For more than a decade, Dr. Joseph Mercola cautioned parents against a potentially lifesaving shot of vitamin K for their newborn babies: “Vitamin K shots are completely unnecessary for your newborn.”

But now, in a break from his past warnings, Mercola is saying he no longer believes that. 

ProPublica contacted Mercola recently as it was preparing an article about babies who died as a result of their parents turning down the vitamin K shot. Mercola’s new point of view is just as unequivocal as his old one: “The data is clear: vitamin K saves lives,” he wrote in an April article on his website two days after ProPublica contacted him. He added: “Based on the totality of the published evidence, I support vitamin K prophylaxis for all newborns.” 

He also directed parents to speak to their children’s pediatricians. 

“Vitamin K deficiency bleeding is rare, but when it occurs, the consequences can be devastating and irreversible,” Mercola wrote. “A single injection at birth can prevent it. Please talk to your doctor.”

Mercola is a leading vaccine skeptic and an ardent supporter of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He is a popular figure online, with a Facebook page that has some 1.7 million followers. He sends out a daily newsletter and sells alternative treatments for a variety of ailments. 

His reversal comes at a critical moment. Hospitals and research studies have documented an alarming jump in babies not receiving the vitamin K shot, which has been recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics since 1961 to help newborns’ blood to clot. Without it, research shows, babies are 81 times more at risk for late vitamin K deficiency bleeding, which can be fatal. 

Just as has happened with measles and other vaccines, vitamin K shots have become the target of a deluge of false information online. That has caused some parents to view it as an unnecessary pharmaceutical intervention amid a lingering mistrust of the medical system following the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Some point to a 2010 post from Mercola, entitled “The Dark Side of the Routine Newborn Vitamin K Shot.” A doctor in Tennessee recalled reluctant families citing the article, as did doctors in Oregon. 

In the years that followed, Mercola stood by his opposition. He reiterated his position in 2014, after four babies in Nashville, Tennessee, suffered vitamin K deficiency bleeding. And he did so again in 2019, after hospital staff contacted child protective services in Illinois and took temporary custody of a newborn whose parents refused the shot for their baby.  

In place of the shot, Mercola had recommended vitamin K drops, which are taken orally and have been touted online as a popular alternative. The drops, however, are not approved by the Food and Drug Administration and research shows they are not as effective as the shot, though they are used in some European countries. 

In his April article, he addressed the rampant false information online regarding the vitamin K shot and acknowledged the role his writing may have played in spreading it. “The internet contains a significant amount of misinformation about vitamin K,” Mercola wrote. “Some of it may reference my own 2010 article. That article reflected the state of a scientific debate that has since been resolved. The science moved forward, and so have I.”

In fact, the science around the vitamin K shot has been settled for decades. The discovery of vitamin K and its role in clotting blood won the Nobel Prize in 1943. Newer studies have confirmed and furthered many of the findings that were available in 2010, but they do not represent a scientific shift from previous research. Some recent studies that Mercola cited in the April article document the rise in babies not receiving the shot and the catastrophic bleeding in the brain that can follow, but again both reinforce the same science that has encouraged giving the shot for more than 60 years. 

In Mercola’s earlier posts, he wrote about what he deemed to be risks from the shot, beginning with “inappropriate” and “unnecessary” pain to the baby. He incorrectly claimed that the amount of vitamin K injected into newborns was far more than the needed dose. In addition, he wrote that the shot may contain preservatives that can be “toxic” to a baby’s immune system. 

Benzyl alcohol is often used as a preservative in vitamin K shots, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other organizations have stressed that it’s safe. In the 1980s, doctors realized that some extremely premature babies suffered benzyl alcohol toxicity, but, according to the CDC, that was because they were on so many medications containing it. In addition, many hospitals now offer preservative-free options.

Some families have also expressed fear about a “black box warning,” which appears on a drug’s label to alert providers of serious risks. The shot does contain a boxed warning, as do more than 400 other medications, but that is primarily related to adults and vitamin K that is given through an IV, not as a shot in the thigh muscle, which is how doctors typically administer vitamin K to babies. None of the dozens of doctors interviewed by ProPublica said they have ever seen an adverse reaction in an infant who received a vitamin K shot.

But even back in 2010, Mercola dispelled one popular misconception that vitamin K injections increased the risk of cancer. That belief stemmed from a pair of older refuted studies. In 2010, he wrote, “that conclusion was in error.” In April, he reinforced that message.

Alternative treatments promoted by Mercola have attracted federal scrutiny. He and his companies have had to pay millions of dollars to settle allegations that he had made false claims about the safety of products. 

During the pandemic, for instance, the FDA sent Mercola a warning letter after he offered unapproved and misbranded products, including vitamin C, on his website as ways to prevent or treat COVID-19. 

In 2017, the Federal Trade Commission announced it was mailing $2.59 million to people who bought Mercola indoor tanning systems. The agency charged that Mercola and his companies claimed the tanning systems were safe and that research showed that indoor tanning doesn’t raise the risk of melanoma, a type of skin cancer. 

Mercola did not admit wrongdoing. His online posts include a disclaimer that they are intended as a way of sharing knowledge and information, not medical advice. He also has said his 2010 vitamin K article was based on an interview with a Dutch researcher who studied vitamin K.

Mercola, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, declined to be interviewed for this story but said his current stance is accurately reflected in the April article. “While I do not agree with all of the characterizations and conclusions in your summary,” he wrote in response to questions from ProPublica, “I have nothing further to add at this time.” 

Even though Mercola has now reversed his position on vitamin K, many on social media still cling to debunked and distorted claims. On Facebook, TikTok and Instagram, unsubstantiated claims often go unchecked.

One theme that has emerged on social media is the notion that God created babies perfectly, and there must be a reason they are born without sufficient vitamin K. In one video on TikTok, a woman who identifies herself as a nurse asked, “Did God really get it wrong?” 

Responding to another, someone wrote, “Just know our creator didn’t make a mistake. Every baby is born like this for a reason.” 

Others lump the vitamin K shot, which is not a vaccine, in with vaccines. A comment on a video about the vitamin K shot declared, “My baby isn’t getting any vaccines.” It received more than 600 likes.

Mercola also is not the only doctor being cited by vitamin K shot opponents. Commenters on Instagram, TikTok and Reddit have directed people to Dr. Suzanne Humphries, who has spoken out about vaccines and the vitamin K shot for many years. 

“My opinion is that the more I read about vitamin K,” she said in a video posted in 2014, “the more I can’t believe that it’s injected into newborn infants.”

Last month, she appeared in a lengthy interview on the website of Children’s Health Defense, the anti-vaccine nonprofit founded by Kennedy. She cited the pair of studies from more than 30 years ago that found an association between the shot and cancer, though they were both called into question shortly after they were published. As even Mercola noted in 2010, several additional studies found no increased risk of cancer following the shot. 

“Those of us that believe in a divine creator,” she said, “believe that maybe it is by design, or that actually it is by design, and that there’s a reason for it.” 

Humphries did not respond to requests for comment.

During Kennedy’s time at Children’s Health Defense, the group published a post in 2020 that claimed aluminum adjuvants — added components that boost the body’s immune response — in vaccines are “significant sources of early exposure” to aluminum. Some vitamin K shots contain a small amount of aluminum, but studies have not found any evidence of serious or long-lasting harm. Adjuvants, according to the CDC, have been used “safely in vaccines for decades.” 

Brian Hooker, chief scientific officer at Children’s Health Defense, said the aluminum concern remains, as does the cancer fear, despite multiple studies that found no basis for them. He said he would like to see more research on the vitamin K shot, as well as other newborn interventions like the hepatitis B vaccine. 

“I do want to look at the individual components of these shots in conjunction with everything else that the infant is getting,” he said, “and to me that body of literature is really incomplete.”

Hooker said he worked with Kennedy for many years and, while they are no longer in direct contact, he has full confidence in the country’s leading federal health official. But Kennedy’s silence has served to deepen skepticism among experts. 

“Now we’re starting to see something that I never saw, which was brain bleeds and gut bleeds in infants,” said Rep. Kim Schrier, a Washington Democrat who worked as a pediatrician for more than 15 years before running for Congress. “And that’s so scary and heartbreaking.”

At an April House subcommittee hearing, Schrier confronted Kennedy about vitamin K, saying that he made parents distrust doctors and shots, and as a result some parents are refusing the vitamin K shot and other standard care. 

“Right now, Secretary Kennedy, given what I just told you about vitamin K, will you just tell pregnant women out there for the record, ‘Yes, you should get your babies the vitamin K shot’?” Schrier asked Kennedy.

Kennedy did not oblige her. He said he has never said anything about the vitamin K shot. 

An HHS spokesperson did not answer ProPublica’s questions but said the CDC recommends that parents give newborns the vitamin K shot within 6 hours of their birth to prevent vitamin K deficiency bleeding. She acknowledged that uptake of the shot has declined during recent years “as public trust in health care institutions has fallen, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic amid heavy-handed mandates and inconsistent messaging during the Biden administration.”

“Rebuilding that trust,” the spokesperson wrote in an email, “requires honesty, informed consent, and respect for individual choice.” 

Schrier said she empathizes with parents who are inundated with so many conflicting messages. She said she recently stepped out of the Capitol building and overheard a woman say — inaccurately — that every childhood vaccine contains glyphosate, which was an ingredient in some forms of the weed killer Roundup. 

“I can just see how this is going to spiral right now. It gets out there, then it’s on social media,” Schrier said. “Every parent just doesn’t want to do the wrong thing.” 

The post A Popular Doctor Had Long Warned That Vitamin K Shots Are Risky for Newborns. Now He’s Changed His Tune. appeared first on ProPublica.

A federal lawmaker is pushing for a provision that would bar the Federal Bureau of Prisons from offering taxpayer-funded VIP perks to pardoned drug lords and child traffickers. 

Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat, introduced the measure last month as an amendment to a House appropriations bill, telling her colleagues that there “should never be preferential treatment for narco leaders.”

The move comes in response to ProPublica reporting on the special treatment extended to one high-profile pardon recipient — former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who was released from a federal penitentiary late last year. Less than 18 months earlier, Hernández had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for taking bribes and allowing drug traffickers to export more than 400 tons of cocaine to the U.S. while he was in office.

But after President Donald Trump pardoned him in December, the Central American strongman — who has long maintained his innocence — got what Torres and others have described as the “red carpet” treatment. On the day of his release, ProPublica found, Hernández had in place what’s known as an immigration detainer, a formal request for law enforcement agencies to hold noncitizens for pickup by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Yet instead of holding him, the Federal Bureau of Prisons scrambled to get the detainer removed so he could walk free. Then, instead of giving him a bus ticket or airfare to get home on his own, prison officials paid a four-man tactical team overtime to drive him six hours from a West Virginia high-security facility to the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan, New York, according to records and three people familiar with the situation. 

Torres sought to stop that sort of treatment with a narrowly tailored amendment barring the bureau and several other agencies from using taxpayer dollars to give convicted drug traffickers and child traffickers — even those who have been pardoned or received a sentence commutation — special accommodations or transportation, as well as from lifting “any detainers not provided to other inmates.” 

Last month, the amendment hit an early stumbling block when the House Appropriations Committee voted along party lines against including it in its proposed 2027 spending bill. 

“Taxpayer dollars should not be used to give convicted criminals special accommodations, lifted legal holds, or government-funded transportation,” Torres said in a press release afterward. “We should be enforcing the law, not handing out favors. I’m shocked that my Republican colleagues didn’t agree with that common sense idea.” 

But that doesn’t necessarily mean the proposal is dead. Last week in a statement to ProPublica, Torres — a Guatemalan immigrant who last year criticized the decision to pardon Hernández — said she planned to raise the issue before the Rules Committee, which can decide whether previously rejected amendments still get a vote on the House floor.

“I am not giving up,” she said, adding: “The American people deserve a government that enforces the law fairly and holds powerful criminals accountable, regardless of who pardons them.”

A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson declined to comment on the measure out of respect for members of Congress. Previously, a spokesperson said that the bureau does not discuss conditions of confinement or security procedures and that employee standards of conduct prohibit staff from giving any prisoners preferential treatment. ICE had previously referred questions to the White House, which this week did not respond to a request for comment.

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Long before his arrest and controversial release, Hernández had been a polarizing figure, plagued by allegations of corruption in his country. Still, he was seen as a key U.S. ally under the Obama and first Trump administrations, in part because of his apparent interest in tackling drug trafficking and migration issues.

But in 2018, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration arrested his younger brother, former Honduran congressman Tony Hernández, for weapons and drug trafficking charges. The following year, a jury found Tony Hernández guilty in a Manhattan federal trial.

And weeks after the elder Hernández left office in 2022, he was arrested in Honduras and extradited to the U.S. to face drug trafficking and weapons charges. Prosecutors said Juan Orlando Hernández funded his political career with money he got from “violent drug-trafficking organizations” in exchange for allowing them to “move mountains of cocaine” out of the country. At one point, they said during trial, he bragged that he would “stuff the drugs right up the noses of the gringos.”

After a federal jury voted to convict him in early 2024, Hernández was sent to a notorious high-security penitentiary in West Virginia to serve his time. Last year, he appealed to Trump’s sympathies, penning a four-page letter framing his case as a “political persecution” by the Biden administration. 

In November — two days before the Honduran presidential election that swept Hernández’s right-wing National Party back into power — Trump announced his intent to pardon his former Central American counterpart. Experts said the timing sent an obvious message on the eve of a tight race; as one former high-ranking U.S. diplomat previously told ProPublica, the pardon was a show of support that served as a “clear green light for the National Party to manipulate the vote.”

(The narrow victory for Nasry “Tito” Asfura, who had been trailing in multiple polls, came amid reports of voter intimidation and fraud allegations. After the election, Asfura promised to “work tirelessly for Honduras.”)

On Dec. 1, Trump formally granted Hernández the full pardon, and by the end of the day he was on his way to the swank, five-star hotel in New York City, ProPublica reported. Days later, Renato Stabile, Hernández’s court-appointed lawyer, filed a motion to vacate the judgment and dismiss the indictment in light of the presidential pardon. When prosecutors didn’t file a response opposing it, a federal court agreed to Stabile’s request.

Previously, Stabile told ProPublica his client’s treatment during the release process was appropriate, as Hernández could have been arrested or killed had he been deported to his home country. He also declined to comment on where Hernández stayed but said the government did not pay the bill. Hernández had declined to comment through his attorney.

At the time, Joe Rojas, a retired prison worker and former union leader, said that BOP staff were “disgusted” after the agency “rolled out the red carpet” for Hernández. 

Last month, when the amendment came up for debate in front of the 63-member House Appropriations Committee, Torres held up a printed copy of ProPublica’s investigation as she told her colleagues about the special treatment Hernández received and about how the prisons agency had used “our hard-earned taxpayer dollars” to pay for his transport to New York. 

“These actions can never be allowed to happen ever again,” she said.

Two other lawmakers spoke in support of the measure. One, Rep. Hal Rogers, a Kentucky Republican, opposed it, calling the amendment “performative and unnecessary.” He did not explain his reasoning to the committee, and his office did not respond to an emailed request for comment. 

Ultimately, 31 Republicans opposed the amendment and 27 Democrats supported it. None of the Republican members who voted against the amendment responded to requests for comment from ProPublica.

Though Torres plans to raise the issue again this summer in front of the Rules Committee, the 9-4 Republican majority there makes it unlikely the measure will garner enough support to move forward right now.

But if the House fails to agree on spending bills before the end of this Congress, the November elections could change the balance of power and give the Democrats more say in what amendments make it to the floor next year.

The post Lawmaker Pushes for Ban on Special Treatment for Convicted Drug Traffickers After ProPublica Report appeared first on ProPublica.

In city after city, the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has been met by protests and rallies from members of the local community opposed to the White House’s deportation policies. Federal agents from the Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have repeatedly attempted to break up and drive back these crowds through the use of airborne irritants like tear gas and pepper spray, which can cause an array of immediate reactions — from eye pain to shortness of breath to nausea and vomiting — intended to temporarily disable their targets.

DHS has defended its use of these weapons on crowds and said that it “does NOT target children,” but after reviewing news accounts, lawsuits and officer-worn body camera footage, as well as verifying incidents by interviewing more than 40 victims or witnesses, ProPublica recently identified more than six dozen instances in which children had been harmed by tear gas and pepper spray.

Here are five things you should know about how these airborne weapons have been used during Trump’s immigration crackdown and how their use has particularly harmed children.

Dozens of children have been harmed by tear gas deployed by immigration agents.

So-called less lethal weapons like tear gas and pepper spray were developed to inflict severe pain and debilitate adult combatants and rioters, but ProPublica identified 79 children across the country since 2025 who have been harmed by these chemicals after they were deployed by federal immigration officers. Our tally is nearly four times the number cited in a recent congressional report, yet it is likely still a vast undercount.

The Department of Homeland Security has defended its agents’ use of the chemicals and claimed the blame lies with “agitators” in the crowds and parents who put their children in harm’s way. Many children harmed by tear gas and pepper spray were in their cars, at home or walking to school when they came into contact with the airborne weapons.

Tear gas and pepper spray are especially toxic to children.

There is no one such thing as “tear gas.” It’s a catch-all term for various chemical irritants that exist as a fine powder and trigger nerve endings to feel as if they’re on fire. The chemicals sear your lungs and throat, inflaming your airways until it feels like you’re breathing through a straw, while snot and tears stream down your face. They can cause vomiting, rashes and coughs that last for weeks. Pepper spray is made from compounds found in hot peppers and causes similar effects.

Because children breathe more rapidly and can pull in more contaminated air than adults relative to their body weight, these weapons are particularly dangerous to the young. Children are also more vulnerable because they have narrower airways and they are closer to the ground, where tear gas tends to pool after being deployed. The Trump administration’s use of tear gas has been so extraordinary that no one yet knows what long-term harm may result from children who’ve come into contact with these chemicals — some of them multiple times.

Courts have found that agents’ use of tear gas is excessive, but their power is limited.

In November 2025, a federal judge in Illinois ruled that ICE and CBP officers had deployed these chemicals “without justification, often without warning” against people who didn’t pose a physical threat. This constituted an illegal use of excessive force, said the judge, ordering the agencies to stop. But her injunction covered only the areas mentioned in the complaint. Agents were unfettered to continue using the weapons elsewhere.

After federal agents in Portland, Oregon, responded to a Jan. 31 rally by firing various less-lethals into the crowd — including Triple Chaser grenades that each separated into three tear gas canisters; dozens of pepper ball projectiles filled with chemical munitions; and “rubber ball grenades” that released stinging pellets, bright lights, and loud sounds — a judge there issued a temporary restraining order that forbade federal agents from using chemical munitions unless targeted at someone who posed “an imminent threat of physical harm.”

However, appellate courts have subsequently vacated the Illinois judge’s ruling and multiple rulings from judges in Portland seeking to enjoin the use of these weapons.

Once deployed, these weapons are difficult to contain.

Though the Trump administration has defended agents’ training and said ICE officers are taught to use “the minimum amount of force necessary to resolve dangerous situations,” not only can tear gas canisters launched into a crowd bounce and roll unpredictably, but the toxic chemicals can travel through the air, sometimes for blocks. In Minneapolis, ProPublica found that tear gas had traveled at least a quarter mile before seeping into a McDonald’s.

Derrick Nash and his family live a block and a half east of an ICE facility in Broadview, Illinois. Even from that distance, they felt the effects inside their homes when officers tear-gassed protesters. Each time the tear gas seeped in, the kids — ages 6 to 17 — coughed, and their throats often burned. The eldest, a high school senior with asthma, would hide out in his second-floor bedroom. One evening, his face turned red as he coughed uncontrollably and sucked on his inhaler without relief.

“He was wigging out, saying, ‘I can’t breathe,’” Nash recalled. The family considered calling an ambulance, but the street was closed.

No national standard for use of tear gas exists.

Law enforcement policies governing the use of tear gas and pepper spray differ widely by location, and no federal standard exists. The DHS policy on force says officers must use tactics that “minimize the risk of unintended injury” and should be guided by “respect for human life.” The CBP’s policy says officers “should not use” pepper spray or “less-lethal” chemical munitions against “small children.” ICE’s policy says “the presence of other officers, subjects, or bystanders” are a factor in determining whether an officers’ use of force is reasonable.

Compare that with tear gas policies in two cities that have experienced Trump’s immigration crackdown firsthand. In Portland, police officers who consider using tear gas must take into account their proximity to homes. Meanwhile, Minneapolis forbids officers from using chemical munitions for crowd control unless authorized by the police chief — even when officers fear they will be physically harmed.

Requiring all law enforcement agencies to adopt uniform policies and training methods would go a long way, experts told ProPublica. At the same time, they acknowledge that this would likely require Congress to pass a bill mandating that federal law enforcement entities adopt stricter practices and incentivize local police departments to do the same.

Bills that seek to strengthen use-of-force training on such a wide scale and legislation that targets DHS and its use of these weapons have thus far failed to even make it to a vote in Congress. Following ProPublica’s investigation, U.S. lawmakers have begun demanding reforms to immigration officers’ use of these weapons.

The post What You Need to Know About How Tear Gas Harms Kids appeared first on ProPublica.

A white Ford pickup truck broke through a thick curtain of fog one morning in February, winding its way down a muddy farm road in California’s Central Valley. From it emerged a 64-year-old dairyman, burly and tan, who left the engine running as he lumbered toward me with open arms. 

“You must be Mark,” I said, warning him I wasn’t one for hugging. 

“I’m a hugger,” he said, pulling me in anyway. “I feel like I’ve known you for a lifetime.”

I had spent the past couple of weeks corresponding with Raw Farm founder Mark McAfee, who’d filled my inbox with messages and PowerPoints extolling the virtues of his most important, and controversial, product:

It is delicious.

It makes you feel good (the gut-brain serotonin and dopamine cycle).

It’s great for asthma and literally saves lives.

He was talking about raw milk, which, if you trust 150 years of bedrock science, offers little reason to consume. By definition, it has not been pasteurized, the simple process of heating milk to kill off harmful bacteria. Before the practice was widely adopted a century ago, thousands of babies died each year from illnesses linked to contaminated dairy. Today, most scientists and health experts agree that raw milk has no significant, proven nutritional benefits over its sanitized counterpart, cannot treat or cure disease and subjects its consumers to over 100 times the risk of foodborne illness, which can be especially dangerous for young children.

And yet, McAfee’s farm, the largest raw-milk dairy in the country, is pulling in about $30 million a year, meeting a growing demand from customers who say they want food that hasn’t been robbed of health benefits by industrial processing. Once drawing a fringe crowd, raw milk has been thrust into the mainstream in recent years by a potent mix of politics, wellness culture and a wave of suspicion that health institutions have been compromised by Big Pharma and Big Food. Its proponents have turned it into a symbol of freedom and defiance. More than 10 million Americans now drink it; national weekly sales rose by 65% from 2023 to 2024 alone.

Raw milk’s success confounded me: How had it gained such a foothold in this country, despite regular outbreaks of salmonella and E. coli, and even the discovery of bird flu in Raw Farm’s milk? More pressing still, what was the government doing to protect the public amid demands for products that scientists warn are risky, even deadly? Speaking with McAfee seemed like a good place to start; federal and state regulators had linked his business to more than a dozen recalls and outbreaks that had left hundreds of people ill.

“I’ve put a couple kids in the hospital, and they have been sick, but they recovered,” McAfee acknowledged before my visit. “But here’s the thing: I’m a pioneer. And I’m going against the grain here. I’m climbing a mountain they say you can’t climb.”

McAfee isn’t any ordinary farmer. He is a raw-milk zealot who has escaped serious sanctions despite two decades of skirmishes with the Food and Drug Administration and the Department of Justice, which have repeatedly accused him of breaking federal laws and regulations. The Biden administration was on the verge of a crackdown against his farm when President Donald Trump assumed office and turned over leadership of the nation’s health agencies to one of McAfee’s most notable customers. 

The year before he was confirmed as the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ran for president, using his campaign platform to decry the government’s “aggressive suppression” of raw milk. In his new role, he said he was “advocating” for it and celebrated the release of a federal report to Make America Healthy Again with a toast of raw-milk shooters in the White House.

For his part, McAfee isn’t just selling Kennedy’s favored milk. He is selling the notion that his dairy products are safe and healthy — for you, your kids, your grandparents — because his farm thoroughly screens its milk for bacteria. 

“They think we’re some kind of a fringe, weird trend, and we are dead serious here,” McAfee said after he greeted me at his farm, which he runs with his adult son and daughter, 20 miles southwest of Fresno. “And you’ll see that in what we’re doing today.”

He led me into a cream-colored bungalow he called his pathogen laboratory, where two workers in lab coats prepared milk samples.

The farm screens each batch for four types of bacteria: salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter and listeria, all of which thrive in the intestines of cattle and can contaminate milk through microscopic flecks of infected feces. The microbes can cause a constellation of symptoms in humans, from vomiting and diarrhea to sepsis, kidney failure and even death.

“We catch these things and divert the milk immediately,” McAfee said of the pathogens. 

I assumed that after diverting batches, the farm discarded them. 

Later that day, I learned otherwise.

“We have a red-flag system here, where if there’s anything that gets really out of whack, they can immediately tag the milk, and it doesn’t go to anything but cheese,” McAfee told me. “Because, you know, cheese is resistant to pathogens.”

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

Hearing about the practice took me by surprise — the farm did what with that milk? — so I asked about it again.

McAfee confirmed that milk with pathogens was used to make cheese, except for batches with salmonella, which he said were dumped or sent out for pasteurization. (I later learned the FDA knew he was doing this and had told him to stop two years ago. But no one had alerted the public.) 

“Our cheese is just wildly successful across America,” McAfee said, noting it was sold in hundreds of stores from natural food shops to chains like Sprouts Farmers Market. “H-E-B down in Texas sells 50,000 bucks a week.”

I wondered how long it might take for the cheese to be linked to another outbreak. 

Unbeknownst to me, one was already underway.

Chapter 1: The Pioneer

In the early 2000s, McAfee was producing pasteurized milk for the dairy group Organic Valley when a raw-milk enthusiast named James Stewart made an unusual request. 

Stewart had founded a private food club in Venice, Los Angeles. Its members included movie stars, “crystal worshippers” and other “fanatical people,” McAfee recalled. They were looking for a steady source of raw milk at a time when consumers were waking up to the risks of food contaminated by additives, fertilizers and pesticides.

“How fast can you drive down here with as much milk as you can?” McAfee recalled Stewart asking.

McAfee, not fully grasping why people would want to drink milk that was unpasteurized, nonetheless went to his silo, filled half-gallon containers and packed them in ice chests. Then, with his wife, he made the long drive south to the L.A. coast.

Dozens of people were waiting for them, McAfee said, launching into a scene that unfolded with a Hollywood sheen. “I couldn’t even get out of the car,” he said. “They’re beating on the windows and opening up the back. … Just mayhem, cheering, excitement, crying.” 

As their $20 bills started flying at him, so did their stories, about how raw milk had healed their health issues, including asthma. The moment transformed him, he said: He realized that he was selling more than just milk — it was “food as medicine.”

Twenty-odd years later, Stewart, too, recalls the moment. “I saw the light go off in his head,” Stewart told me. “He was looking for a way to expand what he was doing and not just be a commercial, pasteurized, homogenized milk provider.” 

McAfee, a third-generation California farmer, was born into a family that had charted an unconventional course. His father, whom McAfee described as both a humanitarian and a rebel, founded multiple farm cooperatives and made national news in 1972, when he helped post bail for activist Angela Davis by putting his land up as collateral. 

McAfee didn’t initially follow in his father’s footsteps. He worked for 16 years as a paramedic before taking the helm of family farmland that his grandparents left behind. The farm grew apples, almonds and alfalfa, and, by 2001, McAfee had expanded into commercial dairy. But his days of producing milk for pasteurization were short-lived; within a few months of meeting Stewart, McAfee converted his dairy to sell only raw milk.

He entered a market on the verge of extraordinary growth. 

California had always permitted raw milk to be sold in stores, but Los Angeles County’s more stringent rules had, in effect, curbed its retail sales. In 2001, food-freedom advocates, including Stewart, successfully petitioned the county to weaken regulations, providing McAfee access to a new pool of customers. That would happen again and again, in state and local governments across America, as the internet, and then social media influencers, drew exponentially more people to the cause. 

Around the time McAfee converted his dairy to raw milk, only 27 states allowed its sale. 

In one way or another, nearly all of them ultimately would.

One thing stood between McAfee and all of that business: a federal regulation restricting the sale of raw milk from one state to another. The 1987 ban had the effect of keeping outbreaks contained, making it easier for local officials to address them. 

But there was a loophole: Raw milk could be sold across state lines if labeled as pet food. 

McAfee saw an opportunity, and he wasn’t subtle about it on the website for his farm, which at the time was called Organic Pastures. The farm “creatively labeled its products for sale outside of California in such a way that it is not illegal,” the site said, and it assured people they could still consume them. Justifying the strategy to an Oregon newspaper, McAfee said in 2005, “I am a revolutionist in this, and I won’t overlook any loophole that will get the milk out there.”

As his raw dairy grew, McAfee portrayed himself as an underdog waging a war against industrialized food. “The giants of the marketplace have processed our food to death to extend shelf life and expand distribution,” he said in a 2006 interview. “The raw milk revolution grows right out of this disorder.” 

Two decades later, he still talks about raw milk with the passion of a convert. He answered even simple questions with lengthy explanations, speaking in a quick, torrential style and snapping his fingers or pinching the air for emphasis. Only later did I realize that much of what sounded spontaneous was a pitch he had been refining in years of promotional interviews and farm tours.

McAfee has professed the benefits of unpasteurized milk in public libraries and chiropractor offices. Raw dairy, his farm has claimed, could cure, treat or prevent myriad diseases and ailments, from diabetes and ear infections to allergies, eczema and arthritis. The farm developed the website icanbreathe.org to promote the so-called Milk Cure for asthma. “Only raw milk works in this natural treatment,” the dairy stated. “Pasteurizing milk kills or changes the natural enzymes, antibodies, and fatty acids that are critical to the physiology of how this works in your body.”

McAfee founded a nonprofit, Raw Milk Institute, in 2011, broadcasting similar claims alongside studies he said support them. While a few European studies he cited observed a correlation between drinking raw milk and lower rates of asthma and allergies, they did not prove raw milk directly led to reduced illness, nor did they recommend its consumption due to pathogenic risk. Experts have suggested the association could likely be explained by the “farm effect,” in which children growing up around animals and agriculture have been shown to have stronger immune systems.

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

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

“I’m begging you to say: ‘This is not anti-science, this is extremely pro-science,’” he told me. “It’s using science that is not conveniently accepted yet.”

And for many health-conscious people, this possibility that raw milk may help them — or their loved ones — is often enough for them to try it.

Chapter 2: The First

Mary McGonigle-Martin was shopping in a Southern California grocery store in 2006 when she spotted ads suggesting McAfee’s milk could treat allergies and digestive problems. She thought of her 7-year-old son, Chris, who she suspected was dealing with dairy sensitivity, and later visited McAfee’s website to learn more. She knew the risks of forgoing pasteurization, but the site eased her concerns: It said the farm tested its milk and had never found a single pathogen. 

So she started buying it, and her son started drinking it. And about a month later, he fell gravely ill. What began as a trip to the nearest hospital for bloody diarrhea turned into a race to save his life as his kidneys started to fail. Airlifted to a children’s hospital in Loma Linda, Chris was put in a medically induced coma. He spent nine days on a ventilator and 18 days on dialysis, during which time doctors gave him blood, platelet and plasma transfusions. “He was on the verge of death,” Martin told me. “I had flashes of him being in a casket and being at his funeral.”

Chris had a dangerous strain of E. coli, known as O157:H7, which led to hemolytic uremic syndrome. This rare condition, which mostly impacts children, occurs when bacterial toxins spread throughout the body and damage red blood cells, causing clots in the organs, primarily the kidneys. With quick intervention, most people survive. But it can cause lifelong complications.

While sitting in the intensive care unit, Martin overheard another mother mention her daughter had the same condition. It turned out the young girl had also drank milk from McAfee’s farm. Hoping to intervene before others got sick, the families reported the illnesses to the dairy and the state, which quickly issued a recall and quarantine order, suspending distribution of the farm’s products.

McAfee told me that when he learned of the two sick children, he “wanted to know the truth.” So he took his wife’s Volvo and drove four hours to the hospital. Then, somehow, he found a way into the ICU. “I knew how to get back past security,” he said. “A paramedic can get anywhere, and I sucked up to the nurses.”

Martin told me she was surprised when McAfee introduced himself in the waiting area, but nonetheless she shared details of her son’s ordeal. “I listened to her as compassionately as I could,” McAfee told me. But in his recollection, he observed that Martin’s son was not as critically ill as he’d been led to believe. “He’s eating McDonald’s, watching cartoons, doing just great, and they’re telling the story to the world that he’s ready to die,” claimed McAfee. “I was really upset about that.”

McAfee’s version of events was impossible, Martin told me: When he appeared at the hospital, Chris had just been taken off the ventilator and still struggled to breathe on his own; reams of her contemporaneous notes confirm this. Even after being extubated, he couldn’t have solid food for weeks due to severe pancreatitis. “I was so hungry,” Chris told me. “I started crying because I couldn’t eat.”

When I asked Martin why she thought McAfee gave such a different account of their meeting, her response was simple: “Mark is the master of spin.” (McAfee maintained that his recollection was accurate: “This is not spinning; this is simple truth.”)

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

Chris suffered permanent kidney damage. Now 27, he can’t drink alcohol and will spend the rest of his life under a nephrologist’s care because of his elevated risk of chronic kidney disease. 

The illness lingered in other ways, too. “I would have random flashbacks and panic attacks from anything,” he told me. The smell of hospital soap. The sticky feeling of Band-Aids or tape on his skin. His mother found him a trauma counselor, which was “life-changing,” he said, except he still held onto a knot of resentment. Not toward his parents; he views them as victims like him. “Just so much anger towards Mark,” he recently told me. When he later saw McAfee’s milk being sold at a Sprouts, “I wanted to take a bat and smash the entire aisle.”

Martin couldn’t let go either. She hired Bill Marler, a Seattle attorney who specializes in food safety litigation. Alongside the family she met in the hospital, she sued McAfee’s farm in 2008, and the dairy settled for an undisclosed sum. “They couldn’t find the pathogen in our milk,” McAfee told me. “She claims she had it in her milk with her child, and that’s what the insurance company took to settle, and we weren’t going to litigate it.”

Emboldened, Martin, who was a high school guidance counselor, found her second calling as a food safety advocate, testifying against raw-milk-access bills across the country.

Following the settlement, McAfee wrote to Martin to apologize, but also begged her to move on. 

“Mary, please appreciate that so many children thrive and grow very strong on raw milk,” he wrote. “The very remote theoretical risk of illness from tested, retail, approved raw milk is far outweighed by the health and recovery from the illness that children that drink raw milk enjoy.”

Martin appreciated the note, but recognized that even in his seemingly heartfelt apology, McAfee could not adapt his belief system to fit her experience. “He really believed this was like a fluke. It’s not going to happen again,” she said.

Chapter 3: The Pathogens

Eager to keep showing me his farm’s serious approach to pathogens, McAfee ushered me into his truck to see the milking of his cows. Raw Farm keeps about 1,400 of them, which produce up to 8,000 gallons a day, each priced at $19. The smell of sweet milk hung in the air, mixed with the earthy musk of manure. 

“We’ll see what kind of music they’re playing this morning up in the milk barn,” he mused. 

“You play music for the milking?” I asked. 

“Mexican music,” he said, as he got behind the wheel. “It’s very Pavlovian. … You start seeing milk coming out of their teats.”

In the open-sided barn, workers sprayed a small herd of cows with a fire hose, removing flies and flecks of manure from their bellies, which were then inspected, coated with iodine and wiped with a towel. The steady pulsing of milking machines mingled with a thumping musical beat as McAfee marched down the rows, pointing to their light pink udders. “Super clean,” he said with pride. 

Hygiene appeared to be a clear priority everywhere we went, from the thick binders of safety plans — “not one of those documents collects dust,” he told me — to the sterile, full-body moon suits workers wear to package milk. 

McAfee said the 2006 outbreak opened his eyes to the risk of his product and was part of the reason he developed standards for unpasteurized dairies. 

But more awareness and better practices didn’t stop McAfee’s customers from continuing to get sick — in 2007, and 2011, and 2012, and 2016 — and the farm had to issue recalls more than half a dozen times after pathogens were found in its products.

And then between 2023 and 2024, regulators linked the farm to one of the largest publicly known raw-dairy outbreaks in decades, with more than 170 people falling ill from salmonella. McAfee disputed his farm’s connection to many of the outbreaks, including this one.

“I call complete crap,” McAfee said, claiming that his farm was not responsible for all the cases. “It was 25, maybe 30.” He also disagreed that the majority of patients were children, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had detailed in a report published last year. “I challenge that data at the fundamental level.”

It was a typical McAfee defense. Throughout our conversation, he never lost his composure, even when discussing outbreaks. Instead, he calmly dismissed the government’s methodology, explaining that it was counting cases of “standard diarrhea,” which he said have “no claims for illness,” as they could be managed with “good hydration and plenty of good bone broths and electrolytes and stuff.” 

He also seized on instances when the government could not identify an outbreak strain in his products, but instead found it in samples of farm water and cow feces or drew ties to his farm using genetic sequencing or interviews with patients — practices epidemiologists routinely rely upon. McAfee held that none of this was smoking-gun proof that his farm directly caused outbreaks. Instead, such episodes seemed to reinforce his perception that he was climbing a mountain alone, battling institutions that were already biased against raw milk before hearing his case.

When mandated quarantines ended, he would declare victory.

After his dairy reopened following an outbreak that sickened five children in 2011, he revealed how much people were suffering without his product in a celebratory video. McAfee shook the hand of a young man who was wearing a sideways cap. “This guy came all the way from Alaska to get raw milk!” McAfee said. The young man described a kind of withdrawal: “My immune system broke down. I lost a lot of lean body mass.” When a gray-haired woman said she was driving four half-gallons to her grandbabies in Texas — “that’s how desperate I am for them to be healthy” — McAfee kissed her on the head and called her a “raw-milk freedom rider.”

At least 233 people have been sickened in eight outbreaks that federal and state regulators have connected to McAfee’s farm since 2006, and at least 40 of them have been hospitalized. 

The tally is almost certainly an undercount, experts and regulators told me. Many recover at home from foodborne illness and do not seek out testing.

The outbreaks raised an obvious question: Why hadn’t regulators shut down the farm? America’s food safety system aims to balance public health with people’s freedom to eat foods that can harm them, like raw oysters and sushi. Regulators expect some will inevitably get sick, and so they focus on ensuring consumers, at the very least, are aware of the risk.  

State regulators are responsible for overseeing raw milk sold legally within their borders. In California, they require it to be sampled and tested monthly for pathogens. Raw Farm is in good standing, according to the Department of Food and Agriculture, consistently meeting standards for sanitation and cow health. But spokespeople for that agency and the state Department of Public Health emphasized that the best way to prevent illness is to drink milk that has been pasteurized. Otherwise, they wrote in an email, “there will always be some risk of contamination.” 

Many people who turn to raw milk don’t have a full understanding of that risk, John Lucey told me. A professor of food science who directs the Center for Dairy Research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Lucey grew up on a farm and has studied dairy products for three decades. “Cows poop all the time,” he said. “Farms are just a reservoir of bacteria: The soil has got bacteria, the walls have got bacteria, the cows are carrying bacteria.”

One of the draws of raw milk is a deeper connection to its source; by knowing a farmer personally, people assume their food will be more safe, Lucey said. But what raw-milk consumers often don’t realize is that many dairy farmers are in a relentless battle to produce clean milk.

“Sometimes you lose because the cow kicked off the milking machine. Something just happens,” he said. “Farmers do the best they can and they are super hardworking people, but just because Daisy is a nice cow and the farmer is a nice guy doesn’t guarantee that things are sanitary and that they can prevent things 100% of the time.”

Over the past two years alone, nine states have experienced outbreaks that regulators linked to raw dairy, not including those connected to McAfee’s farm. In Washington state, about 10 people fell ill with E. coli connected to raw-cheese consumption, and in Florida, where raw milk can be sold only as pet food, about 20 people got sick. Among them was a pregnant mother whose toddler was hospitalized; she said she caught his bacterial infection and had a miscarriage at 20 weeks. (The Florida farm said its products had not tested positive for pathogens and that it informed customers its raw milk was not for human consumption; the Washington creamery voluntarily recalled its cheese.)

Just last week, Idaho’s health officials announced that nearly 60 people had become ill after consuming raw milk.

Discussing the risk of raw milk with McAfee was a challenge. 

As we rode in his truck to the next stop on the tour, I brought up the prevalence of pathogens, as well as his farm’s pattern of outbreaks. He acknowledged that some risk exists, but stressed that it was “very, very, very small” and was “fantastically” outweighed by raw milk’s therapeutic value. And then, he insisted one should disentangle the benefits from the risk, as if that’s even possible.

“Show me the criticism of raw milk if it’s safe,” he told me, one hand on the wheel, the other punctuating his points in the air. “None.”

“Well, the critics would argue that there’s risk—”

“No, if it’s safe,” he said, cutting me off. “If it’s safe, how could you criticize it?”

“But they would argue that it’s not safe,” I said.

“Show me the risk,” he repeated. “I’ve yet to see it. We found it. We immediately diverted it.”

Chapter 4: The Art of War

We’d seen nearly every stage of production — from “grass to glass,” as McAfee called it — when he parked his truck next to the hangar that houses his Cessna 210 Centurion propeller plane. Next to it, steps from his hacienda-style home, is a bungalow he uses as an office. 

He showed me his replica medieval broadsword, his podcasting setup and one of his favored books, Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War.” He said the ancient Chinese military treatise had informed his longstanding feud with the federal government. 

Two decades ago, his use of the pet food loophole to ship across state lines attracted scrutiny almost immediately. In 2005, an undercover investigator from the FDA called the farm and was told the milk was safe for human consumption. Two years later, according to court records, the farm sent an email to consumers saying, “Raw milk can be shipped via UPS to all US states,” and “Tell everyone who has asthma that they will be cured by raw milk.” 

In 2008, the DOJ pursued criminal charges and a civil suit. McAfee resolved the charges, promising that the farm wouldn’t sell raw milk across state lines again. But prosecutors wanted a court order that would force McAfee and the farm to comply, citing their “unabashed efforts to manipulate the law.” 

To illustrate McAfee’s ongoing defiance, the government pointed to statements he had made online that year and the next. In one post on a blog, he said, “If we ever get raided it will be grand theater. … There will probably be some riots.” In another, he said he would not use guns “until the tipping point” and mentioned “another Wounded Knee, Ruby Ridge or Waco.” Prosecutors argued his conduct demonstrated a “cognizable danger” that he would violate the law again.

In 2010, the judge granted a permanent injunction, requiring, among other things, that the farm stop selling raw milk beyond California and take down any statements promoting its health benefits. McAfee told me the directive was an attack on his right to free speech. “I deeply and passionately believe in the truth, and they were telling me I could not speak the truth,” he said. “I’ve had to have therapy over that, you know. I didn’t want to do something stupid.”

A violation of the order could have led to an enforcement action, but in the years that followed, officials pulled their punches. (McAfee insisted they had no punches to throw.)

The FDA and the DOJ kept finding evidence of violations, in 2016, and 2019, and 2021, according to court records. Though federal prosecutors initially pushed for strong penalties, including holding Raw Farm and McAfee in contempt, they agreed to a consent decree in 2023, which required the farm to undergo independent audits to ensure it was complying with the law.

Then, in early 2024, FDA inspectors discovered the farm had a “standard practice” of producing cheese from milk suspected or known to contain pathogens, according to court documents; lab records showed its cheese had also tested positive even after the mandated aging period. 

That February, federal regulators publicly linked Raw Farm’s cheese to a monthslong E. coli outbreak. Nearly a dozen people across five states fell ill. 

Among them was Paul Panelli, who went to his grocery store in Newport Beach, California, looking for Tillamook cheese to make tacos. Finding it was sold out, he reached for Raw Farm’s cheddar, drawn in by packaging that made it seem organic and all-natural. He told me he didn’t realize the cheese was made with unpasteurized milk.

Both Panelli and his wife, Julie, came down with food poisoning. She was diagnosed with an E. coli infection that left her needing several kidney surgeries. “She literally is afraid to eat things,” her husband told me. The family’s lawsuit against Raw Farm is ongoing; in court records, the farm denied responsibility for their illnesses.

Raw Farm pushed back against the government, maintaining that it followed federal regulations by aging its cheese and claiming to have tested all of it before sale, so no contaminated product reached the market, according to court records. Federal law allows the interstate sale of unpasteurized cheese as long as it’s aged for at least 60 days, though this doesn’t fully eliminate the risk — or account for a farm using pathogenic milk to make it. The FDA told the farm to destroy any cheese made with contaminated milk, arguing that it was violating the law, according to court documents. The farm’s lawyer said it was in compliance, and insisted there was no “bad cheese” to throw out.

To force the farm to follow the government’s orders, it needed a judge’s ruling, but a backlog in the under-resourced Eastern District of California left the case on pause well into 2025. The arrival of the Trump administration that year created a political opening for McAfee.

By the time Kennedy took the helm of the health department, McAfee had already developed close ties to his inner circle. “I go way back with him,” McAfee told me. Kennedy’s running mate, Nicole Shanahan, had made a stop at Raw Farm during his presidential campaign, creating multiple videos featuring McAfee. (She did not respond to my emailed questions.) He was even asked to become an adviser to the FDA, McAfee told me. The position never materialized, but McAfee still benefited from the change in administration. 

Without publicly stating a reason, this past January the government dropped its efforts to take action against the farm. A former federal employee with knowledge of the suit told me that cases involving raw milk were deprioritized in the new administration because of Kennedy’s stance on it. 

Natalie Baldassarre, a DOJ spokesperson, didn’t respond to my questions about the decision, but said in an email that the administration will “always be concerned about risks to public health and will continue to take enforcement action as appropriate to protect American consumers.” The health department and the FDA did not respond to my attempts to seek comment. Kennedy, through his department, also did not respond to my questions.

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

“You win the war they don’t expect you to fight,” he said. While officials were gathering evidence, he was focused on the “education” of consumers. He once delivered his message to dozens at a time. Now online influencers spread it to audiences of millions. “They have the guns and the money,” he said of the government. “I got the truth and the moms.”

His work could soon pay off. A month after I shook McAfee’s hand and left his farm, Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Kentucky, and Rep. Chellie Pingree, D-Maine, reintroduced the Interstate Milk Freedom Act, which would prohibit “federal interference” with the interstate sale of raw dairy in states where raw milk is already legal. 

Massie, who served raw milk at his recent wedding, has a farm with 50 cattle, and Pingree, a former dairy farmer and the only Democratic sponsor of the bill, raises her own grass-fed beef. “The Interstate Milk Freedom Act would make it easier for families to buy the milk of their choice,” Massie said when he announced the bill, “by reversing the criminalization of specific dairy farmers.”

When asked if she was concerned the bill may increase access to a product that puts people at risk, Pingree told me that the bill was not about marketing raw milk or making any health claims. “I trust state departments of agriculture and health to monitor compliance, assess health risks, and enforce the rules in place to protect consumers,” she said in an emailed statement. Massie did not respond to my questions.

Chapter 5: The Devoted

Six weeks after I left Raw Farm, it happened. 

On March 15, federal regulators publicly linked its cheese to yet another E. coli outbreak. 

Nine people were infected across three states; more than half were younger than 5. Of the three people who had to be hospitalized, according to regulators, one developed the same severe kidney condition that Martin’s son had battled two decades earlier. 

Initially, federal health agencies didn’t urge the public to avoid the cheese or throw it away, as they had under previous administrations. Instead, a CDC notice said consumers should “consider” not eating it; the FDA gave no consumption guidance at all. Three federal health employees later told me political appointees had watered down the original language. (The agencies’ advisories have since been updated. Neither the CDC nor the FDA responded to my questions.)

The fact that the agency was under Kennedy’s leadership didn’t make Raw Farm any more compliant when regulators asked it to recall its products. It refused. “If there was ever a question about whether there was a pathogen in our products,” McAfee later told me, “I’d be the first one to recall immediately, voluntarily.”

He said he texted Kennedy to “call off the dogs,” but got no response. 

When FDA inspectors showed up unannounced at the farm, it complied with an investigation. And when the agency threatened to force a recall, the company reluctantly issued its own, 18 days after the outbreak was announced. 

The farm appended several unusual statements to its April 2 advisory: 

This Voluntary Recall is being performed under protest.

This Voluntary Recall is performed as a path forward.

The farm retracted those statements five days later, but continued to dispute the cause of the outbreak and contest the agency’s findings. It had tested its products, found no pathogens and wasn’t at fault, McAfee said.

However, during its investigation, the FDA also sampled and tested the company’s cheese. While it didn’t find the recent outbreak strain, one sample tested positive for E. coli. In their inspection, agency officials also found the farm’s cheese had recently tested presumptively positive for pathogens even after 60 days, showing the limitations of its aging process. The farm destroyed these contaminated batches. 

I reached out to McAfee and asked him whether the illnesses might be connected to his practice of using problematic milk to make cheese. But now, he told a different story. 

“We would in the past divert to cheesemaking,” he told me. “We no longer do.” He didn’t pinpoint exactly when the farm made the change, throwing out dates from two years ago to last summer. “It’s been quite some time.”

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

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

In almost the same breath, McAfee noted that his farm would not have violated any laws if it had done so. “It’s not illegal,” he said. “That’s why the FDA dropped their thing.” (California regulators told me such a practice was “concerning.” The FDA refused to respond to questions about it.)

Speaking to a congressional subcommittee on April 16 about the outbreak, Kennedy noted that companies usually comply with recalls right away. “But there was foot-dragging,” he said. “This company was intransigent.” 

U.S. Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., asked Kennedy whether in the face of these new, serious illnesses, it wasn’t time for a shift in his messaging: “You are the Secretary of Health and Human Services. Is there not some moral responsibility or compunction to say, ‘Don’t drink raw milk’?”

“Every product can contain contaminants,” Kennedy replied. “What we do is inform the public, and we let people make the choice.” 

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

“We don’t feel bad at all,” McAfee told me about the entire episode. “Our sales are highest they’ve ever been, and feedback online with influencers is: If the FDA says something, do the opposite. It’s safer. They don’t trust them at all.” 

On a sunny weekend in early May, hundreds congregated at Raw Farm for its annual Camping With the Cows event. Blue skies extended to the horizon, and a small colony of tents, camper vans and motorhomes sprawled out across the lush alfalfa fields. Influencers in cowboy hats chugged cartons of milk. Matt James, the leading man on Season 25 of “The Bachelor,” ambled around with his mother in a T-shirt that read, “Raw Milk Club.”

Many attendees were unbothered by the recent illnesses. They said they consumed raw dairy because they wanted to reduce their inflammation, and avoid additives, and prevent lactose intolerance, and clear their skin, and bring their hormones into balance. They wanted nutrients that didn’t exist in “boiled to death” milk. They wanted to drink it “the natural way.” 

Alyssa Wolfer, a 42-year-old mother of two from Bakersfield, viewed raw milk as a symbol of “true American freedom,” she said. “I very much lean on the side of freedom of people to choose what they consume and less regulation.”

“I’m seven months pregnant, and I drink raw milk because that’s how God has created it to be,” said Lindsay Espinoza, 34, reclining on a bale of hay with her husband and young son. “There’s so much fear behind raw milk, but it makes sense to us.”

Some, like 58-year-old Melanie Copeland from Huntington Beach, questioned whether the outbreak had occurred at all. “The odds of it being true are slim to none,” she said, “and people need to do their research.”

McAfee mingled among his flock. Some stopped him for pictures as he beamed down the camera and flashed a thumbs-up.

The post He Profits Off Raw Milk That’s Making People Sick. The Government Isn’t Stopping Him. appeared first on ProPublica.

In late November in Jamnagar, India, the scions of two of the most powerful families in the world stood face-to-face. On one side was 30-year-old Anant Ambani, son of one of the richest men in Asia. On the other was Donald Trump Jr. For months, the Trump administration had been on the offensive against the sprawling Ambani energy empire, placing it at the center of an escalating tariff campaign against India. But after Trump Jr. touched down, the two men toured the Ambanis’ private zoo, and at night they performed a Gujarati folk dance, grinning as they moved together to the music.

Four months later, an obscure Texas startup called America First Refining announced that it had received a nine-figure investment from the Ambanis’ company. The deal puzzled numerous energy investors familiar with the project, which aims to build the first major new oil refinery in the U.S. in about 50 years. The company is run by a serial entrepreneur with a history of bankruptcy and lawsuits alleging fraud. After more than a decade of failed attempts to raise money, blown deadlines and rebrands, it had been floundering.

America First Refining’s unexpected breakthrough came after it forged a previously unreported relationship with Trump Jr., who secretly acquired a stake in the startup, according to records and seven people familiar with the company. The new details reveal the role the president’s son has played in a theme of Trump’s second term: overseas investors with interests before the administration putting money into the Trump family’s business interests.

Over the past year and a half, Trump Jr. has amassed a fortune from stakes in companies ranging from crypto startups to a drone business to a firearms retailer. Some firms tied to the president’s son have received contracts or other support from the federal government, part of what critics describe as a run of Trump family self-dealing. In December, Forbes estimated that Trump Jr.’s net worth had rocketed from roughly $50 million to $300 million since the election. But the Forbes figures were based on the investments that have been publicly disclosed. The America First Refining episode suggests there is much about the family business that remains secret.

The size of Trump Jr.’s stake in America First Refining and what he paid for it remain unclear. Top executives at the startup have also said that they speak regularly with Trump Jr., according to a person close to the company. And after the Ambani investment was announced, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer took credit on social media for playing a part in the deal.

America First Refining has flexed its Trump Jr. connections during pitch meetings with foreign officials. Early last year, Trump Jr. joined the company’s leadership for a meeting in South Florida with potential investors from Saudi Arabia, according to two people familiar with the matter. Another foreign government official pitched on the project told ProPublica that the company’s team emphasized they had backing from the Trump family and suggested that an investment would help with White House access.

The Ambanis’ investment coincided with the family’s securing major U.S. policy wins that their company, Reliance Industries, had been lobbying for. “Reliance Goes From Trump Foe to Friend With Refinery Pledge,” ran the Bloomberg headline after the deal was announced. Reliance’s intent with the deal was to “smooth out” tensions between the U.S. and India, the outlet reported.

A Trump Jr. spokesperson said that Trump Jr. “has no operational involvement in AFR and is simply a passive minority investor in an American company that aligns with his worldview.” 

“The entire premise of this story relating to Don is false,” the spokesperson said, adding, “Don does not interface with the Federal Government on behalf of any company that he invests in or advises.” ProPublica did not find evidence Trump Jr. was aware of refinery executives’ suggesting that an investment would help with White House access. 

In response to detailed questions, a spokesperson for America First Refining said, “The claims in this story are false,” but declined to specify what they were referring to. The company’s CEO previously denied wrongdoing in the lawsuits against him reviewed by ProPublica, and the suits were either settled or dropped.

The Ambani family had long been cultivating its relationship with the Trumps. Reliance paid $10 million to the Trump Organization in 2024 as a “development fee” for a project in Mumbai, according to the president’s financial disclosure. (Despite the payment, Reliance has not yet announced a Trump project. Reliance told ProPublica that “the real estate project is real” and “remains under development.”) Ivanka Trump attended Anant Ambani’s wedding party in India that year, where guests were treated to a Rihanna concert. Anant’s father, Mukesh — who is worth an estimated $90 billion and lives in a 27-story home — came to Washington, D.C., for Trump’s second inauguration, posing with the president at a private reception.

At the Private Reception in Washington, Mrs. Nita and Mr. Mukesh Ambani extended their congratulations to President-Elect Mr. Donald Trump ahead of his inauguration.

With a shared optimism for deeper India-US relations, they wished him a transformative term of leadership, paving… pic.twitter.com/XXm2Sj74vX

— Reliance Industries Limited (@RIL_Updates) January 19, 2025

But by the summer of 2025, the family was under attack from the White House. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Reliance had reportedly made billions in profits by purchasing vast quantities of Russian oil at a discount. In August, as Trump grew frustrated with his administration’s struggles to bring the war to an end, the president doubled his tariffs on India to 50%. The move was explicitly designed to force companies like Reliance to stop buying Russian oil. White House trade adviser Peter Navarro publicly assailed “India’s politically connected energy titans” for “funding Putin’s war machine,” widely read as a reference to the Ambanis.

Amid this tension, Trump Jr. visited Anant Ambani on his November trip to India. At the end of the trip, Trump Jr.’s personal lawyer commented at a business conference in Miami: “I had a nice closing this morning with Don Trump Jr., who’s flying back from India today.” (The following week, the Texas startup — then called Element Fuels — filed paperwork to create America First Refining LLC. In an email, the attorney, John Willding, told ProPublica that there was “no transaction in India or with an Indian company that I was ever involved with.”) 

Anant Ambani, who helps run Reliance’s energy business, personally worked on the Texas refinery deal for months before it was announced, a major Indian newspaper later reported.

As the Ambanis quietly finalized their deal with America First Refining, U.S.-Indian relations appeared to warm. In February, the Trump administration struck a trade deal with India, dramatically lowering tariffs, and also reportedly gave Reliance a license to buy Venezuelan oil. When the Iran war broke out and rocked global energy markets, the U.S. gave India a sanctions waiver to buy Russian crude. (The waiver was later expanded to all countries.) 

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the White House said that “there are no conflicts of interest.” Reliance did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Trump Jr.’s and Anant Ambani’s roles in the investment deal, but said in a statement that the company did not receive “any unique or preferential treatment” from the U.S. government. 

“There is no connection between Reliance’s investment in AFR and any unique measures associated with general U.S. trade, tariff, sanctions or licensing outcomes,” Reliance said. “The investment was evaluated and approved on its commercial merits, strategic fit and long-term value creation potential.”

In March, President Trump personally announced Reliance’s deal with the Texas startup on Truth Social, thanking the Ambani company for its “tremendous Investment.”  

After the announcement, Willding, the Trump Jr. lawyer, shared the news on LinkedIn: “Just so proud to have been part of this one.”

Willding rowed back his claim in an email to ProPublica. “I have never worked for or advised AFR and had zero involvement in their deal with Reliance Energy,” he said. “I simply saw the press release and was excited for them.” America First Refining’s spokesperson called Willding’s comment “moronic and false.”

In June 2025, Willding registered a new entity in Wyoming called TX Fuels, LLC, listing the company’s address as Trump Jr.’s mansion in Jupiter, Florida. In his email, Willding said his “only involvement in AFR was handling the legal paperwork” for the Trump Jr. LLC’s investment in the startup.

Trump Jr. first hired Willding in May 2021, according to interviews the lawyer has given. A corporate deal lawyer in Dallas, Willding has referred to himself as “outside business counsel to the Trump family” and has said he talks to Trump Jr. or Eric Trump almost daily. A former Bill Clinton and Barack Obama voter who fell hard for MAGA, the attorney has installed a portrait of President Trump over the mantel in his living room.

Willding’s practice has boomed during the second Trump administration, bringing the lawyer to Argentina, Saudi Arabia and South Korea. “Everybody in the world wants to do business with the United States right now,” Willding said at a conference in June 2025. “Every company wants to do business with the Trump family.”

There are other fingerprints of the Trump world on the refinery deal. 

Howard Lutnick’s firm Cantor Fitzgerald — which his sons took over when Lutnick became Trump’s commerce secretary — is working as the financial adviser to America First Refining, including on the Ambani investment deal, Cantor Fitzgerald announced. (Cantor Fitzgerald declined to comment.)

And the Trump administration played a direct role helping America First Refining find potential foreign investors, according to public comments from the company’s CEO, John Calce. “We have received support from the White House,” he told a local news outlet. The National Energy Dominance Council, led by the interior and energy secretaries, has “helped us with, candidly, introducing us and helping us meet some of these people overseas,” Calce said on an industry podcast. 

America First Refining has recently explored going public, according to three people close to the company. That could allow its current investors to start cashing out even if the refinery never gets built — a milestone many energy industry insiders still view as a long shot. Reliance made its investment in the startup at a valuation of at least $1 billion, according to America First Refining’s announcement.

Building a refinery at the Port of Brownsville on the Gulf Coast has been Calce’s mission for a decade. A former Yale offensive lineman, he started his career as a high school football coach after an unsuccessful attempt to make the NFL and now describes himself as a “lifelong entrepreneur.” 

The project has been serially delayed, out of money, rebranded and trailed by angry former business partners. At one point, Calce’s companies were being sued simultaneously by eight other firms. In 2022, during bankruptcy proceedings for an earlier iteration of the project, the trustee appointed to impartially oversee the case sued Calce too. The trustee alleged that Calce and other insiders had improperly siphoned away cash and other assets. (Calce denied wrongdoing. The case was ultimately settled.)

During the Biden administration, as the company sought financial support from the Department of Energy, it pitched itself as a climate-friendly green project that would also help “people of underrepresented social demographics” in Brownsville, according to records from that period. The company failed to get enough money from outside investors, and the planned construction was delayed. 

By the company’s own estimate, building the refinery will take years and cost $3 billion to $4 billion. Even if it’s built, profitability could be hard to achieve. Many energy investors told ProPublica there’s a reason the U.S. hasn’t seen a major new refinery in decades. “Refineries cost a lot of money and essentially make pennies on the dollar,” said Ed Hirs, an energy economist in Houston. “Wall Street is not going to finance a new refinery.”

Even after the start of the second Trump administration, the company was in jeopardy, according to interviews and documents. It laid off workers last year, and, by late 2025, with delays continuing to plague the refinery, officials at the Port of Brownsville believed the project looked to be dead, according to records reviewed by ProPublica.

That has not stopped Calce and his team from making grandiose claims to the public. Earlier this year, a website went live for another Calce company called Brownsville Energy Storage Terminals. It claims to have a far-flung network of oil storage terminals in places like the Netherlands and Singapore, more than 850 employees and a C-suite of experienced energy executives. But ProPublica could find no evidence that the executives are real people or that the storage terminals actually exist. The phone numbers on the website are also currently listed online as the contacts for a Houston baklava caterer, a Dallas-area taxi service and an OB-GYN office. The numbers are dead.

America First Refining’s political ties, though, may have boosted its standing with Texas state regulators. In February, shortly before the Ambani investment became public, the company sought an extension on its permit from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. 

Inside the state agency, emails obtained by ProPublica show, officials scrambled to approve the request.

“Need to get this one logged and processed asap,” wrote one official.

“You are going to have to do this one. I will explain why in person in a few,” wrote another. “You can guess if you check out the name.”

America First Refining got its approval the next day. A spokesperson for the Texas agency did not address questions about the emails. “This request was processed quickly due to the quality of information provided,” the spokesperson said.

The post An Indian Billionaire Was Targeted by Trump. Then He Poured Money Into a Startup Secretly Backed by Donald Trump Jr. appeared first on ProPublica.

A little over a year ago, Sen. Tim Sheehy floated an audacious proposal to reshape the way the federal government fights wildfires. It called for expanding the use of private planes and helicopters to quickly attack blazes while also eliminating the U.S. Forest Service’s rigorous airworthiness inspections for those aircraft.

The idea stood to benefit Sheehy, a Montana Republican, personally. Before running for Congress, he founded and ran an aerial firefighting company called Bridger Aerospace, which is known for its scoopers, aircraft built to retrieve water from lakes or oceans and drop it onto fires. Since 2021, the Forest Service has paid Bridger more than $235 million for use of its scoopers, according to public records.

Sheehy’s ownership of Bridger is well known, but what hasn’t been reported is that the same month the proposal leaked, a Forest Service inspector had discovered a crack in a wing of an aircraft Bridger had presented as ready for service. The scooper had failed the very inspection Sheehy sought to eliminate. 

Forest Service inspectors have flagged problems with Bridger’s scoopers for years, according to sources and documents obtained by ProPublica under the Freedom of Information Act. The records were heavily redacted by the agency, including the problem that the inspector discovered last April. But a former government official with direct knowledge of the inspection told ProPublica it had revealed a crack in a wing. “It was a big crack,” the official said. Other experts said that kind of finding is rare and could have proved catastrophic.

“Very seldom do you find a crack in a major component,” said Paul Markowitz, a former national aviation maintenance manager for the Forest Service. Detecting such problems is the reason the Forest Service operates an airworthiness program, he added: “It’s to keep people alive.”

Veteran fire officials noted that Sheehy’s proposals would eliminate costly oversight of the company he founded and others like it while increasing spending on aerial firefighting. At the time the document leaked, he owned Bridger stock worth between $13 million and $15 million.

Within the Forest Service, the company was known to resist oversight, officials told ProPublica. Five current and former Forest Service officials say Bridger Aerospace has chafed at the agency’s rigorous inspections, even as records and sources indicate the company has presented aircraft in need of maintenance and repairs as ready to fight fires. The sources asked not to be named for fear of reprisal.

Bridger did not answer questions about the failed inspection but said in a statement, “Safety is the bedrock of our company, and we spare no expense.” It added, “Our investment in maintenance and training runs into the tens of millions annually and reflects the high safety standard we believe this work demands.”

Bridger’s aircraft have never been involved in a crash, according to records maintained by the National Transportation Safety Board. 

Sheehy’s office did not respond to interview requests. But he has been open about his frustration with the Forest Service’s inspections and contended that Bridger’s scoopers, because they are built to fight fire, require less oversight than other firefighting aircraft that were originally designed for other purposes. 

In response to detailed questions about Sheehy’s role in reshaping the fire service, a spokesperson for the senator said he stands by his efforts to eliminate Forest Service inspections. The process is “a relic of a bygone era and has become an unnecessary barrier to asset availability,” the spokesperson said in an email. The spokesperson also said that Sheehy has no conflict of interest because he has since moved his assets into blind trusts, adding, “The senator will continue to be adversarial toward anyone protecting a broken status quo that has allowed cities to burn to the ground.”

Former Forest Service officials say it’s common for companies to complain about inspections. What sets Bridger apart is its connection to a senator who is seeking to change how wildfire aviation is managed. A spokesperson for the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the Forest Service, did not answer questions about Sheehy’s relationship with the agency.

Last June, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing agencies to consolidate their wildland fire programs, an idea Sheehy and others have long favored. The order left Forest Service inspections in place. But as fire officials discuss consolidation, an influential industry group that Sheehy helped shape is advocating for ending them.

The United Aerial Firefighters Association was launched in 2022, with Sheehy serving as a founding board member. The group now wants to allow contractors to develop their own inspection standards.

“Industry inspects itself all the time. Industry inspects automobiles. Industry inspects baby formula,” said Tiffany Taylor, UAFA’s senior policy director. “Why can’t we be inspecting ourselves?”

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Contractors like Bridger own the vast majority of aircraft that the federal government uses to fight wildfires. In 2022, the last year for which data is available, only 5% of the Forest Service’s flight hours for firefighting came from aircraft it owns. Regardless of their ownership, aircraft must be inspected before flying. That job falls to about 25 aviation safety inspectors, most of whom work for the Forest Service. 

The Federal Aviation Administration certifies aircraft but does not conduct regular inspections. The agency instead relies on companies to ensure their planes and helicopters are airworthy. Even when the FAA performs inspections, fire officials and contractors say, they do not account for the stresses inflicted by steering aircraft through wildfires. “The Forest Service is way more in-depth,” said Britt Coulson, president of Coulson Aviation, a prominent air tanker contractor.

Forest Service officials often say the agency’s rules governing aviation are written in blood. A pair of shocking crashes in 2002 ignited the push for more rigorous inspections. That June, an air tanker was dropping retardant in California when its wings folded upward, like a bird in flight, and detached. The plane burst into flames and fell to the ground. The harrowing moment was caught on video. Three people onboard were killed, and the NTSB later attributed the accident to undetected cracks in one of the plane’s wings. One month later, in Colorado, another tanker contracted by the Forest Service crashed after a wing separated from the fuselage. Two pilots were killed. Once again, the NTSB said the accident was caused by unidentified wing cracking.

Since 2010, when the Forest Service implemented its current airworthiness program, the accident rate for aircraft it owns or contracts has plummeted. Between 1993 and 2010, it reported 85 accidents that killed 63 people — an average of nearly four deaths per year. Between 2011 and 2023, the last year for which data is available, the agency reported just 17 accidents and seven fatalities.

Inspectors examine everything from the fuselage to the altimeter. When they find problems, they require the contractor to make changes before they issue a certifying document known as a card. In a separate procedure, inspectors issue cards to contractors’ pilots.

By 2018, Bridger had a modest fleet of surveillance aircraft, but Sheehy had bigger ambitions. According to Sheehy’s 2023 book, “Mudslingers: A True Story of Aerial Firefighting,” his brother, Matt, a Bridger co-founder, helped connect the company to the Blackstone Group, which invested a reported $150 million. Bridger used the funds to buy six scoopers from Viking Air. Sheehy wrote that the day of the first aircraft’s arrival in 2020 was “among the proudest of my life.”

In his book, he described that aircraft as a “brand new” model CL-415 but according to FAA records and aviation experts, this was inaccurate. The records show Bridger’s first scooper was built in 1985 and that it is in fact a precursor to the CL-415 model. Viking Air is now part of a larger company called De Havilland Aircraft of Canada Limited. A De Havilland spokesperson declined to comment about the aircraft’s age.

Records also show that Bridger’s first scooper had undergone extensive repairs before the company bought it. The skin of the fuselage had cracked from stress, and both wings had been repaired. One repair, done in 2012, fixed a crack in the left spar — a load-bearing beam extending outward from the fuselage. Experts say any repair to a wing spar is significant. “A spar is what’s holding the damn thing together,” said Markowitz. 

According to Sheehy’s account, in 2020, the Forest Service’s airworthiness chief at the time, John Nelson, insisted that Bridger’s scoopers meet an updated standard of maintenance and inspection. Sheehy was extremely upset. “Unfortunately, the relationship between industry and the USFS Airworthiness Branch is at an all-time low,” he wrote in his book. (Nelson did not respond to questions about Sheehy’s characterization.)

The next year, Bridger’s first scoopers received cards, allowing the government to pay for their use.

By 2023, the company had six contracted scoopers. Inspectors soon found more problems with the aircraft, according to the records. In January 2024, Bridger presented its first scooper as ready for service, only to have a Forest Service inspector find issues with the engine and electronics. The problems and reasons for the failed inspection were redacted in documents obtained by ProPublica. The scooper received its card the next month.

According to experts who examined the Bridger inspection records at ProPublica’s request, these issues are common in the aerial firefighting fleet. But they said it’s extraordinary for inspectors to find a problem like the one identified last spring.

In early April 2025, Bridger presented two scoopers for carding, saying they were ready for service. During one of these assessments, a Forest Service inspector found a crack in a wing.

The Forest Service records show that Bridger completed a repair in Montana by April 18. Within a week, both aircraft had been cleared for flight.

Bridger did not answer specific questions about the repair. In a statement, the company said, “For a 30,000-pound aircraft that skims bodies of water repeatedly at 100 mph to scoop 11,700 pounds of water in 12 seconds, regular maintenance and periodic repairs are an inherent part of the job.” The company added, “We welcome the rigorous certification process.”

But the relatively quick repair was not a reflection of the severity of the issue. Gil Elmy, a former Forest Service official who wrote the agency’s aircraft inspector guide, said such a finding “should not happen.” Markowitz said the finding evoked an uncomfortable historical echo. The 2002 crash, which was caught on camera and precipitated the Forest Service’s reckoning and its modern airworthiness program, was caused by unidentified wing cracking.

As Bridger’s scooper was being repaired, officials in the wildland fire community were responding to a proposal from the senator’s office that would have ended the airworthiness program. In March 2025, Sheehy asked Brooke Rollins, the secretary of the Department of Agriculture, to stop the inspections, and in mid-April, a draft executive order that proposed eliminating them leaked from his Senate office. Metadata showed the draft had been edited by one of Sheehy’s policy advisers at the time as well as a lobbyist for Bridger. The United Aerial Firefighting Association also shaped the draft.

“Senator Sheehy’s office circulated a living, breathing document to members of congress, outside policy experts, and industry stakeholders on ways to improve the way we fight fire in this country,” wrote Sheehy’s spokesperson.

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When Sheehy resigned from Bridger in July 2024 to run for the Senate, he owned 21% of the company, making him its largest individual shareholder. Four months after taking office, in May 2025, he moved most of his stock into two revocable blind trusts, claiming they eliminated any conflict of interest he might have.

But the trusts appear to be managed by executives at Tallgrass, an energy infrastructure company that until March was run by Sheehy’s brother, Matt, who was also a significant early investor in Bridger. Neither Matt Sheehy nor representatives for Tallgrass responded to questions about the trusts. In an email, a spokesperson for the senator did not dispute the Tallgrass executives’ stewardship but pointed out that the Senate Select Committee on Ethics had vetted the trusts. The spokesperson wrote, “Senator Sheehy’s blind trusts are completely independent — he has no control over them.”

According to Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the nonprofit Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a decision to entrust stock to such close associates undermines the purpose of a blind trust, which is to ensure that a lawmaker’s investments are independently managed. In an email, Brown said, “Selecting a family member’s company appears to do that exact thing that the rules mean to prohibit.”

Since last spring, Sheehy has said little about airworthiness inspections. But he has pushed other policies that would increase business opportunities for aviation companies, such as requiring a response within 30 minutes to all wildfires on federal land. At the same time, he has driven an agenda that could debilitate his longtime foe, the Forest Service.

In statements, on podcasts and in the New York Times opinion section, he has advocated for a single national fire service. And at almost every turn — including in proposed legislation — he has insisted that the Forest Service’s vast wildfire apparatus be moved within the Department of the Interior’s smaller operation. It would hollow out the Forest Service, which draws more than half its budget from fire operations. “It would be a fatal wound,” said Doug Crandall, the agency’s former legislative affairs director.

There are inefficiencies in a fire aviation system spread between agencies. The rush for a couple dozen inspectors to certify hundreds of planes and helicopters before wildfire season can cause delays, temporarily grounding aircraft and cutting into contractors’ revenues. And the agencies have sometimes required duplicative inspections. 

But even officials and firefighting labor advocates who support consolidation, which requires congressional approval, have questioned why Interior should absorb the Forest Service’s fire program. Some liken it to forcing a minnow to swallow a whale. The Forest Service employs about twice as many full-time wildland firefighters as the Interior Department, and it spends at least three times more on aviation contracting. It is also responsible for the vast majority of inspections. According to a recent organizational chart reviewed by ProPublica, only five aviation safety inspectors currently work for the Interior Department.

Bridger carries significant debt and in 2024 warned shareholders that it had “substantial doubt about our ability to continue as a going concern.” But last year, the company reported a profit for the first time since going public. It also purchased two more scoopers and predicted that efforts to unify fire agencies “could increase contracting opportunities for private aerial providers.” In another recent filing, Bridger said, “the legislative and policy environment has never been more aligned with our mission.”

Last year, six Forest Service aviation safety inspectors resigned or retired, according to the agency. The recent organizational chart reviewed by ProPublica shows the same number of positions remain unfilled, representing more than 20% of Forest Service aviation safety inspector jobs. It’s unclear what would happen to the rest of the inspectors if the Interior Department were to absorb the Forest Service’s fire operations. In an emailed statement, Adam Mendonca, the Forest Service’s deputy director of fire and aviation management, said the agency “has no intention to change our aircraft inspection standards,” adding that it was “working closely with the Department of the Interior to streamline aviation operations.”

In late March, the Forest Service announced a dramatic reorganization that will move its headquarters to Salt Lake City. The Department of Agriculture reiterated the administration’s desire to fold the Forest Service’s fire operations into the Interior Department.

By that point, blazes had ignited in the Midwest. With the arrival of fire season, the Forest Service’s airworthiness inspectors performed their close examinations. At hangars across the country, they looked for cracks.

The post A U.S. Senator Pushed to Cut Firefighting Aircraft Inspections the Same Month His Former Company Failed One appeared first on ProPublica.

Trump administration officials earlier this year killed a federal criminal investigation into the coal empire owned by Sen. Jim Justice, a Republican from West Virginia and a close ally of the president’s.

The investigation examined potential criminal violations of the Clean Water Act by the multistate mining operations largely run by Justice’s son, Jay, according to current and former officials familiar with the matter.

The criminal probe was a significant escalation in the yearslong effort to police serial pollution offenses by Virginia-based Southern Coal and dozens of affiliated mining operations controlled by the family. In the past decade, Southern Coal and other Justice corporations have racked up tens of thousands of alleged violations of the Clean Water Act and have been sued repeatedly by state and federal prosecutors over their failure to properly follow environmental laws at their mining sites.

The investigation shuttered by the Trump administration was a joint effort by prosecutors and investigators with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Justice’s Environmental Crimes Section and the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Western District of Virginia to probe whether the incessant violations of antipollution laws had risen to the level of criminal behavior, people familiar with the matter said.

People familiar with the investigation told ProPublica that prosecutors believed they had a strong case. They initially had the blessing of Robert Tracci, President Donald Trump’s top official in the Western District of Virginia, to move forward.

But in recent months, as prosecutors battled the Justice companies in court over subpoenas for records, the Office of the Deputy Attorney General shut down the probe. At the time, Todd Blanche still headed the office, before assuming the role of acting attorney general in April.

“They were told ‘pencils down,’” a person familiar with the investigation said.

That prosecutors were even conducting a criminal investigation is noteworthy, people said, because the DOJ only charges a dozen or so criminal Clean Water Act cases each year. It is rare for top DOJ officials to derail a criminal investigation initiated by career officials at such an early stage, people familiar with the case said.

“I’ve never heard of that happening before,” said former federal prosecutor Rick Mountcastle, speaking generally about DOJ protocols. Mountcastle spent 24 years as a prosecutor in the Western District of Virginia. “There shouldn’t be some sort of untouchables list of people who are immune from enforcement.”

The move is part of a pattern of behavior at the top echelons of the DOJ to push cases against Trump’s political adversaries and ease up on allies.

Environmental enforcement against large polluters has plunged under the second Trump administration. Just days after inauguration, the administration reassigned top career environmental lawyers at the DOJ, including those overseeing the Southern Coal case, to work on the president’s immigration crackdown. At the beginning of the year, Blanche personally ordered prosecutors to stand down from cases against diesel emissions cheating.

Steven Ruby, an attorney for the Justice companies, said they became aware of the criminal investigation earlier this year.

“Ultimately the finding of the inquiry by the government was that there wasn’t any evidence to pursue criminal charges,” Ruby said. “There’s never been any intentional wrongdoing by the companies.”

While objecting to the subpoenas in court, the company simultaneously convinced the DOJ to drop the case, he said.

“The Justice companies — because Sen. Justice has been governor and because he’s now a senator — are singled out and put under a microscope, and there’s news coverage of violations and consent decrees and compliance actions,” Ruby said. “But the fact of the matter is that those kinds of issues exist throughout the industry.”

Current and former government officials familiar with the companies’ environmental record called them routine bad actors. 

Spokespeople for the EPA and the Western District of Virginia referred questions to the DOJ. Justice’s senate office did not respond to questions.

“There is no case to be made here for a criminal investigation,” Emily Covington, a DOJ spokeswoman, said in an email. “Any career prosecutor who would paint a criminal case as strong is simply a deep state prosecutor continuing to push the priorities of the Biden administration.”

The deputy attorney general’s office is routinely involved with reviewing cases, she added. The office determined that this case was not consistent with the Trump administration’s priorities, she continued, and it was more appropriate to resolve it through the less punitive civil process. “The bottom line is that this was a politically motivated prosecution for a case that can and should be resolved civilly,” she wrote.

The Justice family runs a sprawling coal mining enterprise that extends across the South. Estimates of its fortune fluctuate. Forbes tallied Jim Justice’s net worth to be as much as $1.9 billion until 2021; more recently, it declared him “broke” and facing $1 billion in debt. But environmental groups have accused his companies of misrepresenting their assets to avoid paying environmental penalties. 

Ruby said company finances seesaw because coal is a “boom and bust” industry.

Justice, who was first elected governor of West Virginia as a Democrat, announced he had become a Republican at a Trump rally in 2017. Trump backed Justice’s bid for Senate in 2023, amid a contested GOP primary. Justice went on to win the seat, helping Trump clinch a GOP majority in the Senate.

Coal mines often leach dangerous chemicals like arsenic into waterways and are required to strictly monitor pollution discharge and keep it under certain limits. The family’s companies have settled many accusations of environmental violations by agreeing to pay fines and invest in better pollution prevention without admitting or denying culpability.

In recent years, however, the company has repeatedly flouted regulators and the legal process. Jay Justice has been a no-show at court hearings involving Clean Water Act violations in the past, and in 2024 a judge in Alabama issued a civil contempt order against him for his repeated failure to respond to those lawsuits. Ruby, the Justice companies’ lawyer, attributed the violations in that case to surrounding facilities the family does not own. The case is now in mediation. 

A number of recent legal proceedings have laid bare the extent to which the Justice companies may have knowingly violated environmental laws, a key threshold for bringing a criminal matter. 

Such allegations surfaced in a 2023 civil case brought by the Justice companies’ former chief of environmental compliance Robert Fowler. In the suit, Fowler claimed that Jay Justice blocked him from spending the money necessary to comply with environmental laws, including making court-ordered payments and repairing equipment. As a result, according to emails disclosed in the lawsuit there were at times complaints of near-daily violations of permit water requirements.

In a resignation letter and in subsequent court filings, Fowler said he was concerned the circumstances exposed him to “potential civil and criminal liability.” Fowler declined to comment. 

The Justice companies denied Fowler’s accusations. The Justice companies believe the government’s criminal investigation was based primarily on Fowler’s claims, which Ruby dismissed as the allegations of a “disgruntled” former employee. 

Last month, a jury in Alabama found that the Justice companies had made false representations to Fowler about his role, but it did not award him the millions of dollars in damages he demanded in his lawsuit. The judge has yet to enter his final ruling.

In the DOJ’s aborted investigation of Southern Coal, prosecutors and federal agents had begun to gather evidence, scrutinizing testimony in the Justices’ various civil trials, and had approached former employees seeking information. Government attorneys also sent subpoenas seeking further documentation, said those familiar with the probe, a move that was opposed by the company’s lawyers.

People familiar with the case said Justice Department attorneys were ready to fight the Justices’ lawyers over the subpoenas.

But before they could move forward, Blanche’s office shut it down.

The post Trump Administration Killed Criminal Investigation of GOP Senator’s Coal Companies appeared first on ProPublica.

American children lined up for the world’s first measles shots in the early 1960s, but it took nearly 40 years of shoring up immunization programs before the infamous contagion had been so thoroughly controlled that a panel of experts declared in 2000 that the United States had eliminated measles within its borders.

For a quarter century, the U.S. only saw outbreaks when infected travelers brought the virus in from abroad. The resulting waves of measles didn’t last more than a year.

Those days are gone.

Measles began tearing through the dusty plains of West Texas in January last year, and since then, all but a handful of states have seen cases. Two unvaccinated Texas girls and an adult across the border in New Mexico died before the West Texas outbreak seemed to burn out last July.

By then, measles was popping up in Utah, and state health officials couldn’t tell where the earliest patients had caught the virus. Infections in that state took off that fall and winter and continued into May of this year.

The Texas and Utah cases now sit at the center of an unusually technical — and politically fraught — question: whether the United States will lose its measles-free distinction.

Countries aren’t penalized for losing the status, but it’s an indication of cracks in a nation’s once rock-solid immunization programs, a loss of faith in vaccines among its people — or both.

To have any chance of keeping the designation, the U.S. will need to make a strong case that measles didn’t spread endemically — from person to person in a continuous chain within the country for more than a year. If the Texas virus, for example, made its way across the Southwest to Utah and continued infecting people there, that would be a problem. But if cases in Utah were instead sparked by a patient who caught measles abroad, that would be a new chain, restarting the clock.

For clues, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is analyzing the full genetic code of measles viruses that infected patients. Last November, the CDC’s leader at the time said preliminary genomic analysis suggested the Utah cases were not directly linked to those in Texas. A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services told ProPublica that the work was done by the state laboratories and the CDC is conducting a more comprehensive investigation.

ProPublica embarked on its own analysis, reviewing over 1,800 whole genome sequences, including those released as recently as last month, to compare the genetic fingerprints of measles viruses circulating in the U.S. and Canada. This showed that the measles virus still spreading in Utah as of this May is very closely related to the one that sickened Texans over a year ago.

ProPublica’s analysis isn’t a smoking gun that proves endemic spread. It’s impossible to tell from this information whether the virus spread from state to state or if it at some point left the country and was brought back by a sick traveler.

But given how similar the viruses are in the sequences ProPublica identified, it’s going to be difficult for the U.S. to prove measles isn’t endemic — “unless CDC has something up their sleeves,” said Dr. Alberto Severini, a retired molecular virologist and measles expert who spent two decades at Canada’s Public Health Agency.

This is a small portion of the genetic code from a sample of measles virus collected in Utah in May 2026. Each letter represents one of the four molecules that encode the unique instructions for how the virus is built and operates.

ProPublica compared it to the sequence from a virus collected during the first days of the Texas outbreak in January 2025.

The two sequences are nearly identical. But when you look closely, mutations — tiny changes in the virus’s genetic code — begin to appear. These mutations form a distinct fingerprint.

Out of the nearly 16,000 genetic letters in each sequence, only 12 differ between the original Texas virus and the Utah virus sampled more than a year later. The mutations did not appear all at once.

As the virus spread in Texas, tiny copying errors appeared in its genetic code. One of these cropped up weeks into the outbreak: a G molecule turned into an A.

Over the following months, this branch of the outbreak continued spreading — and continued mutating. By May 2025, a virus collected from a Texas patient bore five distinct mutations.

Then those same five mutations appeared in Utah. A virus carrying this distinctive genetic pattern was found there in June 2025.

Soon, measles cases surged in Utah. Many viruses collected there carried the same five mutations, along with additional new ones. Related viruses continued infecting Utah residents as recently as this May.

The unique fingerprint of mutations hasn’t been limited to these states. The five mutations observed in Texas and Utah were also present in sequences the CDC published of viruses that infected patients last May and June in Iowa, North Dakota, Minnesota and Alaska.

But it’s not clear that the genetic fingerprint is only in the U.S.: No whole genome sequencing has been made public from cases in either Mexico or the Canadian province of Ontario, where measles has also raged.

That matters because whether the virus was spreading continuously in the United States for more than a year — rather than circulating abroad and being brought back into the country by travelers — is a key question facing a panel of experts convened by the Pan American Health Organization.

A regional office of the World Health Organization, PAHO will decide whether the U.S. keeps its measles-free designation. Canada lost its status last year. PAHO invited the U.S. to make its case in April, but American officials asked for more time to investigate how the virus had been spreading. The review was moved to November.

Daniel Salas, a PAHO official, said the kind of thorough analysis that CDC is doing “takes time.”

“What the U.S. is trying to do with this whole genome sequencing is trying to find some patterns that could eventually say, for example, this mutation of the virus occurred in a different country, in a different place to the current outbreak that they’re trying to analyze, so that eventually, that might be taken into consideration to somehow replace the epidemiological information that is missing,” he said. “There’s no country that has done this before.”

One of the biggest questions is how the virus got into Utah. Health officials determined that the first confirmed patient there, identified last June, couldn’t have been exposed to measles in another country or even another state. Utah State Epidemiologist Dr. Leisha Nolen said she and her team reviewed the places the patient had been and the people they had been around, but still couldn’t figure out where they caught the virus.

Clues suggested measles had been quietly spreading in the region. A CDC disease detective investigating subsequent cases that spanned the Utah-Arizona border said there had been reports of community members with rashes last June, but the patients declined measles testing and families were often reluctant to answer questions.

Throughout the outbreak, no interviews suggested any patient was exposed in another country, Nolen said, but she and her team cannot rule out the possibility.

ProPublica asked the CDC whether its epidemiologists had linked any of Utah’s measles cases to an international outbreak, but the agency wouldn’t say, nor would it directly comment on genetic similarities ProPublica found between viruses in Texas and Utah. In a written statement, a spokesperson said, “Sequencing alone cannot determine whether transmission has been continuous or sustained.”

While genomic analysis can provide clues, the spokesperson wrote, “These findings must be interpreted alongside epidemiological data, including travel history, exposure information, and known outbreak connections.”

The CDC is still working on “a comprehensive analysis of potential linkages among cases and outbreaks” and has gathered additional epidemiological data, the spokesperson said, but did not elaborate on what that shows.

With the midterm elections approaching, the spread of measles has become a political liability for President Donald Trump, who picked the founder of an antivaccine organization to be his health secretary. Since Trump’s inauguration last year, there have been more than 4,300 U.S. cases, a high not seen in three decades.

Eliminating the endemic spread of measles is the public health equivalent of slaying a dragon. The disease is among the most contagious humans have ever encountered. Patients are infectious even before the telltale rash appears, and the contagion can linger in a room for two hours after they leave.

Policymakers built the U.S. immunization system on lessons learned from measles outbreaks. To get the sky high-vaccination rates needed to stop the disease from spreading, states made shots mandatory for school and daycare attendance, and the federal government provided them free to low-income kids. When measles still managed to roar back, state lawmakers in California and New York cracked down on exemptions to their school mandates. The U.S. helped other countries fight measles, too, not only to prevent deaths but also because people in power recognized that infectious diseases kept in check abroad are less likely to return to American shores.

During prior U.S. outbreaks, health and political leaders, with unwavering language, urged Americans to vaccinate their children and assured them the shots were safe.

Trump and HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. haven’t followed that playbook. Both have fueled doubts about the safety of the MMR shot, which guards against measles, mumps and rubella.

Researchers around the world have found the vaccine does not cause autism. Nevertheless, at a press conference on autism last fall, Trump said he had heard for years that there was a problem with the combination vaccine and urged parents to insist on separate shots for their kids — even though standalone shots don’t exist in the U.S.

Kennedy has said the vaccine offers protection from measles, but he also has repeatedly made the shot sound scarier than the disease.

“There are adverse events from the vaccine,” he told Sean Hannity on Fox News last year. “It does cause deaths every year.”

On a podcast, Kennedy said that when he got the virus as a kid, he got to watch television for a week. “I got chicken soup and vitamin A, which nobody can patent,” he said.

Measles kills 1 to 3 out of every 1,000 people infected and can cause deafness, intellectual disability and brain swelling. In a “know the facts” post, the Infectious Diseases Society of America said there have been no deaths shown to be related to the shot in healthy people. “There have been rare cases of deaths from vaccine side effects among children who are immune compromised, which is why it is recommended that they don’t get the vaccine,” the medical society explained. “That’s why it is so important that everyone who can get vaccinated does so, to protect those who can’t.”

HHS spokesperson Andrew Nixon said in an email that Kennedy “believes Americans deserve clear information about both the benefits and risks of medical products so they can make informed healthcare decisions in consultation with their healthcare providers.”

Nixon said “heavy-handed mandates” contributed to the significant loss of trust in health institutions during the COVID-19 pandemic. “The Secretary maintains that public health agencies rebuild trust through honesty, transparency, and respect for individual choice — not coercion,” Nixon wrote.

Kennedy has tried to distance himself and the administration from the measles resurgence. He said the U.S. has done a better job of limiting the spread than any other country and pointed to the far higher number of cases in Canada and Mexico, whose populations are much smaller.

White House spokesperson Kush Desai told ProPublica, “Fake News reporters should be spending more time examining why the Trump administration’s efforts to contain America’s measles outbreak has been so much more successful than those of Canada and Mexico instead of regurgitating the same, tired narratives.”

Kennedy has also reminded lawmakers that the Texas outbreak began before he became health secretary.

“We have a global pandemic,” he told senators in April. “It has nothing to do with me.”

Kennedy has been among the most prominent voices in the antivaccine movement for more than a decade.

Dr. Adam Ratner, a pediatric infectious disease physician who wrote a book about measles, said Kennedy has done “everything in his power to undermine confidence in vaccines in the U.S.”

During a measles outbreak in New York City that began in 2018, Ratner treated at least five unvaccinated kids who were hospitalized, including a couple who needed intensive care, so he knows that not every child escapes the disease with nothing more than memories of screen time and soup.

While most parents still support immunizations, Ratner worries that the country no longer has the stomach for the kinds of policies that once stopped endemic spread. Rather than making school vaccine requirements stricter, some states are working to do away with them altogether in the name of medical freedom.

“You need a highly vaccinated population to control the spread,” he said. “In the absence of that, I think that we will have ongoing spread, and we’ll have tragedies like the ones that we saw in West Texas with the two kids who died.”

The U.S. may very well find the international travelers it needs to prove that the country is still measles free. But if all remains the same, experts said, it will only be delaying the inevitable.

“It doesn’t change the fact that there’s been transmission of measles in the United States for over a year,” Severini said. “If people don’t vaccinate, measles is going to be endemic.”

The post What ProPublica Found in the Genetic Code of America’s Measles Outbreaks appeared first on ProPublica.

On the day 5-year-old Lens Joseph was killed by a Boston Public Schools bus last year, the driver had already struck a postal truck, ignored a stop sign and missed several stops, prosecutors said. When he got to Lens’ house, he dropped him off on the wrong side of the street and then ran over the kindergartner as he crossed in front of the bus.

Transdev, a multinational company that has been the city’s sole bus contractor since 2013, hired and trained the driver of the bus that killed Lens. Yet a federal safety database shows no sign that the company was involved in the April 2025 crash. WBUR and ProPublica found at least 60 fatal Transdev crashes in the last decade, but the federal database shows only 18 under the company’s name. That means 42 fatal crashes are not identified as Transdev’s.

This missing information is important because the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which oversees commercial motor vehicles, relies on it to pinpoint unsafe companies.

But the process the agency uses to collect information is faulty: It identifies only a fraction of a company’s fatal crashes.

As a result, the full safety record of Transdev, one of the largest private operators of public transit in the U.S., remains a secret to regulators, the public and the local government agencies that might award it a contract.

“That is a serious, serious gap in safety,” said Peter Kurdock, general counsel with Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety, a nonprofit that promotes transportation safety and has pushed for improvements in crash data for years. “And it’s a serious, serious shortcoming when it comes to the regulation of these carriers by FMCSA.”

The deadly crashes associated with Transdev span at least 16 states and involve pedestrians, at least two bicyclists and other vehicles. Lens’ death and at least two others have resulted in criminal charges against the bus drivers. Transdev did not provide comment on any specific crash.

The crash data feeds into FMCSA’s online Safety Measurement System, which makes safety records public for bus companies nationwide. Instead of listing Transdev, that data often lists collisions under the government agency that hired Transdev or the name of a company it acquired. Also, when crashes are listed under other names, companies that oversee the buses involved are not required to claim the collisions. The agency’s instructions for how to determine the motor carrier involved in a crash are interpreted differently by police who respond to the scene, the news organizations found.

Based in France, Transdev has vast U.S. operations. It says it holds contracts in busing, light rail and other forms of public transit in 46 states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico. The multibillion-dollar company employs more than 30,000 people nationally. Transdev’s only school bus contract is with Boston Public Schools.

Transdev U.S. CEO Laura Hendricks declined an interview. In a written statement, Transdev said it complies with “federally mandated reporting standards.”

“Transparency and continuous improvement are central to our safety approach, and we work closely with oversight agencies and our clients to ensure our practices meet or exceed expectations,” the statement said.

The statement did not respond to questions about why Transdev did not ensure crashes the company was involved in were logged as part of its safety record. It did stress that reporting crashes is the responsibility of law enforcement.

At the publications’ request, Transdev reviewed lists of the crashes that reporters tied to the company. Transdev confirmed that most of them matched with collisions in their records but did not have records for all of them.

The FMCSA did not respond to requests to interview Derek Barrs, the head of the agency, or emails with a list of questions.

Other than the federal database, there are few ways to connect crashes to particular bus companies. A different database, run by the Federal Transit Administration, records transit crashes but doesn’t connect them to contractors. Separately, FMCSA requires all bus companies to keep an internal register of how many serious crashes take place during their operations. However, those records are not open to the public, and companies are not obligated to submit the information to regulators unless they ask for it. Transdev declined the publications’ request for its register.

So while Transdev may know about its own collisions, federal agencies and the public often don’t.

Darin Jones, a former FMCSA Midwest field administrator, spent more than 35 years in federal transportation safety and often oversaw investigations. He said investigators are supposed to consider a company’s serious crashes as part of their assessment. If many are logged inconsistently, they cannot determine whether Transdev or any other company is operating safely.

“ The knowledge of this motor carrier’s operation, any motor carrier’s operation, is critical,” said Jones. “If you don’t have the full picture of an operation, how do you truly know what’s going on?”

At least in Boston, Transdev appears to have had no serious school bus crashes over 10 years. But that’s not true. WBUR and ProPublica uncovered at least 71 serious crashes involving the company that weren’t under its name.

Kurdock says the FMCSA needs to fix its safety data, especially in Boston.

“The  agency needs to be much more proactive in ensuring that the data they do have is accurate, even more so when you’re talking about a carrier that is operating a transportation service for schoolchildren,” Kurdock said. “If there is one bipartisan issue left here in Washington, D.C., it’s that schoolchildren should have a safe ride.”

Nurse, Cyclist Among Those Killed

When a crash happens, local law enforcement fill out accident reports that document the location, identities of the drivers and companies involved. This information becomes part of the federal safety database and helps regulators connect a crash to a particular company.

But the news organizations found multiple examples where that system masked the company running the bus lines. For most of these crashes, the database is also unclear on whether the drivers violated traffic laws.

In Lens’ case, the motor carrier is listed as “CITY OF BOSTON MVMB,” an abbreviation for the city’s Motor Vehicle Management Bureau, which acquires and manages municipal vehicles. There is no mention of the school district or Transdev being involved.

Another crash killed registered nurse Renée Shea in southern Massachusetts in 2017. It appears under the name of the Greater Attleboro Taunton Regional Transit Authority, not Transdev, the agency’s contractor at the time. A bus made a left-hand turn into the path of the Jeep SUV she was driving, according to a police report. The bus company’s driver, Margaret Correia, may have been distracted because she began to take off her jacket before she made her turn, the report found. She could not be reached for comment. 

Correia pleaded guilty to misdemeanor negligent operation of a motor vehicle, court records show. A GATRA spokeswoman said Shea’s family received $1 million from the area transit agency’s insurer.

Charlie Shea said his ex-wife was a generous mother who had taken custody of her granddaughter.

As a former MBTA bus driver, Charlie Shea said he continues to be shocked by the bus driver’s actions.

Driving and taking your jacket off “ain’t a bright idea for anybody,” he said.

He said his ex-wife’s death, like all crashes, needs to be part of Transdev’s safety record.

“It’d make them more accountable,” Shea said. “They would have to use their safety records to get contracts from the state or the counties or from schools.”

Outside Massachusetts, there are dozens of other fatal Transdev crashes in the database with no mention of the company.

In a November 2023 Las Vegas crash, federal records list the Regional Transportation Commission of Southern Nevada as the motor carrier of a transit bus that killed bicyclist David Ortiz in a crosswalk. Court records state driver Johnelle Johnson, a Transdev employee, pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter charge. A lawsuit by Ortiz’s family against Transdev and the driver was settled for an undisclosed sum.

Transdev has operated the Las Vegas-area bus system since 2023, when it acquired First Transit, which originally held the contract, the commission’s records show.

Although First Transit is now part of Transdev, at least five fatal crashes across the United States are still recorded under First Transit’s name after the acquisition.

Beyond the fatal crashes, WBUR and ProPublica also took a close look at all of Transdev’s serious, but nonfatal, crashes with Boston Public Schools. Those include crashes where any person was transported to a hospital or a vehicle was towed.

In a December 2024 crash, a bus lurched onto a sidewalk outside Curley K-8 School in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. The bus struck an 8-year-old boy with autism and his school aide before smashing into two fences, a police report states. The crash sent both victims to the hospital with long-term injuries, their civil lawsuits against Transdev allege.

A bus camera showed that Transdev driver Vitony Laguerre’s eyes were closed and his head was back before he pressed the accelerator, police stated. He pleaded not guilty to a misdemeanor charge of negligent operation of a motor vehicle.

The federal record lists the city of Boston, not Transdev, as the carrier.

Attorneys for Laguerre and both crash victims did not comment for this story. Laguerre and Transdev denied they were negligent in the crash, according to records in an ongoing civil case.

Boston Public Schools Superintendent Mary Skipper declined an interview request. A spokesperson did not answer a list of questions, but in a written statement said that the district follows established safety protocols and has worked with Transdev over several years to improve accountability and performance.

“We will continue to work with our transportation partner to monitor performance, address issues as they arise, and ensure every student gets to and from school safely,” the statement said.

Local Law Enforcement Takes Over

The current system of collecting and publishing bus crash data began as part of a federal push for safer roads. In the early days of this work, in the 1970s and 1980s, rules put the burden on bus and truck companies to self-report serious crashes to the U.S. Department of Transportation. Each operator had to report its fatal bus crashes in person or by telephone “as soon as possible”; crashes that resulted in injuries or serious vehicle damage had to be reported in writing, and in triplicate.

But both companies and federal safety investigators complained the process was burdensome and inadequate. For one thing, investigators could not tell whether companies failed to report their accidents, said Jones, the former FMCSA regional administrator.

Regulators and traffic safety researchers thought they could do better. At the time, many states were already collecting crash information electronically from local police departments.

“Why burden the industry with reporting?” Jones said. “We had a more accurate record from the states.”

So in 1993, the federal Department of Transportation decided to end self-reporting by carriers. Today, local law enforcement agencies send their bus and truck crash information to state agencies, which submit it to FMCSA.

After investigating, a local officer must fill out a form that asks for the name of the bus company, or “carrier,” that is involved in the crash and the company’s U.S. Department of Transportation identifier. FMCSA training material recommends the officer determine which company should be included in the form by figuring out which entity “controls” or “directs” the bus.

For transit and school buses, this decision can be surprisingly complicated. Transdev employees may be behind the wheel, and the company may manage the daily operations of the buses, but the transit agencies or a school district may choose the routes. So who is in charge? In these cases, Transdev’s role often disappears in the data.

Transportation experts and former FMCSA officials said bus companies can voluntarily inform the agency that crashes under other names belong to them.

But Alex Scott, a University of Tennessee, Knoxville transportation expert, said companies rarely update the federal record, according to research he published in 2021. “There’s not really an incentive for them to account for all of their crashes,” Scott said. “If a company could just magically make them go away, of course they would.”

Boston City Councilor Erin Murphy, a former teacher for the district where Lens attended school, has become a vocal critic of how Transdev operates its buses. She was shocked when she learned from a reporter that the company is not required to take steps to ensure all its crashes are part of its federal safety record.

“Horrifying,” she said. “Why would they be able to not report accidents — one that was a fatal accident? There’s nothing worse than a fatal accident.”

“There’s not really an incentive for them to account for all of their crashes. … If a company could just magically make them go away, of course they would.”

Alex Scott, a transportation expert at University of Tennessee, Knoxville

After several passenger bus crashes with multiple fatalities, Congress passed legislation in 2012 that gave FMCSA powers to conduct more comprehensive inspections into the safety operations of bus companies.

When Transdev underwent one of these reviews in 2016, investigators uncovered what they described as “numerous crashes” that were not listed as part of the contractor’s safety record, according to the inspection report. There were enough crashes that the FMCSA planned to give Transdev a “conditional” safety rating, which would mean the company had insufficient safety procedures.

Because local police departments may not “be aware or equipped” to report crashes to the FMCSA, the carrier should report them, the report stated.

“This self reporting is required for accurate evaluation by FMCSA and the accurate safety record of the carrier,” it added.

The company successfully appealed the decision to lower its safety rating by arguing its drivers could not have prevented many of the crashes investigators uncovered.

FMCSA investigators urged Transdev to report to the agency when its role in a crash is not reflected in safety data, yet the company’s name continues to be absent from many of them. Transdev did not comment on this recommendation.

A Father Seeks “Justice”

Lens’ death last year became a local flashpoint, shedding new light on Transdev’s safety procedures and raising questions about its ability to keep the city’s children safe.

The driver of the school bus that killed Lens should not have been behind the wheel that day, and the bus never should have been on the road, according to information from city officials and prosecutors.

Driver Jean Charles became ineligible to operate a school bus in December 2024 after a required driving credential expired, according to a statement from Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s office last year. But the company did not take him off the road then. In the weeks before Lens died, Charles had two minor collisions and underwent remedial training, it said, and soon returned to work.

On the day of Lens’ death, Charles began his shift without conducting a required pretrip inspection, prosecutors alleged. One of the bus’s four rear tires was flat, and a safety crossing bar was broken. Transdev is also in charge of maintenance, but it’s unclear how long the bus had these problems.

Had Charles followed procedures, the bus would have been sent for repairs, prosecutors said. And yet Charles set off on his route to UP Academy Dorchester, where Lens climbed aboard.

At 2:42 p.m., Charles dropped off Lens and his 11-year-old-cousin on the wrong side of their street. To get home, they would have to cross in front of the bus.

Neighbor Carolyn Tomlinson was inside her home cleaning windows when the cries of a child brought her outside. She followed the sound to the corner of Glenwood Avenue and Washington Street, where she saw the cousin screaming. Lens was on the ground.

“I’m looking at Lens, just lying there,” Tomlinson said. “And as a mom it broke my heart.”

Tomlinson said she dialed 911 and held the cousin in her arms to comfort her.

“I was praying with her, saying, ‘It’s going to be OK. God’s got us,’” Tomlinson said.

Lens’ father, Esaie Joseph, had parked his truck in North Carolina after a day on the road as a long-haul trucker when his brother told him about the crash in a phone call. Hours later, he got word that his boy was dead.

Lens was Joseph’s only son, and he was self-assured beyond his years, his father said in an interview with WBUR. His nickname was “smart guy.”

Every time Lens asked Joseph for a new toy, he’d begin with, “Dad, you know I’m a smart guy?” the father recalled.

Joseph has kept his son’s soccer ball and toy cars, and he smiled as he sorted through them on a recent evening: a police car, because Lens wanted to be an officer. A Spider-Man-themed car because he loved the superhero.

After he lost Lens, Joseph stopped driving trucks and moved with his relatives to a new neighborhood, away from the scene of the crash. He now is a driver for a city of Boston van service for seniors.

He and his family are suing Transdev and Charles, who resigned from Transdev soon after the crash. Joseph said he wants some good to come from Lens’ death, and for Transdev to operate safely.

“The first thing I hope is justice for him,” he said. “They have to care for safety so something like this will not happen again.”

Charles pleaded not guilty to felony involuntary manslaughter and other charges in March. His attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

Transdev did not comment about the crash and said the company had discussed its safety measures publicly during a Boston City Council meeting last August. The company and Charles denied in civil court filings that they were negligent or reckless.

Transdev is in the third year of its five-year, $651 million contract with Boston Public Schools and transports about 19,000 of the district’s students every school day. It is currently looking to expand in Boston, where it is one of three finalists for a multibillion-dollar commuter rail contract.

To this day, the federal record does not show that Transdev was the operator of the bus that killed Lens. Neighbor Tomlinson wants it to be part of Transdev’s safety record so regulators can hold them accountable, and agencies and school systems can understand the companies they are hiring.

“It should be visible to the ones that need it, so we can see it and keep our babies safe,” Tomlinson said.

The post A School Bus Killed a 5-Year-Old. The Crash Is Among Dozens Missing From the Bus Company’s Federal Safety Record. appeared first on ProPublica.

Timmy G. Robinson Jr., founder and owner of what was once Kentucky’s largest drug addiction treatment company, was criminally indicted Thursday by a federal grand jury on charges of wire fraud and money laundering.

The indictment, filed in the Eastern District of Kentucky, charges Robinson with fraudulently selling millions of dollars of the same IRS tax credit to two companies. Robinson “devised a scheme” to “unlawfully enrich himself” by selling those tax credits to two parties, the indictment says. Robinson is also charged with two counts of money laundering  for spending the proceeds of the fraudulent sale. 

Robinson has resigned as CEO of ARC, company spokesperson Vanessa Keeton said Thursday. Robinson, 50, founded the company in 2012 after becoming sober and telling people he felt called by God to help people in the state with addiction. 

ARC, which at one point operated more than 40 drug treatment centers around the state, has been under FBI investigation for Medicaid fraud since July 2024. That investigation is ongoing, the FBI confirmed on Friday. The Lexington Herald-Leader, in partnership with ProPublica, reported in April firsthand accounts from former ARC employees and clients who said they were told by ARC to falsely bill Medicaid, or witnessed others billing for services that were not actually provided. The company said at the time that it “has never knowingly or fraudulently billed Medicaid for services, and there is no evidence that the organization encouraged employees to falsify group notes for billing purposes.”

Robinson’s attorney, Kent Wicker, said he and his client were surprised to learn an indictment had been placed over a “dispute with some investors that is now pending in a civil courtroom.”

That dispute escalated earlier this year, when ARC was sued by two companies to which Robinson had sold IRS credits, including the Bahamas-based Angelica Capital Trust. But both companies allege that when ARC received the IRS credits, it illegally kept more than $8 million the companies were owed. They allege ARC was refusing to repay the money in part so it could pay a preliminary $28 million settlement with the Department of Justice over alleged Medicaid fraud. Robinson has said he would make payments to creditors upon the sale of the company, which he described in January as imminent. 

“To be clear, Mr. Robinson did not defraud anyone, did not gain anything from the transaction at issue, and he has done nothing but deliver high quality care for over a decade to thousands of Kentuckians,” Wicker said in an emailed statement to the Herald-Leader and ProPublica. “We look forward to defending this case in court.”

Starting in 2023, ARC applied for two COVID-19-related tax credits, totalling nearly $7 million.

In July 2025, Robinson sold the rights to the first tax credit to a loan company, the indictment says. Under the agreement, the purchaser would pay ARC $2.7 million in exchange for a future repayment of the tax credit once the IRS funds arrived. Robinson signed that agreement, and later that month the buyer wired ARC the agreed amount. 

Soon after, the indictment says, Robinson “devised a scheme” to sell that same credit amount to a second company and in doing so “falsely represented” that the $2.7 million in initial tax credit was available to purchase. “Robinson concealed the prior transactions” to the new buyer, according to the indictment.

In November, Robinson signed an agreement with the second buyer, who sent a wire transfer that included $2.7 million for the twice-sold tax credit. 

In December, when the IRS paid ARC the COVID-19 tax refunds, “at Robinson’s direction, ARC spent the ERC [Employee Retention Credit] funds on other operational costs and debt obligations,” the indictment reads.

Keeton declined to comment further on the case, citing pending litigation. However, she said ARC continues to operate normally.

“All facilities, programs, and services remain open and fully operational,” Keeton said in an emailed statement. “Our leadership team, employees, and clinical staff remain committed to delivering high-quality care and support to the individuals and families we serve.”

Robinson faces 20 years in prison and a $250,000 fine, or twice the gain or loss, for the wire fraud count. Each money laundering count carries up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.

The post Founder of Kentucky Drug Rehab Center Indicted on Fraud and Money Laundering Charges appeared first on ProPublica.

Democratic lawmakers in North Carolina introduced a trio of constitutional amendments this week aimed at protecting traditional powers of the state’s governor and reforming oversight of its court system.

The effort was prompted in part by ProPublica’s reporting, including an investigation that found that over nearly a decade, Republican lawmakers had pushed through law after law shrinking the powers of North Carolina’s governor, always a Democrat during that time.

At a press conference on Wednesday, the bills’ sponsors readily acknowledged that the initiatives are unlikely to pass, at least in the current legislative session: Republicans hold majorities in North Carolina’s House and Senate.

But in proposing the measures as changes to the state constitution, the group of eight Democrats said their goal was to make them less vulnerable to the persistent partisan warfare that has engulfed the narrowly divided swing state.

Republicans “won’t always be in the majority,” said Rep. Phil Rubin, the primary sponsor of one bill. “And when they’re not, they’re going to suddenly think these are great rules. So let’s do them now.”

Republican leaders in the House, Senate and court system did not respond to requests for comment on the bills.

Experts have long maintained that Republican power grabs have thwarted the will of North Carolina voters, removing the Democratic governor’s control or partial control over numerous boards, entities and executive prerogatives and leaving him the nation’s weakest. (Republican officials have defended the shifts, pointing out that voters also elected a GOP legislative majority.)

Rubin’s measure would bar the legislature from stripping away additional gubernatorial powers, as well as block majority leaders from what he called “government by ambush” — springing major legislation on the minority and public without notice.

“ProPublica’s reporting shows the perils of not having this law,” Rubin said. Voters should have “the opportunity to secure their constitution, demand absolute transparency in lawmaking and ensure that people, not backroom deals, have the final say.”

The two other constitutional amendments unveiled this week target aspects of the judicial system.

The first, authored by House Rep. Marcia Morey, would make disciplinary hearings and sanctions by the courts’ internal watchdog, the Judicial Standards Commission, public.

GOP rules currently cloak the commission’s work in secrecy. Behind closed doors, ProPublica revealed, the majority-Republican state Supreme Court quashed the commission’s recommendations that two Republican judges who’d admitted to committing egregious conduct violations be publicly reprimanded. (Spokespeople for the North Carolina Supreme Court and the Judicial Standards Commission declined to comment or respond to a detailed list of questions about the matter.)

Morey’s bill would also change who appoints the commission’s members, a step she called critical to preventing the “weaponization” of its work.

Currently, Republican legislative leaders and Paul Newby, the state’s conservative chief justice, appoint a majority of the commission’s members. As ProPublica has reported, in 2023 Newby encouraged the commission to investigate a Black Democratic justice who’d criticized his decision to effectively shut down a racial equity commission. (Newby, as well as spokespeople for the court and the Judicial Standards Commission, declined to comment for the story.)

Morey’s measure would divide commission appointments equally among the chief justice, the governor and the North Carolina State Bar. “Who makes decisions about discipline and who appoints the decision-makers,” she said, are critical to making the system “fair and effective.”

The second bill, sponsored by Rep. Deb Butler, would disqualify state Supreme Court justices from hearing cases in which family members are parties. Justice Phil Berger Jr. has caused controversy by ruling in multiple cases in which his father, the leader of the state Senate, is a defendant in his legislative capacity. (Berger referred recusal requests on these cases to the Republican majority on the Supreme Court, which ruled he could participate.)

Butler’s measure would also compel justices to disclose more information about large stock transactions, outside sources of income and sponsored travel. A ProPublica investigation found Newby didn’t disclose a trip to a luxurious Hawaiian resort, paid for by a conservative judicial education program. Newby and court spokespeople did not respond to requests for comment about his decision not to disclose the trip.

Butler described her bill as an effort to restore public trust. “People deserve complete confidence in the integrity of their court,” she said.

In the unlikely event that the bills pass, the public would then have the chance to vote on them in November. If not, the sponsors said, they’d revive them in the next session, by which time even some Republican strategists think that a blue wave may have flipped the North Carolina House.

“We’re committed to following through on these bills to ensure fairness and impartiality in our courts and legislature,” Morey said. “This should be the norm, not the partisan bias we have now.”

The post North Carolina Democrats Propose Changes to Block GOP Power Transfers and Secrecy appeared first on ProPublica.

If Eric Murphy loses his primary election on June 9, he believes he already knows one reason why.

Last year, the North Dakota state representative, a Republican, tried to expand the window of pregnancy in which women could access abortion. The state legislature had banned it for almost everyone from the moment of conception.

Tied up in court, the ban hadn’t yet gone into effect. But Murphy wanted to lock in a less restrictive law, making abortion accessible up to 15 weeks and even later for women whose doctors deemed it a medical necessity.

To convince his fellow legislators, he read out loud from two ProPublica stories about women in Texas who died without lifesaving care. “Physicians felt compelled to follow the law,” he said in a hearing, “and both women died so that an inane law could be followed.”

A conservative colleague had warned him not to file the bill, Murphy told ProPublica, recalling the man’s words: “I can no longer protect you from who’s going to come after you.”

There was some truth to that sentiment.

At least four Republican state lawmakers who challenged severe abortion restrictions lost support from anti-abortion groups and key party allies and went on to lose primary elections, ProPublica found.

The blueprint in those races was remarkably similar. Opponents either embraced stricter abortion policies or avoided the issue altogether. Anti-abortion organizations campaigned against the incumbents, party endorsements shifted to their opponents and activists worked to turn out voters in low-participation primary elections.

In some of the races ProPublica examined, lawmakers who replaced abortion-ban reformers went on to support even stricter abortion legislation. In South Carolina, for instance, two new senators supported a bill to eliminate almost all exceptions to the state’s abortion ban. One provision of the bill would send women convicted of illegally terminating their pregnancies to jail.

Murphy is one of at least two Republican state lawmakers now facing a contested primary after trying to modify their states’ abortion restrictions. Richard Briggs, a state senator from Tennessee, is also fighting to keep his seat. In 2019, Briggs voted for the state’s so-called trigger law — a ban that would snap into place if the federal right to abortion was ever overturned.

But he had second thoughts after that actually happened. A cardiothoracic surgeon, Briggs realized the newly activated law didn’t provide adequate protections for patients having medical complications. “As a medical doctor, I drew the line,” he said in an interview. He introduced bills for a clearer medical exception and protection for doctors who intervened in cases where a fatal fetal anomaly risked the mother’s health.

The latter bill failed and now serves as ammunition for the challenger vying for his seat in the state’s Aug. 6 primary. “My opponent consistently works to weaken Tennessee’s pro life laws,” Kent Morrell says on his campaign website, noting that Tennessee Right to Life had revoked its endorsement of Briggs.

Murphy, who teaches biomedical sciences at the University of North Dakota’s medical school, ultimately did not succeed at reforming the state’s ban. His bill failed 87-6, and the state Supreme Court later reinstated the original ban, which forbids abortion from conception, with exceptions for rape and incest up to six weeks and to save the life of the mother.

The first time Murphy ran for election, his county’s Republican Party had endorsed him. Not this time. Instead, the party endorsed his two challengers, including Jill Chandler, the executive director of a “crisis pregnancy center” who believes abortion should be banned from conception.

She told ProPublica she happened to be present in the committee room when Murphy made the case for his bill. “To know that he was an endorsed Republican candidate from my district and one that I had voted for because of that endorsement was eye-opening,” she said. “I remember thinking, ‘This can never happen again.’”

It was not the first time either Briggs or Murphy had taken positions that aggravated members of their parties in legislatures that have taken sharp turns to the right. Murphy voted against book bans and private school vouchers. Briggs had urged the public to get COVID-19 shots and has said that medical expertise should trump politics in decisions that involve public health.

Briggs expressed confidence in his election chances; he feels that voters agree with the decisions he’s made and noted that his Republican colleague, Sen. Becky Duncan Massey, survived a primary challenge over her support for abortion-ban exceptions.

Murphy believes the “silent majority” supports the intent of his abortion bill, but primary races historically have low turnout. It could come down to a handful of votes, he said.

“I might lose an election over this,” Murphy said, “but would I rather win an election by not doing the right thing?”

The Fallen Reformers

Mary DuBuisson, a former state Republican representative in a suburb outside of New Orleans, considers herself passionately “pro-life.” Like Briggs, she voted for her state’s near-total abortion ban in 2019. Three years later, just before Louisiana’s trigger law was implemented, it came before the legislature again.

Recognizing that women would now have to live under the restriction, DuBuisson wanted to make sure victims of rape and incest could terminate their pregnancies. When her colleagues refused to include those exceptions, she became the only Republican to vote against the ban.

A year later, she caused a stir when she sponsored a bill that would have allowed women whose pregnancies were not viable to end them. “To force a woman to carry to term with zero chance of survival is heartless and cruel,” she said at the time.

She didn’t feel it would be controversial. Other Republican women in the House told her she was doing the right thing. But when it was time to vote, another female Republican state lawmaker made a motion that ultimately succeeded at killing the bill in committee. “I mean, I just couldn’t understand,” she said of all her colleagues. “What if this was you, your daughter or granddaughter?”

When she came up for reelection, her primary opponent latched onto her record. Brian Glorioso was an attorney she had handily defeated in 2018. He called her proposed legislation a leftist attempt to circumvent the state’s abortion ban and said any “pro-abortion” doctor would falsely deem a pregnancy nonviable in records just to perform the procedure.

She beat him in the Oct. 14, 2023, primary by 384 votes — not enough to avoid a runoff.

Then, he got some extra support.

On Oct. 16, Louisiana Right to Life told its followers this runoff was key. Glorioso was expected to have a 100% “pro-life” voting record, while DuBuisson’s was 77%.

On Oct. 27, the state’s new governor-elect, Republican Jeff Landry, endorsed him, citing issues other than abortion; he wouldn’t tell ProPublica whether DuBuisson’s record on it played a role. But Landry, who had defended the state’s ban as attorney general, made clear during his campaign that he was “an unwavering defender of life, especially in the face of adversity,” citing his 100% rating from a national anti-abortion group.

“I think it partially cost me my election,” DuBuisson said of her attempts to reform the ban.

History repeated itself the following year, this time in South Carolina.

Three state senators — all Republicans who consider themselves “pro-life” — worked across party lines to defeat an abortion bill that essentially banned the procedure from conception and eliminated rape and incest exceptions. At the time, the state allowed abortion up to 20 weeks.

Sens. Sandy Senn and Penry Gustafson spoke out against limitations on abortion access for victims of rape and incest. Sen. Katrina Shealy, who had the longest tenure for a woman in the state legislature, pushed for making abortion accessible up to 12 weeks and later for exceptions in cases involving rape, incest and fatal fetal anomalies. Ultimately, a six-week window with rape, incest and fatal fetal exceptions became law.

Amid the Statehouse showdown, they were nicknamed the “Sister Senators.” All lost their county GOP’s endorsement to their male opponents.

But the bigger repercussions came from anti-abortion groups that mobilized a multifront grassroots campaign against them. Students for Life Action announced that it generated “37,000 pieces of mail, almost 130,000 personal text messages, more than 51,000 phone calls and thousands of doors knocked” to unseat the trio.

“All three of them got voted out — every single one of them lost because of that decision,” said Dr. Matthew Clark, the executive director of Personhood South Carolina, which believes abortion shouldn’t exist at all and that women who have them should be prosecuted for murder.

Clark, an allergist and Presbyterian pastor, said his group’s desired legislation has a better chance to advance now that the Sister Senators have been replaced.

Matt Leber, who beat Senn, previously co-sponsored a bill as a member of the state House that would make abortion a crime equivalent to homicide. It failed to advance, and Leber withdrew his name as a co-sponsor amid a controversy surrounding it in 2023.

This legislative session, Leber and Carlisle Kennedy, who beat Shealy, supported a bill that carries misdemeanor criminal penalties for women seeking abortions, with jail time up to two years. Senate Bill 1095 passed with supermajority support out of a committee Leber sits on.

The bill died before the session, but watchers of abortion restrictions noticed it got further than any other similarly repressive legislation ever has.

A Fateful Disconnect

The outcomes do not neatly match public polling. Surveys in states such as South Carolina and Louisiana have found that many Republican voters support at least some exceptions to abortion bans, including in cases of rape or threats to a woman’s health.

But primary elections often draw only a small share of eligible voters, giving outsized influence to highly engaged activists and organized interest groups.

DuBuisson’s runoff drew about one-third of registered voters. Participation in the South Carolina primaries was lower still. Some races were decided on tiny margins; Senn lost hers by 33 votes.

The North Dakota GOP has moved further to the right on abortion in recent years, even as polling suggested the state’s restrictions were losing support from Republican voters. At its 2026 convention, the party passed a resolution rejecting any policies that “normalize” abortion.

North Dakota is one of the few states with a multimember system, where two representatives and one senator govern together in the same district. District 43, which Murphy currently represents, is one of the only purple districts in an otherwise deeply red state. It includes part of Grand Forks, a growing college town home to the University of North Dakota.

Murphy’s fellow representative, Democrat Zac Ista, told ProPublica he hadn’t been able to make a dent in this legislature. He announced he wouldn’t be seeking reelection, opening up an opportunity for a Republican takeover of the district.

Ista said the lack of support rallying around Murphy is due to his position on abortion, as well as culture-war legislation he refused to support. “I think it’s illustrative of that schism, where at this district level, Republicans are really trying to sort of press the most extreme conservative opinions,” Ista said.

Richard Glynn, the GOP county chair in Murphy’s district, had previously supported Murphy’s abortion bill. In written testimony, Glynn shared his experience hearing about young women performing illegal abortions when he was a freshman at the University of South Dakota in 1966. Four young women who were in sororities died from using metal hangers to terminate their pregnancies, he wrote.

“These deaths were viewed as preventable if these girls could have received competent care. Unfortunately, North Dakota is going down the same path with limited access to obstetric care that negatively impacts the health of the woman,” his letter said.

When reached by phone, Glynn said delegates in the county voted and Murphy had the least amount of votes, which is why he did not receive the county’s endorsement.

Glynn declined to answer more questions before hanging up on a reporter.

One of Murphy’s opponents, Mike Holmes, has drawn a lot of excitement — and an endorsement from Gov. Kelly Armstrong — for his expertise in energy technology and industrial development. The governor said Holmes understands “what it takes to keep North Dakota’s economy strong.” Holmes has been silent on abortion and didn’t respond to ProPublica’s requests for an interview.

Chandler, who touted her “respect for life” in a campaign mailer, is favored among anti-abortion groups. “It’s a pretty stark contrast,” said Bridget Turbide, executive director of North Dakota Right to Life, who called Murphy’s proposal “the most extreme pro-choice bill we’ve ever seen.”

Citizens Alliance of North Dakota, a conservative group that opposes abortion among other causes, paid for a mailer calling Chandler a “champion of family values.” The same group marked Murphy in “bad standing” in an online roster of legislators, questioning his alignment with North Dakota values.

Murphy’s third colleague who also represents District 43, Republican State Sen. Jeff Barta, campaigned alongside him in 2022 as part of a unified Republican ticket when the primary election was uncontested.

Asked about the upcoming race and the candidates, Barta pointed to Murphy’s proposal that would have expanded abortion access in North Dakota.

“Last session, he introduced House Bill 1488, which created a little divide there,” Barta said.

Barta said Murphy has also broken with the party on other issues.

“That probably opened the door for the third candidate to run,” Barta added. Had that not happened, Murphy would have made it to the general election without having to defend his spot on the ballot.

Before the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, lawmakers taking such nuanced stands on abortion bans may not have risked a career death sentence, said abortion historian and law professor Mary Ziegler.

“The kind of incrementalism that Eric Murphy seems to be doing is something from a bygone era, where people were more pragmatic in the movement and not punished for it,” she said.

The post These Republican Lawmakers Challenged Abortion Bans. Then They Faced Backlash. appeared first on ProPublica.

They were pillars of their church, congregants in a little-known denomination that sets itself apart from the world and teaches that even the most unconscionable acts can be wiped away — not just forgiven, but forgotten and never spoken of again.

So it went in a rural Wyoming church, where a man was accused of sexually abusing young girls hundreds of times in the pews during Sunday services. Though the preacher knew of the abuse, he never reported it to police, local prosecutors said. Instead, he told the man to seek therapy.

In Minnesota, a man from the same faith admitted that he began entering the bedrooms of his daughter and son at night around the time each of them turned 12. He and his siblings grew up in the church and were sexually abused themselves, and then he repeated the abuse with his own children.

And in Washington state, preachers knew a member of their congregation had sexually abused several young boys. Instead of reporting him to police, they allowed him to ask for forgiveness, according to a family member, and he continued to sexually abuse children. He was later found guilty of raping the 9-year-old son of a church member and sentenced to life in prison.

The abusers and victims all belonged to the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, or the OALC, a Scandinavian-rooted revivalist church that teaches its followers that heaven is reserved just for them. To get there, according to current and former members, they must follow a strict doctrine, which emphasizes asking for forgiveness for their sins and says that being forgiven by a fellow church member washes away those sins. 

What’s more, the church teaches that once a perpetrator is forgiven, anyone who speaks about the wrongdoing — including the victim — can be accused of harboring an unforgiving heart. Those who have left the church, as well as some who are still with it, say this means the burden of sin shifts from the person who committed the act to the person who refuses to let the matter rest. 

Sexual abuse survivors say these rituals have created a culture where allegations of abuse are resolved outside of the criminal justice system and the victims must bear their pain alone or risk going to hell. In some families, sexual abuse stretches across generations, ensnaring a parent, child and grandchild. 

“This is what I would call institutionalism of abuse of young women and children,” said DaNece Day, the prosecuting attorney for Crook County in Wyoming, whose office has charged two OALC members in the past two years.

Day and other prosecutors said one of the biggest obstacles to breaking the cycle is the way church members move among congregations spread across the U.S. and Canada, often hundreds of miles apart but tightly bound by large, multigenerational family networks. 

Last fall, ProPublica and the Minnesota Star Tribune reported that preachers in Minnesota had known for years about allegations that one of its members, a man named Clint Massie, had sexually abused young girls in the congregation. But instead of reporting it to police, church leaders urged some of the victims to take part in sessions where they were brought face-to-face with Massie and encouraged to forgive the abuse. 

Now, new reporting by the two news organizations shows how the sexual abuse of children in the OALC, as well as the failure by church leaders to report it to authorities, is a persistent and national problem.

Some current and former OALC members are calling on elders from what the church regards as its mother congregation in Sweden — where the church originated — to intervene. In fact, those elders, who don’t have authority over the American church but wield considerable influence, are coming to the U.S. and Canada this summer to meet with congregations. What they’ll find are a growing number of criminal cases against church members and increasing legal scrutiny of leaders for failing to report allegations of sexual abuse to police. 

In a statement, representatives from the Swedish church said the cases are isolated incidents and they didn’t “observe any pattern” among the tens of thousands of members in 34 OALC congregations in the U.S. and Canada. They said sexual abuse should be reported to authorities and that it was possible “some matters have been handled improperly or without sufficient knowledge.” And they acknowledged that church guidelines “are being reviewed with the American missionary pastors in order to ensure compliance.”

Representatives of the OALC in the U.S. and Canada said in an email that they also “do not perceive there to be a general pattern of behavior,” describing sexual abuse as a serious and persistent problem across society. They acknowledged that bringing a victim to face their abuser, as a pastor for the OALC church did with Massie, can be traumatic. But they defended the church’s doctrine of forgiveness, saying it was not a means to conceal wrongdoing or to shield offenders from legal consequences, and no one is coerced to forgive or to ask for forgiveness. If those teachings had been misapplied or misunderstood in some cases, they said, it “does not reflect an error in our doctrine.”

ProPublica and the Star Tribune interviewed 20 people who said they were sexually abused, almost all as children, in OALC communities, along with parents of victims as young as 3. Reporters also traveled to OALC churches around the country and reviewed court and police documents from at least eight cases, along with victims’ statements to local authorities. 

Their abusers were family members, other children or men who were trusted to be alone with children because they are part of the same insular faith community. Some victims spoke anonymously for fear of retribution from the church or their own families. Others identified themselves as well as their abusers publicly, unafraid of the repercussions. 

Many of those victims said church leaders pressured them to keep quiet. In Minnesota, police records describe a woman telling a young girl that her abuse, which began when she was around 5 or 6 years old, was not a big deal and she “needed to get over it.” In Washington state, a police report notes a woman told law enforcement that her preacher had, for “spiritual reasons,” discouraged her from contacting authorities after her daughter told her she’d been raped by three men from church.

“We’re always told that what the preachers tell us, that’s coming from God,” explained one woman, who said she, too, was told not to speak of her abuse. “Who’s going to argue with that?”

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Sexual abuse in the OALC has sometimes been a legacy passed from one generation to the next — hidden, quietly endured, repeated. Lorie Peldo was sexually abused for eight years by her older brother, starting when she was only 2, she said in an interview. A quarter century later, after the memories began to resurface during therapy, Peldo’s mother told her that she’d known about the abuse. But on the advice of her preacher in Battle Ground, Washington, her parents didn’t report the crimes to the police. Instead, they took her brother to a doctor, she said.

Peldo said she eventually confronted her brother, who said that it had haunted him his entire life. She tried to forgive him, she said, but the weight of what he’d done did not lift. She fell into such deep despair that she tried to commit suicide. She said she ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Her brother later died; her parents are also deceased.

It didn’t stop there. On a church road trip, Clint Massie — who was sentenced for child abuse in Duluth, Minnesota, last year — sexually abused Peldo’s daughter, Tonya, when she was 11 and he was a teenager, according to Tonya Peldo’s statements to law enforcement. Peldo’s case was included in the police file involving Massie, but it wasn’t charged criminally, according to a prosecutor, because the statute of limitations had run out. Massie has not responded to repeated requests for comment.

Tonya Peldo told investigators from the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office in Duluth that she didn’t see Massie again until some two decades later, after she moved to the city and recognized him passing out candy to kids at the church.

She said she told the pastors about what he’d done to her, yet one of the preachers told her to ask Massie for forgiveness, as if she had wronged him. “I was like, ‘No. No!’” she said in an interview. It would be more than a decade before Massie was charged with sexual abuse crimes.

In 2019, Tonya’s daughter was also sexually abused, making her the third generation of Peldo girls to be victims. The daughter was 14 when a 25-year-old relative, Blake Nelson, bought her a pack of cigarettes and then invited her into his trailer in Clark County, Washington, so that he could teach her how to give a massage, according to court records.

Nelson pleaded guilty to charges of communication with a minor for immoral purposes and fourth-degree assault in the case involving Tonya Peldo’s daughter. At his sentencing, Tonya told the judge how church leaders had tried to keep her daughter from reporting the abuse to police. Nelson’s own lawyer, Michele Michalek, said the pastors repeatedly called her law office to insist the case should be handled internally. 

“They think that law enforcement shouldn’t be involved,” Michalek said.

A judge in Minnesota commented on the cyclical nature of abuse in 2023, when a man from an OALC family turned himself in to police after repeatedly abusing his son and daughter. At his sentencing, the judge took into account that the man and his siblings, who grew up in the church, had also been victims of child sexual abuse. She said she found it “almost incomprehensible” that the adults in his life didn’t know about the abuse he and his siblings had suffered as children.

“All I can see are the ripples of consequences for you and all of your siblings, who were abused or abusers, and then for your children,” the judge said.

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The OALC church is a branch of a broader faith called Laestadianism, a conservative Christian revival movement that began in the mid-1800s in northern Scandinavia. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, as millions of Scandinavians migrated to the U.S., some followers of the Laestadian movement brought with them more than language, traditions and religious devotion.

Alongside the faith came a deeply insular church culture shaped by strict obedience and a doctrine of forgiveness that critics and former members say enabled the concealment of wrongdoing.

One of them was Eija Marttinen. A photo in a newspaper in 1951 shows Marttinen as a little girl wearing a Finnish sailor suit and braids, standing alongside 14 family members and several large suitcases. Her family had just arrived in Nova Scotia from Finland, and they would soon launch Canada’s first Old Apostolic Lutheran Church. In the photo, Marttinen is smiling brightly toward the horizon, as if spellbound by the endless possibilities of a new world.

But even then, at age 9, Marttinen harbored a secret that would be the source of a lifetime of emotional pain. Now 84 and living in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, she said in an interview that her older brother sexually assaulted her starting when she was 5. Another brother soon started abusing her, too, she said. Both brothers are now dead.

Years later, Marttinen said she came to learn that there were other predators in the church. She kept silent about her abuse for most of her life, fearing she would be forced to forgive and still live with the stigma if she came forward. She only told her own daughter about the extent of the abuse in recent months, after reading the ProPublica and Star Tribune stories.

“They can do whatever they want and you have to forgive them. That’s not right. But you go along because you were brought up in it. 

“I wish I wasn’t,” she added. 

The Laestadian churches in Scandinavia have faced their own reckonings. From 2009 to 2011, a Finnish child welfare scholar, Johanna Hurtig, documented widespread sexual abuse cases among Finnish church members and found that the concept of forgiveness of sins had been warped into a tool to silence victims. 

At first, church leaders were defensive, according to news reports. But they later acknowledged “serious mistakes” in how the church handled sexual abuse, including pressuring victims to forgive offenders instead of reporting them. They urged members to report abuse to police and child welfare authorities.

Several men were convicted in Finnish courts and sentenced to long prison terms. 

In 2017, Norwegian police documented 151 cases of rape and abuse, many with child victims, in a remote northern village of some 2,000 people. Following a newspaper investigation, the police said they tied many of the cases to members of Laestadianism, with some incidents dating to 1953. The police found the practice of forgiving and forgetting often led to abuse being considered “settled” internally, effectively silencing victims and protecting perpetrators.

The church’s emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Minnesota, Wyoming and southern Washington. Families rely heavily on one another socially, financially and spiritually while keeping their distance from what members often call “the world” — outsiders and secular influences viewed as dangerous or corrupting. Even ordinary activities like watching TV and dancing are treated as transgressions that must be confessed. One abuse victim said she felt anxious every time she turned on her car radio, fearing that if she listened to a pop song and died in a crash before asking forgiveness, she could go to hell. 

Some church members hope the Swedish elders address sexual abuse during their visit, including the mother of a 15-year-old girl who revealed in May 2025 that her father had been abusing her for years. It happened both in Minnesota and after they moved to Washington, according to court records. The mother, according to child protection services reports, said she told her preacher about the abuse. 

Authorities did not learn of the allegations until August, when her daughter saw a therapist after weeks of her mother trying to get help through church channels, according to the reports. That visit triggered an investigation by child protection authorities in Washington, who substantiated the complaint. Prosecutors in Minnesota charged the father with criminal sexual conduct, but he hasn’t been charged in Washington. The father has asked the court for a public defender and has not yet entered a plea. He did not respond to voice and text messages seeking comment. 

Asked why church officials did not immediately contact law enforcement, a spokesperson for the church declined to answer, saying the case was “complex” and in authorities’ hands. However, he said that, in general, spiritual advisers need to use counselors and other professionals “to determine if there is a reasonable cause to report as dictated by law.”

But the mother said it was she — not the church — who set up the therapy session. 

“Their job is to pick up the phone and say, ‘Hi, I’ve got some confusing, conflicting information but I’m concerned for the safety of this person,’” she said. “They don’t have to be investigators, all they need to do is tell somebody.”

The mother said she plans to raise the church’s failure to notify police with elders when they visit this summer. Nonetheless, she plans to remain in the church. Asked why, she said, “Because I want to go to heaven.”

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Last summer, in the rural expanse of eastern Wyoming, Moorcroft police drove up the long dirt road leading to the OALC church, a large brick building on the edge of town with a white cross emblazoned under the eaves. 

The investigators were looking for records that could verify the membership of a man who several children said had abused them during services. His name was Charles Massie — the brother of Clint Massie, who had pleaded guilty to similar crimes in Minnesota months earlier.

Over 10 years, authorities alleged, Charles Massie had sexually abused at least seven girls. Some of the abuse occurred at his house and some at his businesses, where young girls worked part time. But the vast majority of the abuse occurred at church, according to court documents. Investigators tallied 832 incidents where Massie sat near the girls’ parents, allegedly fondling the girls’ genitals and breasts. One victim, who told the police she was 5 or 6 years old when she was abused by Massie, said that he “raped me with his fingers.” 

Wyoming has charged Charles Massie with nine counts of sexual abuse and sexual battery. He is being held in jail in Nebraska, where prosecutors also have charged him in connection with sexual assaults. He has pleaded not guilty in both states. He could not be reached for comment.

When investigators in Moorcroft contacted families of the victims, they learned that the families already knew about the abuse. One had learned of it three years earlier, according to charges. But according to court records, none of them had told the police. Instead, the charges say, the father of some of the victims had told their preacher, David Lindberg, about the abuse in 2024. Charles Massie would later turn himself in, but not for another year.

Day, the top prosecutor in Crook County, Wyoming, said there was “no support” for victims and the church did nothing to punish Charles Massie. “There are no consequences for him,” she said. “He’s allowed to sit in church with them every Sunday, even after they’ve come forward and said, ‘This man has been hurting us.’” She said Charles Massie turned himself in to the Moorcroft police after he admitted to a mental health provider that he had abused children; the provider told him that they would report Massie if he didn’t go to police.

Lindberg disputed the characterization that he did not act when Charles Massie confessed to him. “All I can say is, when I first heard about it, he came to me and he had a problem, so I told him he needs to go get therapy and turn himself in to the police,” Lindberg said. “And he did.” 

He referred additional questions to a church spokesperson, Troy Massie, who is a relative of Charles and Clint Massie. In written responses, Troy Massie said the church told Charles to stop attending services after he confessed to Lindberg, though he could listen to services on the phone. 

“We continue to improve our efforts as needed to protect all children,” he wrote.

The Wyoming church isn’t the only one to face accusations that it failed to report abusers. In southwestern Washington in 2017, a jury convicted church member Carsie Tikka of raping a 9-year-old boy. But one woman, who was a member of the church at the time, said that years before he was charged, Tikka had assaulted her stepchildren and the leaders had done nothing to stop him. Instead, Tikka asked her family for forgiveness.

After Tikka was convicted at trial, a court-ordered psychiatrist wrote in a report that Tikka had “a history of offending 29 males,” an allegation that Tikka denied in court. At his sentencing, Tikka said his conscience was clean. He said he had already “received the testimony of sins forgiven” by one of God’s disciples.

“You clearly by your statement here are not remorseful,” the judge remarked before sentencing him to life in prison without parole. “You put the blame on everyone else.”

Then Tikka illustrated the central problem facing prosecutors and victims alike — a powerful religious culture that prioritizes spiritual absolution over secular justice — with his final, defiant words:

“My sins have been forgiven,” Tikka told the judge. “Have yours?”

The post In This Church, Child Sexual Abuse Has Gone Unchecked for So Long That It Spans Generations appeared first on ProPublica.

I was a new reporter at KQED in 2021 when former elementary teacher Joseph Brian Houg was sentenced to more than three decades in prison for sexually abusing 10 students. He’d taught at the same San Francisco Bay Area school for more than two decades. Were there warning signs?  

I soon discovered parents on social media saying they had complained to school administrators for years about Houg. I also knew that schools could release such complaints if they were substantiated or if teachers were disciplined. So I filed public records requests with Houg’s school — something anyone can do. 

I received 43 pages of records within a few months showing that parents had reported Houg to the principal at least four times since 2009. They complained about him for asking students to strip down to their underwear in his classroom in order to try on costumes for a play he was directing, and for coming into their changing room. They also complained about his touching boys’ chests or stomachs and tapping one boy on the butt. I learned that the principal had twice warned Houg to stop touching students. But he was allowed to keep teaching. (The principal said in a deposition that while Houg’s actions crossed professional boundaries, they were not reported to her as sexual.)

Over the next two years, I reported on similar cases of teachers remaining in the classroom after complaints of unwanted touching. Another Bay Area elementary school, in Benicia, reported a teacher to the state’s licensing body after he resigned due to accusations of misconduct. He was hired by another school, and his educator license remained in good standing until he was criminally charged. (He is currently fighting those charges.)

This raised a whole different set of questions for me: Should these teachers have been allowed to keep teaching in new schools? How much about a teacher’s disciplinary history did potential employers know? And what was the state’s responsibility for acting on, and sharing, the information it had about these teachers?

After I entered journalism school at the University of California, Berkeley in 2023, I wanted to investigate how common it was for teachers to continue working with kids after schools found that they had committed misconduct. California law bars the teacher licensing agency from releasing disciplinary records to the public, so my classmate and I requested records from the 300 largest school districts in California. We asked for complaints of teacher sexual misconduct made to schools in the five previous years. We also asked for any reports sent by schools to the state’s teacher licensing agency, which are required to be filed when public school educators are fired or resign due to alleged misconduct.

Dozens of districts responded within two months. We began building a spreadsheet of teachers against whom complaints were raised. Getting the records was slow: California requires public agencies to determine whether they have records to disclose within 10 days, and to release them promptly, but most dragged their feet. Whenever schools stopped responding, I copied school board members and attorneys on my emails, citing the law. By the time I graduated more than a year after filing the records requests, I had received more than 350 complaints, which I used in my recent investigation with KQED and ProPublica.

To this day, Los Angeles Unified, the largest school district in California, still has not released any records pertaining to teacher misconduct cases that it reported to the state. Instead, the district said it would charge me $8,000 ($100 an hour for 80 hours of work) for it to “investigate approximately 2,500 potentially responsive personnel files.” The First Amendment Coalition, a California nonprofit that advocates for free speech and government transparency, is representing me in a lawsuit filed in May. We argue that the Los Angeles school district is violating public records laws with its failure to release documents pertaining to alleged educator misconduct. A Los Angeles Unified spokesperson told me in a written statement this week that its policies balance the public’s right to access records with “responsible stewardship of public resources” and the law. 

Districts slow-walking their responses isn’t the only obstacle to getting records from schools. Districts typically notify teachers before releasing complaints to give them the opportunity to block the documents’ release. The former Benicia teacher who was criminally charged with sexually abusing students in 2024 sued to block the release of complaints made against him at two school districts. The First Amendment Coalition represented me in that case, too, and we won. It took nine months to get the records. In another case in which I had requested records, the court granted an injunction preventing release of the teacher’s records, but the legal filings contained the details of the allegations against him, so the nature of the complaint became public anyway.

At least four teachers have called or emailed me directly to ask why I’m requesting their disciplinary records. They wanted to share their side of the story, which I was more than happy to hear, and some argued that their cases were not worth my time. One asked me to retract my request. (I did not.) Another sent a 1,700-word email saying that the allegations were only partially true and lamented that he did not have the money to defend himself. 

While I appreciated the complexity of individual cases, I believed that those misconduct complaints might contain important truths. Undeterred by school districts’ recalcitrance, I followed the public record-seekers’ mantra: If you can’t get records from one agency, the answers you’re looking for may exist somewhere else. 

Records of state disciplinary hearings are presumed public when teachers object to their dismissals by school districts or appeal the suspension or revocation of their licenses. And those records reside in the Department of General Services, a state agency that houses another agency responsible for convening administrative hearings of public employees. 

This agency proved helpful with the case of Jason Agan, a San Francisco Bay Area math teacher who KQED and ProPublica reported on last month. Agan had been fired for sexually harassing high school students but went on to teach at two more schools, even after an independent panel convened by the Office of Administrative Hearings deemed him “unfit to teach.” Because he had asked for an outside hearing after the district moved to fire him, I requested those records. 

I got them the next day. The documents contained summaries of testimony from students, administrators and Agan himself at his dismissal hearing. Agan, who has not been accused of a crime, admitted to touching students’ shoulders but denied any sexual motivation, stating during his dismissal hearing that he did so to offer them support and encouragement. He maintained his teaching license. 

Getting a response from the Department of General Services was like discovering a secret portal to obtaining records quickly and easily. 

So I requested five years’ worth of decisions about other teachers by independent panels from this agency, in search of further insights into how the state’s teacher disciplinary system works and where it falls short. I obtained a gold mine of documents in less than a week.

I had learned some important lessons: What seems to be secret isn’t always so. Sometimes you just need to know who to ask, and for what.

The post I Got Access to Hundreds of Teacher Misconduct Complaints in California — and You Can Too appeared first on ProPublica.

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.

Last May, as President Donald Trump settled into his second term, the Justice Department walked away from federal efforts to reform troubled police departments across the country.

Officials announced their decision to not only drop lawsuits against two cities for unconstitutional policing but also retract findings of abuse in a half dozen other places.

Some of those jurisdictions celebrated the news. But not Louisville, Kentucky, a blue city in a red state whose elected leaders used the occasion to make their own announcement.

After the federal withdrawal, Mayor Craig Greenberg said Louisville would be “moving ahead rapidly” with reforms to its police department, which had been found to have a pattern of unconstitutional policing. In fact, the city would be adopting a version of the reform agreement Louisville had previously negotiated with the Biden administration and hiring an outside monitor to oversee its progress.

“I made a promise to our community,” the mayor said, “and we are keeping that promise.”

There was much to do. In 2023, federal investigators had found that the city’s police routinely discriminated against Black residents, inappropriately used police dogs against people, and failed to properly respond to people facing mental health challenges.

The mayor said the local reform plan would allow city leaders to correct these problems and accomplish key goals, perhaps even faster than he outlined.

But police records obtained by ProPublica show just how entrenched the issues were. Two years after the DOJ revealed its initial findings, while the Greenberg administration was charting its path to reform in early 2025, officers were still engaging in the problematic policing practices called out by federal investigators, according to the records. Most notably, police officials were failing to thoroughly review officers’ use of force.

Today, one year into the city’s reform effort, community leaders and civil rights advocates say the results have been mixed.

For example, the city has expanded a pilot program to direct some mental health calls away from police and send them instead to mental health specialists. Yet a panel created to review the department’s mental health practices overall only met for the first time in March, almost a year after it was announced, and it isn’t scheduled to issue recommendations for another year.

“What we do as a city, we make things look good on paper, but then in the application of it, it plays out so differently,” said Shameka Parrish-Wright, a Louisville city council member and a candidate for mayor looking to unseat Greenberg later this year. “And what plays out on the ground in day-to-day interactions is different.”

Underscoring the stakes for Louisville residents is the March fatal shooting of a 28-year-old woman named Katelyn Hall, who was experiencing a mental health crisis when police gunned her down in her own apartment.

Experts in mental health told ProPublica that the incident is emblematic of practices flagged by the Justice Department more than three years ago. Louisville Metro Police Department Chief Paul Humphrey, however, said the department should not be judged by one shooting given that it responded to 3,200 mental health calls last year and “only about eight resulted in any injury to anyone.” The incident is still under investigation.

In the aftermath of the killing, Greenberg’s office is exploring ways to pair mental health professionals with police in such situations — an idea that, critics note, was explicitly recommended in 2023 by the Justice Department. Today, the city sends either mental health professionals or police to calls, but does not have them respond together on critical incidents, including when a weapon is present.

Greenberg declined multiple requests for interviews, but his press secretary, Matt Mudd, defended the reform work, which he said was now being overseen by an independent monitor. “The Louisville Metro Police Department is in a much better place than it was three years ago,” he told ProPublica in an email. “That work is ongoing, and we are partnering closely with the community to ensure progress continues.”

Humphrey, the police chief, noted that police reform can often take years to achieve under federal oversight. By comparison, Humphrey told ProPublica, “I think we’re going at a really good clip.”

Today, the city stands as a test case for how effectively a community can implement police reform without a court order and the accountability that comes with federal intervention.

“There’s no enforceability by law,” said Ed Harness, Louisville’s first-ever inspector general. He is charged with investigating misconduct in the police department. “Now whether reform can happen voluntarily, with compliance and supervision by elected leaders, kind of is the question that will be answered in Louisville.”

The Path to Reform

Policing in Louisville has been under a national microscope since March 2020, when plainclothes officers broke down the door of Breonna Taylor’s apartment serving a no-knock search warrant. Her boyfriend thought they were robbers and fired a single shot at them. Taylor, a 26-year-old Black medical worker, was killed as police returned fire. Her case, along with that of George Floyd in Minneapolis, helped spark a national reckoning over race and policing, and attracted the scrutiny of the Justice Department.

In 2023, just months after Greenberg took office, the DOJ published a scathing report on the police department’s pattern of misconduct and constitutional violations. By December 2024, the city and the DOJ announced the details of a court agreement, known as a consent decree, that would set requirements for improvements and be overseen by an outside monitor and a judge. Greenberg touted the city’s commitment to “aggressively implement police reform.”

In the following months, however, the questionable police behavior continued. Police records first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union and later by ProPublica through a public records request detail nearly 50 use-of-force incidents from December 2024 through April 2025. In more than half of them, officers engaged in actions that the Justice Department had noted in 2023 were either violations of people’s rights, like using choke holds and allowing police dogs to continue biting people who no longer posed a threat, or otherwise needed improvement, like how supervisors reviewed such incidents.

In one case, a suspect spit on an officer, who then performed a “takedown” of the man while he was already in handcuffs. In another, multiple witnesses said an officer put his knee on a man’s back while he lay on the ground, a tactic that has been widely condemned since George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee on Floyd’s neck in 2020. In both those instances, as well as others, the department’s internal review unit found the uses of force to be appropriate. According to the records, the review unit failed to discuss alternative approaches or completely review all uses of force by the officers involved. 

Jenn Rolnick Borchetta, the deputy project director for the ACLU’s Criminal Law Reform Project, said her team requested the records in Louisville and six other jurisdictions to assess whether they corrected the problems flagged by the DOJ in its investigations.

In Louisville, she said her organization expected oversight to be extra diligent given the DOJ’s criticism of what it called “biased” internal investigations.

“We were troubled by a review process that seemed more concerned with protecting the agency from liability than with protecting the public from further abuse,” she said.

The Louisville police department did not respond to ProPublica’s inquiry about the records and the use-of-force review process.

Last May, just five months after the consent decree was signed, Harmeet Dhillon, head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, announced the department was dropping the case against Louisville, ending what she called the “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments with factually unjustified consent decrees.”

Questions Over City’s Commitment

The same day, Greenberg unveiled his administration’s reform plan, dubbed the Community Commitment, and pledged to hire an independent monitor to oversee the police department’s progress. The document carried over much of the federal reform plan, but civil rights advocates and community leaders noticed it differed in key ways. Most notably, it had no mechanism for enforcement in the event of a disagreement between the monitor and the police department. Under a federal consent decree, a federal judge makes the final decisions on such disputes and can force departments to implement corrective actions. Louisville’s plan simply calls for the parties to have continued talks.

That makes the policy initiative vulnerable to the vagaries of politics or local budgeting, critics say.

“That’s the biggest risk here, that it will just prove to be too difficult, too expensive, not politically advantageous for this or subsequent administrations to continue this effort,” said Christy Lopez, a professor at Georgetown Law who spent years investigating police misconduct for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. “That is one advantage that consent decrees offer, that they have the oversight and threat of a federal judge, who can make contempt findings if people are not doing what they said they would do. You don’t have that here.”

Because of that, several community leaders want to enshrine key parts of the agreement in local law. “We need an ordinance that makes sure the reforms from the consent decree are done regardless of administration,” said Kungu Njuguna, a lifelong resident of Louisville and a policy strategist for the Kentucky ACLU.

Ericka Seward, a community activist who has been campaigning for police accountability since Taylor’s killing in 2020, said the current reform plan requires residents to trust the police to make change — a difficult task, she said, given the department’s history of discriminatory policing.

Seward, who is Black, said she watched officers manhandle her 21-year-old son in the parking lot of his apartment complex in 2022. He had called her during a traffic stop for what police said was erratic driving, and she drove to the location. After patting him down, officers were about to let him go with a warning when he argued that the stop was dubious and told the officers he would be complaining to members of the department’s leadership who his mother knew through her work as an activist, Seward said. The officers then physically pulled him back to their car and told him they were now going to issue him tickets, she said. Her son was cited for careless driving and failure to signal.

“It was scary to me, it was scary to him,” Seward said. “Because we know what they’re capable of.”

Seward filed a complaint with the city inspector general’s office. According to its report, the lead officer defended his actions, telling investigators that, because Seward’s son was accusing him of not having a valid reason for the stop, he “became concerned and wanted to document the stop to show that he did have probable cause.”

While Harness’ office found no wrongdoing on that count, it did note that the officer couldn’t say how fast Seward’s son was driving. It also found that the department did not have a policy prohibiting retaliation and recommended that one be adopted, according to records. The department has since done so, though that too has drawn criticism from Harness’ office, which said its recommendation was “largely ignored.” The revised policy only applies to retaliation after a complaint has been filed, the inspector general’s report said, meaning it does not cover retaliatory policing in response to “citizens’ words, actions or demeanor.”

In its 2023 investigation, the Justice Department found that Louisville police officers had “threatened and retaliated against civilian complainants.” It also found that Black drivers were nearly twice as likely as white drivers to be cited by police for minor violations — part of a pattern of discriminatory policing that investigators said often led to unnecessary and tense interactions between police and the public, sometimes resulting in arrest. The DOJ noted racial disparities in enforcement for loitering, littering and having dark window tinting.

The federal consent decree dictated that those kinds of offenses receive warnings unless an officer could articulate why that approach was “insufficient” to deal with the issue. That change, however, is not in the city’s reform plan.

Humphrey said that leaders determined the measure wasn’t in the best interest of the city or its officers. He also said police are trained on how to best determine the right course of action on those low-level infractions.

A Mental Health Crisis, a Deadly Encounter

The city did incorporate into its plan many of the DOJ’s recommendations for handling people with mental health issues. Such incidents made up nearly a quarter of the use-of-force cases investigators reviewed, according to the federal report, “and a large share of those incidents involved at least one unreasonable use of force.”

The city’s plan included a number of measures, starting with the formation of a behavioral health council to review incidents and recommend changes to policies and practices with the goal of “reducing the number of police encounters with people with behavioral health disabilities involving unnecessary use of force and reducing the severity of the force when force is required.”

The council, however, didn’t have its first meeting until March — about 10 months after the mayor’s announcement. Police officials told ProPublica that city leaders decided to first hire the independent monitor and develop an implementation plan before putting the behavioral council to work.

Four days after the group had its first meeting, Louisville police responded to a 911 call about Katelyn Hall, the 28-year-old woman in mental health crisis. She had locked herself in the bathroom and, according to her roommate, had cut her wrists and ingested cleaning fluids, and was behaving erratically. She had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and had previously attempted suicide.

Within 13 minutes of their arrival, police shot and killed her.

“No one wants to see an outcome like this,” Humphrey said in early April during a press conference. “We have already begun to use this incident to work on improving how we handle these situations. We owe that to everyone involved and to the city.”

But mental health and law enforcement experts who reviewed police body camera footage of the incident told ProPublica that officers demonstrated some of the same problematic behaviors first identified by the Justice Department more than three years ago.

The federal investigators found Louisville officers “frequently fail to give people experiencing crisis time or space” and “do not engage in verbal de-escalation for enough time to be successful.” In fact, officers often made the situation more tense and confrontational, which would lead to “increased safety risks to themselves and the person in crisis and increased the likelihood of the use of force.”

In Hall’s case, the officers started out asking questions like, “What’s going on?” and, “Can you talk to me?” while Hall screamed at them to let her die.

Police spent about six minutes talking with her before a member of the Emergency Medical Services unit, worried that Hall had cut her wrists, suggested forcing the door open. The team spent the next three minutes breaking the door’s lock and popping one of its hinges, during which time the officers pushed themselves against the door attempting to get into the bathroom.

Sharon Gandarilla-Javier, an assistant professor of police science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, called it a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation, but stressed that the six minutes of discussion wasn’t enough time and the police should have considered alternatives to forcing the door open.

For example, Hall’s mother, Rebecca, was on scene and identified herself to first responders, assuming they would ask her to help talk with her daughter. They never did.

Mariela Ruiz-Angel, the director of alternative response initiatives for Georgetown Law’s Center for Innovations in Community Safety, said Hall’s mother could have been a “game changer.”

“We’ve used that tactic multiple times to try to find the loved one that makes the most sense, to be like, ‘Hey, I’m here, Mama’s here,’” she said.

At one point, an officer tells Hall, “I want you to live,” and that her friends and family are worried about her. 

The responders designated which officers would use their hands, a Taser and a firearm in preparation for Hall’s exit from the locked room. But Gandarilla-Javier, who spent more than 10 years as a New York Police Department officer and teaches classes on trauma-informed policing and crisis intervention, told ProPublica that the plan overheard on the video needed to be more detailed, with an explicit discussion about how to safely subdue Hall if she were to advance on them.

When Hall ultimately opened the door and walked toward the officers, she was holding a broken piece of toilet. Within five seconds, she was shot by two officers, including the one who minutes before had told her he wanted her to live. Had the officers planned better, the outcome may have been different, Gandarilla-Javier said.

Louisville Metro Police Deputy Chief Emily McKinley told reporters in April that “each encounter poses a unique and often chaotic challenge,” and that in the Hall case, “If you look at the porcelain, I think it could be an extremely lethal situation” for the officers. Asked whether officers could have instead tackled Hall, she declined to answer, saying such questions would be part of the investigation into the shooting.

Hall’s mother said police could have done more.

“My daughter deserved more than eight minutes of their time,” Rebecca Hall said through tears in an interview. “She needed kindness and she needed somebody back there” to let her know that they cared. Hall continued: “She didn’t get that in that moment. I know she definitely didn’t need bullets. … She just needed help.”

Mental health advocates like Khalilah Collins have been pushing for years for the department to allow mental health professionals to lead the response to such calls. In fact, she was part of a group of professionals who, at the city’s request, researched alternative responses in 2021. The study was part of the reforms that the city pledged to undertake in a lawsuit settlement after Taylor’s killing, but a nonpolice response failed to win the support of city leaders and wasn’t adopted.

“We refuse to build what we need for people,” Collins said. “We don’t want the police there. The police don’t want to be there. They’re not trained to be there, but we refuse to do anything else.”

To be sure, the department did create a program to divert some calls to mental health professionals, but that did not happen in this case because police determined Hall was “armed with glass.” Louisville police policy dictates that if a weapon is present, mental health professionals cannot respond to the calls.

In the wake of Hall’s death, though, Greenberg and Humphrey say they are now exploring whether police and mental health professionals should be allowed to respond together. According to Mudd, the mayor’s spokesperson, one option being discussed involves using “new technology, like cameras, to add behavioral health providers to situations that require their expertise without potentially sacrificing their safety.”

When ProPublica asked Mudd if there was a timeline for making a decision, he said only that the city and the police department were “moving with urgency.”

The post After the Trump DOJ Halted Police Reform, This City Stepped In. Then Officers Shot and Killed Katelyn Hall. appeared first on ProPublica.

Marianna Mitchem grew up in the Denver suburbs, where she played high school soccer. One day in April 1999, her team faced off against a nearby rival, Columbine High. The next day, two teenagers went on a shooting rampage at Columbine, killing more than a dozen people.

The massacre left an imprint on Mitchem. After graduating from Providence College, she joined the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. “Fearing for my friends and watching what was happening — you don’t forget things like that,” she told me. “I wanted to make a difference.”

She started in the ATF’s Denver office as an industry operations investigator, the bureau’s term for inspectors who ensure that firearms dealers are conducting the required background checks on buyers and maintaining sales records. When the bureau found discrepancies, it tended to settle for reprimands and improvement plans, rarely going so far as to revoke a dealer’s license.

In 2021, things started to change. The country was experiencing a surge of deadly violence, with homicides up more than a third since 2019, and the administration of President Joe Biden was desperate to reverse the trend. For years, data had shown that a large share of guns used in shootings came from a small fraction of dealers, and that guns that were trafficked — sold by stores to straw purchasers (people other than the intended users) or resold on the street — were far more likely to be used in shootings.

Acting on this data, the administration in June 2021 announced what became known as “zero tolerance”: Dealers found to be willfully violating the law would lose their licenses, period. Revocations spiked, from fewer than 50 in 2019, 2020 and 2021 to a record 181 in 2023.

Also in 2021, Biden’s attorney general, Merrick Garland, started urging federal prosecutors to prioritize gun violence. A year later, Congress passed a law that added a firearms trafficking conspiracy charge to the federal criminal code, a crucial new tool for prosecutors.

After 2021, the homicide rate started falling, which criminologists attributed to several factors, including repair of the social fabric since the coronavirus pandemic and a closing of the breach in police-community relations that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd. One other factor got less attention: the clampdown on the illegal flow of firearms.

The Biden administration struggled to broadcast its gains on public safety, and Donald Trump won the election in 2024 partly by vowing to restore order. By the time Trump reentered the White House, Mitchem had risen to associate assistant director for industry operations, overseeing inspectors across the country. “We were making incredible progress on trafficking, on violent crime,” she said late last year.

But the Trump administration, driven both by gun-lobby advocacy and its own political priorities, quickly set about undoing much of its predecessor’s moves to combat gun violence. It repealed the zero-tolerance policy, going so far as to invite revoked dealers to reapply for new licenses. It shifted hundreds of ATF agents to immigration work. And it scaled back on prosecutions for gun trafficking. The White House declined to comment, referring questions to the ATF and the Department of Justice.

The homicide rate fell further last year, but criminologists warn against complacency, because the illicit gun trade is a classic pipeline problem: The harm can take a while to make itself felt. Research has found that the typical “time to crime” for trafficked firearms ranges up to about three years, which means that any positive lag of the anti-trafficking efforts of the Biden years would still be in effect now, with any negative effects of the Trump pullback lying in the years to come.

Among those now sounding the alarm is Mitchem. Dismayed at the policy reversal, she left the ATF last spring, after 21 years, and joined Everytown, the gun-safety group founded by Michael Bloomberg.

“Just because no one is watching the trafficking pipelines right now doesn’t mean guns aren’t flowing through it. It just means they’re not being intercepted,” she told me.

“And as you walk away from that, and you don’t have your focus on that anymore,” she added, “that pipeline is going to be flowing, and we are going to start to see the violent crime impact from that over time.”

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Estimates put the number of guns in the United States at close to 400 million, but the odds that any of them will be put to ill use rise exponentially if they are obtained illegally. Of the 2.3 million firearms traced from crime scenes between 2017 and 2023, half were bought less than three years earlier and 87% were recovered in possession of someone other than the original, legally authorized buyer. Over that period, stores sold almost 1.3 million guns to traffickers that were subsequently recovered in a crime, according to an Everytown analysis of ATF statistics.

This is why the laws governing gun sales carry such high stakes for public safety. But enforcement of these laws has long occupied an unusual no-man’s-land in this country, scrambling the standard political lines around criminal justice. Conservatives favoring tough-on-crime rhetoric are frequently torn when it comes to firearms trafficking: On the one hand, traffickers are helping fuel the violent crime that conservatives decry; on the other, prosecution of gun laws brushes against tenets that conservatives hold sacrosanct. It is liberals who are more likely to push for tougher enforcement, though they can be conflicted, too, as their belief in stricter gun laws runs up against a general preference for a less punitive approach to lawbreaking.

Marooned in this no-man’s-land for decades now has been the agency assigned the task of enforcing federal gun laws, the ATF. Going back to an episode at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992, where an ATF investigation of illegal gun dealing led to federal agents killing the wife and son of a white separatist, the ATF has been viewed with scorn by people who otherwise might side with armed government authorities. “ATF IS GAY” read the T-shirt worn by one attendee of a big gun show I attended earlier this year in Manassas, Virginia.

The agency’s radioactivity with the gun-rights lobby has left it on shaky political ground. It went seven years without a Senate-confirmed director. Its budget has not enjoyed the same expansion as that of other federal law enforcement agencies. And stringent laws constrain any ATF capabilities viewed as potentially threatening the rights of gun owners. To comply with a 1986 law preventing the creation of a federal gun registry, for example, the ATF uses software with some features disabled. Steve Dettelbach, who served as director under Biden, joked in a 2024 congressional hearing that the ATF might be “the only customer of Adobe Acrobat that pays money to remove search function.”

Despite these constraints, the ATF has developed its investigative capability. In the 1990s, the agency started sharing with local law enforcement agencies its National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, which collects the unique marks on bullet casings found at shooting scenes. The system has become much more potent as it became easier to share large numbers of images from crime scenes rapidly and compare them against the NIBIN database. The work was boosted further by the creation, starting in 2016, of 25 crime gun intelligence centers to process the data.

Given that a tiny share of the nation’s guns are used in shootings, with many of those used multiple times, the leads produced by the technology can have an outsized impact, said Daryl McCormick, who retired last year as special agent in charge of Ohio and southern Indiana. “It’s crazy how it might spiderweb out,” he told me, “because you have a gun that’s used in three shootings, but in one of those three shootings, there’s a guy that’s linked to three more shootings.”

Starting in the spring of 2020, that technology was put to the test. As homicides rose sharply, so did sales at dealerships. By one estimate, there were 3 million more guns sold between that March and July than would have been expected. Many soon turned up in shootings; the number of guns recovered at crime scenes that had been bought from a dealership less than a year earlier, an especially strong indicator of firearms trafficking, jumped by nearly a third from 2019 to 2021.

Meanwhile, many shootings involved ghost guns assembled from kits, which had begun proliferating a few years prior. Amid other factors driving the killing, the sheer plenitude of weaponry on the streets was pivotal, said Daniel Webster, a gun-violence researcher at Johns Hopkins University. “We know,” he told me, “that a small number of dealers can create a substantial amount of harm, and traffickers as well.”

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In the spring of 2021, a 25-year-old man was summoned to help a friend in a confrontation at a low-income housing development in Middletown, Connecticut. It was a petty beef arising from disrespectful comments made to someone’s girlfriend, but Tylon Hardy responded anyway. “He was one of the guys who wanted to protect his community,” his sister, Tianna Hardy, told me later. “He showed up to protect his friend.” After he arrived, Tylon was fatally shot in the back.

Guns are tightly regulated in Connecticut, where buyers must first obtain a permit. But this gun had not been sold by a Connecticut store. It had been purchased six days earlier at Smokin’ Barrel Guns and Ammo in Raleigh, North Carolina, more than 600 miles away.

It was a particularly rapid movement up the Iron Pipeline, the name for the trafficking channel from southern states with lax gun laws to northern states with stricter ones. And it turned into a clear example of why trafficking enforcement matters. Investigators obtained camera footage from the shop showing a young man emerging after buying the gun, a Taurus 9 mm pistol, to make a call on his cellphone.

The following spring, the Biden-nominated U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of North Carolina, Michael Easley Jr., produced indictments in the case that started with the camera: Four people were charged with having engaged in a conspiracy to traffic dozens of guns from shops in eastern and central North Carolina. All told, the ringleader had bought more than 100 guns from straw purchasers in North Carolina; 10 of the guns surfaced at crime scenes in Connecticut and New Jersey. The ringleader ended up pleading guilty and being sentenced to more than 10 years in prison; the other three received sentences ranging from 18 months to five years.

Easley kept pursuing trafficking cases, poring over spreadsheets full of NIBIN data showing information for every gun traced from shootings in his district. His office would zero in on guns with a short “time to crime” from the initial sale and see if investigators could build leads from purchase records. His team made its interest in trafficking plain to the local ATF division, motivating agents to build cases. “Prosecutors have the ability to send a demand signal to the marketplace of agents, that we have an interest in these and if you bring us the cases, we will push them over the end zone and get convictions,” he told me.

Prosecutors kept getting more encouragement from Washington. In April 2022, the ATF issued a rule decreeing that ghost guns had to conform to the same regulations as regular firearms, including carrying serial numbers and requiring background checks.

Two months later, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, which got crucial Republican backing from North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis. In addition to the new trafficking conspiracy charge, the law included a new straw-purchasing charge, expanded background checks for buyers under 21 and funding for states with red-flag laws permitting gun confiscations from those judged dangerous. And a month after that, the Senate confirmed Dettelbach, giving the ATF its first confirmed director since 2015, one who had prosecuted gun crimes as U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Ohio.

Across the country, federal prosecutors took on trafficking cases with gusto. Over the remainder of Biden’s term, they charged more than 500 defendants using the new trafficking statutes; others brought cases using laws already on the books.

In Ohio, McCormick and his ATF colleagues took on a sprawling case that started with a shooting with a machine gun in Avondale, outside Cincinnati, and led to a six-year prison sentence for a 24-year-old man who had made and sold over 80 machine-gun conversion devices; two other men who trafficked the devices to Cincinnati gangs were sentenced to nine and 11 years. As in North Carolina, the Ohio agents were getting encouragement from prosecutors, including Kenneth Parker, the then-U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Ohio. “I made it clear, through my edicts, my announcements to them that we wanted those cases involving violence, that they know how seriously we were taking them,” he told me.

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In February, I drove to Raleigh to meet with Easley and visit Smokin’ Barrel — or what used to be Smokin’ Barrel. The shop closed after the ATF revoked its license in early 2023, not for having sold the gun in the Connecticut case, but for an earlier incident, in which the owner sold a gun to an 18-year-old woman, in violation of North Carolina’s 21-year age minimum for buying a handgun. The shop, a small outbuilding adjacent to a used car lot, now sat empty; its fading sign still stood roadside.

Not far away, I found the former owner, Richard Humphries, at his home. He told me how upset he still was over the revocation, especially since, he said, he had self-reported the improper sale.

When I asked him about the Taurus that ended up being used six days later in the Connecticut killing, he initially had trouble recalling it, confusing it with another case in which a man had used a gun bought at the store to kill his wife. What was it like to learn about shootings with the guns he sold? “I hate it,” he said. “I hate that I sold it and he might have used it, but there’s nothing I can, you know …” He trailed off.

I pointed out that in the Connecticut case, investigators had been able to uncover the trafficking ring after tracing the gun to his shop. Was that a good use of resources? “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, they need to be able to do that. But they just, you know, they need to pay more attention to the crooks than people trying to make an honest living.”

I heard similar complaints from other dealers who had their licenses revoked during Biden’s term for transgressions they insisted were mere clerical mistakes. One in Indiana told me that his violations included a mix-up involving an Amish customer’s name; one in South Carolina told me his violations included filling out forms on behalf of elderly customers with shaky handwriting. “If it had been six months earlier, they would have given us a slap on the hand,” he said.

Even some within the ATF had misgivings, worrying that the policy would strain the agency’s relations with law-abiding dealers and make them less likely to offer alerts on suspicious behavior by buyers. “The industry is probably one of the best ways we get information about trafficking,” McCormick, the retired Ohio agent, told me. “But if there’s friction between us and the industry, they’re less likely to report it.”

Gun-safety advocates discounted that risk, saying the policy had both shut down many lawless stores and encouraged countless other sellers to make sure they were complying with the law. “It’s not only targeting bad dealers but sending a message to the entire industry: button up,” Josh Scharff, general counsel of Brady United, told me.

In 2024, revocations rose yet further, to 183. This represented a mere sliver of dealers — only 2% of those inspected that year — but it provoked new ire, not only from traditional lobby groups such as the National Shooting Sports Foundation and National Rifle Association but from ascendant groups of gun owners with even more aggressively anti-regulation stances.

Some dealers challenged their revocations in federal court. In 2023, the ATF revoked the license of a shop in the Phoenix suburbs, Chambered Group, after four inspections in five years turned up a host of violations. The business sought unsuccessfully to block the revocation in court, with a federal judge, Steven Logan, finding that the business had “purposefully disregarded [federal] regulations by repeatedly violating the same regulations despite being given multiple opportunities to cure its mistakes.” In 2024, one of the shop’s co-owners tried to get a new license under a slightly different name, Chambered Custom Firearms, and the ATF blocked him, noting his past role with the revoked store. (A lawyer for the shop declined to comment.)

But after Trump returned to the White House, his administration announced an end to the zero-tolerance policy, urged revoked dealers to reapply and started settling the court cases, one after another. In April 2025, the DOJ informed the court that it had started settlement talks in the Arizona case and a month later alerted it that Chambered Custom had submitted a new application “which ATF will expeditiously process.” It issued the license in July.

In Oregon, a dealer had gone to federal court to challenge the ATF’s 2024 denial of his license renewal for South Valley Firearms in the town of Monroe due to his past conviction for domestic violence. Trump’s DOJ initially contested the dealer’s bid, but early this year, the department notified his attorney out of the blue that his client would be getting his license, after all. “They didn’t give any explanation as to why,” said the lawyer, Leonard Williamson. “They just said, ‘Have him resubmit his application and we’ll give it to him.’”

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The end of zero-tolerance was, on its own, hardly a surprise for an administration elected with the strong support of gun-rights and gun-industry groups. What has differed from the first Trump term has been the wholesale shift of resources away from the enforcement of gun trafficking laws and toward the immigration crackdown, both at the ATF and DOJ.

Last spring, the administration began shifting large numbers of ATF agents to a new assignment: assisting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions against undocumented immigrants. ICE records obtained by the libertarian Cato Institute in September showed that nearly 1,800 of ATF’s roughly 2,500 agents had taken part in enforcement and removal operations.

While ATF agents were shifted to immigration operations, criminal referrals fell. ATF referrals for common trafficking-related charges, including the two added in the 2022 law, decreased 15% in 2025 from 2024, according to a ProPublica analysis. Asked about the drop, ATF spokesperson Tanya Roman pointed at DOJ prosecutors. “Not every ATF referral is accepted by the [United States Attorney’s Office] for prosecution,” she said in a written response to questions.

Eventually, the shift toward immigration enforcement reached even beyond ATF’s agents to the industry operations investigators who inspect dealers. Terrence Robinson had served in that role for six years, based in Baltimore. He took pride in the work, but soon after Trump’s second term began, Robinson realized it would be a turbulent year for his agency. As part of the push by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to shrink the government, the ATF offered early retirement to many of its 800-odd inspectors. In the end, some 125 took the offer, threatening to overburden a corps already struggling to inspect even a sliver of the nation’s 130,000 licensed firearms dealers. “ATF does not comment on personnel matters,” Roman said.

Around the same time, Robinson went to inspect the location of an applicant for a dealership license in Baltimore. The city, long wracked by gun violence, has come to have virtually no licensed dealers within its boundaries; those that remain are mostly in the suburbs. Robinson was startled to discover that this applicant intended to sell guns from his apartment in a building downtown, a few blocks from Camden Yards. Robinson voiced his concerns to his supervisor, who told him that he had to approve it. “According to our rules and regulations now, he passed a criminal background check, and he’s a citizen, so …,” Robinson said. “It’s mind-boggling.”

Most upsetting, though, was the directive that he and other industry operations investigators received in late summer to start spending at least six hours per week on immigration-related work. It was hard to understand what this even meant — their job was to inspect firearms dealers. To comply, he began scouring dealers’ sales records looking for buyers with foreign-sounding names, which were then relayed to the Department of Homeland Security. This struck him as a monumental misuse of resources.

This was what pushed him over the edge and made him decide to take early retirement, too, in September. “I didn’t sign up to be an immigration person,” he said. “I’m just not that.”

Asked about such orders, the ATF’s Roman said: “In support of President Trump’s whole of government approach to combat illegal immigration, ATF is assisting the Department of Homeland Security and other federal law enforcement partners with their immigration enforcement efforts. To ensure operational security and the safety of our agents and partners, ATF does not disclose details or specific numbers of personnel deployments or enforcement activities.”

Now that Robinson was gone, his former team was down from 10 to six, with a temporary supervisor. He worried what the changes at ATF meant for public safety. “I’m not saying I can see the future, but I don’t see things getting better,” he said. “I see things getting worse.”

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“Everyone’s been in a little bit of shock about what’s going on,” Marianna Mitchem said last December, speaking from the stage of a conference on gun violence at the Center for American Progress, the center-left think tank in Washington. She described what the ATF had accomplished in recent years, then she laid bare the extent of the pullback now underway.

Mitchem told the advocates that they would have to look to officials in their home states and cities to try to fill the void left by the Trump administration. “It’s up to the states to start tackling this trafficking problem, because unfortunately, you’re not going to have the support of the ATF,” she said.

This has already started happening in a few places. In the suburbs of Philadelphia, a city that suffered one of the worst pandemic-era homicide spikes but has since experienced dramatic improvement, county sheriffs have started doing more inspections of dealers to make up for the decline in ATF enforcement. A member of the conference audience asked Mitchem what else states could be doing to respond. Her answer suggested she wasn’t sure.

“ATF wasn’t always the most widely known agency. I think we sort of liked it that way. We did really, really good work and kept our head down,” she said. “And so now, you’re trying to let everybody know, unfortunately, there are still good people there, but they’ve been redirected.”

In February, Trump’s nominee to lead the agency, Robert Cekada, downplayed that redirection at his confirmation hearing. Cekada is a 20-year ATF veteran, a fact in which gun-safety advocates have tried to take some reassurance. Cekada testified that the agency was continuing to “do dealer inspections uninhibited.”

But ATF has made it much harder for researchers and the public to track that work. It took the administration more than 15 months to release a tally of how many dealer licenses it had revoked: 56 in 2025, down 69% from the year before. Cekada also challenged a report last fall that 80% of the ATF’s agents had been reassigned to immigration enforcement. The reassignment had never amounted to more than 100 agents at a given time, Cekada said. “ATF in those operations has been focused on offenders that were illegally armed with firearms,” he told senators.

But as the former federal prosecutors and ATF agents I spoke with noted, the key question when it comes to the fight against trafficking is whether prosecutors are seeking out cases. After all, the ATF investigates cases, but U.S. attorneys prosecute them. And here the evidence suggests a pullback. A ProPublica analysis shows that in the first year of the Trump administration, the DOJ declined 30% more referrals from the ATF for the main trafficking-related charges than it had the year prior. 

Despite the high rate of declinations for ATF referrals, the DOJ last year ended up prosecuting nearly as many gun-trafficking cases from all sources as it had in 2024. But a growing share of the cases, roughly 30%, were under the new trafficking conspiracy charges included in the 2022 law, which since its inception has proven especially useful in cases involving gun trafficking across the Mexican border: About a fifth of all people charged under that law over the course of 2024 and 2025 are in a single district, western Texas. Asked about the rise in declinations of ATF referrals and the shift toward border-related cases, DOJ spokesperson Katie Kenlein said, “The department declines to comment on prosecutorial strategy.”

Webster, the Johns Hopkins researcher, said numbers leave little doubt as to the shift away from general anti-trafficking enforcement. “Everything is diverted,” he said. “It’s all about immigrants.”

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On April 29, right after being confirmed as ATF director, Cekada announced 34 proposed rule changes, including requiring dealers to hold records for only 20 or 30 years, not indefinitely, and limiting ATF scrutiny of the state-issued permits that can replace background checks for buyers. “We are proposing to remove unnecessary hurdles that were standing in the way of law-abiding citizens and businesses,” he said, flanked by leaders of the NRA and National Shooting Sports Foundation.

One crucial Biden-era reform has persisted: the clampdown on ghost guns. The 2022 ATF regulation survived a Supreme Court challenge last year, and lawsuits by several cities helped drive the leading producer of ghost guns out of business. Webster and other criminologists note that the reduced flow of ghost guns correlates with a sharply lower rate of shootings by teenagers, who had been heavy users of the guns during the 2020-21 homicide surge.

Even that progress seemed as if it might be at risk. In early April, a joint status report issued to the federal court in Texas where the case originated stated that “ATF has advised that it plans to take agency action to amend the challenged rule” (even though the rule has been upheld by the Supreme Court). A day later, the White House’s 2027 budget called for reversing “the imposition of excessive restrictions on homemade firearms.” But five days after that, the DOJ notified the court in the Texas case that “the government has decided to maintain the definition” that underlies the ghost gun rule. Asked for clarification, the ATF’s Roman said last week: “ATF is still conducting legal reviews for other, more technically challenging rules. If changes are needed following the review, a proposal will be published.” For now, one key valve in the pipeline remains closed.

The post “No One Is Watching”: How Trump Reversed Biden’s Crackdown on Gun Trafficking appeared first on ProPublica.