No state has taken over as many local public school districts as Texas. Just since 2020, the Texas Education Agency has installed its own hand-picked leaders in eight districts. Four of those came this spring. At least another 10 are at risk of takeover, including, as of last week, the Austin Independent School District. 

And to lead some of these districts, Texas is turning to a cadre of officials with ties to Mike Miles, the man the education agency chose in 2023 to oversee the Houston school district, the state’s largest. Miles is also a close ally of Mike Morath, Texas’ powerful education commissioner.

Already, at least two of these new district leaders have started to adopt policies similar to the contentious reforms Miles has pursued in Houston. He has touted improved test scores under his charge. Houston ISD had no F-rated campuses and fewer D-rated campuses in the state’s latest ratings compared with previous years. But Miles has also sparked widespread protests in response to the district’s rigid adherence to scripted lessons and repetitive testing, the firing of principals and teachers, mass school closures, and the conversion of schools into charters.  

Miles did not respond to requests for comment from the Texas Observer. Houston ISD officials, in a statement to the Observer, said the district did not achieve better ratings by maintaining the status quo but “made difficult decisions” to improve academic performance, noting the majority of its campuses are now rated A or B. 

These school districts whose new leaders have connections to Miles should prepare for “upheaval and chaos,” warned an elected Houston school board member. 

“If anything doesn’t align with improving test scores, it will be taken away,” said Maria Benzon, who was elected in November to the Houston ISD board but is not permitted to serve under the ongoing state takeover. Under Miles, for example, Houston ISD eliminated librarian positions and turned some libraries into what Benzon called “detention centers,” because they are being used, in part, for students with behavioral issues. Morath, the TEA commissioner, has said the centers are used for more than just punishment. 

Texas law allows the TEA to take control of districts with multiple failing school ratings or governance issues and to replace their superintendent and elected boards. 

The recent takeovers include Beaumont, Lake Worth and Connally independent school districts, whose new superintendents worked under Miles when he was superintendent in Dallas ISD; two of them also worked for him in Houston. In Fort Worth ISD, one of the state’s largest districts, the new state-appointed superintendent chose Daniel Soliz as his second-in-command, another person who worked under Miles in Houston ISD. Soliz did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

At least two of the state’s new superintendent appointees — Sandi Massey, who now helms Beaumont ISD in southeast Texas, and Ena Meyers, TEA’s appointee for Lake Worth ISD, a small district near Fort Worth — also worked for the controversial Colorado-based charter network Third Future Schools, which Miles led prior to becoming superintendent in Houston. In April, the Observer revealed that Miles had an ongoing $120,000 annual consulting contract with the charter network, an arrangement that likely violated a new statewide ban on public school administrators’ moonlighting. After questions from the news organization, Miles canceled the contract. The district said Miles “remains fully focused on leading Houston ISD and delivering results for students.”

Third Future’s charter network is expanding around the state as districts turn campuses over to the nonprofit’s Texas subsidiary, often as a means to delay possible state takeover. The nonprofit did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment. 

School district takeovers often involve layoffs, school closures and an increase in charter schools, as has happened in Houston, said Domingo Morel, an associate professor of political science and public service at New York University, who found Texas has had more district takeovers than any other state since 1989. 

What’s unique to Texas, Morel said, is that the low bar required to take control has led to more takeovers. Since 2015, five consecutive failing state ratings at just one school can trigger a takeover, as occurred in Houston, which has 273 campuses. 

Texas has also made it harder for districts to appeal these seizures. The Legislature passed a law in 2021 that barred districts from using public funds to challenge the education commissioner’s “final and unappealable” decision to take them over. The threshold that defines a failing school was also lowered. Then, in 2025, the state passed another law restricting districts from using public funds to sue the state when challenging its accountability ratings. 

The state “is the player, the referee, the coach, the scorekeeper,” when it comes to rating schools and deciding when to seize control, said Steven Nelson, an associate professor of education policy and leadership at the University of Nevada who’s been studying school takeovers for more than a decade. He said he suspects the TEA-appointed leaders connected to Miles will also focus on standardized testing, which will result in “a narrow curriculum when all is said and done.” 

The acceleration of takeovers, and the state’s increasingly stringent rating system, comes just as Texas rolls out a school voucher program that will, in most cases, award parents $10,000 in state funds to send their children to private schools. State accountability standards do not apply to private schools, where students don’t have to take the standardized tests required in Texas public schools. 

TEA spokesperson Jake Kobersky said the agency does not expect the four school districts that have recently been taken over to adopt the same reforms that Miles implemented in Houston. “During an intervention, state law requires the agency to appoint a new superintendent and a board of managers. All other staffing and operational decisions are made locally by the district,” Kobersky said. 

But last August, Morath told lawmakers other districts “should be copying the changes that we see in Houston.”

Massey, the new superintendent in Beaumont, has also cited the changes in Houston ISD as a blueprint.

“The model that we are implementing here is a very similar model to Houston. And why? Because of the success that Houston has had,” Massey said at a May 21 board meeting, referring to her time working with Miles at Houston ISD, where he selected her to be chief of schools.

Under Massey, the newly appointed board of managers voted at their first meeting to temporarily suspend a number of policies related to governance and hiring practices, including employees’ rights to present grievances to the board and principals’ ability to approve new hires without district permission. Board of managers member Jeff Wheeler said at the meeting, “We are requesting that they be suspended until the board can move, can more fully evaluate our local policies.”

The board has taken other steps that mirror what happened in Houston after the takeover there: On May 14, the district announced it was cutting 34 positions that support student mental health, and on May 21, it announced a high school would close. 

Massey did not respond to the Observer’s requests for comment about whether she’s following the Houston playbook. Jackie Simien, a spokesperson for Beaumont ISD said, “Massey has worked alongside successful educational leaders with demonstrated results in improving systems, instruction, and student performance.”

Benzon, the elected Houston ISD board member, said Miles is sidelining parent and teacher voices in her district, and they are leaving in droves as a result. “They are trying to escape the New Education System and Miles’ bad policies,” Benzon added, referring to a program Miles transplanted from his former charter school network that is characterized by scripted lessons and repetitive testing. The Houston Chronicle reported the district “is losing students at an accelerated pace” under the takeover, spurring the district to shutter 12 schools ahead of the next school year. 

In its statement to the Observer, Houston ISD cited a survey of families reporting a “favorable perception” of the district and said it retained many exemplary teachers.

Nelson and Morel said they believe the ultimate objective of any takeover is to disenfranchise local communities. Black and Hispanic students make up the majority of the population at all four of the districts now headed by Miles’ associates.

“It all begins at the school board level to then completely disempower the community,” Morel said.

On April 23, Houston ISD moved to fire a veteran teacher and president of the Houston Education Association teachers union after she protested requirements to comply with Miles’ New Education System. 

Meyers, the new Lake Worth superintendent who at the time was Houston ISD’s deputy chief of strategic initiatives, testified in favor of the teacher’s termination. 

“We do not allow our staff to make decisions about curriculum in a New Education System school or in Houston ISD,” Meyers said, according to a transcript of the hearing. “If they are not following expectations, we would not allow them to stay in HISD as an employee.” 

Since taking over in Lake Worth, Meyers and the board of managers have temporarily suspended board policies related to governance procedures, hiring and employee assignments and schedules, similar to what Massey and her board did in Beaumont. 

In response to the Observer’s inquiries about replicating Houston ISD’s reforms in her new role, Meyers wrote in an email that “Lake Worth ISD is very different from Houston ISD. We are a district of five schools serving a much smaller community, so our approach must reflect the unique needs of our students, staff, and families.” 

Her email continued, “I believe educators should learn from successful practices wherever they exist.”

As in Beaumont and Lake Worth, the takeover in Fort Worth ISD has been characterized by swift changes. After less than a month under the new leadership, the 68,000-student district has suspended local board governance and hiring policies and has cut dozens of staff positions, including those supporting English-language learners. 

Parent organizer Zach Leonard said a new instructional model Fort Worth ISD is rolling out in 19 schools, called “Elevate,” is essentially the same as what Miles has done in Houston, an assertion district spokesperson Tierney Tinnin refuted. 

Leonard, along with other parents with his organization, notes the similarities between the programs: “scripted slide-by-slide lessons, rigid timed instruction, and ‘demonstrations of learning’ reduced to data points.”

“This isn’t education reform,” Leonard said, referring to Miles’ model of learning being transported to Fort Worth. “It’s a franchise being handed to our children without a vote.”

The post Texas State Takeover of Local School Districts Expands, Raising Concerns appeared first on ProPublica.

A group of lawmakers demanded answers from the White House this week following a ProPublica investigation revealing that a top aide to the president intervened to secure a $620 million Pentagon loan to a startup linked to the president’s eldest son.

ProPublica’s reporting “reveals a staggering level of corruption and influence peddling that superseded this process, enriching the President’s son at the expense of U.S. national security and taxpayer dollars,” wrote the group of Democratic lawmakers, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Mazie Hirono of Hawaii as well as Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado and Mike Levin of California.

Last year, the Pentagon announced the loan to Vulcan Elements, a small North Carolina startup, about three months after Donald Trump Jr.’s venture capital firm took a stake of undisclosed size in the rare-earth magnet company.

Interviews and Defense Department records reviewed by ProPublica show that the request to lend to the firm was made by Peter Navarro, who serves as the president’s senior counselor for trade and manufacturing and is a friend of Trump Jr.’s.

Of the dozens of companies the Pentagon was considering funding at the time, Vulcan’s was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly told ProPublica.

After defense officials got the White House request, they asked Pentagon staff to move at an unusually rapid pace, said another person who was involved in the deal at the Pentagon but not authorized to speak about it.

“The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the person said.

In their letter, addressed to White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the lawmakers asked a series of questions about Navarro’s involvement in the deal, including whether he intervened at someone else’s direction, if the president was aware or involved, and who Navarro communicated with at the Pentagon.

They also asked more broadly about whether White House officials have communicated with federal agency officials about other companies linked to the Trump family.

“The American public — and service members that are in harm’s way — expect that the DoD contracting process is fair, unbiased, and competitive to ensure that only the best companies, providing only the best products, receive taxpayer dollars,” the lawmakers wrote.

Navarro, who served as trade adviser in the president’s first term, and Trump Jr. have formed a close bond in recent years. The president’s son visited Navarro in prison while he served time for defying a subpoena from lawmakers investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump Jr. was one of the small group of people Navarro dedicated his latest book to for having “my back when it was against the wall.” And a week before the Vulcan deal was announced, Trump Jr. hosted Navarro on his streaming show, encouraging his nearly 2 million subscribers to buy Navarro’s book. That interview was not long after word came down from Navarro to Pentagon staff to make the massive loan to Vulcan, one of the defense officials involved in the deal said.

Asked to respond to the lawmakers’ allegations and ProPublica’s reporting, Navarro in a text message wrote “Staggering level of hyperbole. More fake news” but did not elaborate. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Navarro did not respond to questions from ProPublica sent to him directly before the initial article was published. But in a post on X afterward, he called the story “fake news on steroids.”

Vulcan has not commented. A White House spokesperson had said in a statement that the administration is working “in the best interest of the American people,” adding, “The President’s entire team, including Senior Counselor Navarro and officials at the Department of War, is working together and with private industry to secure America’s critical mineral supply chain at Trump Speed.” Trump Jr.’s spokesperson said last week that the president’s son does not discuss companies he has invested in with federal government officials and did not speak to Navarro about Vulcan. He “has no knowledge about how this deal came together,” the spokesperson said. A spokesperson for 1789 Capital, the venture firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, said it also played no role in Vulcan getting the loan and did not learn about the deal before it was public.

“No company receives preferential treatment,” a Pentagon spokesperson said. “Outside affiliations, investors, or political connections play absolutely no role in the Department’s funding decisions.”

The loan was part of the Pentagon’s effort to fund companies that could help the U.S. reduce dependence on China’s critical mineral supply chains. It represented a big win for Vulcan and its investors. Estimates of the company’s valuation grew tenfold after the deal was announced.

The deal is one of many actions by the administration of President Donald Trump that have helped companies in which his family holds stakes. Government contracts and other benefits have gone to various Trump-linked companies. But ProPublica’s reporting on the Vulcan loan represented the first time the awarding of a contract from a federal agency was directly linked to White House intervention.

A number of other lawmakers also criticized the Vulcan deal following ProPublica’s investigation.

Sen. Raphael Warnock, a Georgia Democrat, called it “corruption to the highest degree,” alleging on X: “They are looting this country. Dismantling it, selling it for parts, and lining their own pockets.”

Sen. Patty Murray, a Washington Democrat, called for a congressional investigation. “It’s just nonstop corruption from this White House, and Republicans in Congress are content to twiddle their thumbs and look right in the other direction,” she posted on X. “Congress should be investigating and putting a stop to this kind of crooked self-dealing—not enabling it.”

The post Lawmakers Demand Answers After the White House Initiated a $620M Loan to a Firm Tied to Donald Trump Jr. appeared first on ProPublica.

On any given night, thousands of people sleep on the streets in Portland, Oregon. They seek shelter in tents, bushes and overpasses in a city that has struggled with one of the worst housing crises in the country.

Portland, like many cities, has raced to increase its supply of affordable housing by turning to a federal program that’s existed since the 1980s: the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. It provides up to $15 billion worth of tax credits a year nationally to help developers build apartments. Portland supplemented the federal construction money with local dollars, creating incentives that were hard to turn down.

But to meet the affordability requirements, all the developers needed to do in most cases was put rents within reach of someone earning 60% of median income, an earnings threshold that equates to about $75,000 annually for a family of four. It turns out that this amount of rent is now close to what the typical Portland landlord charges without any subsidy.

The result of the federal tax credit has been a glut of apartments costing renters on the order of about $1,400 a month for a one-bedroom. That’s a manageable outlay for a family making $75,000 but nearly half the monthly income of someone who earns $35,000 at the local minimum wage.

Nearly 2,000 of Portland’s subsidized units sat vacant and unused at last count, as The Oregonian and Willamette Week have reported. The same situation has repeated from Seattle to the San Francisco Bay Area to Denver.

Economists and other academic researchers have been warning for decades that this was precisely the sort of problem that the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit was likely to create.

Studies have concluded that the program, which currently supports nine out of every 10 subsidized units built in America, is an expensive and ineffective way to house people who can’t afford it. Researchers have said it doesn’t subsidize housing deeply enough to reach truly low-income renters, so it produces housing in markets and at income levels that already have a surplus instead of filling a shortage.

Independent researchers have found little evidence it’s expanded the overall housing supply beyond what the market would have produced without it. Its complexity has birthed an industry of affordable-housing-focused developers, investors, lawyers and accounting specialists who profit off the tax credit. Between 1991 and 2024, a dozen studies concluded that many more people could benefit if the money were spent on rental vouchers, which let consumers, rather than the government, decide which landlords get tax subsidies. Estimates went as high as twice the impact for the dollar.

“The evidence is telling us this program is lacking its reason to exist,” said Kirk McClure, an emeritus professor of urban planning at the University of Kansas and a leading critic of the tax credit. “We should reform the program to make it work better.”

McClure and others have brought their concerns to Congress. He recommended diverting the money into rental vouchers for tenants, or else changing the tax credit’s rules to reward only developers who build units in genuinely short supply: those affordable to people at the very bottom of the income ladder.

The ideas never went anywhere. Instead, money for the tax credit has grown at a much faster rate than rental assistance vouchers since 2000, data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and the U.S. Treasury shows. Rock-solid support from industries that benefit from the tax credit and both parties in Congress has made it the linchpin of U.S. housing policy.

“The program leverages housing market forces, entrepreneurial innovation and private accountability to increase housing supply,” former HUD Secretary Ben Carson told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in 2025.

Among the tax credit’s other prominent backers are two Northwest Democrats on the Senate Committee on Finance, Ron Wyden of Oregon and Maria Cantwell of Washington. Cantwell has introduced bills to increase funding for the existing tax credit, and Wyden has proposed expanding the target of the credits to benefit not just low-income families, but also middle-income households — the opposite of what McClure says needs to happen.

Both Wyden and Cantwell say Congress should hold more hearings to ensure the program is run efficiently, but they also defended it in written statements to Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica.

“There isn’t any silver bullet to the housing crisis in Oregon and around the country,” Wyden’s statement said, “but the low-income housing tax credit has been the most successful federal housing construction program on the books for decades and is the only housing program Republicans haven’t tried to gut.”

Indeed, President Donald Trump has sought to cut housing programs such as rent assistance. But as part of his spending package last year, Congress approved the biggest expansion of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit in decades.

“That’s a mistake,” McClure said.

It won’t alleviate homelessness or the housing shortage for people at the lowest incomes, he said. It will just create more buildings that compete with the market and with one another for the same pool of renters.

McClure recounted seeing a brand-new affordable housing complex near his home in Kansas not long ago with a sign enticing tenants of another government-backed complex down the street, promoting newer units at the same price.

“So the taxpayers of the United States subsidized the creation of this new property to help bankrupt another federally subsidized property,” he said. “That is stupidity 101. We have got to be better stewards of the American taxpayer’s dollar.”

Subsidized Vacancies

Oregon’s affordable housing production has skyrocketed in recent years. So have rents and homelessness.

Over the past decade, Oregon lawmakers doubled funding for the state’s affordable housing tax credit and started offering low-interest and deferred loans for construction.

Voters in the Portland area, meanwhile, passed housing bonds totaling more than $900 million. Developers can use that money to secure federal housing tax credits. The state went from building about 1,800 affordable units a year pre-pandemic to nearly 5,000 last year.

Industries that benefit from the tax credit say it’s the engine that makes that kind of building boom possible.

The Affordable Housing Tax Credit Coalition, representing lenders, developers and others in the industry, has called the program “the most effective tool we have to meet the affordable housing needs in rural, suburban, and urban areas.”

Jennifer Schwartz, director of tax and housing advocacy for the National Council of State Housing Agencies, which advocates for the tax credit and other housing programs administered by states, said the housing market by itself won’t produce a big enough supply of housing within reach for low-income renters. That goes for even those who receive federal rent vouchers, she said.

“It costs too much to build housing to turn around and rent it to households who are low-income households,” Schwartz said, “unless you have some sort of incentive like the housing credit.”

But in Portland, all that new construction hasn’t made a dent in the city’s affordability crisis. A report from the Portland Housing Bureau in 2025 found that rent and home sale prices were growing faster than incomes, even as the city’s vacancy rate was also rising.

The vacancy rate was roughly 7.6% as of May, according to Aaron Kirk Douglas, director of market intelligence at the Portland-based brokerage HFO Investment Real Estate. Vacancies are even higher for ostensibly affordable units: 11%, leaving nearly 2,000 units unused. Housing industry experts consider 5% vacancy to be a baseline for ordinary turnover.

The time it takes to verify that a tenant’s income meets the tax credit’s requirements and prep units for move-in played a role in the struggle to fill vacant units built with the federal subsidy. But housing advocates say the biggest barrier is price.

The gap between market-rate rents and affordable housing rents has shrunk, and not just in Portland.

By one industry estimate, in more than a dozen U.S. cities at least 40% of affordable housing was competing with market-rate buildings rates in 2025.

In the Portland suburb of Gresham, federal rules cap a two-bedroom apartment built with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit at $1,675 a month. Zillow puts the equivalent market-rate apartment at $1,525.

Operators of a new $53.8 million development in northeast Portland, built with the tax credit and the local housing bond, had trouble filling studio and one-bedroom apartments whose affordable rents were near market rate. They began offering a month of free rent for new tenants, according to a March report from the committee that oversees the region’s housing bond.

Affordable housing providers, which in Portland are predominantly nonprofit organizations, are also increasing their marketing budgets to attract renters away from market-rate buildings.

“The idea that we’re competing with the market would have been unfathomable a few years ago,” said Margaret Salazar, CEO of Reach Community Development Corporation, one of Portland’s largest affordable housing providers.

Salazar, who led Oregon’s state housing agency during the COVID-19 pandemic and later worked as a regional director for HUD, is a longtime proponent of the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit. But she said the people who can afford to rent apartments the tax credit has produced would rather move into a market-rate apartment for similar money and with fewer rules and restrictions.

“It’s becoming a slimmer and slimmer slice of residents” that Reach can serve, she said. “Suddenly we’re competing for this little slice of people.”

Meanwhile, a substantial group of Portland-area residents remain priced out.

HUD data shows more than 90,000 households in Multnomah County earn less than the 60% of median income that a family would typically need to afford a federally subsidized unit. (The precise number of families who can’t afford “affordable” units is unclear because it depends on variations in household size, actual rent levels and other subsidies that might reduce rents further.)

Salazar said that right now Reach can rent to people at lower income levels only if it can find additional subsidies such as housing vouchers — and funding for vouchers is so limited that only 1 in 4 people who qualify are able to get them.

Despite the convergence of rent levels in market-rate and subsidized housing, supporters of the tax credit say it remains valuable because the units it subsidizes are constrained from raising rents faster than incomes — and there’s no guarantee market-rate rents will remain at this level in the future.

But Steve Rudman, who ran the local housing authority in the Portland area for more than a decade, said the fact that the tax credit is now delivering market-rate housing rather than housing for the poorest households raises an existential question for the federal program.

“What is this thing really doing?” Rudman said. “What is the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit?”

A Stopgap Takes Off

Criticism of the federal construction credit has been a near constant since it began.

In the Reagan era, housing experts began to worry rents would become unaffordable amid deep cuts to housing programs and the drafting of the Tax Reform Act, which eliminated several tax shelters for real estate.

McClure, an economist for the city of Boston at the time, worked with others to design a tax credit that would reward affordable housing production.

“It was meant to be a three-year stopgap until we came up with something better,” he said.

The idea was to incorporate low-income housing into market-rate housing construction that was already taking place. Developers could receive a tax credit if they capped rents for a certain portion of the apartments in their building, and they could continue to rent the rest at any amount they chose.

McClure crafted letters for Boston’s mayor to send Congress in support of the idea. His analysis helped decide the subsidy amount. Developers could offset 70% of the cost of new builds or 30% of the cost of a rehab. Congress signed off in 1986.

Almost immediately, the program diverged from the outcomes McClure had envisioned.

He and other drafters of the tax credit had thought developers would use it to offer deep discounts on a small number of units, allowing them to charge market rate on the rest. But developers found it more profitable to subsidize 100% of their units at the smallest allowable discount, a rent affordable to households at 60% of median income.

In 1992, as lawmakers considered making the 6-year-old Low-Income Housing Tax Credit permanent, an analysis by the Congressional Budget Office declared the program “unlikely to substantially increase the supply of affordable housing” and “more suited to the needs of investors than poor renters.”

For one, the tax credits cost a lot to administer, congressional economists said. They also pointed to evidence that subsidized housing production dampened market-rate construction.

Congress was preparing to give developers $3 billion through the tax credit as of 1992. Putting that money into housing vouchers instead, the CBO concluded, would help 550,000 households, more than twice as many as would benefit from the construction tax credit. The numbers echoed findings from an earlier HUD evaluation of tax credits vs. vouchers.

Congress made the tax credit permanent a year later.

As time wore on, McClure’s emerging doubts about a program he originally expected to be temporary only deepened.

When the Fannie Mae Foundation hired him in 1997 to analyze how the tax credit was doing, he concluded it was a “very inefficient subsidy delivery mechanism” that didn’t produce as much housing as it should have.

Other studies came to similar conclusions as McClure, HUD and the Congressional Budget Office. At least five found the tax credit does little to increase the overall housing supply.

The Government Accountability Office noted problems with the program in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018, finding it lacked basic oversight to show the federal funds worked as intended. A 2017 investigation by NPR and Frontline documented numerous examples of waste and fraud, including one developer pocketing tax credits without building the required housing.

“Given the available evidence on program performance, we should certainly not expand the tax credit program,” Edgar Olsen, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Virginia, wrote in a 2017 article for the American Enterprise Institute. “The existing evidence argues for terminating it.”

There are some critics within Congress. Rep. Glenn Grothman, a Republican from Wisconsin, introduced a bill to kill the program last year, calling it a “cash grab for developers and banks.” But the bill went nowhere.

Olsen, like McClure, remains adamant today about what he considers the tax program’s uselessness. In a recent interview, he told OPB and ProPublica that he’s urged policymakers, in academic articles and in testimony, to re-examine whether the program has any value at all.

“How often do they talk to people like me or like Kirk McClure? The answer is almost never,” Olsen said. “What they hear from are people who represent the financial interest of the industry, and so they want more money to be spent on this.”

The post A Low-Income Housing Program Is Pouring Billions Into Housing Many People Can’t Afford appeared first on ProPublica.

Kara Meredith can tell you the exact day her life turned upside down: Aug. 23, 2025.

She was at her home in Fort Gibson, Oklahoma, caring for her 5-week-old son, when one of her daughters ran to tell her there was water all over the bathroom floor. Her husband, Mitch Meredith, wasn’t worried — until he saw the dark liquid bubbling up around the base of the bathtub. Mitch and his relatives worked all night trying to contain it. It was near dawn when his uncle said, “This is oil.”

The United States is the largest oil and gas producer in the world. All of that drilling produces hundreds of billions of gallons of toxic wastewater each year. For decades, energy companies have disposed of that briny fluid by shooting it back underground using high-pressure injection wells. But across Oklahoma, the fluid is spreading uncontrollably belowground, blasting out of old, unplugged wells, polluting land and contaminating drinking water.

In a new documentary from The Frontier and ProPublica, reporter Nick Bowlin investigates a scourge of oil field wastewater seeping into the lives of Oklahomans, about half of whom live within a mile of an oil and gas operation.

His reporting takes him to the headquarters of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the state agency tasked with regulating oil and gas. The agency told Bowlin that it is committed to “doing the right thing, holding operators accountable, protecting Oklahoma and its resources, and providing fair and balanced regulation.” But as Bowlin continues to dig, he discovers he is far from the first one to raise the alarm about what’s happening in Oklahoma.

Watch the documentary here.

The post Toxic Ground: How Oil Field Pollution Is Threatening Oklahoma appeared first on ProPublica.