterm results shocked private school leaders. Some were counting on the state funding to support their business. He said private school leaders could start a lobbying effort to grandfather in the families already benefiting from the program, but schools are also planning for what they will do if the state funding goes away altogether.

“It’s going to be a hot mess,” Schneider said.

The post Texas’ School Voucher Program Could Be “Unrecognizable, If Not Extinct,” Says Democratic Lawmaker appeared first on ProPublica.

Jacob Hawk leaned over the plastic fencing to get Vivek Ramaswamy’s attention as the Republican candidate for Ohio governor moved down the line shaking hands at the Ohio University branch campus in Chillicothe, six days before the midterm elections. Hawk held onto Ramaswamy’s hand and started trying to tell him everything he was dealing with, everything he wanted the Republican candidates gathered there to help him with.

Hawk, 39, told him that he was a self-employed landscaper who was having a hard time with the high cost of fuel. He told him that he was raising three young kids from two different moms, mostly on his own. He told him of his worries for his 9-year-old son, who was autistic and underweight and suffered from a two-year delay in brain development.

Ramaswamy, a biotech billionaire, nodded and offered some token reassurance and moved down the line, toward the arena where he would soon be appearing with President Donald Trump and Sen. Jon Husted and the rest of the Republican slate in a state that Trump had won by 11 percentage points two years ago, and which the party had dominated during the era of Trump. I had been at many Republican events in the state over that time, including a rally in an airplane hangar outside Dayton in March 2016, where a giant crowd had roared as Trump’s jet had rolled into view and where he had declared that he had come to save Ohio. “Our jobs are being sucked away,” he said then. “It’s unbelievable what’s happening.”

This event was different. Ten years had passed, and gone was the fierce bravado of Trump the conquering hero, bristling with retribution and promises. This rally was populated largely by the same sort of voters who had been particularly drawn to Trump all along, working-class Midwesterners who had not been engaged in politics before he came on the scene. But there were fewer of them — the campaign had chosen an arena that held only 2,000 — and their devotion had been subsumed by uncertainty. They were still with Trump, but they weren’t sure how to reconcile their own difficulties with the fact that he was the president during this trying time.

Take gas prices, which “are beating the hell out of me,” Hawk told me. He was trying his best not to hold them against Trump and his decision to go to war against Iran, instead faulting Congress for limiting domestic oil drilling. “The president has to go find oil in another country because Congress won’t let him find it in our country,” he said, overlooking the fact that Trump’s party has controlled both houses of Congress during his second term.

Nearby, Debbie Shock, a 57-year-old mail carrier, blamed the high fuel costs on “the stock exchange, the markets — they’re the ones that control it.” “We have oil right here in the U.S.,” she said. “Why are we buying it from other countries to begin with?”

Shock fit a profile I had gotten to know well in 2016: an Obama-Trump voter. She was loyal to Trump — “I like the man. Nobody’s perfect, you know what I mean?” — and told me she would never go back to Democrats now. Why not? I asked. “They’re covering up the child molestation,” she said. What did she mean by that? “I’ve heard stories about the sex trafficking. The Clintons are involved in it, Disney World, you know, all that.”

It would be easy to ridicule such murky talk, yet it was not much less coherent than what soon emerged on the arena stage, which was streamed on a large screen for the few hundred of us who were out on the lawn outside the arena. Trump has never been known for structured oratory, but it is hard to overstate the extent to which his digressive style has advanced since 2016, and to convey how surreal it is to experience firsthand, as the reality of what presidential communication has come to in 2026.

The rally opened with the customary introductory video of late-era Trump, an explicitly messianic framing: “God said, ‘I need someone who will be strong and courageous,’” the voice-over intones. “So God made Trump.”

Thus introduced, Trump opened his remarks with a lengthy disquisition on Husted’s body, which had newly become part of his routine. “I looked at Jon and studied his physique,” he cooed, after referring to his recent comments on Husted’s “ass.” “I studied the feet, the legs, the shoulders. I tapped him on the shoulder, and it was like hitting a piece of steel.”

When a protester inside the arena started shouting something — those of us outside couldn’t hear what — and was removed, Trump bid him good riddance: “Now he goes home and his boyfriend gets upset with him.”

There were protesters outside, too, and things were starting to heat up between them and the supporters. “What are you talking about, ‘boyfriend?’” shouted one protester, a young man. “He was just talking about Jon Husted’s ass! That’s not gay??”

A supporter in front of me, a bearded man in his 50s, stewed as he watched the protesters. “You’re going to see someone dropping like a bad habit,” he growled, as he started to move toward them, before being held back by the woman who was with him.

A moment later, Trump had moved on to Jeffrey Epstein, saying that the Democrats had protected him for years. “I threw Jeffrey Epstein the hell out of Mar-a-Lago,” he declared. “I was the one who was totally exonerated from him. But they use it, because that’s what they do. They’re sick, weak people.”

This set off a new round of shouting outside, as cries of “pedophiles!” flew back and forth.

Suddenly, one Trump supporter near me rushed hard at a protester and knocked him to the ground, his head landing with such a thud on the blacktop that I initially thought it might be a suppressed gunshot. Dozens of officers swarmed to the spot. Cameras flashed.

A few moments later, a couple other protesters, also young men, began railing against the war against Iran. “We’re going to be the ones sent off to die for Israel,” one shouted. “‘America First,’ and you want me to die in the Middle East?”

Trump touched on the war — “they’re getting beaten very badly” — but spent far more time on his home renovations. “The White House has to be beautiful outside, it needs that exterior plaster. The bricks were falling, the stone was broken, the monuments were coming off, the beautiful windows were cracked, it looked terrible, and I fixed it very inexpensively, and now it’s more beautiful than ever,” he said. “And President Obama, who doesn’t understand cleanliness, who doesn’t understand broken cracked stone and sidewalks, who doesn’t understand that having asphalt going to your main entrance is not the right thing, we’d like to have granite and marble we’d like to have it look nice, you don’t use asphalt, you use asphalt for your streets. …”

On the ramble went. To the Haitians in nearby Springfield: “The town went from no crime to high crime,” but “they’re being moved out.” To a riff on Ramaswamy’s ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s mother calling her a liar, in apparent reference to Acton’s having accused her stepfather of raping her when she was 12, as he was subsequently charged with doing. The ad had met with widespread opprobrium, but Trump defended Ramaswamy. “The mother said that Amy Acton, the daughter, is a liar, that she is no good. … How the hell is that his problem?” To “O Canada, which has been ripping us off for years,” and Somalia, “which isn’t even a country,” and “transgender mutilization,” and his plan to rename the Strait of Hormuz for himself.

Finally, Trump ceded the stage to Husted and Ramaswamy. But by then, the lawn had emptied out as people drifted home, Jacob Hawk among them. A vendor was shouting out discount prices on his MAGA merchandise. “$10 special on hats! All the hats are $10! These are normally $25 hats. That’s a good hat for $10.”

The next day, the full Republican slate of statewide candidates appeared, sans Trump, at a small pep rally inside a former Delphi auto-parts factory in Vandalia, outside Dayton. It is an enormous building that employed more than 100 prior to its closing in 2009 and is now being used as a warehouse by a company that sells air conditioners, employing only 10 or so; Delphi announcements still remained on the bulletin boards, adding a ghostly feel.

The setting was an unintentional reminder of what Ohio has been through. Between 2000 and 2025, the state lost 300,000 manufacturing jobs, a devastation that had made it highly susceptible to Trump’s message in 2016. But Republicans have been in charge of the state since 2010, and so it was the task of the candidates gathered there, with an audience of just a few dozen, to cast the state as being on an upswing. Complicating this challenge is the fact that so much of the state’s recent growth has been concentrated in the Columbus area: countless data centers, defense contractor Anduril, a massive Intel plant under construction.

The bigger challenge, though, was the nationwide pall that hung over the event: the reality of stubbornly high inflation and high gas prices, the latter a direct consequence of Trump’s decision to go to war with Iran. He had stood against costly foreign entanglements when he ran in 2016, in opposition to his party’s recent record, and carried that same banner again in 2024. But another aspect of his political persona had prevailed: a heedless swagger that, in this case, had been fanned by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. It had led him into this drawn-out conflict that has already cost U.S. taxpayers more than $47 billion.

And it had left a long row of Republican candidates standing in this giant building stacked high with made-in-China air conditioners all but pleading the small assemblage to save them from the political climate. “You can’t give up,” Husted said. “This is a Republican state, and the only way Democrats can win is if Republicans don’t vote.”  

Five days later, I was in York County, Pennsylvania, which Trump had won by 25 points in 2024, and which was home to one of four Republican-held House districts targeted by Democrats. I chose to go to a precinct on the outskirts of York, thinking it would offer a diverse cross-section, in between more Democratic York proper and more Republican rural areas. But over 90 minutes of conversations, I didn’t encounter a Republican voter until I was about to call it a day.

The first person I spoke with, Bill, a 52-year-old state government employee who asked that I not use his last name for fear of losing his job, had voted for Trump three times. He hardly considered himself MAGA but was drawn in 2016 to Trump’s “drain the swamp” rhetoric and his disavowal of the war in Iraq. He voted for him again in 2020 and 2024 because he didn’t think much of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.

But on this day, Bill was coming to vote against his Republican representative, Scott Perry, because he was too “Trump adjacent.” Bill had finally had enough of Trump, especially when it came to all the revelations of self-dealing involving his family and cronies. “I will not be falling for him again,” he told me. “Drain the swamp, no wars. … It was all a lie.”

He said he couldn’t understand how Trump had gone from America First to seemingly letting the country’s foreign policy be dictated by Israel. He said that he was voting for the Democrats mainly just for the sake of “gridlock,” as deliberate blockage. “Someone’s got to stop this,” he said. “It’s getting out of control.”

Each Democratic voter I spoke with after that was coming with their own motivation for voting against the Republican slate, like the cast of “Murder on the Orient Express.”

For Annie (who also asked that I not use her last name), it was for Trump’s social-welfare cuts, which had cost her and her disabled husband $300 per month in SNAP benefits and nearly cost them their Medicaid coverage.

For Desiree Edmonds, an elementary school teacher, it was high inflation, which was translating into anxiety among the working-class children in her classroom.

For Mark Castillo, a 19-year-old ironworker, it was for the sky-high cost of diesel.

For Jacqueline Jimenez, a native Puerto Rican who worked as a home-health aide, it was for the excessive harshness of ICE arrests.

For Shiri Kramer, a warehouse worker, it was for the general meanness emanating from the administration, which made her think of her grandfather, a Jewish American who had extended mercy to German POWs during World War II. “My grandfather would be writhing right now,” she said. “Nothing happening in our country is OK.” 

By night’s end, Republicans had lost this Pennsylvania district by 10 points, as well as the other three in the state and more than 40 nationwide. They had lost at least seven Senate seats, even in states where Democrats hadn’t prevailed in decades — Kansas, Texas, South Carolina. Incredibly, even Mississippi was on the verge. In Ohio, Republicans lost the race for Senate and governor — only one of the seven statewide candidates on stage at the warehouse emerged a victor — as well as two Republican-held House seats, a stark reversal in a state that had seemed to be trending away from Democrats for good. In all, Democrats flipped five governorships and up to 12 state legislative chambers. The Democratic popular-vote margin in congressional races nationwide was 13 percentage points — nearly double the Republican margin in their own wave years of 2010 and 1994, and approaching the scale of the historic Democratic rout in the post-Watergate election of 1974.

The particularly stunning loss of the South Carolina seat brought to mind a warning issued in May 2016 by Lindsey Graham, whose death this July left the seat vacant. “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it,” Graham tweeted in 2016. For years, the Republican Party had avoided the catastrophic reckoning he warned of — through Trump’s narrow win in 2016, through the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the Capitol, through Biden’s fateful insistence on running for reelection at age 81 in 2024. Along the way, much of the party, including Graham himself, had accommodated itself to Trump. One way of looking at the 2026 results was that the warning had finally come true. The reckoning had been delayed by a decade, but it had gathered more force over time, like a boulder rolling downhill.

There was a hint of such a reckoning in the words that Bill, the three-time Trump voter, left me with in York. After he returned from voting, he bade me farewell with a parting regret.

“You see what’s going on,” he said, “and you’re like, ‘What the hell did I do?’”

The post On the Ground in the Final Days Before Trump’s Midterm Debacle appeared first on ProPublica.

The Trump administration has likened the need to build out the nation’s artificial intelligence infrastructure to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb.

The White House’s point person on the effort, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has spoken of the “AI arms race” with China as an existential issue for the nation. “AI is manufacturing intelligence, and, if we don’t manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, it affects every job, every company and every industry,” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025.

But advancing the administration’s AI objectives also could benefit Burgum’s own finances.

Much of his wealth is held in Arthur Ventures, an investment firm he co-founded, according to his 2026 financial disclosure form, which has not been previously reported. Between $18.1 million and $64.4 million of those investments are in AI companies, according to an analysis of the companies’ marketing materials shared with ProPublica by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks. (Government financial disclosure forms allow filers to report wide ranges instead of the specific value of their investments.)

Burgum made his fortune 25 years ago when he sold a software company to Microsoft and has remained heavily invested in technology. In the year before joining the administration, when he was North Dakota’s governor, he made between $2.1 million and $11 million in capital gains from AI-related investments, Save Our Parks’ analysis showed. In 2025, he sold millions of dollars of stocks and equity in AI companies, bringing in capital gains worth between $2.5 million and $15.1 million.

In the ethics agreement Burgum signed as part of his Senate confirmation, he agreed to resign from his positions at Arthur but not give up his financial interests there.

“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement. “Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”

Officials across the Trump administration also stand to profit from the White House’s support for AI and data centers. For example, 380 of President Donald Trump’s political appointees or their spouses hold stocks or have other financial connections to Nvidia, which has become the world’s most valuable company thanks to the data center boom. More than 320 have ties to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which plans to spend at least $195 billion this year building data centers and AI-related technology. And more than 240 are invested in or otherwise have financial ties to Meta Platforms, which is developing a “fleet” of data centers. This is according to an analysis of records added last week to the Trump Team Financials database developed by ProPublica to make accessible the financial disclosures of administration officials.

Read More

Explore Financial Disclosures From President Trump and 2,300 of His Appointees

Federal officials’ activities are governed by a criminal statute that sets a high burden of proof for potential wrongdoing — for example, approving permits for a company in which they are substantially invested, multiple ethics professors and lawyers told ProPublica. They said that Burgum’s investments appear to be acceptable under this law.

But ethics rules that do not carry criminal penalties also apply, explained Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group. These rules, she said, “instruct officials not to work on anything that would create the appearance of a conflict of interest.” She said this would include Burgum’s support for data centers on federal land while holding investments in AI.

Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, agreed that Burgum should avoid making decisions benefiting an industry in which he is heavily invested. “I, as the ethics lawyer, would insist he stay away from it,” Painter said. “In the Bush administration, the answer would’ve been ‘he has to recuse,’ I can guarantee you that.”

A review of recent Interior Department secretaries’ financial holdings suggests it’s common to have some potential conflicts, but Trump’s appointees are more heavily invested in the industries they oversee than their predecessors. Deb Haaland, President Joe Biden’s appointee, held no direct financial investments in companies the department regulated. President Barack Obama’s first appointee, Ken Salazar, listed ownership of his family’s ranch but few other investments. Obama’s second appointee, Sally Jewell, held stocks in oil and gas, which she agreed to divest as a condition of her confirmation.

Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt served as Interior Department secretaries during Trump’s first term. The former was found by the agency’s Office of Inspector General to have improperly assisted a development in his hometown, while the latter had so many potential conflicts that he reportedly carried a card listing them. (Zinke said the OIG investigation was a political attack, while Bernhardt recused himself from several decisions in which there would have been clear conflicts.)

More recently, as the effort to build data centers has run headlong into broad public opposition, the current administration has offered federally managed public lands to them. Unlike local or state processes, where concerns about water use, power consumption and the lack of transparency around permitting have slowed or halted projects, the public has less ability to stop them on federal property. The Interior Department oversees most of this land.

A little-noticed U.S. Geological Survey report released earlier this year found at least 91.3 million acres of public lands managed by the Interior Department — an area comparable to Montana — could potentially host data centers.

The department’s mandate includes overseeing tribal affairs, managing national parks, regulating extractive industries like coal and operating dams across the West. Burgum, though, is spending significant time on other things. This includes meeting with representatives of companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet more than 20 times from January through November 2025, according to a compilation of his schedules shared with ProPublica by public interest watchdog group Public Citizen.

In response, several Democratic senators sent a letter to Burgum in October saying, “We demand that you immediately cease all efforts to hijack public lands for the development of data centers, and urge you to provide full transparency on your role in the DOI’s efforts to site data centers.”

Some of Burgum’s meetings have been previously unreported, including a June 2025 dinner with a high-ranking United Arab Emirates delegation in the wine room of the upscale Italian restaurant Cafe Milano in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. The small guest list included the United Arab Emirates’ AI lead, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, as well as Amos Hochstein, a prominent American proponent of AI data centers via his investment firm TWG Global.

Several months later, Burgum signed a memorandum of understanding with the Emirati delegation, pledging to work together to deploy AI.

Neither the Emirati Embassy nor TWG Global responded to requests for comment.

The Interior Department spokesperson said that Burgum “is responsible for helping unleash American energy production and ensuring our nation has the resources and infrastructure necessary to lead the future. That mission requires engagement with industry leaders, stakeholders, and international partners.”

In an August Fox News appearance to promote the administration’s AI efforts, Burgum was asked about the network’s poll showing 70% of voters opposed data centers. He countered by alleging that “foreign influence” and “misinformation” had played a large role in fueling public opposition.

Jayson O’Neill, a spokesperson for Save Our Parks, said Burgum and others in the administration are out of touch with public concerns. “His almost myopic focus on artificial intelligence and the data center build-out at the expense of our public lands serves not only the globalist tech titans behind and within the Trump administration, but also him and the tens of millions of dollars of his own personal wealth invested in the industry.”

Potential Conflicts of Interest Across the Administration

Across the administration, political appointees whose offices have AI business before them hold significant investments in the industry.

Steve Pearce is director of the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that administers more land than any other entity in the country. The former New Mexico representative was confirmed over Democrats’ concerns that he favors selling public lands and that his career in oil and gas presents a conflict of interest involving an industry the agency regulates.

But public lands advocates say his AI investments now worry them. Pearce owned stock in Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet and other AI-focused companies, according to his most recent publicly available financial disclosure, signed in October 2025. He also is invested in Titan Development, a real estate company that has managed several land acquisitions for data centers in the Southwest. (He pledged to divest many of his AI investments, but not Titan.)

An agency spokesperson pushed back on the concerns. “Director Pearce complies with all applicable federal ethics requirements and financial disclosure obligations,” the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that “conflating lawful disclosure of financial holdings with an actual conflict of interest ignores the federal ethics framework designed to identify and address precisely these questions.”

The BLM is reviewing permit applications for about 15 data centers and 17 associated infrastructure projects, including nuclear power plants and transmission wires, in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. This is according to an agency spokesperson and its Mineral & Land Records System.

The project that was to be the first data center on BLM land, near Boulder City in southern Nevada, had earned a permit to build a solar plant, before changing its plans. The BLM approved the change in June without studying the potential environmental implications. (An Interior Department appeals board has since paused the project, sending it back to the agency for further review.)

Meanwhile, it remains unclear how much the public will benefit from data centers on BLM land. The foundational federal land management law was passed in 1976, so it does not envision data centers. Even so, the department said it is relying on this statute to permit data centers.

Businesses pay the government to use public land. Oil and gas drillers pay a royalty on each barrel they produce. Solar power plants pay a per-megawatt fee.

For data centers, the main charge appears set to be an “annual fair-market-value rent,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. But such rental fees can be quite low, so the economic benefit to the public won’t be known until the data centers are permitted.

Another key official with a land management agency who’s heavily invested in AI is Michael Boren. He first served as acting assistant secretary of the Interior Department before transitioning to U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary, where he oversees the Forest Service, second only to the BLM in the land area it stewards.

Among his many investments in AI companies, Boren reported between about $1.5 million and $6.1 million worth of financial interests in Elon Musk’s xAI, which has since been acquired by SpaceX. Additionally, he has up to $500,000 invested in Valar Atomics, which is pushing to build a data center complex called Project Beehive on thousands of acres of BLM land in Utah, complete with more than 450 small nuclear plants to power it.

“Undersecretary Boren has fully complied with all federal ethics laws and requirements and will continue to follow the advice of USDA’s excellent ethics attorneys,” an Agriculture Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Lee Zeldin, whom Trump appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency, has also emerged as a major AI booster. He too has dabbled in AI investments. Zeldin’s financial disclosure forms reveal that in May 2025 he bought and sold up to $15,000 worth of shares of Datavault AI, a company selling AI-, data- and blockchain-based products.

“Administrator Zeldin followed every ethical rule to a tee in his disclosure without exception,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. The agency added that he was cleared by its ethics officials and that he has no obligation to explain such transactions.

The EPA under Zeldin has taken steps to minimize oversight of data centers and power plants built nearby to keep them running. This includes a rule the agency proposed in July to end a requirement that states gather public feedback as they consider air permits for certain facilities, including data centers.

In October, a group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Zeldin asking the EPA to withdraw the proposed rule. “The federal government should encourage transparency and public engagement around these projects, not make it easier to shroud their construction in secrecy,” they wrote.

The post Trump Official Who Wants Data Centers on Public Lands Has Tens of Millions Invested in AI Industry appeared first on ProPublica.

Across the country on Tuesday, voters delivered a wave of Democratic victories, flipping seats in Congress as well as state legislatures, and weakening a number of Republican majorities.

Missouri was no exception. Democrats made significant gains in the state House, picking up 16 seats, though Republicans still hold every statewide office and maintain control of the legislature. 

Nonetheless, the election was more than just a rebuke of President Donald Trump. It reflected a long-simmering frustration with Missouri politicians who, time and again, have sought to override the will of voters — a practice that has intensified under years of Republican control. What’s more, voters went beyond weakening the Republican majority. They approved a constitutional amendment that curtailed the powers of the legislature and shifted more authority directly to the people.

Amendment 6, approved by a decisive margin, sharply limits the legislature’s ability to overturn laws and constitutional amendments enacted through citizen initiatives, and its ability to revive laws voters rejected through referendums. 

Missouri Republicans have only themselves to blame, according to political observers who have watched the conflict between lawmakers and voters intensify. They resisted a voter-approved Medicaid expansion, repealed paid sick leave protections and sought to reverse abortion rights. They sometimes packaged their efforts with unrelated culture-war provisions, like limiting healthcare for transgender minors, that were intended to appeal to conservative voters. 

Then they tried to persuade voters this summer to surrender some of their own power by changing the constitution to make it harder to pass initiatives in the first place. Voters rejected that proposal by more than a 4-to-1 margin. 

“I think the people of Missouri are trying to wrest control back from our legislature because our legislature at this point does not seem to really be representing the majority view in the state,” said Jayne Woods, a professor at the University of Missouri law school who has written about the tension between direct democracy and legislative power.

Benjamin Singer is the co-founder and executive director of the Respect Missouri Voters campaign, which helped organize the push for Amendment 6. He said the frustration stretched back decades, including periods when Democrats controlled the legislature. He said when the campaign began organizing in late 2024, many volunteers were still angry about lawmakers’ decision in 2011 to weaken restrictions on puppy mills that voters had approved just a year earlier.

The campaign, he said, had already built a substantial volunteer operation before Republican lawmakers moved in 2025 to undo voter-approved measures that were intended to mandate paid sick leave and protect abortion rights. Respect Missouri Voters ultimately gathered enough signatures to put Amendment 6 on the ballot, seeking not only to protect the initiative process but to strengthen the electorate’s power over the legislature.

With the passage of that amendment, lawmakers now must get 80% support in both the House and Senate before they can propose changing or repealing measures enacted through citizen initiatives, or move to revive laws voters rejected through referendums. Even then, voters must approve any change in a statewide election. The restriction applies to measures voters have approved since 2010, including the constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights that voters approved in 2024.

Republican lawmakers put a measure on Tuesday’s ballot to restore abortion restrictions, but voters rejected that, too. With the passage of Amendment 6, abortion opponents don’t have a clear path to try again.

Amendment 6 also strengthens the referendum process. In addition to restricting lawmakers’ ability to reenact laws similar to those voters have rejected, the amendment explicitly protects the right of citizens to enact laws and constitutional amendments with a simple statewide majority, rejecting the higher threshold Republican lawmakers had sought to impose earlier this year. And it safeguards the power of Missouri’s courts to rewrite misleading ballot language, a power that Republican officials have repeatedly tried to strip away.

The result, political observers said, could make the legislature less consequential than it once was. Republicans still have the votes to pass most laws, but when voters reject those laws at the ballot box or enact their own measures or constitutional amendments through citizen initiatives, lawmakers will now face significant obstacles to overriding them. 

Denny Hoskins, the secretary of state and one of Amendment 6’s most prominent Republican opponents, acknowledged how profoundly it would change the balance of power. Before the election, he told the Missouri Independent that if the amendment passed, “it will basically cut our legislature off at the knees as far as being able to pass laws to reduce crime and cut taxes.”

In text messages on Wednesday, Hoskins said that Amendment 6 weakens the legislature and governor “regardless of party” and predicted that it would be challenged in court. He said that “giving power back to the people” might be a great slogan but that the amendment’s sponsors “have no idea what this actually will do.”

Hoskins himself had tried to keep Amendment 6 off the ballot. In August, he refused to certify the initiative petition, arguing that it violated constitutional restrictions on ballot measures. He also rejected a separate petition seeking a statewide referendum on a newly gerrymandered congressional map that Republican lawmakers, working at Trump’s behest, had approved to give their party another seat in Congress. 

The Missouri Supreme Court overruled him in both cases, ordering that the measures appear on the ballot. The court found Hoskins in contempt when he sought to use the map in spite of its ruling. Hoskins backed down and the justices did not have him arrested.

On Tuesday, voters rejected the map too. With Amendment 6 now in place — and Democrats significantly bolstering their numbers in the House — Republican lawmakers aren’t likely to gather enough support to override the voters’ rejection of their map.

Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis and an expert on voting rights and election law, said he knew of no other state with a restriction quite like Missouri’s 80% threshold. But he said the amendment was understandable given the legislature’s repeated attempts to reverse voter-approved policies and its unsuccessful effort this summer to make citizen initiatives harder to pass.

“I think that there’s just been this boiling frustration with how the legislature has ignored the initiative process and then sort of tried to rewrite it to its own ends,” he said.

John Hancock, a former Missouri Republican Party chair and longtime GOP consultant, acknowledged that Republican lawmakers had brought some of the backlash on themselves. But he warned that Amendment 6 could make Missouri a magnet for well-financed out-of-state interest groups seeking to enact laws through ballot initiatives — possibly on taxation or gun policy.

That concern about wealthy outside interests was also central to the Republican-backed proposal to restrict citizen initiatives that voters rejected in August. Gov. Mike Kehoe had spent months warning voters about out-of-state special interests trying to rewrite the state constitution, even while a campaign supporting his proposal to phase out the state income tax benefited from funding from a Delaware nonprofit with undisclosed donors.

Woods said the defeat suggested voters weren’t persuaded by that argument. Regardless of who finances an initiative campaign, she noted, Missourians are the ones organizing, gathering support and ultimately deciding whether to approve the measures.

“I think that the people of the state pretty resoundingly said, ‘No, we don’t believe that that’s true,’” Woods said. “‘We believe this is our citizens who are doing this. This is what we want as citizens.’”

The post Missouri Voters Just Made It Much Harder for Lawmakers to Overturn Citizen-Led Initiatives appeared first on ProPublica.

After slashing funding for programs that documented atrocities and protected human rights abroad, President Donald Trump’s State Department is now granting one of its first new human rights awards to a controversial South African organization that promotes the disputed notion that white farmers are a violently targeted, persecuted group, according to multiple sources knowledgeable about the funding. 

The group expected to receive the nearly $1 million award, AfriForum, is a nonprofit that advocates on behalf of Afrikaners, a subset of South Africa’s white population. The organization says its members, who have a “God-given calling,” fight for Afrikaner interests and self-governance. The money will be used to “document hateful rhetoric and violent acts” against Afrikaners and other minority populations in the country. 

The new award comes from a State Department bureau tasked with promoting democracy and human rights internationally. Until last year, those funds were mainly spent in poor and authoritarian nations — to fight corruption in the Democratic Republic of Congo, for example, or combat child exploitation and sexual abuse in Afghanistan. Since Trump returned to office, his appointees have transformed the bureau, gutting its staff, canceling programs and reorienting some of its funding toward conservative causes in Europe. 

Samuel Samson, who was appointed as a deputy assistant secretary to the State Department bureau by Trump, has claimed the U.S. has a “civilizational” connection to Afrikaners, who descend primarily from Dutch migrants and predominantly speak Afrikaans. Samson, who has met with far-right leaders in Europe since joining the administration last year, has framed the U.S. government’s financial support for Afrikaners as grounded in “a common heritage, a common culture, a common way of life, shared history and ultimately a common anthropology.”

There’s a long shared political history between Afrikaner groups and white nationalists in the U.S., said Audie Klotz, a political science professor at Syracuse University who has studied those connections. But, she said, “There’s no heritage connection here. It’s pure scientific racism. In the history of U.S. immigration, there’s no direct connection between South Africa and the United States.”

AfriForum met with the Trump administration in February 2025 to plead for help. The group told officials that Afrikaners are subject to racial discrimination and murders that are more frequent and asked the administration to “act strongly against hate speech that incites violence” against them, according to a statement. 

South Africa is plagued by high rates of violence, and some Afrikaners have been tortured and murdered. But independent researchers have found those killings represent a tiny fraction of murders across the country, whose victims are disproportionately people living in poor urban areas, where residents are predominantly Black. Official government statistics, and two formal inquiries into the matter, do not reveal a pattern of targeted violence against Afrikaners. 

But Trump subscribes to the idea that white farmers face a “genocide” and has cited disproportionate violence against them as a reason for punishing Africa’s wealthiest nation. In February 2025, he issued an executive order that cut off hundreds of millions of dollars of aid to South Africa and welcomed Afrikaners to the U.S. as refugees. Since then, the administration has opened the doors to more than 16,000 white South Africans while halting virtually all other immigration. Officials recently told Congress they plan to invite as many as 17,500 Afrikaner refugees to the U.S. in 2027.

AfriForum did not respond to specific questions for this story but said that “our understanding is that the allocation has not yet been finalised. Should the allocation indeed be awarded to AfriForum, we will make a public announcement in this regard.”

The new award is the administration’s latest show of support for the Afrikaner cause. The white South African group governed the nation for decades under a brutal system of segregation known as apartheid, which kept the Black majority an impoverished underclass until the system was dismantled in 1994. Now, with Black South Africans governing the country, white people — of which Afrikaners are the majority — remain one of the wealthiest segments of the population. 

The support has caused dismay among several former high-level diplomats, who spoke to ProPublica anonymously because they fear retribution from the administration.

Two former senior U.S. officials responsible for Africa policy said that they would never have met with AfriForum, let alone funded the group, because it was considered to be politically extreme and not credible. They described the organization as cherry-picking crime statistics to create a misleading narrative. “We would certainly not have funded what we would see as a racially incendiary initiative,” said one of the officials. 

The decision to direct money toward the group comes after the Trump administration halted programs that advocated for the end of violence in African countries such as Sudan, where the Biden administration determined in 2025 that there was a genocide, calling it “the world’s largest humanitarian catastrophe.”

“It’s offensive to provide funding solely to this one group after we’ve cut off funding in countries undergoing real documented crises,” said David Jandura, who managed the Africa portfolio for the State Department’s human rights bureau for several years and lost his job during the mass layoffs in 2025.

Congress has also raised questions about how the award was made. A Senate aide to Democrats told ProPublica that despite repeated requests to State Department officials, they had not received a briefing outlining the recipients of funds earmarked for democracy and human rights, which they described as “highly unusual.” 

“The Trump Administration proceeded with funding fringe right-wing causes internationally despite objections from Congress,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a New Hampshire Democrat and ranking member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, who described the lack of transparency as “unacceptable.”

In response to a series of questions about the AfriForum funding, a senior State Department official wrote in an email that the department does not comment on funding deliberations and that they routinely keep Congress informed of their actions, consulting extensively on this year’s programming. “The Administration has been clear about its concern about the abhorrent race-based discrimination and violence in South Africa,” the unnamed official wrote. “Human rights protections do not depend on a person’s income or ethnicity.”

In July, ProPublica revealed that the State Department originally intended to give the $1 million research award to Lex Libertas, a small organization founded last year by a former AfriForum executive named Ernst Roets. Trump officials later expanded the potential awardees to a small pool of handpicked organizations. The plan drew outrage from Congress over the content of the award as well as plans to bypass the typical competitive bidding process. After ProPublica’s reporting, the State Department released an open call for the funding opportunity, offering $986,500 to a nonprofit organization to “create a comprehensive record of violence affecting Afrikaner and other South African minority populations.” It’s this grant that is now being awarded to AfriForum.

Both AfriForum and Lex Libertas advocate for Afrikaner rights and have developed relationships with the Trump administration. Trump’s ambassador to South Africa, L. Brent Bozell III, visited AfriForum’s headquarters in September, praising the organization for its neighborhood watch programs while criticizing the South African government for not enacting policies requested by the Trump administration. AfriForum has also met with Trump officials in Washington, D.C., drawing public criticism from South African President Cyril Ramaphosa. And in September, Roets met with administration officials. 

AfriForum was founded 20 years ago and, with some 300,000 members, claims to be the biggest civil rights organization in South Africa. It says it aims to “establish self-dependence and growing self-governance” and provides some local civic services, such as garbage collection and systems for reporting pot holes and broken traffic lights. The group has said it distances itself from “white supremacist and extremist groups” and that it disagrees with Trump’s assertion that white South African farmers are experiencing a “white genocide.” But it has also said the South African government is “targeting the continued existence of Afrikaners” through racial legislation and the downplaying of farm murders, among other things. Academics and former U.S. diplomats have repudiated some of the ideas the group promotes as racist.

It unsuccessfully challenged a ban on the “gratuitous display” of the national flag flown during apartheid, which a South African court has found to be a form of hate speech. And while the group’s leader, Kallie Kriel, has said apartheid “was wrong,” he has also said it did not constitute “a crime against humanity” as the U.N. has determined, on the grounds that not enough people were killed during that time. 

AfriForum has been focusing on farm attacks since at least 2009. In 2018, during Trump’s first presidency, Kriel and Roets, who was then his deputy, met with government officials in Washington, D.C., about the issue, and Roets spoke about it with Tucker Carlson on Fox News, as the chyron below him announced in all caps, “White farmers brutally murdered every week in SouthAfrica.”

Additional research on crimes against white South Africans is an unnecessary and confusing  use of U.S. taxpayer dollars, said Carolyn Holmes, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, who studies democracy in southern Africa. Holmes noted that AfriForum already produces annual reports on crimes against farming communities. “These data already exist,” she said. “You don’t need a new study. You don’t even need a far-right study, we have those.”  

The U.S. support offers more than a financial boost to the organization. “For some time, AfriForum has been campaigning for recognition of their claim that white people face discrimination and persecution,” said Alex Dyzenhaus, a lecturer in international relations and African politics at the University of St. Andrews. “Before, they were only getting the Tucker Carlsons and the far right of the news ecosystem. Now they have the U.S. government on their side.”

The Trump administration has made the plight of white, rural South Africans a key foreign policy issue. In addition to the early executive order, Trump held a contentious meeting with Ramaphosa in the White House last year where Trump claimed white farmers were being executed. The administration has also considered an ad campaign focused on encouraging more Afrikaners to come to the U.S.

In September, Roets of Lex Libertas met with the White House to discuss what he sees as the crisis facing the Afrikaner community and, along with the New York Young Republican Club, placed 3,000 white crosses on the National Mall to commemorate South African farm murders. 

Roets declined to answer specific questions from ProPublica but, in a text message, described the murders of several Afrikaners that he knew personally. He also wrote, “I see the suffering of black people in South Africa, I am deeply moved by it, and I spend every day of my life campaigning to make things better for us all.”

Appearing at a press conference for the Lex Libertas event, Samson, the State Department official, showcased the sharp shift the administration has made in U.S. relations with South Africa. While apartheid has been understood globally as a symbol of racist oppression, Samson described the current South African government as having discriminatory “race-based” policies and a cautionary tale for the rest of the world.  

At the end of apartheid, in 1994, South Africa was a “flourishing, prosperous society,” Samson said. Since then, the country has gone to “ruin.” He blamed the fall on a “radical ideological leftist movement that wears human rights, that wears tolerance and inclusivity, as a skin suit to advance their Marxist communist worldview.”

Part of the Trump administration’s solution to this perceived crisis, he said, was to provide the research funding.

The post Trump’s State Department Is Giving $1 Million to Controversial Group to Study Crimes Against White South Africans appeared first on ProPublica.

The U.S. Center for SafeSport is taking steps to stop coaches banned over allegations of sexual abuse from working with children, part of an initiative that the organization said it is launching because of reporting by ProPublica and The Washington Post about gaps in the child protection system in youth sports.

Charged by Congress with investigating allegations of sexual abuse in sports, SafeSport has the power to suspend or permanently bar coaches from contact with athletes and place their names on a public disciplinary list. But the center has authority only over the country’s national sports governing bodies, which are overseen by the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee. Elementary and high schools, colleges and many independent youth sports leagues are not required to follow SafeSport’s bans, though some opt to do so. Parents and other caregivers only know if a coach has been sanctioned if they check the list.

SafeSport’s new initiative encourages people to find and report banned coaches who are continuing to work with children, SafeSport said, with a publicity initiative that includes a video with its CEO.

It is also launching a new “internal process” to notify schools and other organizations that coaches are on the SafeSport list. Hilary Nemchik, SafeSport’s vice president of external affairs, said the organization would send a form letter when it learned coaches were still working with kids, either as a result of its own investigation or in response to a report.

“When SafeSport imposes a sanction for abuse or misconduct, the community should be aware,” Benita Fitzgerald Mosley, SafeSport’s CEO, said in a statement. “Someone could be on the SafeSport Database for abuse but go on to work at a school or coach for a league outside of our jurisdiction.”

ProPublica and The Post discovered several coaches who had been banned by SafeSport but continued to work with children. One story highlighted the case of a volleyball coach, Ryan Richardson, who SafeSport found to have committed sexual misconduct with a minor but who has continued coaching teenage girls in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas. An independent volleyball league allowed Richardson to coach at several of its tournaments even after his name appeared on SafeSport’s database. Videos posted online showed Richardson on the sidelines.

The reporting showed that Richardson continued coaching in part by allowing a former assistant, Gavin Rudder, to take over the volleyball club after Richardson was banned by USA Volleyball, the sport’s governing body, in 2024. ProPublica and The Post found that Rudder allowed Richardson to coach the teams for years after the ban, a violation of the SafeSport code.

After the story was published, SafeSport added Rudder’s name to its public database, listing him as temporarily restricted from unsupervised coaching or training.

Rudder is currently listed as the coach at Weslaco High School, near McAllen. Abel Aguilar, the Weslaco district’s deputy superintendent, said in an email that the district “does not comment on personnel matters.”

In a text message, Rudder said the SafeSport ban “has nothing to do with high school volleyball” and that he had not “done anything wrong.” He said he was no longer associated with Richardson’s club volleyball team following the end of the 2026 season.

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Richardson has not responded to requests for comment on ProPublica and The Post’s reporting. When he was first suspended in 2024 by Lone Star Region Volleyball, the organization overseeing volleyball in South Texas, Richardson told the local news website MyRGV that complaints about him were an effort to “retaliate and defame someone’s character,” and said he “would never do anything to risk the physical or mental wellbeing of these strong young ladies.”

In announcing the changes, SafeSport also nodded to a bipartisan inquiry into a major youth sports organization launched last month by the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee, which also oversees SafeSport.

The lawmakers said they were launching a probe of the Amateur Athletic Union after ProPublica and The Post reported that the nonprofit does not follow SafeSport bans and has become a haven for coaches who are banned for abuse. The committee asked AAU President Jo Mirza for details on its child safety policies and training, setting a deadline of Oct. 21.

Committee representatives this week didn’t respond to questions about the status of the investigation. The AAU, which has said in a statement that it is “committed to protecting its athletes through comprehensive protection policies overseen by our Compliance Department,” said it would “cooperate fully” with any inquiry.

The post SafeSport Will Now Alert Schools, Clubs if Coaches Sanctioned for Abuse Continue to Work With Kids appeared first on ProPublica.

This summer, Vermont’s Clean Water Board celebrated a milestone: Over the past decade, the state has invested nearly a billion dollars to clean up its polluted streams, rivers and lakes. The vast majority of that money has gone toward Lake Champlain.

“I think that’s something to be extremely proud of,” said Douglas Farnham, the board’s chair.

Vermont was supposed to get an independent evaluation of what it has gotten for all that money. But that study was never done.

A decade ago, Vermont lawmakers mandated that the board submit an audit from an outside environmental consultant to determine whether the projects the state had invested in to improve water quality were working. The audit also was meant to examine whether the state’s agriculture and natural resource agencies are doing enough to enforce water quality regulations on farms, which are the biggest source of phosphorus in Lake Champlain.

Lake Champlain has been overloaded with phosphorus-laden runoff from farms, roads and urban sewers for decades. That pollution fuels potentially toxic blue-green algae blooms that have raised health concerns and hurt the state’s tourism industry. Under sustained pressure from citizens, environmental advocates and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Vermont’s leaders embarked on an ambitious initiative to improve the lake’s water quality, enshrined in the state’s landmark 2015 Clean Water Act. 

Now, halfway through a 20-year cleanup effort mandated by the EPA, some lawmakers worry they don’t have enough information to ensure that the state is pursuing the most cost-effective cleanup strategies. 

When lawmakers approved the clean water law, they took the major step of establishing a fund to pay for the cleanup and a board to administer it. Since 2016, Vermont has disbursed $928 million — $755 million in state funding and $173 million in local and federal dollars — on water quality projects and programs. That’s nearly as much as what Vermont has spent on paving and resurfacing state highways over the past decade.

As part of the law, the legislature also required the board’s leaders to provide it with a full program audit by January 2021.

But the board received no responses to an initial request for proposals in 2020. Lawmakers extended the deadline to 2023. Yet again, no outside firms bid on the audit. 

Farnham said the board received informal feedback from some firms that the audit’s scope was too broad and complex. He reported back to fellow board members that he and Julie Moore, secretary of the Vermont Agency of Natural Resources, had asked legislators what to do next but didn’t receive any clear suggestions.

The board never issued a new request or revisited the matter (until Seven Days and ProPublica recently asked about it), and Vermont’s legislature never followed up to narrow the scope.

Former state Rep. David Deen, who sponsored the clean water law and retired in 2018, said he was dismayed to learn that the audit never happened. 

“Personally, I find it amazing that they haven’t done that audit and that somebody in the legislature did not hold them to account to conduct that audit,” he said.

Rep. Amy Sheldon, the longtime chair of the House Committee on Environment, recalled hearing about the audit challenges but noted that it’s difficult for the legislature to follow up because Vermont’s lawmakers don’t have staff. In the other chamber, former state Sen. Chris Bray, who chaired the natural resources committee until 2025, said he did not recall hearing about the missing audit.

In an interview, Farnham acknowledged that an outside audit would be helpful. But he said the board already has robust tools for assessing progress through a yearly performance report compiled by the Vermont Department of Environmental Conservation, which coordinates and tracks most of the state’s clean water spending.

“We’ve got enough eyes coming at it from different angles that I think that mutes the need for that comprehensive audit,” he said. 

The annual reporting process has improved greatly since the audit was mandated, and the DEC’s website “provides a lot of transparency,” about how the state is spending clean water money and the results, said Emily Bird, director of the department’s Water Investment Division.

But some current and former state officials say that approach isn’t a substitute for an audit to determine whether Vermont is getting adequate and cost-effective returns on its huge water quality investments.

The last independent assessment of clean water spending was a 2019 report from the state auditor. It found that a disproportionate amount of money was being spent on wastewater treatment plants, which contributed by far the smallest share of phosphorus pollution, instead of targeting bigger sources such as agriculture. 

That mismatch persists seven years later. Agriculture is the largest source of phosphorus runoff, yet agricultural water quality programs receive less than a third of the total clean water funding in the current budget.

“I’d like to think they’re getting something done,” said Doug Hoffer, state auditor since 2013, referring to state agencies and legislators. “But the only way to know that is to hire someone who is independent to study that. And it’s really concerning that hasn’t been done. It really raises questions about accountability on both sides.”

An audit would do a few key things that the department’s performance reports do not, Tee Thomas, a former water finance director for the state of Vermont who now runs her own environmental consulting firm, noted via email. The reports rely on models for how effective each type of project is at reducing phosphorus. An audit would analyze water quality monitoring data from rivers and lakes to check those estimates. It would also scrutinize how well Vermont has managed projects and whether it’s gotten results, she said. 

The Clean Water Fund gets, on average, $25 million to $30 million each year from the state’s rooms and meals tax, a surcharge applied to some property transfers and deposit money that consumers pay on cans and bottles. That money is paired with between $6 million and $12 million from the state’s annual capital bill, which finances infrastructure projects. The funds have gone to programs and projects to restore wetlands, expand natural buffers around fields, shore up rural roads against erosion, upgrade stormwater drains and improve manure storage on dairy farms.

The state treasurer in 2017 estimated that the cost of Vermont’s 20-year initiative would be $2.3 billion.

But finding that money could be difficult as state government spending outpaces tax revenue and cooling housing and tourism markets squeeze clean water funding sources.

Without the audit, the governor and legislators responsible for coming up with the next billion dollars’ worth of projects may not have a clear understanding of what Vermonters have gotten for the last billion, lawmakers said.

Read More

Vermont Has Spent Nearly a Billion Dollars to Clean Up Lake Champlain. But the Green Slime Keeps Coming Back.

Jane Kitchel, who as longtime chair of the state Senate’s Committee on Appropriations was known for her encyclopedic knowledge of the Vermont budget, noted that a billion dollars is a significant sum for the small state. Had she not retired from the body two years ago, she said, reviving the audit “would be one of the things I’d put on my to-do list.”

The next legislative session starts in January. State Sen. Anne Watson, who chairs the Committee on Natural Resources and Energy and serves on the Committee on Appropriations, told Seven Days and ProPublica that she would likely discuss whether to revive the audit with her colleagues.

“If we value having a clean lake,” she said, “then we need to put our resources toward places that are going to make a difference, and it’s unclear to me right now that what we’re doing is effective.”

The post Vermont Was Supposed to Get an Audit of Its Lake Champlain Cleanup. It Never Happened. appeared first on ProPublica.

On the last day of August, Jeff van den Noort spotted thick swirls of neon green film coating the water just steps from his home in Vermont. He waded in up to his ankles and dipped a jar to get a sample of the scum.

It wasn’t the first time he’d seen the slime. Since his parents bought the house on an island in Lake Champlain in 1966, van den Noort has spent part of nearly every summer in this quiet spot. Back then, the lake was clear.

But he began to witness the water’s deterioration as he grew older, especially after he moved into the home full time in 2010 to care for his ailing mother. That day in late August was the worst he’d seen all summer. 

Later that week, van den Noort grabbed a bucket, a few Mason jars and a smartphone and got into his rusty Saab. He drove past the boat launches, frozen-in-time general stores and windswept pastures of the lake’s islands in northern Vermont and stopped at four other spots along the shore. Each time, he collected some murky water, gauged how thick the muck was, took a few photos and jotted down the weather conditions. He then uploaded his report to an online database.

Van den Noort was one part of a large volunteer effort to monitor a problem that has plagued Lake Champlain, which supplies drinking water to about 200,000 people. In recent decades, blooms of potentially toxic cyanobacteria, often called blue-green algae, have killed pets, forced beaches to close and hurt business and property values along the shores of this iconic Vermont feature.      

“I just don’t feel like enough is being done,” van den Noort said. “And I think the state needs to take this seriously.”

Just over a decade ago, state leaders seemed to be doing just that. In 2015, then-Gov. Peter Shumlin stood a few feet from Lake Champlain by the Burlington waterfront and signed Vermont’s Clean Water Act. It promised to tighten limits on pollution and provide funding to clean up the state’s waterways. 

The move was a response to ratcheting pressure from environmentalists and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA had been telling Vermont officials for years that they needed to take much stronger action. In 2016, the agency finalized tougher cleanup targets that the state must meet by 2036.

But after 10 years and nearly a billion dollars spent on water quality projects and programs, Vermont’s cleanup effort is faltering. In a little-noticed letter to the head of Vermont’s Department of Environmental Conservation last year, the EPA’s regional administrator warned that the state was “not on track” to meet its cleanup goal and would need to more than double its annual pace. 

Halfway through the two-decade timetable, Vermont has achieved only 35% of the goal, according to the state’s most recent estimates. And the steps that Vermont has taken to get there, such as upgrading sewage treatment plants, represent “low-hanging fruit,” Eric Perkins, a former EPA official involved in setting the target, wrote in an email in response to questions from Seven Days and ProPublica.

The culprit behind these blooms is phosphorus, an element that is an essential building block of life, present in all organic matter. But too much of it has been pouring into the lake from farm fields saturated with fertilizer and manure, dirty stormwater, and raw sewage from treatment plants overwhelmed by heavy rains. That has tipped the lake’s ecosystem out of balance, spurring the growth of microorganisms that turn shallow bays and shorelines into no-go zones.

Ingesting cyanobacteria-laden water can cause vomiting, diarrhea, dizziness and liver damage, while skin contact can lead to rashes. Researchers have also detected possible links between chronic exposure to cyanobacteria and heightened risk of Parkinson’s disease and ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. The algae blooms can also deprive fish and other aquatic life of oxygen. 

While some areas of Lake Champlain have seen incremental improvements in phosphorus concentrations and cyanobacteria blooms, other parts of the lake are getting worse. Seven of the lake’s 15 sampling stations have exceeded the EPA’s annual phosphorus limits every year since 2015, a Seven Days and ProPublica analysis of lake monitoring data through 2025 shows. Four stations recorded higher average phosphorus levels over the past decade than in the decade before, including in the southern part of the lake and its northeast arm.

In September, the Department of Environmental Conservation reported to the EPA that in two northeastern sections of the lake most chronically plagued by phosphorus runoff, the state is not nearly on track to meet its targets. The department specifically acknowledged that it was not making enough progress in addressing stormwater runoff and that reductions in farm pollution in the Missisquoi River watershed have slowed since 2023.

Vermont shares the 120-mile-long lake with New York and Quebec, but it’s the source of about two-thirds of the phosphorus that flows into the water body. Agriculture is the largest polluting sector, while stormwater runoff from development, like urban parking lots and rural roads, contributes the highest amount of phosphorus per acre.

State agencies have repeatedly delayed taking more difficult and politically fraught action to crack down on pollution from farms, businesses and housing developments. Policies around them have encountered resistance from the dairy industry, property owners and lawmakers sympathetic to their interests.

The challenges in cleaning up Lake Champlain raise a salient question: If a small, conservation-minded state like Vermont can’t tackle this problem, what does that mean for other areas of the United States grappling with algae blooms in the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay and the Gulf of Mexico?

State officials counsel patience as they remind Vermonters it will take more time to solve the problem. 

“We are moving apace with the commitments we’ve made, in terms of the projects, but it isn’t manifesting itself nearly as quickly in the lake monitoring data,” said Julie Moore, Agency of Natural Resources secretary. “This is a complex ecosystem, and we need to come at this work with a whole lot of humility.”

Leaders of the Agency of Agriculture, Food and Markets said it will take time for investments, such as programs to reduce soil erosion and help farmers upgrade their manure storage equipment, to pay off.

“The first five years, we were really developing an enormous amount of programs,” said Laura DiPietro, the agency’s water quality program director, but implementing them “doesn’t happen overnight.” She said she expects to see greater phosphorus reductions resulting from them in the coming decade.

But for van den Noort, the blooms are increasingly hard to ignore. 

“The worst days ever are really, really bad,” he said. “Just as far as you can see, the whole bay is green.”

Pushing the Limits 

Unlike chemicals and heavy metals that can be removed from lakes and rivers with dredging, phosphorus isn’t technically or economically feasible to extract.

So environmental regulators focus instead on limiting the amount of phosphorus that flows into the water each day. It’s like putting the lake on a diet. The EPA sets what’s known as the total maximum daily load, a target based on the agency’s determination of how much phosphorus the lake can absorb and remain healthy. To meet that goal, the state must cut pollution from agriculture, stormwater drains, roads, forests and wastewater treatment plants.  

The EPA had set previous targets for Lake Champlain in 2002, but, concerned that Vermont wasn’t taking strong enough measures, the agency set tougher ones in 2016. For the first few years after those targets were updated, Perkins, who was then the EPA’s Vermont water quality coordinator, felt that the state was generally on the right track. 

During his tenure, state agencies and lawmakers set up the Clean Water Fund to finance water quality projects and dedicated tax revenue streams to support it. They put in place stronger rules for fertilizer use and manure storage on farms. They created permit programs to limit stormwater runoff from roads and municipalities. That progress was reflected in a 2020 report card the EPA issued, acknowledging that Vermont had checked off all the milestones up to that point. 

“Overall, I was very impressed with the level of commitment demonstrated by the state,” Perkins wrote to Seven Days and ProPublica.

By the time Perkins retired in 2021, he and colleagues at the EPA had become concerned about signs of lagging commitment by Vermont’s agencies to water quality enforcement on farms.

One clear opportunity to speed up phosphorus reductions, according to Perkins, is to ensure farms comply with required agricultural practices and avoid spreading manure before anticipated rainstorms, which has caused “major phosphorus runoff events.”

If the state and farm operators were to make that a priority, “it could likely make a big difference,” Perkins wrote. And the state could encourage that practice by overhauling its permitting system to tighten water quality requirements and enforcement for farms that keep animals confined in barns for long periods of time. Those farms are called concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs. In recent years, many small family dairies in Vermont have closed or consolidated into larger operations that would be considered CAFOs under federal law.

Yet Vermont has delayed action on an EPA directive to strengthen its approach to regulating CAFOs. Just across the lake, New York has used such permits for decades to ensure better environmental practices on larger farms. In Vermont, a recent state task force report recommended working to develop this program for another five years.

A second, related reform the EPA has recommended is to change who leads regulation of those farms.

Vermont has two different agencies that oversee farm pollution. The Agency of Agriculture regulates how farms handle waste on site, while the Agency of Natural Resources is responsible if runoff from that waste leaves the farm. This split responsibility has caused oversight problems, including lapses in following up on reported water quality violations with inspections and enforcement actions. Environmental advocates have long maintained that the agriculture agency has a conflict because it also has a mandate to promote the state’s farm sector.

This arrangement frustrates farmers, too. In a letter to Gov. Phil Scott earlier this year, owners of one Vermont dairy farm wrote that “the lack of alignment and clear communication between these agencies” places farmers in an uncertain position. “Many in the farming community feel caught in the middle of interagency disagreements, unsure which standards will ultimately govern their operations or how enforcement will proceed,” they wrote.

In interviews, officials at the two agencies acknowledged those communication problems but said that they have taken steps to improve how they share information on potential violations and coordinate more closely on inspections.

In 2024, the EPA ordered Vermont to consolidate the regulation of agricultural pollution under the Agency of Natural Resources, Vermont’s main environmental agency, which the EPA says has sole authority to administer federal Clean Water Act rules. 

In a letter that year to Moore, the agency’s secretary, EPA Region 1 administrator David Cash noted that the EPA had monitored the situation in Vermont for well over a decade. “And despite having had ample time and opportunity to cure longstanding program deficiencies,” he wrote, “ANR has failed to do so.” Cash noted that the state has failed to give ANR “sufficient resources or operational authority” to regulate runoff from farms.

Hovering over this back-and-forth is the threat that the federal government could take over enforcement of water pollution rules from Vermont.

Following the letter to Moore, the divisions between the two agencies were on display as they discussed their regulatory approach in internal emails obtained under Vermont’s Public Records Act by Seven Days and ProPublica. In a 2025 email, Agency of Natural Resources general counsel Catherine Gjessing reminded her counterpart at the agriculture agency and legislative counsel staff that “there are a significant number of farms that are in fact discharging without a permit” in violation of the federal Clean Water Act. She added that the two agencies had been working under this split responsibility arrangement, with the agriculture agency taking the lead, “for decades now and we are still not in compliance.”

In an interview, the agriculture agency’s general counsel, Steve Collier, said there was never “a Wild West situation where farms were not being regulated” and that his agency’s rules protected the environment. “Whether or not the Clean Water Act was being administered exactly as it should be is a different issue,” he said.

Outside of agriculture, Vermont has yet to fully implement a third EPA demand as well as the directives of its own Clean Water Act. That 2015 law mandated the Department of Environmental Conservation to require properties with 3 or more acres of paved surface, such as parking lots, to install systems to slow and capture stormwater runoff.

Five years later, when the department still hadn’t finalized this “3-acre rule” permit system, the EPA warned Vermont that it would have to give the state “a failing grade” if it didn’t do so by Sept. 4, 2020. Vermont met the EPA’s deadline but in 2025 passed a law pushing the date for getting permits to 2028 for properties in the Champlain basin. 

And those property owners don’t need to make the stormwater upgrades until 2033.

Treading Water

For a quarter century, Steve Cushing has been advocating to clean up St. Albans Bay in the northeast part of Lake Champlain near the epicenter of Vermont’s dairy industry. Throughout that time, he listened as federal and state environmental officials came through town and pledged to act. “Expect a lot of progress 10 years from now in many segments of the lake,” one EPA official told him and his neighbors in 2015. 

A decade later, this summer’s cyanobacteria blooms in the shallow bay were some of the worst he’s seen in several years, he said. Since June, the public beach in the St. Albans Bay Park has mostly been closed to swimming.

“Overall, you can’t really see a big improvement in water quality in the bay,” Cushing said.

Public data supports that notion. Every three years the federally funded Lake Champlain Basin Program, which coordinates research and grantmaking across the lake’s watershed, issues a report summarizing its water quality monitoring.

Its most recent edition, from 2024, revealed “deteriorating” trends in the northeast arm of the lake for both phosphorus and cyanobacteria and no progress in Missisquoi Bay, a shallow stretch spanning the U.S.-Canada border that frequently suffers intense blooms. 

That’s troubling, scientists and advocates say, because the failure to address new pollution is exacerbated by both historical pollution and the effects of climate change. 

What scientists call “legacy phosphorus” has accumulated in soils and lake sediments after many decades of fertilizer use, manure spreading, deforestation and unregulated septic and wastewater systems. 

“We are working on a system that’s been impacted by human activities for the past 150-plus years,” said Matthew Vaughan, the chief scientist of the basin program.

Climate change poses another headwind for the lake cleanup. Since 2003, cyanobacteria blooms have appeared earlier in the spring and later in the fall as temperatures rise, and even at lower phosphorus levels. The drought that hit Vermont in 2025 led to a spike in blooms, thanks to the combination of heat and low water levels. Meanwhile, downpours are turning Vermont’s streams and rivers into fire hoses of phosphorus-laden sediment: In just one week in July 2023, record-shattering floods pumped six months worth of phosphorus into the lake.

“All of this just makes it more urgent to do our part to address these water quality challenges,” Vaughan said. 

Some state officials and researchers contend that phosphorus deposited in the lake bed and soil decades ago might play as significant a role in fueling algae blooms as today’s runoff.

But while legacy phosphorus remains a challenge, “I think it’d be wrong to just rely on that as the excuse,” said Eric Smeltzer, who worked for the Department of Environmental Conservation for 35 years, including as the state limnologist who monitors the health of Vermont’s lakes and ponds.

“The most important technical question about the Lake Champlain phosphorus cleanup is: Are these practices working? And if not, why not?” Smeltzer said. “How can it be done better? I think you can’t just explain it away based on time lags and legacy phosphorus forever.”

In reviewing the state’s data recently, one detail in particular jumped out to him, he said. Wastewater treatment still garners an outsize share of Vermont’s clean water spending, even though it has been clear for years that it’s not a major contributor of phosphorus, while agriculture and stormwater are.

Read More

Vermont Was Supposed to Get an Audit of Its Lake Champlain Cleanup. It Never Happened.

Cushing traces the algae blooms back to the dairy farms that dominate the watershed and to regulators’ failure to “put any teeth behind” restrictions on manure spreading and other water quality rules.

Cushing, a former dairy farmer, has pushed for policy changes as a volunteer with the St. Albans Area Watershed Association and has led an effort to mechanically remove vegetation that contributes to the phosphorus problem in his overburdened bay.

At 78, he is now searching for someone to take over the weed removal effort. “I’m getting a little burned out,” he admitted. 

Seven miles to the west, on the island of North Hero, van den Noort questioned this summer whether all the data he gathers is making any difference. 

“If we really wanted to solve the problem, I think we’d have to make some tough choices,” he said. “I don’t think anybody wants to do that. It’s a head-in-the-sand thing.”

Every week, van den Noort drives up the western edge of Isle La Motte on his monitoring circuit, looking out over a stretch of water that is supposed to be one of the cleanest parts of Lake Champlain. On the worst days, a pea green broth of blooms stubbornly hugs its entire shoreline.

The post Vermont Has Spent Nearly a Billion Dollars to Clean Up Lake Champlain. But the Green Slime Keeps Coming Back. appeared first on ProPublica.

Despite being an iconic part of Vermont’s landscape and a large source of the state’s drinking water, Lake Champlain has been polluted for decades. Phosphorus runoff from farm fields, rural roads, parking lots, stormwater drains and wastewater treatment plants flows into the lake, fueling algae blooms that frequently choke its bays and shorelines.

Vermont is halfway through a 20-year effort to clean up the lake. In 2016, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency established new, stricter requirements for reducing phosphorus runoff that the state must meet by 2036. But more than a decade in, after spending nearly a billion dollars, the state is lagging behind. Water quality has not improved dramatically, and in some parts of the lake, it is getting worse. This past summer algae blooms shut down swimming at public beaches in St. Albans Bay in the northeast part of the lake.

Seven Days and ProPublica have teamed up to understand the reasons behind this lack of progress. We want to know how pollution in the lake is affecting Vermont’s economy and the lifestyles and livelihoods of Vermonters and visitors alike. We’re also interested in learning more about how persistently poor water quality in Lake Champlain affects Vermonters’ health, well-being and finances. 

Do you live, play or depend on Lake Champlain? We want to hear from you. Your perspective will help us understand how longstanding pollution affects a wide range of issues, from drinking water quality to tax revenue from tourism around the lake. 

We’re gathering these stories for our reporting, which can take several weeks or months. We may not be able to follow up with everyone, but we will read everything you submit and it will help guide our project.

Please fill out this form.

The post Do You Live Near Lake Champlain? Help Seven Days and ProPublica Investigate Algae Blooms. appeared first on ProPublica.

This has been a midterm election cycle unlike any other. Wealthy donors spent staggering sums. Both parties moved to redraw congressional district lines. President Donald Trump and his allies relentlessly questioned whether the results could be trusted even before a single ballot was counted. At Trump’s direction, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit that said the federal government would contest any outcome in which Sen. Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent in Alaska, was not victorious.

Newsrooms, including ours, have tried to plan how we will cover an election in which the losing side refuses to accept the will of the voters. Was the Alaska lawsuit a single data point or a harbinger?

As we prepare to write about Nov. 3 and beyond, we find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of trying to game out what might happen in the future — not our strong suit. The record shows that journalists are pretty good at telling readers what happened, particularly if we have some time and some data to sift through, and much less good at forecasting the future.

And yet we have to plan. Over the past few weeks we have prepared our reporters and editors to cover every scenario we can imagine. None of us have forgotten the chaos of 2020 when Trump was urged by advisers to send the military to seize voting machines in states he had lost. The Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol as lawmakers gathered to certify Joe Biden’s victory underscored the sense that literally anything was possible in the aftermath of elections.

We will have reporters on the ground in 11 key states covering voting, with even more in Washington, D.C., and others on standby. Our reporters have detailed what experts will be watching. But elections are no longer confined to Election Day (early voting and voting by mail constitute a huge share of the electorate). And our plans for covering voting stretch back many months.

Over the past year, we’ve tried to use the techniques of accountability journalism to add new facts to this pivotal moment in American history.

We have focused considerable attention on the mechanics of elections, a once-arcane issue that has become a central aspect of the MAGA movement’s argument that Trump’s 2020 loss was “rigged” by his opponents. We examined how the Trump administration depleted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the arm of the federal government charged with safeguarding election systems. We discovered that Department of Homeland Security officials had asked CISA to obtain a voting machine and hack it without informing the manufacturer of any vulnerabilities found. The plan wasn’t acted on, but its existence made CISA employees fear they were being asked to take part in political interference. CISA and DHS didn’t respond to our questions, but a White House spokesperson said Trump “has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”

Another story looked at how delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures endangered the validity of mail-in ballots in rural counties, typically Republican strongholds, during this year’s primaries. The Postal Service said such delays are less likely in the general election.

One of our most detailed election stories traced the career of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who spearheaded the legal attacks on the 2020 results. Mitchell leads a coalition of what she calls “election believers” — people who scour the voting results for errors that they believe point to larger conspiracies. Changes she’d hoped Trump could push through before the midterms, such as compelling states to turn over confidential voter information to the Justice Department, have been blocked by the courts. But she has nonetheless become the voice of a well-funded national movement, one which has the president’s ear. When Trump is weighing what to do in the aftermath of this week’s vote, our reporting strongly suggests that Mitchell will be among the people he listens to.

We asked to speak with Mitchell multiple times. She declined but told us in an email: “​​​​What we focus on is making sure the election process is accurate, transparent, and honest. The ONLY steps I’ve urged the Administration to take are those that will give the voters — ALL voters — confidence that the outcomes are correct.” A White House spokesperson said she has no official role in election policy but is an effective private advocate.

We have also spent time doing the traditional work of investigative reporting, looking closely at candidates’ records in public office. A newsroom like ours can’t cover every race, so we focus our resources on areas where we have particular expertise.

Our team in Texas has covered state Attorney General Ken Paxton for years, and we kept our focus once he announced he would run for the U.S. Senate. One story looked at his travels, revealing that only 1 in 6 of his nearly 1,000 out-of-state trips were linked to his official duties. Texas taxpayers paid $3.3 million for Paxton’s security detail to accompany him. (Paxton didn’t answer our questions, but his office said he “faced numerous security threats.”) That has become an issue in the Senate campaign.

Another opportunity arose from an investigation that was seemingly not related to the midterms: our examination of the Trump administration’s handling of the Justice Department. We began many months ago to look for promising cases that had been dropped and found out the FBI had been looking into pay-to-play allegations involving prominent Democratic and Republican members of Congress. The case included a bipartisan list of political figures such as Susan Collins, the Republican senator from Maine running in a closely contested race this year, and James Clyburn, a leading Democratic representative from South Carolina who’s also on the ballot this year.

Our first story revealed that Collins helped a little-known defense contractor win millions in federal contracts while the company’s CEO helped bankroll her 2020 reelection effort through a donation made via a shell company. Our second story revealed that the FBI was looking into interactions that Clyburn and Sen. Lindsey Graham, who died in July, had with the same contractor. Collins has denied all wrongdoing. “A donation would never cause Congressman Clyburn to increase his support for the donor’s request,” Clyburn’s office said. Graham’s communications director wrote that “any allegations of quid-pro-quo behavior … are simply false.” The FBI stopped examining the allegations after Trump purged the bureau. Our coverage likewise has become an issue in the Maine race.

We stand at a moment of uncertainty in our history as a democracy. Trump has made his willingness to smear news organizations an essential aspect of his appeal. He routinely insults reporters to their face and has attempted to ban some outlets from the White House and Air Force One because he didn’t like the stories they wrote about him. He has diverted hundreds of federal agents from their jobs fighting drug cartels and organized crime to search for evidence that noncitizens have illegally voted in federal elections. Hardly any were found.

I’m deeply reluctant to make any predictions about how all this will end. ProPublica prepared for an array of dire scenarios in November of 2024 that might arise from a close election. None of them came to pass as Trump decisively prevailed. A federal judge dismissed the Justice Department’s lawsuit to block the Alaska Senate race results over the weekend, and the Trump administration’s plans to appeal stand on shaky legal ground.

The one thing I know for certain is that we will keep digging into the story of what really happened in this election, whoever wins.

The post How We’re Covering the Midterms — and the Aftermath appeared first on ProPublica.

Three summers ago, over Father’s Day weekend, my family and I went camping in the Lincoln National Forest, just a few hours drive north of our home in El Paso, Texas. It’s a beautiful area that’s long served as a getaway for the region, with skiing in the winter, and golf and hiking in the summer. My daughter played under the trees, and I rode my bike down mountain trails that, I noticed, seemed concerningly dry. 

The next evening, after we left to drive home, two fires started in forests surrounding the town of Ruidoso, New Mexico, around 25 miles away from where we’d been. I watched horrifying videos online of fire lapping the mountains behind the village’s strip malls and parking lots. The fires were eventually suppressed by a combination of human effort and the late summer monsoon season. But when the downpour of rain hit the burnt landscape around Ruidoso, it created another problem: Recurring floods then ripped through town, damaging homes and infrastructure, and leading to emergency rescues.

The following summer, the scene repeated. On July 8, 2025, monsoon rain hit a burn scar and quickly swelled the Rio Ruidoso and its tributaries. Three people — two of them children — lost their lives. 

Reporter Abe Streep, a member of ProPublica’s Southwest office, and I met in Ruidoso to report on what happened. Ruidoso is a place built on tourism, with a paid (rather than volunteer) fire department staff and its own disaster manager. How could two children and a man be swept to their deaths in a place that appeared equipped to handle such disasters? 

In two stories ProPublica recently published, Abe answered those questions. He found that, after the 2024 fires, experts warned the town of increased flash flooding risks. Initially, local and state leaders considered a relocation plan for some homes and businesses that would get people out of harm’s way, but the project faltered. Instead, village leaders continued promoting tourism to the town, and the mayor even chastised residents for warning of floods on social media. Abe also reported that, while local and state officials insisted the emergency response to the flood was admirable, first responders say the three deaths could have been avoided. The responders told Abe that village leadership left them understaffed and inadequately equipped to contend with the flooding.

The Village of Ruidoso did not respond to detailed written questions about its emergency response, and it has not publicly released a report on rescue efforts during the flood. Reached by phone, the fire chief, Cade Hall, disputed our reporting but declined to provide specifics. Mayor Lynn Crawford has said protecting the village includes balancing public safety with tourism, the lifeblood of its economy. But in an interview last year, Crawford said to Abe and me: “Who’s to blame? I didn’t start the fire.”

My role as a photographer was to document Ruidoso as the story unfolded — to visualize the people and place at the center of it. It’s a role I’ve had countless times in my career, but this story hit unexpectedly close to home. I could imagine my own family caught unaware in a similar situation, trying to escape the El Paso summer heat but instead navigating an unfathomable disaster.

When Abe and I started reporting, we met people from the community and out of town who tried to help. I watched as New Mexico National Guard service members loaded sand bags into families’ cars, people prepared hot meals for those who had been displaced and volunteers handed out donated supplies from collection centers. 

While we were reporting one afternoon, it started raining. Fear swept through me. Our phones lit up with flood warnings from the National Weather Service. We knew we should take them seriously.

Abe and I sought refuge in a local brewery perched high above the river basin. Before we knew it, the water from that thin little creek of Rio Ruidoso became a torrent. The rushing water rose quickly. It swept through the river valley right under the brewery, carrying what looked like trees and debris with it.

Still, I wanted to photograph the river up close. I left the safety of the brewery and let the heavy rain cover me as I moved closer to the river. As I made photos that afternoon and throughout the rest of the trip, questions about my own safety ran through my mind: Would the water keep rising? If it did, could I get to high ground? And, notably, would I have enough warning?

In hindsight, I realize these questions were largely about whether I could trust the systems in place to keep me and others safe. And as Abe kept reporting over the next year, the more those questions felt valid. 

Last month, Abe and I traveled again to Ruidoso. The town felt lighter and less ominous. Much of the ruin had been removed or rebuilt. Grass and sagebrush sprouted on a burn scar. Tourists wandered around a lively downtown on a Friday afternoon. People seemed to be moving on from the terror of the previous year.

But Stephanie and Sebastian Trotter still carry the scars of the day. They lost their two children, Sebastian Rowan, 7, and Charlotte, 4, in the Ruidoso flooding. 

There is now a memorial for them and Benjamin “Tim” Feagin, the third person who died, at the RV park where they had been camped. But I wanted to see for myself the places where each of them was found. I felt that making photos of those places could help people connect with the reality of their deaths as well as their lives. So, early one morning, I walked along the floodplain trying to find the locations Abe had shared with me. 

I got to the bridge where a firefighter found Sebastian Rowan. There was no marker, no indication that anyone’s body had been found there. 

Then I went looking for the area where Charlotte was found. I wandered under pine and cottonwood, through knee-deep grasses and wild sunflowers. Crows cawed overhead, and the early morning sun broke through the trees. I stood there for a while, admiring the beauty, awed by the sadness of the river’s trickle.

The post I Was There to Document the Aftermath of Deadly Flooding. Then, It Started Raining. appeared first on ProPublica.

What Happened: Citing ProPublica’s recent investigation, House Democrats are again asking the Trump administration to explain why hundreds of U.S. citizens have been held by immigration agents and how the government verifies citizenship during immigration operations.

In an October letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, California Rep. Lou Correa and 39 other legislators demanded the administration share the number of citizens that immigration agents have detained and how the government is tracking such encounters. They also asked for more information about how agents are trained to verify citizenship and legal status.

Why It Matters: ProPublica counted more than 500 Americans detained by immigration agents — almost certainly an undercount since the government is not transparently tracking the cases.

Experts told us the cases collectively show federal agents running roughshod over the constitutional rights of citizens. We found more than 100 Americans who were questioned about their citizenship, 63 Americans detained while recording, 36 Americans held for at least a day without being able to contact a lawyer or their family and roughly a dozen citizens deported, mostly children.

What They Said: “We remain concerned that the Department’s actions are violating American citizens’ constitutional rights to due process, equal protection, and freedom from unreasonable search and seizure, and request transparency regarding the Department’s actions,” the representatives wrote in their letter to DHS.

DHS has long insisted it is not arresting U.S. citizens, and it defended its immigration operations as “highly targeted.”

“These members of Congress have shown more concern for criminal illegal aliens who’ve broken our laws and destroyed any possibility of ever remaining in our country than they ever have for Rachel Morin, Laken Riley, Jocelyn Nungaray, and the true victims of illegal alien crimes in America,” a spokesperson wrote to ProPublica.

Background: Democrats have been pushing the second Trump administration for more details about how immigration agents are interacting with U.S. citizens since early 2025. Last year, congressional Democrats announced a wide-ranging investigation into immigration agents’ detention of U.S. citizens in response to our earlier reporting that found that more than 170 citizens were detained by immigration agents.

Last month, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández, a New Mexico Democrat, introduced a bill, Justice for Citizens Wrongfully Detained by ICE Act, that would make it easier for citizens to sue immigration agents for wrongful arrests.

Read the Investigation

More Than 500 U.S. Citizens Have Been Detained, Including Handcuffed or Held at Gunpoint, in Trump’s Immigration Crackdown

The post After ProPublica Investigation, House Democrats Demand Answers on U.S. Citizens Detained by Immigration Agents appeared first on ProPublica.

As Americans cast ballots on Tuesday, voting experts’ deepest concerns largely didn’t materialize on a mostly routine Election Day.

Tuesday’s relative quiet followed an anxious run-up in which the Trump administration pressed forward with unprecedented efforts to assert more federal control over elections.

Since President Donald Trump retook the White House, his administration has tried to force states to turn over their unredacted voter rolls and to restrict mail-in voting. The Department of Homeland Security has used its resources to identify and prosecute noncitizen voters, an effort that has unfolded alongside the agency’s massive crackdown on immigrants.

The president has justified these steps by claiming, without evidence, that American elections are beset by fraud and that illegal voting is tipping the scales in favor of Democrats.

Courts have thwarted most of the administration’s plans, but Trump and his top deputies have kept up the pressure. In the days before the midterm, they threatened to prosecute election officials who didn’t reject ballots from people that the federal government has identified as likely noncitizens.

The administration didn’t explicitly rule out sending federal agents to the polls or seizing ballots or voting machines.

Election experts told ProPublica the cumulative effect of these steps was to ramp up anxiety about the vote and to erode voters’ trust in the system.

“The administration has been creating a lot of noise, a lot of confusion, a lot of doubt,” said Ben Hovland, whom Trump fired as a commissioner for the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission earlier this year. He said he worried that this would make voters “sit it out” and “throw their hands up.”

In an emailed response to questions before Election Day, a DHS spokesperson said Immigration and Customs Enforcement was “not planning operations targeting polling locations,” adding that the agency would only arrest people at the polls to address a safety threat as part of “intelligence-driven targeted enforcement.”

The DHS and the Justice Department “are laser focused on identifying, prosecuting and removing aliens who vote and dilute the votes of U.S. citizens,” the spokesperson added. “Our message to aliens who vote in American elections is clear: we will find you, arrest you, and you will face the consequences — including criminal charges and deportation.”

Before and on Election Day, it’s typical for the major political parties to mount poll-watching operations, but both Democrats and Republicans said they’d expanded these activities in this pressurized midterm.

Republicans said they would focus on issues such as voter eligibility and voter-roll accuracy, according to Ally Triolo, the Republican National Committee’s election integrity communications director. Democrats planned to concentrate on voter intimidation and other hurdles to voting, said Angelo Fernández Hernández, a Democratic National Committee spokesperson.

Here are five issues that voting rights experts said they were watching in this year’s election:

1. Will There Be Federal Interference?

As clocks hit 5 p.m. on the East Coast, there’d been no confirmed reports about federal law enforcement at the polls. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin told reporters at the White House that he hadn’t sent immigration agents to the polls.  

Still, an incident during early voting in Leon County, in the Florida Panhandle, illustrates how widespread such fears have been.

Mark Earley, the county’s supervisor of elections, told ProPublica he was “furious” when two marked U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicles parked outside the county’s busiest voting location last month, after he’d been repeatedly reassured by the administration that agents would not do this.

He reported the sighting to the FBI, then learned that the agents, who were headed out of state, had just stopped by to try to vote themselves. The episode generated a flurry of news coverage.

“Given the negative media coverage regarding federal agents at the polls, it shows pretty bad judgment that they showed up in their official vehicles,” Earley said.

It’s against the law for federal law enforcement to be near polling places.

Nick Brown, Washington’s attorney general, leads a group of Democratic state officials and voting rights advocates who have been planning how to respond if, indeed, there were real federal interference. The group has “war-gamed” how to react if government agents attempted to commandeer voting equipment or ballots.

“We’ve seen the tension and chaos that’s in the air,” Brown said. He called the federal government “the biggest challenge to smooth elections right now, which is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

A DOJ spokesperson said “the best preparation for any election official is following federal law.”

As is routine in federal elections, DOJ monitors were watching over polling places Tuesday. The agency had assured states that its observers would follow the law and not interfere with voting or election administration. In Michigan, the state attorney general’s office said it received reports of monitors requesting training materials in Dearborn. A similar report came in about monitors’ interaction with election workers in Flint. The DOJ team overseeing Michigan later told state officials that this was inconsistent with the training they received.

Similarly, in New Mexico, the secretary of state’s office received reports of Justice Department monitors “asking some unusual questions and questioning voters” in Bernalillo County, a spokesperson told ProPublica, adding that the office later received reassurance from the Justice Department that “it would be addressed.” 

This issue also surfaced in August during the primary election in Wyoming, where poll workers reported feeling uneasy when DOJ monitors asked about their training and to inspect voting systems. The state’s governor criticized these actions as “a bit aggressive” and “irregular.”

2. What Effect Will Noncitizen Voter Challenges Have?

The Trump administration’s multipronged effort targeting alleged noncitizen voters has already led to eligible voters being improperly removed from the rolls. Voting rights groups feared this would block some U.S. citizens from being able to vote when they showed up Tuesday, but it’s not yet clear whether this happened.

Federal officials have made clear they plan to go after anyone they think is committing voter fraud.

On the first day of early voting in Texas, Aaron Reitz, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Texas, posted a YouTube video announcing his intentions. “If you violate federal election law,” he warned, “I will hunt you down and prosecute you.”

This threat came days after the DOJ sued California, seeking to block the state from counting mail ballots from more than 20,000 voters it claims are “likely” noncitizens. The administration had obtained the state’s public voter rolls, which the DHS had blended with its own immigration information and third-party data.

In a court filing, California called the claim that there are 20,000 noncitizens on its voter rolls “specious.” Los Angeles County analyzed a sampling of the likely noncitizen voters that the federal government claimed were registered there. Many weren’t registered in the county or had never voted, the analysis showed. Some said on their voter registration forms that they were born in the United States.

Asked about the case, the DOJ told ProPublica, “Federal law prohibits noncitizens from voting in federal elections, and the Department has a duty to enforce it.”

After lower courts rejected the DOJ’s motion for an emergency order that would have barred California from counting the 20,000 voters’ ballots, the U.S. Supreme Court declined the Trump administration’s request to intervene in the dispute. On Thursday, the administration also sent grand jury subpoenas to California officials demanding records about their response to allegations of noncitizens on the state’s rolls. Late Friday, a federal judge issued a restraining order blocking those DOJ demands, calling them an “intimidation plan” that would interfere with legal voting.

Last week, the DOJ wrote a letter threatening to sue Washington state if officials there refused to review a list of 400 voters it believes to be noncitizens within 24 hours. U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche told reporters late last month that the department was considering additional actions, saying there were “a number of states that we’re looking at.”

In a letter responding to the DOJ, Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs called the government list of 400 names “not reliable,” saying it included U.S. citizens, people who aren’t registered to vote and duplicate entries. “Time and time again,” Hobbs wrote, “DHS claims about noncitizen voter registration turn out to be greatly exaggerated or false.”

Sam Trepel is Rule of Law program director at States United Democracy Center and a former attorney for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. She said the agency’s actions involving California and Washington were a “disturbing use of prosecutorial authority.”

Trepel worried that the DOJ would try to seize ballots cast by voters identified as likely noncitizens, before or after the election, which would “put their votes at risk and undermine trust more broadly.”

Voting rights advocates also were concerned that the government’s efforts to target noncitizen voters could frighten eligible voters to the point that they wouldn’t show up.

A federal judge recently put limits on a multistate effort by the DHS to go door-to-door in search of suspected noncitizen voters, at least through Election Day, saying it was illegally intimidating legal voters.

“A voter could say, ‘Well, maybe I don’t want to put myself on the target list here, maybe I won’t register, or maybe I won’t vote,’” said David Janovsky, acting director of The Constitution Project at the watchdog group Project on Government Oversight.

3. Will There Be Problems at the Polls?

By late afternoon, voters and election officials had reported an array of delays and ballot-scanning problems. 

That includes in New York, where the State Board of Elections said a programming error in Westchester County made it impossible to scan ballots using on-site machines, causing voter concern. Officials have said that all ballots would be counted. 

States often change laws and rules related to voting.

Since 2024, Republican-led states have taken a number of steps that experts say will make it more difficult for some of their residents to cast ballots and have them count.

A North Carolina law, for example, required voters to provide proof of identification when sending mail-in ballots. Under new rules, ballots now come with two envelopes, both of which must be sealed. Ballot rejections had skyrocketed, Democracy Docket reported, because voters weren’t sealing the inner envelope.

Texas and other states cut back on the number and location of polling places, especially in areas favoring Democrats. In hotly contested Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, the number of polling sites was slashed by almost a third. This prompted fears of long lines and voter confusion on Election Day. But seven of the 10 voting sites a reporter visited had waits of less than 15 minutes, and the three with longer lines were each within a couple of miles of a site with a short wait. In Tarrant, like many Texas counties, voters can cast a ballot at any location.

Voting rights groups such as the Texas Civil Rights Project are tracking two issues involving the state’s voter registration systems. A software error at the Texas Department of Public Safety stopped several hundred thousand new voter registrations from being forwarded to local election officials, preventing them from being added to the rolls. A separate state system for updating registration information wasn’t processing changes for several weeks, leading to more backlogs.

Texas Civil Rights Project attorney Sarah Chen said the group received more complaints than usual from voters this Election Day who said they had to cast provisional ballots because registrations had not been processed. How much of a jump is unclear, Chen said, because counties have six days to report provisional ballots.

Every election features some issues with voting equipment.

During early voting, there were isolated complaints involving touch-screen voting machines — including one from Dolly Parton’s sister in Tennessee — spawning fears that machines had been “rigged” to switch votes.

ES&S, the company that makes the machines garnering the complaints, told ProPublica that the company hadn’t received widespread reports. Election experts say occasional problems with touch-screen machines don’t signify tampering or manipulation. Any attempt to tamper with programming would surface during testing by election officials and be corrected, they said.

4. How Secure Will the Election Be?

Incidents in the run-up to the midterms had ratcheted up election officials’ concerns about the potential for both cyber and physical attacks.

On Tuesday, bomb threats were made at polling places in at least two states, Ohio and Michigan. In Ohio, a threat at a Toledo elementary school caused the polling place to be evacuated, but the site was later cleared and voting resumed. In Michigan, the threat involved a polling place in Gibraltar, and an investigation similarly determined the threat was unfounded, according to the Michigan Department of State.

Last month, officials in several states, including Arizona, received envelopes with an unknown white powder. Arizona eventually deemed the material nontoxic, but Secretary of State Adrian Fontes said “the fear it caused was real.”

In 2024, false bomb threats, thought to be from foreign actors, caused widespread evacuations of vote-counting sites across the country. The disruptions were brief, however, in part because a message board funded by the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, alerted election officials that the FBI had deemed the threats not credible.

Trump, however, has dismantled CISA since retaking the presidency, leaving states and local election officials to grapple with both physical and cyber threats on their own. Election nonprofits have stepped up to try to fill the gap, and states, with CISA’s help, have enhanced their own cyber defenses. 

Derek Tisler, counsel and manager for the elections and government program at the Brennan Center for Justice, said the federal government’s absence has weakened the defenses.

“States acting on their own just do not have the same power,” he said.

5. Where Will Postelection Challenges Come From?

Election lawyers fear that actions by the Trump administration in the run-up to the midterms suggest the government will aggressively pursue postelection challenges if the results are not to the president’s liking.

Late last month, the DOJ sued Alaska, seeking to block the state from certifying the result of its Senate race if the Republican incumbent doesn’t win. A federal judge threw out that lawsuit on Sunday, but the administration is expected to appeal. 

Trump has said he personally ordered the lawsuit to be filed. It claims the system is unfairly rigged against Sen. Dan Sullivan, because another Alaska man named Dan Sullivan also qualified for the general election ballot. The New York Times reported last week that campaign aides to Democratic Senate nominee Mary Peltola orchestrated the candidacy of the second Dan Sullivan after a monthslong, statewide search to recruit someone with the same name. (The Justice Department has also reportedly sent 20 letters to Democrats, including a prominent elections lawyer who has represented Peltola and other candidates, warning that they might be targets of criminal investigations.)

Nonetheless, the DOJ’s case is unusual, both because federal law prohibits the government from interfering with an active election and because challenges typically come after voting is complete. Postelection challenges are most often brought by losing candidates in state courts.

“This is using the federal government to interfere with our election process in a way that I think is pretty troubling on multiple levels,” said Brown, the Washington attorney general.

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the DOJ pointed to Blanche’s statement about the lawsuit on social media, which said the agency “does not seek to stop any ballot from being cast or to stop the certification of Alaska’s election.” (The lawsuit calls it “vital” that the state not certify “any election result that may be impacted by voter confusion” and asks the judge to prevent Alaska from doing this.)

Some election lawyers have suggested that if the GOP suffers significant losses, Trump could try to pressure Republicans in Congress to block new members from being seated. Several lawyers, including Derek Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, say that the incoming Democratic majority would be able to fend off such an effort; courts, too, are likely to stymie it, though it might cause a short delay, according to Muller.

Brown said he and other attorneys general are also planning how to respond if local election officials or boards refuse to certify election results, based on their own claims of fraud or claims by the administration.

“I worry tremendously about what they might do,” Brown said.

The post Voting Experts Feared “Chaos” on Election Day. So Far, It Hasn’t Materialized. appeared first on ProPublica.

Lorraine Eiler stood in the blazing August sun, surrounded by reporters, to offer a warning. The Trump administration was racing to erect a second border wall across Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, southwest of Tucson. If the bulldozers came, she said, they were bound to disturb the final resting places of her family and Hia-Ced O’odham tribal ancestors.

“People used to live here,” the 89-year-old said.

Fifteen days later, her fears were realized.

ProPublica has confirmed that Native American remains were unearthed in Organ Pipe amid soil overturned by border wall contractors.

The discovery, unreported until now, was made on Sept. 8, the National Park Service said in a statement. “Following established protocols, the University of Arizona conducted an assessment and confirmed that the remains are human and align with tribal cremation practices,” the agency said.

The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act governs the steps agencies must take following an inadvertent discovery of Native American remains on federal land. Those steps include halting any activity that contributed to the discovery until tribal communities are consulted.

“The National Park Service is committed to respecting tribal rights and traditions,” the agency went on to say, adding that it was “working diligently to identify the culturally affiliated tribe and ensure the respectful return of the remains, so the tribe may observe their religious and cultural practices.”

Eiler was alerted to the discovery by a cultural affairs specialist with the Tohono O’odham Nation, a larger tribe whose reservation is east of Organ Pipe, and later by the Organ Pipe superintendent’s office. Her family discussed what to do next. Ultimately, they decided to hold off on reburying the newly unearthed remains until construction in the area stops, fearing the work will disturb more sites.

“​​Who knows what more will come up,” Eiler said in an interview. “They’re going to find remains wherever they dig.”

Customs and Border Protection contractors have bulldozed a wide swath of vegetation parallel to the international divide. The agency has fashioned staging areas for heavy equipment by knocking down, uprooting and attempting to transplant select specimens of the monument’s native plants. Eiler was told the remains were found by a park service archaeologist near the base of a saguaro cactus that was still standing.

In a statement, CBP said it was advised of the discovery six days after it was made, that its cultural resource specialists examined the area and found no other remains, and that “no additional construction has occurred at this location to date.”

The discovery comes amid tensions between the Department of Homeland Security and tribal communities in the Sonoran Desert. In April, border wall contractors bulldozed through a large, well-marked earthen etching, known as the Las Playas Intaglio, that was believed to be at least 6,500 years old. (CBP said the incident was accidental.)

Soon after, the department awarded a $1.3 billion contract for construction of a 62-mile border wall across the entirety of the Tohono O’odham Nation. The tribe is fighting the project in federal court and has erected “no trespassing” signs to keep border wall contractors off its land. As ProPublica recently reported, DHS has responded by deploying masked federal agents as escorts for its work crews and conducting aerial surveillance of tribal members. The head of CBP has justified the need for a wall by describing the reservation as “one of the most dangerous smuggling and trafficking corridors on the Southwest border.”

Verlon M. Jose, the tribe’s chairman, expressed gratitude that the park service had notified his office of the discovery, but mourned the fact that it was necessary.

“When you have mass destruction and disturbance of land taking place where there are clearly sacred sites, cemeteries and other areas of cultural importance, these types of discoveries are bound to happen,” Jose said in a statement. “Every time this happens it is a wound to the heart of all members of the Tohono O’odham Nation — these are our ancestors, our family members — whose remains are being desecrated.”

U.S. Rep. Adelita Grijalva, who appeared with Eiler and the chairman at the August news conference, blasted the government for failing to heed their warnings. “Tribal leaders and elders have warned DHS about the devastating consequences of bulldozing through their ancestral lands, beginning with the destruction of the Las Playas Intaglio,” she said in a statement. “For months, those warnings have fallen on deaf ears. Now, we are seeing exactly what they feared: sacred sites destroyed and ancestral burial grounds desecrated.”

James T. Watson, curator of bioarcheology in the Arizona State Museum at the University of Arizona, analyzed the remains recovered in Organ Pipe in the field.

While he was not authorized to discuss the details of his findings without park service approval, Watson said in an email that he confirmed the remains were human. The evidence suggested they were cremated in a manner consistent with precolonial practices in the region dating back 1,500 years, he wrote. 

Under NAGPRA, the graves protection act, Native American remains inadvertently uncovered on park service lands must be immediately secured, Watson explained, and the superintendent of the jurisdiction must notify “all relevant lineal descendants” with “potential cultural affiliation or ancestral ties to the land.”

“Work in the immediate discovery area must remain suspended for at least 30 calendar days,” he wrote, while the park service consults with tribal representatives “to determine the disposition and physical treatment of the remains.”

In a region as rich with archaeological sites as the American Southwest, the inadvertent disturbance of Native American remains occurs with some regularity. What sets the discovery in Organ Pipe apart are the extraordinary powers the Department of Homeland Security wields to expedite wall construction in the borderlands.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress passed the Real ID Act, which included a provision empowering the secretary of DHS to waive any law that might slow border wall construction. In the two decades since, DHS has invoked its powers 66 times, with 60 of those instances occurring under President Donald Trump’s two administrations.

When DHS uses this authority, it typically waives dozens of laws at a time. That was the case in 2019 when the department set its sights on Organ Pipe. A waiver issued by then-acting Secretary Kevin K. McAleenan set aside more than 40 of the nation’s most stringent environmental and cultural resource protection laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act and others. Also on that list was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the landmark 1990 law that acknowledged the nation’s long history of desecrating Native American burials and required that ancestral remains and cultural objects be returned to tribes.

In an internal 2019 report obtained by The Washington Post, park service officials identified nearly two dozen archaeological sites in Organ Pipe as at risk of damage or total destruction by government contractors.

Of particular significance is a desert oasis known as Quitobaquito Springs. Less than 200 feet from the international border, the springs provide one of the only reliable sources of groundwater and shade for miles around, and they were a longtime gathering place, grazing site and home for O’odham families.

“Archaeological evidence of human presence at Quitobaquito extends back thousands of years, at least to Archaic times,” the survey found, adding that the springs represent the “only known Hia C-ed O’odham village site in the United States.”

A park service report in 2024 noted that a cemetery at Quitobaquito holds the remains of at least two families, including Eiler’s, and 34 graves. Throughout the region, remains of 5,500 ancestors that were displaced have been made available for return to the Tohono O’odham Nation, according to ProPublica’s NAGPRA database.

“This sort of incident has happened numerous times across our homeland, and it’s always alarming to hear about a case from an O’odham point of view,” said David Martínez, a professor of American Indian and transborder studies at Arizona State University and a member of the Hia-Ced O’odham and Akimel O’odham tribes, as well as the Gila River Indian Community.

“Those remains shouldn’t have been disturbed in the first place,” he said. “While there are protocols existing today to properly care for these remains, ultimately, whatever either the government or the corporate world is pursuing to build, we know that at some juncture that construction will continue, and it always leaves us feeling, I think, a little hollow.”

Today, Quitobaquito lies in the shadow of the border wall erected during Trump’s first term. Its construction required detonating explosives in the national monument, blasting apart an area called Monument Hill and outraging tribal leaders. According to Eiler, the remains recovered in September were not found at the springs, though government work crews are working in close proximity to the site.

This year, DHS hired Sundt Construction, an Arizona-based company, to build a second wall in the monument. The $443 million contract was finalized in May. (Sundt directed questions concerning the discovery of human remains on its job site to CBP.)

According to CBP, the 2019 waiver for Organ Pipe is still in effect, years after completion of the project that prompted it. A second waiver, exempting DHS from many of the same laws and applying to the national monument as well as a wildlife refuge to the west, was issued by Homeland Security’s then-Secretary Kristi Noem last year.

“Unfortunately, there is no end date to the effectiveness of the waivers,” said Dinah Bear, a Tucson-based lawyer who served for 25 years as a senior attorney in the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality under both Democratic and Republican administrations. What’s more, she added, “there’s nothing in the statutory language that ties the waivers to a particular project.”

The Department of Homeland Security’s waiver powers have been central to a high-profile legal fight over the department’s efforts to build a border wall through Big Bend National Park in West Texas, with a federal judge overseeing the case recently ordering a temporary halt to the project.

Borderlands advocates in Arizona are hoping for similar interventions. In Congress, Grijalva is preparing legislation to void existing waivers that have allowed DHS to disregard laws designed to protect tribal sovereignty, sacred sites and environmentally sensitive lands.

In the meantime, construction on the border continues. For Eiler, it’s not just the destruction in Organ Pipe that’s troubling. She sees the disturbance of tribal graves resulting from wall construction as reflective of a wider pattern of destruction across the border.

“It’s sad because it’s not only happening down there,” she said. “It’s happening all over the United States, and nobody’s saying much about it.”

The post Tribal Leaders Warned Border Wall Construction Would Disturb Native American Remains. They Were Right. appeared first on ProPublica.

Ahead of next week’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished institutional guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 presidential election, ProPublica’s reporting has shown.

Trump has empowered his loyalists to try to transform the voting process. He launched an unprecedented — and largely unsuccessful — effort to find noncitizen voters. And he tried to restrict mail-in voting.

Our reporters have spent much of this year covering Trump’s efforts to exert more federal control over elections. Here are five takeaways from their reporting.

1. The Trump administration has sought greater federal control over elections.

In April, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield reported on Trump’s efforts to “take over” the midterm elections, detailing how the administration has discarded or diminished endeavors across the federal government to protect the voting process or block foreign interference. Those efforts have included cutting staff on election-related teams at federal law enforcement agencies and finding ways to exert greater federal control over voting. 

Our reporting led by Peter Elkind revealed that the Trump administration harnessed Homeland Security Investigations’ personnel, technology and legal authority to try to back up Trump’s unproven claim that illegal voting by noncitizens is tilting elections toward Democrats. Administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results. Our analysis of Justice Department data found, as of May, 41 alleged noncitizens were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. Earlier this month, CBS reported 156 people have been charged since the beginning of the second Trump administration.

As part of that effort, the Justice Department has demanded states turn over unredacted voter rolls, which contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Since September 2025, the department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the confidential data. Wary of federal overreach, state officials — including some Republicans — have fought back, and so far every DOJ lawsuit that’s been decided by a federal judge has been dismissed. (The Trump administration has appealed most of its losses to federal appeals courts and has said it will consider taking its fight to the Supreme Court. A Justice Department spokesperson said its “attorneys are skilled, principled advocates who argue every case honestly and in good faith.”)

In a March executive order, Trump instructed the U.S. Postal Service to create new regulations for mail voting. The rules would have put the Postal Service in the unprecedented role of deciding whether to send or deny the delivery of voters’ mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court in September blocked the rules, at least until after November.

The Trump administration has said its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so. Spokespeople for the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.

2. Trump has pushed out career officials — and is coordinating with a conservative grassroots organization to transform elections.

At least 75 nonpartisan career officials who’d held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety have been fired or left the government.

Two dozen Trump appointees — including many from the election-denial movement — have been hired. Ahead of the midterms, current and former government officials and election security experts have expressed concerns that once-fringe actors who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections are now in positions to control the narrative around the voting process. (A DHS spokesperson said it hires “experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”)

At least 25 administration appointees have close ties to Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who leads Election Integrity Network, a grassroots conservative group focused on transforming America’s voting system. This month, Clark profiled Mitchell — and detailed how, despite not holding a formal role in the White House, she’s played a key role in shaping the Trump administration’s elections agenda. The White House has appointed her associates to help hunt for noncitizen voters and investigate accusations of voting fraud in 2020. (Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica, but wrote in an email: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”)

Mitchell, who played a role in helping Trump challenge his loss in the 2020 presidential election, has been leading efforts to pass state and federal iterations of the SAVE Act. The 2026 version of the bill, known as the SAVE America Act, would require voters nationwide to provide proof of citizenship to register and present a photo ID to vote, and would compel states to turn over their voter rolls to DHS. Trump has repeatedly called the measure his top legislative priority, but it has been blocked in the Senate. 

In July, Trump also pushed out the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, a four-member board designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats that sets standards for state voting systems. (At the time, a White House official wouldn’t confirm the moves but said the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”)

3. Trump officials asked a cybersecurity agency to secretly acquire a voting machine — and hack it.

A few months into Trump’s second term, political appointees at DHS asked its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure a voting machine, hack it and report the findings so they could be given to the White House, two former administration officials with knowledge of the request told Clark and Andy Mannix.

CISA employees told the political appointees their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. (One of Trump’s first actions when he returned to the White House was to dismantle the agency’s election security work.)

Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems. Since CISA became an agency in 2018, it has come to provide crucial support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.

But some state election officials said CISA provided them with little help as they planned for the 2026 midterms. And other state authorities told Clark and Mannix that they no longer trusted the agency and feared it had been compromised by the Trump administration. (A DHS spokesperson told us in April the “claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”)

DHS did not respond to questions for our October investigation, but a DHS spokesperson previously told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” A White House spokesperson declined an interview request but said, “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.” 

4. The White House floated an idea that would’ve shut down virtually all mail-in voting.

The White House initially proposed a change for the Postal Service that would’ve been even more disruptive than the rule the Supreme Court rejected in September.

As Fifield and Elkind reported, the Trump administration suggested all ballots be delivered through certified mail, meaning voters would need to be home to sign for delivery of their ballots. The Trump administration dropped this plan after the USPS said it would be too difficult to execute. It instead proceeded with the executive order that would’ve forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence.

The Supreme Court’s order in September means that voting by mail can proceed as planned for the midterms, with states left to decide the rules for mail-in ballots.

5. The Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have led to delays and more rejected ballots in rural areas.

Amid the increased attention on the Postal Service’s role in elections, a ProPublica analysis found that delays resulting from the agency’s cost-cutting measures in recent years have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas.

The Postal Service has consolidated processing of first-class mail into regional hubs, and the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from those processing plants. The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and pushed back postmarking, an official mark confirming an envelope has been received by the Postal Service.

Across five states where the best data was available — Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon — the delays during this year’s primary elections have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024.

Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts in place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout.

The post Trump Has Tried to Exert More Control Over Elections. Here Are the Key Findings From Our Reporting. appeared first on ProPublica.

In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change. 

To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work.

Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it there. Forever. 

The experts in Oviedo had stacks of papers proving that parts of the process worked. But major questions remained about how much space exists inside the Earth to store the CO2, how effectively it could be monitored and whether the poisonous, concentrated gas would reliably stay underground. 

Tasked with wrangling roughly three dozen of those scientists toward consensus was Sally Benson, a geoscientist from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who was co-leading the report’s chapter on underground storage of carbon. After a quarter-century of studying how fluids and gases move beneath Earth’s surface, she was an unimpeachable authority on the subject. She was also a savvy and diplomatic leader, skilled at managing rooms full of big egos and big tempers. It was proving handy in a process that had at times devolved into unruly debate.  

The scientists had clashed for years over what the report should say, first at a meeting in Canada, then in Norway,  Australia and Brazil. The evidence was scant. Three large-scale experiments were underway, but only one — a Norwegian operation that captured carbon from a natural gas field and pumped it under the bed of the North Sea — had rigorously tested permanent storage. There, the injected CO2 astonished engineers when it floated 700 feet upward through a series of geologic formations. To their relief, it hit a ceiling of shale that kept it underground, and the project was deemed a success. But with so little to go on, the scientists warned in their first draft that any broad statement about leakage risk would be “almost meaningless.”

The researchers were in Oviedo only because Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries had pressured the U.N. to write the report despite the paucity of evidence, according to U.N. officials and records. The oil, gas and coal industries had spent years casting doubt on climate change while quietly fretting that policies to address it would one day put them out of business. The industry, documents show, saw CCS as a way to forestall that outcome, allowing the world to keep burning fossil fuels while simply burying the pollution underground. A U.N. report would bring the technology into the mainstream. 

In turn, the U.N. hoped such a report would draw the oil-producing nations into its search for climate solutions. So despite objections from some nations and environmental organizations, which warned that the report would distract from the imperative to phase out fossil fuels, the U.N.’s preeminent climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, went ahead. And for the first time, it invited a large contingent of industry researchers to join the scientists in writing the report, as well as several representatives from environmental groups.  Benson’s chapter included authors and editors from Shell, Chevron and Saudi Aramco. 

The process that followed would make some of the chapter’s scientists uneasy. The IPCC’s procedures stated that reports should assess the existing research on a topic based on peer-reviewed literature and that exceptions must be reviewed and clearly cited. 

Bert Metz, one of the highest-ranking U.N. officials at the meeting, was pressing the group to come up with more definitive language about CCS’ potential. The report would be better if it could offer hard numbers, even where none existed in the literature: Precisely how many gigatons of storage capacity did the planet likely have? How long would a well-designed reservoir hold the CO2 injected into it? More than a year? A thousand years?

With so little evidence to work with, David Keith, a Canadian physicist, proposed a workaround: The authors could conduct an “expert elicitation,” taking an anonymous survey about what they expected the evidence to eventually show. 

At first, not everyone was willing to go along. Some scientists worried that making what amounted to educated guesses would mislead the public, they told Drilled and ProPublica. Benson and Metz, though, both argued that on such an important matter informed advice was better than nothing.

In the end, the group agreed to take the survey and to keep it off the record —  they would “burn it afterward,” Keith recounted, making no mention of it in the official report. When the meeting concluded, some of the scientists popped their bottles of cava in celebration.

“It’s not the hard science that you would prefer, obviously,” Metz would later tell Drilled and ProPublica. 

Five months later, the IPCC published its special report, which would help legitimize CCS for a generation.

The 431-page document portrayed CCS as a potential savior for the climate that could enable countries “to continue to include fossil fuels in their energy mix.” It stated that using CCS could lower the cost of stabilizing global CO2 concentrations by at least 30% and that if fully supported by policy, it could account for as much as 55% of the world’s efforts to limit climate change through this century.

It acknowledged that there were still gaps in research and experience with the technology — offering extensive detail deep within its pages about the challenges and uncertainties of piecing together separate but proven steps in the CCS process. But its summary stated that “there are no major technical or knowledge barriers” to storing captured CO2 underground. 

All of those assertions, however, rested on the critical determinations made by the scientists handling the storage chapter. 

Benson’s group wrote that the planet offered vast CO2 storage capacity. Storage sites that were well selected and well managed, they said, were likely to retain 99% of the carbon pumped into them for at least 1,000 years.

A Consequential Decision

The scientists’ conclusions that day in Spain have had profound, compounding consequences.

The special report has been cited in thousands of academic papers, in legislative testimony and in media coverage validating carbon capture and storage as a realistic solution to global warming.

When climate forecasters built models, their calculations assumed CCS would work. When governments and corporations began making so-called “net zero” pledges, promising to subtract as much CO2 from the atmosphere as they add, they assumed CCS would work. When policymakers gave energy companies billions of dollars in public funds to develop “clean coal,” they assumed CCS would work. 

These presumptions shifted the world’s discourse from how to limit carbon pollution to how to remove it from the atmosphere after the fact.

Enthusiasm for the technology has only grown. This spring, California embarked on one of the world’s largest carbon burial endeavors yet. While President Donald Trump eviscerated most programs addressing the climate, he has expanded subsidies for CCS. There are more than 100 applications for storage sites pending in the U.S. alone. U.N. analyses suggest that to achieve environmental goals, a CCS industry the size of the entire global oil production industry would have to be built by 2050. 

But 21 years after Oviedo, a staggering gap lies between expectations for the technology and its operational reality. Since 1996, just 12 large-scale geological storage projects have been constructed. Collectively, they bury less CO2 than a single power plant can emit in a year, according to our analysis of sites listed in an International Energy Agency database. Seven of them have faced technical, financial or performance issues. An investigation by Drilled and ProPublica found there’s reason to doubt carbon capture and storage will ever succeed at the scale needed to offer a significant climate solution.

History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.

But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.

Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research. 

Later, the American Petroleum Institute would write in internal communications that the industry’s “license to operate” depended on companies lowering climate pollution, and CCS, it wrote, “enables the use of petroleum and natural gas by providing an opportunity to capture and/or offset emissions.” And at a 2023 prominent oil industry conference in Houston, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub, would explain that a novel form of CCS that sucks carbon directly from the air “is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time.” 

For many university faculty, the rewards for studying the industry’s favored climate solution have been numerous, opening opportunities, funding papers and raising their profiles. Benson is a clear example. When the IPCC was awarded in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize for its climate work, she and her co-authors were recognized among the scientists who contributed. When Stanford University sought a new director for its ExxonMobil-funded climate research center, it tapped her. When President Joe Biden prioritized climate policy, he brought Benson into the White House. 

Keith, the Canadian physicist, benefited from oil industry interest in a different way: He developed technology to capture CO2. Occidental Petroleum paid more than $1 billion to buy the company he founded.

There is no evidence that Benson, widely described by colleagues as scrupulous, skewed her scientific findings to suit the interests of her industry patrons, and Benson has described CCS’ flaws in her publications. 

However, in speeches, presentations and even congressional testimony, she has been a dogged champion of CCS technology, time and again describing it as safe and ready for large-scale deployment, despite having a ringside view to its many setbacks. 

She has frequently referenced the most affirmative statements from her group’s work in Oviedo as evidence. But the methodology Benson and her co-authors used to reach those conclusions 21 years ago has not been generally understood. When Drilled and ProPublica told prominent climate researchers about the expert elicitation process, several were disconcerted to learn that there was so little scientific basis for the report’s conclusion that 99% of CO2 was likely to remain underground. 

A survey, said Oliver Geden, a vice chair of the IPCC’s forthcoming climate assessment, was “an inappropriate way of assessing the literature.” 

Authors “are not supposed to do original research. They’re supposed to just collect what’s out there,” said Roger Cooke, who was a lead author on a subsequent IPCC report. Cooke said expert elicitation, done rigorously, can be valuable, but “just asking a bunch of experts to give their best guess is one of the worst things you can do.”

In a detailed written response, Benson said she did not believe that the survey undertaken in 2005 violated IPCC norms and said the group’s leadership was aware of the process. She disputed that the approach amounted to an informed guess and said that “there was an enormous amount of data” to draw on. The group was trying to agree on the best language to synthesize evidence detailed deeper in the report. She rejected the notion that her research or career were influenced by industry funding, writing that she has worked “tirelessly for 30 years on CCS and other climate solutions” in a sincere effort to combat an escalating planetary crisis. And, she offered, she views CCS as one valuable tool among many needed to address climate change. 

Keith said the goal of the expert elicitation was not to seek precision, but to provide a sense of the orders of magnitude of the capacity and risks, “because that’s what’s relevant to public policy.” He said even sites with problems haven’t leaked large amounts of CO2 and that the report’s broad statements “have stood the test of time.” The chapter authors’ confidence in CCS doesn’t suggest “that a bunch of us are tools of the fossil fuel industry.”

The IPCC declined to comment on specific questions about how the report came about. “We are not in a position to comment on individual recollections,” a spokesperson wrote about the expert elicitation. However, they said that the group’s process was in keeping with the organization’s procedures at the time and that it reflected contemporaneous understanding of the technology. The IPCC did not directly respond to the assertion that the authors conducted what amounts to new research during the writing process, and it did not provide requested records that would detail the scientists’ vote. “The IPCC’s role is to assess the full range of available scientific knowledge,” the statement said. Metz referred to the IPCC’s response. 

Chevron, Shell and Saudi Aramco did not respond to requests for comment. 

Drilled and ProPublica spoke with more than 100 experts on carbon capture, climate modeling and influence in academia, including a dozen people who attended the Oviedo meeting. We compiled records of geologic storage tests and surveyed an extensive body of peer-reviewed literature. This investigation is part of a broader examination into how fossil fuel industry funding of climate research has shaped climate policy, solutions and public understanding. It follows our report in June about a BP-funded program at Princeton University and the oil company’s role in crafting one of the program’s most influential climate papers. 

Since Benson and her co-authors met in Oviedo, weather catastrophes have multiplied, oceans have acidified and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has soared. In September, the U.N. released an urgent new report declaring that the race to avert disruptive warming has been all but lost. It concluded that “overshoot” — the notion that temperatures will rise above the world’s adopted goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — is now a certainty. 

Carbon capture and storage, it said, is one of the only ways to bring those temperatures back down.

Looking at a Failure and Calling It Triumph 

Just a few days before the meeting in Oviedo, BP put Benson and a handful of other scientists on a chartered flight from London to Algeria. Their destination: the world’s second major geologic carbon storage experiment, in the Sahara.

The British oil giant, along with the state-owned oil companies of Algeria and Norway, had begun to drill for gas at a new field named for a nearby oasis called In Salah. Most natural gas comes out of the ground as a cocktail of methane and CO2. The CO2 must be stripped out and is usually vented into the sky. But at In Salah, the companies saw an opportunity to try out a greener process — one that could become big business.

Earth’s crust is a layer cake of rock. Some layers, like sandstone, contain honeycombed pores capable of holding CO2, while others, like mudstone, can act as impermeable seals, trapping the buoyant gas underground. 

That layer cake is impossible to precisely chart from the surface, but engineers sent sound waves into the ground and interpreted what echoed up into rough maps. They learned their target sandstone reservoir sat below a 3,000-foot-thick brick of mudstone they believed would be impermeable. They also learned the sandstone was “tight” — less honeycombed than they had hoped — but still capable of holding gas. So they had begun to inject the CO2.

The plane landed on a sand-strewn strip circled by jeep tracks and rocky plateaus. A photograph shows Benson, medium height, her blond bob tucked beneath a hard hat, standing in the desert alongside a BP-funded physicist from Princeton named Robert Socolow and seven other men in front of a well that was pushing CO2 under the desert. In Salah had been operating for less than a year but seemed to be going smoothly. 

Afterward, Benson traveled to Oviedo to finish drafting the special report, which listed In Salah among key sites that “indicate that it is feasible to store CO2” underground at significant scale.

That assessment has not held up.

Energy companies had first begun pumping CO2 into the ground commercially in the 1970s, when they realized it would loosen up stubborn crude oil, sometimes doubling an oil field’s output. They called it “enhanced oil recovery,” and though they didn’t try to lock the CO2 in place, much of it seemed to stay underground.

The idea to use carbon injection as a climate fix came a few years later from an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti, who suggested disposing of carbon deep in the ocean or underground. In the 1980s Exxon tried, and gave up on, efforts to develop the idea. And it wasn’t until 1996 when the first large-scale CCS project — the operation in the North Sea — began.

In a recent interview inside her narrow, fluorescent-lit office at Stanford University’s earth sciences building, Benson said it was shortly after that that she first heard of CCS. A colleague at the Department of Energy had sent her a slide deck by Princeton’s Socolow about the technology. “I was like, ‘I think this is nuts,’” she told Drilled and ProPublica.

“I just couldn’t really picture it working at scale.” 

But, as both an idealist and a pragmatist, she was drawn to the potential for science to solve difficult environmental problems. She made a crude calculation of how much CO2 might fit beneath California and was surprised by the answer: a lot. At least in theory. And it changed her mind. 

As Benson became one of CCS’ leading experts and champions, she increasingly found herself in rooms full of oil industry veterans. In 2000, she helped establish a partnership between the Department of Energy and companies including Chevron, Texaco and BP. That program had a focused mission: make large-scale geological storage an operational reality by 2015.  

In 2002, Benson was asked to sit on the advisory council of a new BP and Ford Motor Co.-funded climate research center at Princeton University. At a summit there the following year, Benson expressed concern that focusing on leaks could undermine public support for CCS, according to meeting records and the account of another person in attendance. 

“Need to present optimistic estimates,” the minutes recapping her presentation say.

By 2007, Benson was helping to run her own industry-funded research center. A few years earlier, ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, a thunderous voice of climate denial, had put up $100 million of the company’s money to fund climate and energy work at Stanford University. With another $125 million from three other companies, Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project became one of the best-funded climate research centers in America. 

The donation came with strings: ExxonMobil and the other sponsors had veto power over which research projects received funding.

Students and activists protested the funding structure, accusing ExxonMobil of retracing the path of tobacco companies, which paid for scientific work on obscure causes of cancer as a distraction from their culpability. 

Benson defended the arrangement ardently and often. ExxonMobil and the other sponsors approved every grant that Stanford recommended, never exercising their veto power, she said. Reporting by Drilled and ProPublica did not contradict that assertion. Benson also pointed to the fact that the program funded an array of research, including on renewable energy.  

In an interview and written response, Benson said researchers who take funding from oil companies are motivated not by corporate agendas, but by genuine interest in the work. The funding underwrites the inquiry, she said, not its conclusions. Where there’s “alignment,” she added, the industry support can be “amazingly catalytic and helpful.”

In response to a request for comment, Stanford University directed Drilled and ProPublica to former law school dean Paul Brest, who led a committee that reviewed energy research funding at the school. Brest said that faculty have a right to seek any funding they choose, so long as sponsors cannot direct the work.

Most important to Benson was that scientists and their students have the opportunity to research matters of great consequence. She has published more than 50 papers on geologic carbon storage since joining Stanford, most of them highly technical evaluations of CCS that reiterated its importance to reducing emissions, and many underwritten by ExxonMobil and other industry sources. “I don’t know anybody else,” she told Drilled and ProPublica, “who would eventually provide, you know, $225 million of funding” to study climate solutions.

But whether researchers intended to serve their funders’ agenda on CCS or not, some say the effect has been undeniable. “It seems like a credible solution because you have credible people at credible institutions working on it,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science and an expert in corporate influence. 

Benson was still getting settled into her new job at Stanford when the project in Algeria ran into major problems. 

On a 118-degree day in 2007, In Salah’s inspectors heard CO2 whistling through the top of an abandoned oil well nearly a mile from the nearest injection site. Engineers had believed it would take years before the CO2 plume could spread so far underground, but the gas had cracked through the sandstone and found a new path.

To stop the leak, workers poured cement into the well, plugging it permanently. But soon a second problem arose: Satellite data revealed the desert floor above the injection sites had bulged. When project engineers again used sound waves and other tools to map the layers underground, they arrived at an alarming discovery: Pressurized CO2 had sent cracks a quarter of the way up through the 3000-foot-thick layer of mudstone. If it breached the rest, it could leach into the pan-Saharan aquifer, acidifying a source of drinking water millions of people depend on. 

BP and its partners eventually summoned Benson and the other science advisers to London. The dangerous gas, they could now see, was moving in ways they had predicted it could not. Nonetheless, the advisers suggested that injection proceed temporarily to see whether it could safely be done under lower pressure and with careful monitoring. 

But the Algerians had had enough. In 2011 BP and its partners stopped injection, and in 2012 they quietly scrapped the project. 

Benson would later describe In Salah as a technical failure but a triumph of detection. “It was monitored and people found a problem,” she told Drilled and ProPublica. 

“Then,” she added, they “learned from it.”

More Problems, More Dependence

As she did in Oviedo, Benson still maintains that the fundamental mechanics of CCS are well enough understood to know that it can work. 

As proof that geologic formations can handle high-pressure gas, she points to the natural gas industry, which injects large amounts of its product back underground for temporary storage. 

She also points to enhanced oil recovery. Over the last 40 years, American companies have injected 100 times more CO2 into drilling fields as a way to extract more oil than they have into what CCS industry insiders call “dedicated” CO2 storage reservoirs. There are few reports of accidents or leaks at these sites. 

Unlike dedicated CO2 storage, though, enhanced oil recovery is less likely to cause pressure to build up underground, because the CO2 pumped in fills space left by the oil that’s forced out. (These sites also can result in a net addition of CO2 in the atmosphere, since they wind up producing still more oil.) 

The record of the industry’s largest CCS sites — ones designed solely to help the climate — has been far more troubled.

Around the time In Salah shut down, the world’s third large project — a Norwegian site named Snøhvit several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle — also met critical obstacles. When injection began in 2008, engineers had calculated the site would have an 18-year capacity. But they had radically overestimated how much CO2 it could absorb and had to relocate the project after just three years.

In the U.S., a decadelong effort to build a “clean coal” power plant  outfitted with CCS proved impossible within a reasonable budget and was abandoned in 2015 — but not before the government had spent $378 million in taxpayer money. Benson was on the project’s advisory board for part of that time.

That year in Canada, Shell opened a $1 billion carbon capture and storage facility — also largely paid for by the country’s taxpayers — connected to open-pit oil sands mines. The industry routinely promises that plants like this one, called Quest, capture at least 90% of emissions. But at Quest, once the energy required for the capture process itself is accounted for, the capture rate instead has hovered around 68%, according to a report by the research group Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It has also caused hundreds of microearthquakes.

Shell did not respond to a request for comment.

As one carbon storage project struggled after another, Benson and other academic researchers continued to insist they could flourish. 

In a keynote speech at a 2018 conference in Sweden, Benson showed a slide with a map of CCS facilities across the world, most of which were enhanced oil recovery sites. Her map included In Salah, which had shuttered. And it included another project, in Australia, which had yet to open. “The operations have been very good at all of these projects. And they’ve gone well in terms of safety,” she said.

She also showed a slide pointing to the 2005 U.N. special report’s statement that an “appropriately selected,” well-managed reservoir would likely retain 99% of its carbon for more than 1,000 years. “This was an expression that if you find the right site, the CO2 should be permanently stored,” she said.

In a written response, she said she continues to cite the 21-year-old special report’s conclusions on leakage because “the methodology was sound then and remains so.” Benson said that she is careful to qualify her characterizations and show evidence in her presentations, and that during her presentation in Sweden she did so. She did not directly address the status of projects portrayed in her map.

When the Australian project, called Gorgon, did open the following year, it turned out to be the biggest CCS fiasco yet. Australia had allowed Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to drill a major new natural gas field there with the requirement that the companies buried at least 80% of the CO2 that came out of the ground with it. It was billed as the world’s largest CCS operation. 

Instead, it has been plagued by clogged injection wells and underground pressure spikes. In their operating year ending in 2025, the companies were able to inject just a quarter of the CO2 collected there. Since they vent the remainder, Gorgon, once billed as a model for climate solutions, became the largest single source of industrial carbon pollution on the continent.

“Like any pioneering endeavour, it takes time to optimise a new system to ensure it performs reliably over 40-plus years of operation,” a Chevron spokesperson wrote in an emailed response. “We realise that people refer to the challenges at Gorgon in an attempt to discredit CCS, however, as we have shown, we can capture and store greenhouse gas at scale.” Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond to requests for comment.

An Idea Takes Root

While operators struggled to prove CCS could be viable, the world became dependent on it working. 

As soon as the IPCC published the 2005 report, climate modelers that help assess the most economic ways to limit global warming began folding CCS into their calculations.

They projected not only that CCS could stop billions of tons of emissions from reaching the sky, but that it could suck old carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. They adopted a theory that supposed vast fields of switchgrass or fast-growing willow could absorb carbon into their stalks and leaves, and when those plants were harvested and burned for electricity, their emissions, too, would be captured and buried. 

The modelers incorporated this subtractive approach so prodigiously that, on paper, they could reverse climate change. Global temperatures could overshoot targets in the short term, so long as enough carbon was eventually sucked back out of the air to bring those temperatures back down. 

World leaders embraced the wiggle room this theory provided them. When they signed the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, pledging to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, they counted on these so-called negative emissions among the key tools that could make it possible. In 2018, when the IPCC published a special report on how to reach that goal, 89 out of its 90 scenarios included using large-scale CCS. 

Now, in its latest report, the U.N. says that it is virtually impossible to still get to a 1.5 C future — or anything close — without removing carbon from the atmosphere. There are several ways to do that — reforestation and the use of minerals spread on fields to absorb carbon, for instance. But these methods are either small scale or even less proven than CCS. 

By 2015, the tantalizing idea of “negative emissions” was showing up in new, mainstream ways. “Net zero” pledges to one day offset carbon emissions began rolling in from most of the world’s nations, as well as cities like Omaha, Nebraska; the band Coldplay; ice cream chains; funeral homes; and even ExxonMobil.

But real-world CCS projects have not met the moment. 

To scale the technology as much as U.N. analyses suggest is needed to limit warming to 2 C would require not only a technological feat but almost unimaginable resources, Drilled and ProPublica found. Carbon dioxide injection would have to almost immediately increase by more than 400 times. That would require more than 2,000 new geological waste sites to be established — a new large-scale CCS project put into operation every four days, on average, for the next 25 years.

To move the CO2 to those sites would require 68,000 miles of specialized pipeline in the U.S. alone. Globally, at least 85 custom-built tankers would be needed to carry the high-pressure gas safely across oceans. Just four exist.

And if all of that were accomplished, the effort would come at an almost inconceivable cost: tens of trillions of dollars.

“Fuck, OK, It’s Harder Than We Thought” 

At Benson’s office at Stanford, in a building where rocks painstakingly collected from field sites fill cabinets in the halls, the Society of Petroleum Engineers hosts Friday socials — beer and snacks provided — and the adjacent courtyard is named after the oil company Arco. 

Inside, propped on a stack of boxes, is a framed copy of Biden’s keystone climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. On it, national climate adviser Ali Zaidi scrawled in blue sharpie, “Thank you, Sally, for helping truly transform our energy & climate future!” 

Benson returned to Stanford after a nearly two-year stint in Biden’s White House as the head of the energy division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she says she provided periodic scientific advice as the act was being pushed through Congress. One of the most ambitious climate policy efforts in history, it offered a large set of incentives for CCS, which the fossil fuel industry had lobbied for intensely.

But even while oil industry leaders have pushed the world to embrace CCS, behind closed doors, they have remained skeptical of its potential as a climate solution. 

In 2007, as ExxonMobil funded Benson’s center at Stanford, its former CEO Raymond told a room full of industry leaders that carbon storage might be considered “kind of the Holy Grail.” Executing it, though, would be “a whole different animal” than injecting carbon underground for enhanced oil recovery. “You can’t assume that’s going to happen. And the cost is going to be very, very significant.”

A 2011 internal slide deck from BP stated that while carbon storage would allow fossil fuels to remain the world’s dominant source of energy, “the pace of CCS development has been slow and the future pace remains uncertain.” And in a 2018 internal presentation, ExxonMobil predicted hardly any CCS would be deployed by 2050, even as it modeled that global CO2 emissions from energy production would continue to skyrocket. 

Yet the industry saw brand value in encouraging CCS anyway. An ExxonMobil document from 2021 describes a public relations campaign to persuade the political and financial “elites” to “believe ExxonMobil is committed to helping solve climate change,” in part by proving its efforts on CCS will “play an indispensable role” in a greener economy.  

For her part, Benson still has faith in the technology’s viability, despite the failures. “These are big projects, right? The idea that everything goes exactly according to plan, especially for these first-of-a-kind projects — it’s unrealistic.”

As proof that CCS is on the rise, she pointed to 77 operating CCS projects identified in a report by the industry group the Global CCS Institute and said that another report demonstrated a tenfold growth in CO2 injected underground since 2005.

When ProPublica and Drilled reviewed that same data, however, and excluded the enhanced oil recovery projects, we found just eight operating large-scale carbon burial projects on that list (10 using the group’s more recent data), and half the increase in annual injections that Benson stated. 

Experts interviewed for this story insisted — often in an anguished timbre — that CCS simply must work because decades of delay have foreclosed other paths to a stable climatic future. 

But just because the world now needs CCS to work doesn’t mean it can. 

“It’s always some issue,” said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “I think there’s been a lack of willingness for the community to say, ‘Fuck, OK, it’s harder than we thought.’”

The latest CCS effort got underway this spring, in California, when the oil company California Resources Corp. began injecting CO2 beneath the state’s Central Valley. 

California — long a vanguard of environmental policy — has embraced the technology. In 2021, as it was formulating a plan for how the state should reach its climate targets, the California Air Resources Board invited Benson to give a presentation on the role CCS could play. 

“The fraction of CO2 retained underground is likely to be very high,” she told the board, again pointing to the 2005 special report: “This study said 99% over 1,000 years.” 

The board set the ambitious goal of burying more than 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045, more than all the carbon that has ever been geologically stored around the world combined. Since it opened in May, the new project has injected just 7% of its advertised capacity, but California Resources Corp. is now seeking permits for eight more CCS projects across California, and other oil and gas companies have proposed four more, including two that Stanford is directly involved with.

California Resources Corp., in a written response, said the company is injecting the amount it had planned for early operations and will increase to capacity as the project develops. 

Could California truly be burying 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045? For the first time, in an interview, Benson was hesitant to commit. “I think it’s very challenging,” she said. “That’s a lot of infrastructure, a lot of money, a lot of projects.” 

Asked a second time, she once again demurred. “Oh gosh. If we really set our mind to it. If we could wave a wand.”

The post How a Secret Vote by U.N. Scientists Legitimized Carbon Capture and Skewed Decades of Climate Policy appeared first on ProPublica.

State and federal officials have ramped up scrutiny of online sports betting companies in recent weeks, launching inquiries, demanding information and, in one case, proposing a new rule that would limit when companies like DraftKings can pitch their users to bet more.

The moves — by gaming regulators, government lawyers and federal lawmakers — follow an investigation last month by ProPublica that tested the guardrails DraftKings and other sports betting companies have in place to protect users from spiraling out of control. That system is called responsible gaming, and executives say it’s integral to their companies’ long-term success.

The ProPublica article showed how DraftKings bestowed VIP status on a reporter who deliberately bet like a problem gambler. The report detailed the ways in which the app’s user design and promotions encouraged more betting — even after the reporter opted into responsible gaming tools designed to slow users down. A week earlier, The New York Times reported that DraftKings had used machine learning and artificial intelligence to target promotions to losing bettors.

Those articles were the focus of an Oct. 15 meeting of the Louisiana Gaming Control Board, which, partly in response to the stories, tabled the renewal of DraftKings’ five-year license. Instead, the board granted the company a temporary four-month permit while investigators look into the issues raised in the reports as well as other paperwork concerns.

The board’s chair, Christopher Hebert, said the Times had raised some “very serious questions” and called ProPublica’s reporting “very troubling.”

While news stories “are not findings of regulatory violations,” Hebert said, “as regulators we have a responsibility to examine these matters that could affect the integrity of gaming operations and the protections of our citizens here in Louisiana.”

State health officials say the number of Louisianans believed to have a gambling disorder has risen in recent years amid the surge in popularity of online gambling and prediction market sites. One top official reported this summer that gambling addiction was among the health department’s “top three priorities.”

Paul Liberman, who co-founded DraftKings and serves as its president of operations, told the regulators: “We do not use artificial intelligence to target losing gamblers by any means.”

DraftKings previously told ProPublica that it proactively closes the accounts of suspected problem gamblers “all the time” but declined to provide specific figures. Yet when asked by a Louisiana board member for those same specifics, Lori Kalani, DraftKings’ chief responsible gaming officer, said 175 accounts in the state had been shut down this year. She told the board she didn’t know how many total users DraftKings had in the Pelican State.

“We’re not physicians, we’re not clinicians and that’s not our role, but we certainly want to help people enjoy the service, the platform that we’re offering them,” Kalani told the board. “I know that we’re doing our job and that when we see something, we say something and we engage. I just can’t tell you if 175 is the right number. I wish it was zero.”

In a statement, a DraftKings spokesperson said: “As a legal, regulated operator, DraftKings values an open and ongoing dialogue with regulators and regular conversations and check-ins with regulators are normal course of business.”

In response to ProPublica’s original investigation, Kalani said DraftKings’ responsible gaming system — which consists largely of in-app messages about the company’s tools — “worked the way it was supposed to.” She cautioned against “drawing broad conclusions” from one user’s experience.

The day after the Louisiana meeting, regulators in Ohio proposed an amendment to the state’s sports gaming rule that would bar companies like DraftKings from sending direct ads or marketing to bettors for 48 hours after they’d opted into responsible gaming tools or updated their current settings.

The proposed amendment speaks directly to a finding in ProPublica’s reporting: After blowing nearly $4,500 betting on tennis in 24 hours, the reporter used such tools to limit the amount of time and money he could spend on the app. Just 30 minutes later, though, he received the first of four push notifications promoting new betting opportunities. It wasn’t until he opted into a far more restrictive tool, called a “cool-off,” that the notifications temporarily stopped.

Andromeda Morrison, the interim executive director of the Ohio Casino Control Commission, said that though her office had been working on its proposal for some time, ProPublica’s story illuminated the issue. “Hopefully this is something that is fairly easy for the industry to see as a common sense restriction to make sure those consumers are making good choices without those push notifications,” she said.

But Keith Whyte, a former director of the National Council on Problem Gambling who now consults for industry and nonprofit groups, said the proposed amendment could unintentionally disincentivize users from using tools like deposit limits. “I think the implication is that using a responsible gaming tool is a sign of a gambling problem,” he said. The measure faces a long rulemaking process, including more rounds of public hearings and comments.

Sports betting operators are also feeling the heat at the federal level.

Citing ProPublica’s reporting, three Democrats who have long called for industry reforms are now demanding more information from major sports betting and prediction market companies about how the businesses entice their customers.

The letters are signed by Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, New York Rep. Paul Tonko and North Carolina Rep. Valerie Foushee. They asked the companies to answer a series of questions, including how many customers are enrolled in their VIP programs and how much revenue is generated by them.

“As repeated stories from exploited gamblers and media reports have vividly documented, VIP programs are driving the gambling industry’s most susceptible customers into debt and addiction through rewards tied to waging ever increasing amounts of money,” the lawmakers wrote.

DraftKings conferred VIP status on a ProPublica reporter after he lost close to $6,000 in three weeks on the app by chasing losses with long-shot bets, playing late into the night and firing risky wagers on fast action, like whether a major league baseball player will take a strike, a ball or connect for a hit — betting behavior that experts say are clear red flags of problem gambling.

In a statement, DraftKings said it would “respond accordingly once we have had a chance to review” the letter. Its biggest competitor, FanDuel, which has been trading letters with the lawmakers for months, wrote on Oct. 20 that the company was committed to responsible gaming and said “the VIP program is intended to provide enhanced service and encourage customers who chose to wager to use FanDuel rather than another platform.”

The companies are likely to face further scrutiny.

Read More

I Deliberately Bet Like a Problem Gambler. DraftKings Made Me a VIP.

In New York, investigators for the state’s attorney general have contacted former DraftKings employees about issues raised in the Times’ story, the newspaper reported, citing people familiar with the probe and messages it had reviewed. A spokesperson for the office declined to comment.

That inquiry follows proposals earlier this month by state gaming officials that they say will strengthen New York’s own standards governing the use of artificial intelligence and responsible gaming guidelines.

Regulators in Maine, Massachusetts and Michigan have also said that they’re reviewing some of those same issues.

DraftKings, the spokesperson said, “does not market to customers based on indicators of potential problem gaming.”

Still, there are signs that yet more states may be interested in vetting those claims.

Jennifer Davenport, New Jersey’s attorney general, recently told the RG Journal, a publication that focuses on responsible gaming and industry matters, that “we are monitoring recent press reports alleging certain sports books are ignoring our consumer safeguards and chasing customers who are clearly exhibiting signs of problem betting.”

“Let them be warned, our office stands ready to take action against anyone who violates our gaming regulations and tries taking advantage of New Jerseyans and those who gamble here,” she said.

A spokesperson for Davenport declined to comment.

The post Federal and State Officials Ramp Up Scrutiny of DraftKings, Other Sports Betting Apps appeared first on ProPublica.

Experts have long warned that immigration dragnets will inevitably result not only in the erosion of rights for immigrants but also for citizens. Since the start of this Trump administration, we’ve watched those warnings come true. 

So we have once again done what the government won’t: We have tallied and cataloged every case we can find of an immigration agent reportedly detaining a citizen during the current administration — more than 500 cases from Inauguration Day through Oct. 21, 2026. 

Read our earlier reporting on U.S. citizens being detained.

We compiled our list by scouring social media, court records and local media, and we included an incident only if we could find at least two sources for it. We asked the Department of Homeland Security about each incident, and we searched for any federal criminal charges that were brought in relation to each incident. (DHS has repeatedly said it is not arresting U.S. citizens.)

Since the government itself does not track these cases, our list is almost certainly an undercount. Below, we’re showing you every case we found — the reality that the administration denies — along with the receipts. Read more about how we reported this project.

The post Search More Than 500 Cases of U.S. Citizens Detained by Immigration Agents appeared first on ProPublica.

After years of community opposition, Detroit city officials have taken steps to stop a concrete mixing facility from further expanding into a residential neighborhood.

City Council members, acting on a recommendation last week from planning officials, will soon consider a rezoning measure that would restrict industrial activity at the site of the Kronos concrete plant and surrounding area. The concrete facility at its current size could stay and continue to operate as normal.

The planning recommendation comes after a BridgeDetroit and ProPublica investigation this year revealed how city officials helped Crown Enterprises, a real estate company owned by Detroit’s wealthy Moroun family, obtain property in Cadillac Heights and then provided latitude when its Kronos facility violated environmental laws. Residents have been filing complaints and protesting Kronos for years, frustrated by the dust, noise and other issues created by the concrete operation.

Read More

Left in the Dust: How a Billionaire-Owned Concrete Plant Took Over a Detroit Community

The City Planning Commission voted Oct. 22 to recommend a change to some of the zoning in the neighborhood from heavy to light industrial, which allows buildings such as warehouses but excludes facilities like concrete plants. The commission also recommended that other lots be zoned for residential and commercial purposes. Earlier this month, the commissioners unanimously voted to exclude industrial zoning in the area adjacent to Kronos, but they stepped back from that last week.

Crown has objected to any zoning change.

Sharon Buttry, who helped organize residents to protest against the Kronos plant, said she is  glad the lots would be rezoned but was disappointed that the earlier recommendation, which was more pedestrian- and transit-friendly, didn’t stand.

Buttry said she fears that the latest zoning recommendation would make it easier for Crown to expand eventually. “We still want them to shut down or move,” she said.

The zoning plan was revisited at the request of City Planning Commissioner Fred Russell Jr., who said the adjustment would create a buffer between residents and the existing concrete plant.

The City Council, which will ultimately decide on the rezoning, has scheduled a public hearing for Nov. 19.

Over the last seven years, Crown has obtained dozens of parcels in Cadillac Heights — some through a land deal with the city in 2019 and others after residents sold their parcels and left. In all, the company now owns more than 160 lots in the neighborhood, most of which are barren.

In a letter to Detroit officials in mid-September and Oct. 22, a law firm representing Crown threatened legal action if city officials change the zoning, arguing that doing so would devalue the property and create uncertainty about future development.

Attorney Melvin Butch Hollowell also said if the rezoning goes through, the city would be backtracking on its commitment to support Crown’s development in Cadillac Heights. Crown obtained the land there in exchange for the company swapping property in another part of the city, which allowed automaker Stellantis to open the first new car plant in Detroit in three decades.

City officials have said they didn’t know Crown’s plans included a concrete facility. Crown did not present a specific plan at the time of the land transfer. But after the concrete plant opened, the city in 2022 signed a first-of-its-kind agreement with Crown that gave the company time to fix issues before being penalized. The agreement has allowed the company to avoid fines on several occasions, the news organizations have documented.

In response to questions from BridgeDetroit and ProPublica, a Crown spokesperson said the company has invested more than $10 million to develop the concrete operation based “on the City’s promises and actions of approving our plans for this facility.”

“The property was traded to us for the express purpose of redevelopment,” the spokesperson, Kenneth Dobson, wrote.

Dobson said that if the zoning changes, the company will not make the improvements it has promised, including new landscaping and sidewalks. He claimed the improvements would not be allowed under the new zoning and that they also wouldn’t be a sound business decision. City planning staff, however, said the company can still make the improvements.

The neighborhood surrounding Kronos has been zoned to allow heavy industry since the 1940s, when a rail line operated there. Before the concrete operation, the land was occupied by a trucking depot for decades.

Despite the zoning designation, the neighborhood attracted working-class families who lived in modest single-family houses. Buddy’s Pizza, famous as the birthplace of Detroit-style pizza, was founded there and drew crowds from across the city.

The City Planning Commission’s votes this month were four years in the making and part of a broader evaluation of land near the proposed Joe Louis Greenway, a walking and biking trail that will traverse the city and is already under construction.

Scott Benson, the council member who represents Cadillac Heights, asked the planning commission in 2023 to consider whether the industrial zoned areas along the greenway should be rezoned to a use that better supports safety and public health. He said the request at first was unrelated to Kronos, but then community input further influenced the desire for change.

“That did play a role here,” he said in an interview. “The community came out and said, ‘Yes, we especially want this part done and it abuts the Joe Louis Greenway.’”

More than 30 people — some in favor of a zoning change and some against — spoke out at recent commission meetings. Kronos employees and others told the commission that the company has created jobs for Detroit residents and said Crown has invested in the neighborhood with new paving.

Terrell Daniel, whom the city identified in meeting minutes as a Kronos employee, urged the commission at its Oct. 1 meeting to continue to allow industry in the neighborhood.

“It’s bringing back the backbone of Detroit,” he said. He said the concrete plant has provided an opportunity “for guys who never had a chance to work in the city.”

Those in support of rezoning expressed concerns about the dust, air quality and Crown’s track record of not taking care of the neighborhood, which has included leaving vacant homes unsecured and messy.

Residents have filed about 80 complaints to both city and state environmental offices, according to records obtained by BridgeDetroit and ProPublica. They have described “literal whiteout conditions” and “dust clouds” that blanket their neighborhood and irritate their eyes.

The city has issued several tickets to Kronos for violating Detroit’s fugitive dust ordinance, passed in 2024 to limit pollution. The law requires businesses such as concrete plants and scrapyards to submit plans to limit dust and prevent it from spreading into neighborhoods.

On Oct. 7, the city received a complaint about Kronos and an inspector found the company had spread dust in the neighborhood and had piles of materials that should have been blocked from view, according to city spokesperson Georgette Johnson.

Kronos wrote in a letter to the city that it swept and watered the streets and reduced the height of the piles. Johnson said Crown corrected the problems.

Dobson said readings from its air monitors have never exceeded the city’s pollution limits and that a small number of people regularly complain. He previously said that the company planned to demolish a vacant home littered with trash but was waiting on utilities to be disconnected.

The post Detroit Could Block Billionaire-Owned Concrete Plant From Further Neighborhood Expansion appeared first on ProPublica.

Last November, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the elimination of “black box” warnings on hormone replacement therapies, aiming to reverse nearly two decades of stigma surrounding a key treatment for menopause symptoms.  

Among the officials at a press conference about the decision was Alicia Jackson, director of a federal health agency that invests taxpayer money in medical technology and research. As Jackson stood behind a lectern adorned with the HHS logo, she praised the new policy, calling it a victory for women and science.

“Today we have the opportunity to add up to a decade of healthy years to the life of every woman that you love,” Jackson said. “The science is clear: Hormone therapy is safe and effective. And it is hugely beneficial to the vast majority of women.”

Less clear that day were the financial benefits the new policy could bring Jackson, according to disclosure records obtained by ProPublica.  

Jackson is the founder and former chief executive of Evernow, an online platform that connects women with medical experts who treat the symptoms of menopause. Although she left for federal service last year, she kept at least $115,000 in Evernow stock and an unknown amount of stock options, records show. 

Those are just part of a multimillion-dollar portfolio Jackson holds with her husband, a venture capitalist, that poses potential conflicts of interest with her work overseeing the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health, known as ARPA-H.

It’s unclear what role, if any, Jackson played in dropping the black box warning, the most serious type of federal safety warning that is reserved for drugs with severe side effects or life-threatening risks. A different agency, the Food and Drug Administration, regulates drugs, and its panel of experts had recommended an end to the warning requirement months before Jackson arrived in government.

But ethics experts called Jackson’s official endorsement of the warning removal “alarming” and an “obvious conflict of interest,” noting federal law prohibits government employees from participating “personally and substantially” in matters that could influence their personal finances — even making statements at a press conference or in a news release, as she also did.

“We should care because her company is apparently intending to profit off this change in policy that she endorsed as a government official while still retaining a financial interest in the company,” said Virginia Canter, who served as an ethics lawyer at the White House, Treasury Department and Securities and Exchange Commission during the presidencies of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“I say it puts her within the zone of a potential violation,” she said.   

Months after the announced end to the warning notices, Evernow launched a nationwide expansion. 

Under federal law, agency officials like Jackson are required to submit financial disclosure forms, which must then be certified as complying with ethics laws. But Jackson’s two financial disclosures — filed last October and two months ago — remain uncertified. Canter said it is not unusual for an agency’s ethics office to ask the inspector general to investigate if staff cannot certify that an individual’s disclosure forms meet ethics standards.     

Over two months, ProPublica sought comment from Jackson and submitted questions about her work, investments and ethics records. Jackson did not respond, and HHS never addressed our detailed questions. 

But in a statement to ProPublica last week, an agency spokesperson said Jackson has been placed on administrative leave and HHS would “assess the facts before determining any change in her status. HHS requires all officials to comply with federal ethics laws, regulations, and policies.” 

HHS declined to answer additional questions about the reasons for Jackson’s leave, the decision’s timing or whether the inspector general was investigating. 

Earlier this week, Bloomberg Law reported on the HHS statement that Jackson was on leave and made public a draft memo by one of the agency’s senior officials that would have granted Jackson a conflict waiver involving many of her and her husband’s extensive investments. Since she joined ARPA-H, the memo said, Jackson and her husband’s financial ties required her to recuse herself from “a significant portion” of her duties, including discussions about funding awarded by her agency. The waiver named 30 investments and would have allowed Jackson to take part in decisions that could affect those interests. Evernow is not listed. 

Bloomberg reported that two firms with ties to Jackson sought ARPA-H funding, but it was unclear if either received any. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions asking whether the waiver was ever granted or if the firms had received money from ARPA-H. The Office of Government Ethics does not list Jackson among federal officials who have received waivers.

Jackson’s disclosures are among 2,400 added Thursday to ProPublica’s Trump Team Financials database, a searchable tool launched in March. The records detail the finances of more than 2,300 officials appointed by President Donald Trump. Since last year, we’ve requested disclosure records from 127 federal agencies and the White House. Disclosures from roughly 1,500 appointees remain unreleased. 

The Trump administration’s massive cuts to the federal bureaucracy have taken a toll on the ranks of ethics staff. By the end of 2025, there were 274 fewer full-time ethics officials, according to a recent analysis of federal survey records by the government watchdog group Campaign Legal Center. Some agencies said the losses hampered ethics officers’ ability to conduct training and monitor employee compliance. 

Trump appointees failed to file nearly 420 legally mandated public financial disclosure reports last year, almost a fourfold spike compared with the Biden administration’s last full year, the center found. Nevertheless, our database provides the most complete source yet for this administration’s ethics documents. 

Potential Serious Conflicts

Jackson spent years navigating the worlds of technological research, government and entrepreneurship, according to her government bio and LinkedIn profile. 

After earning a doctorate in materials science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2007, she worked briefly as a U.S. Senate policy staffer. She subsequently joined the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as a program manager, later becoming deputy director of its first biotechnology office.

Jackson left the Defense Department in mid-2015, going on to lead several biotech businesses before starting Evernow in 2019. The San Francisco-based company connects women experiencing sometimes debilitating menopause symptoms with medical providers who prescribe treatments. 

Evernow offers patients one-time treatments or memberships for frequent care. Its website lists celebrity angel investors, including Gwyneth Paltrow, Cameron Diaz, Demi Moore and Drew Barrymore.

Jackson was appointed by Trump as ARPA-H’s second director and was sworn in on Oct. 20, 2025. The agency, created three years earlier to spur revolutionary biomedical research and technologies, has a $1.5 billion budget. It has issued numerous contracts and grants, including $160 million for genetic medicines combating rare diseases and $144 million to study existing treatments for age-related illnesses.

In both of her financial statements, Jackson said she owned Evernow stock worth between $115,002 and $300,000. (Federal disclosures include value ranges, not specific figures.) She also listed company stock options whose value, she said in her most recent financial report, were “not readily ascertainable.” (In a statement late Wednesday, Evernow said Jackson does not currently hold a financial interest in the company. The firm did not immediately respond to follow-up questions.)

Jackson’s disclosures also show investments in Gameto Inc., a Texas-based biotechnology company working through a two-year, $10 million award from ARPA-H to create ovarian treatments preventing menopause-related diseases. The award predated Jackson joining ARPA-H. But as her office oversaw Gameto’s project, her stock’s value increased, documents show. 

Jackson’s Gameto investment was worth between $15,001 and $50,000 in her October 2025 disclosure. Her Aug. 13 filing shows it grew to between $50,001 and $100,000. It’s unclear what drove the increase in value.

In addition, Jackson owns more than 60 venture capital and private equity funds that she says do not disclose their holdings to investors. 

These include at least 13 funds managed by 137 Ventures, a venture capital firm co-founded by Jackson’s husband, Alex Jacobson. The company invests in a wide range of industries, including healthcare, digital health and medical device companies, according to its website. 

Federal appointees must list their spouses’ employment, but Jackson never included her husband’s role at 137 Ventures on her public disclosures. Jacobson did not respond to requests for comment.

Ethics experts said Jackson’s funds could pose a serious conflict of interest if the underlying businesses they invested in received grants or contracts from her agency. To resolve such risks, federal agencies typically require employees to work with the investment vehicles to identify the contents of such funds. If the investment firms insisted on anonymity, employees could be required to sell the funds or recuse themselves from actions potentially affecting the assets, the experts said. 

However, 10 months after starting work at HHS, Jackson retained the funds and their underlying investments remained undisclosed, according to her August financial statement. 

Kedric Payne, Campaign Legal Center’s vice president, general counsel and senior director for ethics, said Jackson’s lack of disclosure about her husband and the funds she owns “suggests that agency leaders may be hiding their conflicts of interest from the public, and there is no ethics enforcement to stop it.”

The disclosures also show her husband owns between $5 million and $25 million worth of stock in Palantir Technologies, which had a $19 million contract from Jackson’s agency when she became ARPA-H director. Palantir, which has similar contracts with other federal agencies, is using its software and AI technology to build and improve ARPA-H’s data infrastructure and operational systems. In June, ARPA-H extended the company’s contract by a year, records show. The renewal is worth up to $13.7 million for Palantir.

The draft waiver obtained by Bloomberg would have allowed Jackson to take part in decisions that could affect Palantir, Gameto and more than two dozen other investments but says she must still comply with the terms of an ethics agreement. The draft waiver includes a note dated April 30 — six months after Jackson started the job — that says discussions about the ethics agreement were ongoing. In addition to Evernow, the waiver does not specifically mention the funds managed by 137 Ventures. 

HHS officials would not answer repeated questions about whether Jackson recused herself from Palantir’s contract, has an ethics agreement or has divested any assets. The agency has not produced an ethics agreement in response to a July Freedom of Information Act request. 

Public Good or Personal Gain?

Since January 2025, ProPublica has continually obtained disclosure records to investigate how personal financial interests have intersected with government decision-making inside the Trump administration. The new disclosures added to our searchable tool Thursday include many that have raised concerns about additional conflicts of interest, including at HHS. 

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Jackson’s ultimate boss, has drawn questions about whether he used his office to help his wife, actress Cheryl Hines.

According to his latest financial disclosure, Hines’ media company, Youngster Productions Inc., received $210,000 in consulting fees from MAHA Action, a nonprofit promoting Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again agenda. Under the contract, Hines has vigorously advocated for MAHA Action, appearing in several videos and press releases. The group has also claimed credit for policy actions launched by Kennedy’s HHS.

News of the contract, first reported by The New York Times, prompted the Campaign Legal Center to ask the HHS inspector general to examine whether Kennedy made or influenced policies that benefited his wife. Kennedy also received more than $270,000 in gifts from allies working to bolster MAHA, his disclosure showed.

“Americans deserve to know whether their leaders are prioritizing the public good or focusing more on their personal financial gain,” said Payne of Campaign Legal Center. 

HHS denied any wrongdoing by Kennedy, telling the Times the secretary “complies with all applicable federal ethics laws, regulations and financial disclosure requirements.”

Campaign Legal Center’s analysis of federal ethics staff this year found Kennedy’s cuts to the agency eliminated nearly 30% of HHS’ full-time ethics workers. 

Another HHS official whose disclosures raised ethical alarms was the agency’s top attorney, Mike Stuart. Stuart was reassigned after a Washington Sun investigation found he invested in a company doing business with the department and repurchased stock in other businesses that ethics officials had required him to sell. 

The Office of Government Ethics refused to certify Stuart’s annual disclosure report “due to continued non-compliance” with his ethics agreement, the Sun revealed.

Stuart said he didn’t know of the company’s involvement with the department and immediately sold his stock when ethics officials raised questions. “My whole career, I’ve never had even a whiff of an ethical issue. I’m extra careful that I am completely in compliance,” Stuart told the Sun. 

The disclosures obtained by ProPublica since early last year have revealed potential conflicts across the federal government, including at the highest levels.

In December, ProPublica reported that Trump had appointed more than 200 people who collectively owned — personally or with their spouses — between $175 million and $340 million in cryptocurrency investments at the time they filed their disclosures. Some hold positions overseeing or influencing crypto industry regulation. 

Among them is Todd Blanche, Trump’s former criminal defense attorney and now the nation’s attorney general. Blanche’s disclosures show that he owned at least $159,000 in crypto-related assets last year when, as the Justice Department’s second-highest official, he shut down investigations into crypto companies, dealers and exchanges. 

Democrats in Congress accused Blanche of a “glaring conflict of interest”; a Justice Department spokesperson said Blanche’s action was “appropriately flagged, addressed and cleared in advance.” An Office of Government Ethics official noted on Blanche’s latest disclosure that the inspector general “declined further action” related to the crypto holdings.

Other disclosures helped show that senior executive branch officials, including Pam Bondi when she was attorney general, made well-timed securities trades, selling stocks just before markets plunged because Trump announced new tariffs. (The officials either did not respond to requests for comment or denied having insider information before trading.)

Disclosure forms also revealed in July that Federal Communications Commission officials took pricey gifts from Paramount, including tickets worth $12,000 and skybox seats worth $125,000 each for the annual honors gala at the Kennedy Center. The media giant provided the perks while seeking FCC approval for its mergers with Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery. (The FCC said agency ethics officers approved the commissioners’ attendance as consistent with ethics law.)

Our database has helped other news organizations uncover potential conflicts of interest. The Lever, for instance, found that the Pentagon’s chief technology officer was “a central figure in the decision to blacklist the AI company Anthropic” while owning a stake in a competitive AI developer. A Defense Department spokesperson said the official, Emil Michael, fully complied with ethics requirements.

The post Top U.S. Health Official Backed a Medication Policy Shift That Benefited a Company She Has Stock In appeared first on ProPublica.