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by Ellis Simani, ProPublica and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Three charter school superintendents who are among the highest paid in Texas are overseeing some of the lowest-performing districts in the state, newly released records show. One of them is at risk of closure by school year’s end. An investigation by ProPublica and The Texas Tribune previously revealed that board members at Valere Public Schools had paid Superintendent Salvador Cavazos up to $870,000 annually in recent years, roughly triple what it reported publicly to the state and on its website. Two other districts the newsrooms covered, Faith Family Academy and Gateway Charter Academy, also substantially underreported the compensation paid to their top leaders. The state determined that all three of those districts have had failing or near-failing levels of performance in recent years. The ratings, released last month by the Texas Education Agency, also show that charter schools make up the majority of the districts that have repeatedly had “unacceptable” performance, though they account for a small portion of public schools across Texas. The agency published two years’ worth of accountability ratings for the state’s public and charter schools that were previously undisclosed due to litigation. Faith Family Academy, a Dallas-area district with two campuses, was one of eight charter school districts that are now on track to be shut down at the end of the school year after receiving a third consecutive “F” rating. Board members paid superintendent Mollie Purcell Mozley a peak annual compensation of $560,000 in recent years to run the district, which has about 3,000 students. Education experts said they were troubled that the underperforming charter networks the newsrooms identified would invest so heavily in superintendent compensation instead of areas with a more direct impact on student achievement. “I don’t know what metrics the board’s reviewing to say that this is performance that would warrant this amount of pay,” said Toni Templeton, a research scientist at the University of Houston. “What we know from academic literature is when you put resources closest to the students, the students benefit the most. And the superintendent’s position is important, but it’s pretty far from the kids.” The state’s “three strikes” law mandates that the state education agency automatically shut down a charter school district that has repeatedly failed to meet performance standards. School leaders have a 30-day window to contest the ratings with the state education agency if they believe there were errors. The state will then release final scores in December that will determine whether failing campuses will be forced to close. Keri Bickerstaff has sent four of her five children to school at Faith Family Academy but pulled most of them out after prekindergarten. She said she was shocked and saddened when she learned about the district’s payments to Purcell Mozley from ProPublica and the Tribune. At her children’s school in Waxahachie, south of Dallas, Bickerstaff observed crowded classrooms and felt that the teachers lacked experience and left the school at high rates. She was surprised that the superintendent had been paid so highly. “I was under the impression that funding was an issue,” Bickerstaff said in an interview. Purcell Mozley and Faith Family Academy did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but in an Aug. 14 letter to parents and staff posted on the school’s website, she stated that the district planned to appeal the state’s rating. “While this rating is disappointing on its face,” Purcell Mozley wrote, “we want our community to know that we have conducted a thorough review of our performance data — and we strongly believe that our true score for 2025 reflects a solid C rating.” Another small charter district in Dallas, Gateway Charter Academy, has two strikes against it after receiving a combination of “F” and “D” ratings over the last three school years. If the district receives another low score next year, it too will be forced to shutter its two campuses that serve around 600 students. State education records show Gateway has been plagued by teacher turnover, with as many as 62% of its instructors leaving the district in recent years. The district has paid teachers about $10,000 less than the statewide average while paying superintendent Robbie Moore more than $426,000 in 2023, according to tax records — nearly double his base salary of $215,000. Gateway and Moore did not respond to requests for comment. After it was originally contacted by the newsrooms about the previously undisclosed compensation, the district posted a new document on its website that lists an undated $75,000 bonus for Moore. While there are no state regulations limiting how much school districts can pay their superintendents, state lawmakers have tried to change that for years. Lawmakers filed at least eight proposals during the most recent regular legislative session that would have constrained administrators’ pay and severance packages at public and charter schools, but none passed. That included a bill authored by Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a Republican from Corpus Christi, that would have capped a superintendent’s income to twice that of the highest-paid teacher in the district. Hinojosa filed another bill during a special session that began in July that would have allowed superintendents to earn up to three times as much as the top-paid teachers when their district scored an “A” rating. But if a district earned a “D” or “F” rating, a superintendent’s income could not exceed that of the top-paid instructors. The measure failed to reach a committee for discussion. “If teachers are held accountable for student performance, administrators should be too,” Hinojosa said in a statement. Although Valere received a “D” rating for the past two years, its

by Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk, The Connecticut Mirror This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Connecticut Mirror. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. A Connecticut Department of Motor Vehicles working group will examine portions of the state’s towing law, potentially leading to more extensive reforms than those passed by the legislature last session. The 10-member committee, which met for the first time Monday, must report its recommendations to lawmakers by February. It was originally tasked with examining a more narrow piece of the Connecticut law that requires proceeds from sales of towed cars to be remitted to the state, but members said they also want to study the way vehicles are valued by towing companies and other aspects of the sales process. The move comes after a yearlong investigation by The Connecticut Mirror and ProPublica found that the state’s laws favored towing companies at the expense of low-income residents. The committee, which is chaired by DMV Commissioner Tony Guerrera, includes three towing company owners, two consumer advocates and other DMV officials. The group discussed several issues still plaguing the towing industry and vehicle owners after the legislature overhauled the state’s more than 100-year-old law in May. That legislation, which passed with bipartisan support and takes effect Oct. 1, makes it harder to tow vehicles from private property and easier for drivers to retrieve their vehicles after a tow. The law also constrains practices that had allowed towing companies to start the sales process for some vehicles after 15 days. The bill also created the DMV working group to study how towers handle profits from sales of towed cars. Under the law, towing companies can sell a vehicle if the owner doesn’t reclaim it, but they are required to hold onto the proceeds for a year so the vehicle owner can claim the money. If the owner never comes forward, companies are required to turn over the proceeds to the state after subtracting their fees. This year, Guerrera told lawmakers the DMV never set up a system for this process and wasn’t aware of any money being remitted to the state by towers. He said that the DMV has been reviewing the issue and that the committee would be prepared to address it in the report. Guerrera said Monday that the working group should expand its mission to study broader changes that make it easier for low-income residents to get their cars back. “There’s got to be a way, too, to make sure that people know what’s going on when their car gets towed,” Guerrera said. “That’s important because that $1,000 vehicle is a lifeline for them, and they need to get it back. So how can we get it back in a way that doesn’t keep accumulating more fees?” Committee members discussed creating a new way to monitor who owns a vehicle by having the DMV require the owner to submit a record of sale. Currently, towers try to reach the last registered owner of the vehicle, but several people told CT Mirror and ProPublica that they were never informed their car would be sold because they had just bought it and weren’t required to register it yet. The new legislation does allow the vehicle owner to submit a title or bill of sale instead of registration documents to get their car back. “A huge part of the problem is the fact that we can’t get ahold of the owner of the vehicle,” said Sal Sena, owner of Sena Brothers and Cross Country Automotive in Hartford. “People are buying a car, they don’t register them, it gets towed, and everything’s going back to the last person that owned it a few years ago.” The committee also tackled several other issues, such as developing a standardized process to determine the value of a car that has been towed. If a towing company deems a vehicle worth $1,500 or less, it can sell it more quickly. Guerrera questioned how towers come up with their estimated values. “If you’ve got a car that’s three grand or four grand, next thing you know, it’s valued under $1,500, how did that happen?” he asked. Connecticut Legal Services attorney Rafie Podolsky said how towers value cars has long been an issue for consumers. “I’m hopeful that either the department or the industry will have data that will allow us to kind of make some comparisons between the presumed value of the car and the dollar amount that comes in on a resale,” he said. Towing industry representatives said another priority should be modernizing the DMV’s process for getting permission to sell someone’s vehicle. Eileen Colonese of Farmington Motor Sports said towers spend weeks sending paperwork back and forth through the mail to the DMV and vehicle owners. “There’s portals out there for all kinds of things. Why is there not a portal for this?” Colonese said. “Everyone can submit everything electronically and have access to a more standardized and modernized system.” The working group must submit a report to the legislature’s Transportation Committee by February, and Guerrera said it’s important to produce something that all members support. “If we go to the legislature with a piece of information that says we have met with the industry on both sides, and this is what we’ve come up with, we’re in good shape,” Guerrera said. “If we bog down now again, you know, now it’s in the hands of the legislature and we don’t know what could happen.”

by Hannah Allam ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In the weeks leading up to July 9, Ayman Soliman told friends he was terrified of losing the sanctuary he’d found after fleeing Egypt in 2014 and building a new life as a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. Soliman, 51, was to show up at 9 a.m. on that date for his first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since losing his asylum status. He’d been granted the protections in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Then, in the last month of the Biden presidency, immigration authorities moved to revoke them based on sharply disputed claims of fraud and aid to a terrorist group. Once President Donald Trump returned to office weeks later, court records show, immigration officials bumped up the terrorism claims and formalized the asylum termination June 3. By the time of Soliman’s ICE appointment, friends said, he was distraught over the prospect of being returned to the regime that had jailed him for documenting protests as a journalist. He arrived at the agency’s field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, accompanied by fellow clergy and a couple of Democratic state lawmakers. “I didn’t come to America seeking a better life. I was escaping death,” he said in a video filmed just before he entered. Inside, Soliman’s attorneys said, he was shocked to find FBI agents waiting for him. They interrogated him for three hours about his charity work more than a decade ago in Egypt, the basis for the Department of Homeland Security accusations of illegal aid, or “material support,” to Islamist militants. His lawyer eventually emerged from the ICE office holding a belt and a wallet. Soliman had been swept into custody, joining a record 61,000 people now in ICE detention. As he awaits an immigration court trial Sept. 25, he is being held in a county jail run by a sheriff who posted a sign outside reading, “Illegal Aliens Here.” Legal observers are watching the chaplain’s case as a bellwether of the Trump administration’s ability to merge the vast federal powers of immigration and counterterrorism. The case is also a reminder, they say, of sweeping post-9/11 statutes that both Republican and Democratic administrations have been accused of abusing, especially in cases involving Muslims. Material support laws ban almost any type of aid to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups, extending far beyond the basics of weapons, personnel and money. Prosecutors describe the laws as an invaluable tool against would-be attackers, but civil liberties groups have long complained of overreach. Over the years, successive administrations have faced legal challenges over how they wield the power; a milestone Supreme Court decision during the Obama administration upheld the laws as constitutional. Now, however, there are particular fears about the material support “sledgehammer,” as one legal scholar put it, in the hands of Trump, who has been openly hostile toward Muslims and determined to deport a million people who are in the United States without permission. “These statutes are written extraordinarily broadly with the unstated premise that discretion will be exercised responsibly. And one thing this administration has shown is that it doesn’t understand what it means to exercise discretion responsibly,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who argued high-profile material support cases and served as national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. At issue are DHS allegations that Soliman’s involvement with an Islamic charity provided material support to the Muslim Brotherhood. But neither the charity nor the Brotherhood is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and an Egyptian court found no official ties between the groups. The Biden-era DHS, which first flagged the issue, said it would revoke Soliman’s asylum if “a preponderance of the evidence supports termination” after a hearing, according to the December notice. At the time, court records show, the material support allegation was listed as a secondary concern after more common asylum questions about the veracity of official documents and his claims of persecution in Egypt. Once Trump came to power weeks later, Soliman’s attorneys said, the material support claims metastasized, with U.S. authorities declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a Tier III, or undesignated, terrorist group and adding new arguments about ties to Hamas. The Brotherhood, a nearly century-old Islamist political movement, renounced violence in the 1970s, though Hamas and other spinoffs are on the U.S. blacklist. In addition to the Egypt-related concerns, DHS filings about Soliman had noted warrants for “murder and terrorism” in Iraq — a country Soliman says he’s never visited. By elevating the national security argument, Soliman’s lawyers said, DHS was able to bypass an immigration judge and order the chaplain held without bond as “potentially dangerous.” An established terrorism nexus means less transparency for immigrants — and more power for the authorities. “DHS is judge, jury and executioner,” said Robert Ratliff, one of Soliman’s attorneys. The idea of Soliman as a secret militant has outraged residents who know him locally as “the interfaith imam” and the first Muslim on the pastoral care team at Cincinnati Children’s, a top-ranked pediatric hospital. Colleagues described a popular chaplain with nicknames for the tiny patients and soothing words for their bleary-eyed parents. Judy Ragsdale, the former pastoral care director who hired Soliman in 2021 shortly before retiring, said she wrote a letter to hospital leaders imploring them to speak out against the allegations that could return him to certain persecution in Egypt. He lost authorization to work in June, when his asylum was terminated. “This is a ‘Schindler’s List’ moment,” Ragsdale said she told hospital leaders. “And if you don’t stand up for Ayman, you’re complicit in what’s happening to him.” Ayman Soliman, center, talking to children at a Cincinnati mosque. Soliman is in ICE detention and facing deportation to Egypt. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica. Faces blurred by ProPublica.) Some fear DHS is parlaying the scope and secrecy of counterterrorism laws into a weapon to boost the president’s mass-deportation

by Mila Koumpilova, Chalkbeat, and Jennifer Smith Richards, ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week. Sign up for Chalkbeat Chicago’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the latest education news. This summer, worried parents called the principal at Chalmers Elementary on Chicago’s West Side to ask if the district had shuttered the school. They had noticed second-floor windows boarded up. But despite years of declining enrollment, the school wasn’t closing. It was undergoing major renovations. Students returning to Chalmers last month found an expansive new engineering space, computer lab and arts studio. The teachers who greeted them had received special training. A cache of new technology — 3D printers, computers and bee-shaped robots to teach students basic coding — offered fresh possibilities. The influx of dollars and attention has lifted hopes at Chalmers, with officials at Chicago Public Schools and City Hall testing the idea that investing in high-poverty schools can reverse enrollment losses. But it could take years and millions of dollars to see if it works. Chalmers, in the historic North Lawndale neighborhood, served about 210 students last year in a building with capacity for 600. Just around the corner, about 210 students populated Johnson Elementary on a campus meant for 480. The local high school, Collins Academy, was down to 200 students. The schools serve mostly Black and low-income students. The enrollment slide at the three schools and others in the area was partly the result of decisions by previous mayors and public school administrations who labeled North Lawndale’s schools as failing and opened new ones — many run by private entities — that drew families away. About a decade ago, the district closed and overhauled Collins and fired educators at Chalmers and Johnson who had built relationships with families and temporarily handed the schools over to a private operator to try to turn them around academically. All the while, families have been leaving the neighborhood or having fewer babies, creating demographic challenges outside school officials’ control. Across the district, overall enrollment dropped by 70,000 in the past decade. That decline meant some schools in North Lawndale and elsewhere became tiny, costly to run and unable to offer a rich student experience. Three of every 10 Chicago schools sit at least half-empty, and closing or merging them remains a political third rail. Chicago officials, faced with pressure from the teachers union and community groups, have not confronted this challenge. And, as Chalkbeat and ProPublica reported in June, for years the district has largely left chronically underenrolled schools to struggle. Now, CPS and the city — under new leadership — are backing a different, community-led approach: spending at least $40 million to transform Chalmers, Johnson and Collins into science, technology, engineering, art and math, or STEAM, academies. The money is covering building upgrades, professional development, new educator positions and technology in the initiative’s first two years. After years spent promoting better-resourced selective and magnet schools and opening up charters en masse, CPS is hoping to draw families back to the neighborhood schools that many of them abandoned. The district has held up the North Lawndale initiative as an example of working closely with local communities to find solutions to under-enrollment — and as a model for other Chicago neighborhoods that have experienced disinvestment and student losses. “When we are successful in having high-quality programs, what we know from history is that more children will want to come,” former CEO Pedro Martinez said at a press event at Collins last school year. Education experts say the North Lawndale experiment is promising, and locally, the project has drawn a lot of cheerleaders, roughly $1 million in philanthropic backing and no vocal opposition. But solving the city’s enrollment challenge by trying to attract families to neighborhood schools is a daunting and uncertain task. New science and technology programs the district launched in other neighborhoods in recent years have not always brought a surge of students. Chicago still maintains a robust system of school choice, and the school-age population continues to shrink. Without an influx of new students from outside of North Lawndale, growing the three schools could mean siphoning students from other schools with their own enrollment woes. Preliminary data a few weeks into the school year shows flat enrollment, but the project’s supporters say word about it is just getting out. A key challenge is ensuring the cash-strapped district keeps funding the new positions, staff training and facility upgrades after money for the first two years runs out. Ralph Martire, the executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, which has criticized the district’s spending in the past, says it’s tough to argue against programs that could boost student outcomes in high-poverty schools. “There’s never a good reason not to invest in the education of kids who’ve been traditionally underserved,” he said. “The impact on enrollment — that’s really hard to predict. I don’t know that we have the data to give a definitive answer.” In any case, given that the initiative took seven years to launch and that it came with a high price tag, it’s likely not a solution the Chicago school district can readily replicate in other neighborhoods grappling with underenrollment. “The question is how the district is supporting innovative models at scale, not how they’re supporting one-off alternatives alone,” said Carrie Hahnel, a school finance researcher with the nonprofit Bellwether. “Districts are trying all kinds of things — work-based learning, dual enrollment, themed academies, small schools within schools — and yet we still see these declines,” Hahnel said. “The education sector is really struggling right now to figure out what it takes to attract families.” Chalmers is one of three Chicago Public Schools in North Lawndale shifting to STEAM programming, which adds the arts and social studies to the traditional STEM focus of science, technology, engineering and

by Jake Pearson ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Last month, when President Donald Trump signed an executive order “guaranteeing fair banking for all Americans,” he served notice of a coming federal crackdown. Banks who have denied customers access to accounts, loans or credit cards “on the basis of political or religious beliefs or lawful business activities,” he said, would now feel the full force of government regulators. Violators could find themselves facing fines, consent decrees or “other disciplinary measures” in an effort to stamp out “politicized or unlawful debanking.” The cause hits close to home for the president, whose family business sued Capital One earlier this year, alleging, without providing evidence, that hundreds of its accounts were closed in the summer of 2021 “as a result of political discrimination.” Even so, the administration may find it difficult to enforce the president’s order for one simple reason: Seven months of aggressive cost-cutting and government downsizing has left the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, one of the primary regulators that Trump tasked with carrying out his banking directive, a shell of an agency. In fact, CFPB leaders appointed by the president are awaiting final court approval to fire the majority of the bureau’s remaining staffers, a move that would leave just a skeleton crew in place and likely end dozens of investigations into alleged corporate malfeasance. Since February, most staffers have been under a stop-work order that has effectively stalled the bulk of its probes — including ones into debanking. Among them are investigations into why JPMorgan Chase and Citibank freeze and close bank accounts, respectively, according to people familiar with the matters. Work was also suspended on inquiries into whether two little-known companies that banks use to screen prospective customers have wrongly flagged some as too risky to serve, said the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss sensitive matters. Court records show that one of those firms, Regulatory DataCorp, provides reports on customers to Capital One — the very financial institution that Trump’s family business has accused of debanking. (A Capital One spokesperson declined to comment, but the bank has disputed the Trump business’s claims of political discrimination and moved to dismiss its lawsuit, writing in court papers that it was “false” that the bank closed Trump accounts because it disagreed with the president’s views.) In dismantling the CFPB, the Trump administration has portrayed the agency as an industry antagonist and an example of government overreach. But Luke Herrine, a consumer law expert at the University of Alabama School of Law, said that Trump officials, in their haste to shrink the federal bureaucracy, “didn’t really consider whether there were some aspects of the CFPB that might be useful for their projects and what they might have to do to preserve them.” In fact, days before he was sacked by the Trump administration, then-CFPB head Rohit Chopra told a gathering of the conservative Federalist Society that the government needed to do more on debanking and advocated for due process rights for customers as well as more “real, clear, bright-line prohibitions” on what information banks can use in deciding to freeze or close accounts. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. To be sure, Trump’s executive order directs a host of regulatory agencies to take action, and some of them, such as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, have already begun making changes to their bank examination processes to address the president’s concerns. But the CFPB is the only one that is specifically charged with protecting consumers, hundreds of whom file complaints each month alleging they’ve been denied access to the financial system. A spokesperson for the CFPB didn’t respond to an email and call seeking comment. But a recent decision by the agency sheds some light on how bureau officials may be interpreting Trump’s order. Last month, the CFPB cited the order as it dropped a Biden-era probe into a company that provided loans for customers to buy firearms and pets, saying the investigation was politically motivated; the services were marketed to conservatives and Donald Trump Jr. was a board member of the firm’s parent company. Though the company had previously reached deals with regulators in California and Massachusetts over its lending practices, the CFPB’s chief legal officer wrote in a recent letter that the case “represents precisely the kind of unconstitutional targeting” barred by Trump’s debanking directive. Banks make decisions about who to serve based on a number of factors, including the financial and reputational risks of doing business. They also must follow laws and rules requiring them to know their customers and prevent money laundering. But leaders in both political parties agree that Americans are sometimes unfairly denied credit or accounts by big financial institutions. The issue became something of a cause celebre in Republican circles after former President Barack Obama’s Department of Justice launched a crackdown on unscrupulous payday lenders and other high-risk businesses, in part by urging the payment processors and banks that provide those enterprises access to the financial system to be more diligent in looking for signs of fraud. The former president of the American Bankers Association asserted that the program was “compelling banks to deny service to unpopular but perfectly legal industries by threatening penalties,” a message that Republicans amplified as an example of Obama-era government overreach. Their argument gained steam when the firearms industry discovered its retailers had been listed as a high-risk merchant in an obscure FDIC newsletter, according to Dru Stevenson, a professor at South Texas College of Law Houston, who has written that the whole affair has taken on “symbolic and mythic proportions in partisan discourse about regulation.” Many conservative activists and party leaders now claim that some Republicans are being rejected as customers because of their politics — and even at the behest of

by Eli Hager ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.” Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop. DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.” The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen. DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?” Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly. Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor. It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic. DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.” The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer. The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.” In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.” For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records. The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it. They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year. They did none of these things. Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than

by Jodi S. Cohen and Jennifer Smith Richards ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The U.S. Department of Education has pulled funding for programs in eight states aimed at supporting students who have both hearing and vision loss, a move that could affect some of the country’s most vulnerable students. The programs are considered vital in those states but represent only a little over $1 million a year in federal money. Nonetheless, they got caught in the Trump administration’s attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, with an Education Department spokesperson citing concerns about “divisive concepts” and “fairness” in acknowledging the decision to withhold the funding. The funding, which was expected to continue through September 2028, will stop at the end of the month, according to letters from the Education Department to local officials that were obtained by ProPublica. The government gave the programs seven days to ask officials to reconsider the decision. The programs, part of a national network of organizations for every state, provide training and resources to help families and educators support students who are deaf and blind, a condition known as deafblindness that affects the ability to process both auditory and visual information. Those students often have significant communication challenges and need specialized services and schooling. (Education Week first reported that the department had canceled grants related to special education.) Nationally, there are about 10,000 children and young adults, from infants to 21-year-olds, who are deafblind and more than 1,000 in the eight affected states, according to the National Center on Deafblindness. The programs targeted by the Education Department are in Wisconsin, Oregon and Washington, as well as in New England, which is served by a consortium for Massachusetts, Maine, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Vermont. “How low can you go?” said Maurice Belote, co-chair of the National DeafBlind Coalition, which advocates for legislation that supports deafblind children and young adults. “How can you do this to children?” In Oregon, the 2023 grant application for the deafblind program there included a statement about its commitment to address “inequities, racism, bias” and the marginalization of disability groups. It also attached the strategic plan for Portland Public Schools, where the Oregon DeafBlind Project is headquartered, that mentioned the establishment of a Center for Black Student Excellence — which is unrelated to the deafblind project. The Education Department’s letter said that those initiatives were “in conflict with agency policy and priorities.” The director of the Wisconsin Deafblind Technical Assistance Project received a similar letter from the Education Department that said its work was at odds with the federal government’s new focus on “merit.” The letter noted that the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, which oversees the project, had a policy of ensuring that women, minorities and disabled veterans would be included in the hiring process. The Education Department also was concerned about other words in the application, said Adrian Klenz, who works with deafblind adults in the state. He said he has talked with state officials about the discontinuation of the grant. “I was told that apparently the administration is going through past grants and two words were flagged: One was transition and one was privilege,” Klenz said. “Transition — transitioning from childhood to adulthood. Privilege came up because a parent wrote a glowing review of staff that said what a privilege it was to work with them.” ProPublica obtained a copy of the grant application and confirmed that those words were included. In a statement, Education Department Press Secretary Savannah Newhouse told ProPublica that the administration “is no longer allowing taxpayer dollars to go out the door on autopilot — we are evaluating every federal grant to ensure they are in line with the Administration’s policy of prioritizing merit, fairness, and excellence in education.” Newhouse said the Education Department renewed more than 500 special education grants that fund services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. She said the agency decided not to renew fewer than 35. “Many of these use overt race preferences or perpetuate divisive concepts and stereotypes, which no student should be exposed to,” she said, adding that the funds will be put toward other programs. The department started funding state-level programs to help deafblind students more than 40 years ago in response to the rubella epidemic in the late 1960s. While the population is small, it is among the most complex to serve; educators rely on the deafblindness programs for support and training. Deafblind programs help educators learn the most effective ways to teach reading and connect families with state and local resources. The programs also tally the number of students across the country who are affected by deafblindness. Disability advocates, who promote inclusion for people in their communities with disabilities, said they are struggling to reconcile how they can now be under attack for language about inclusion. What’s more, under Joe Biden, who was president when the grant applications were submitted, language about diversity and inclusion efforts was required. The department at the time noted that “deafBlind children have complex needs and are among the most diverse groups of learners served” using federal special-education funds. “We were required by the Biden administration to write a statement around equity,” said Lisa McConachie, of the Oregon DeafBlind Project, which serves 114 students in the state. She said the Trump administration’s view of DEI is different from how inclusion is thought of by disability advocates. “Our passion and our mission is around advocacy for inclusion for kids with disabilities,” she said. “Students in special education are often marginalized in their schools. Students in special education are often excluded.” Lanya Elsa, who lives in Washington and has two sons served by the state’s deafblind program, said the organization has provided strategies for her son’s educators over the years and has helped her connect with other families. She also is the former director of the Idaho program. Elsa said that while the funding loss

by Duaa Eldeib, photography by Sarah Blesener for ProPublica This story contains graphic descriptions of suicide attempts. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The email took Dr. Neal Goldenberg by surprise in a way that few things still do. As a psychiatrist, he had grown accustomed to seeing patients in their darkest moments. As someone who reviewed insurance denials, he was also well-versed in the arguments that hospitals make to try to overturn an insurer’s decision not to pay for treatment. But as soon as he opened the review last October, he knew something was different. It was personal and forceful and meticulous — and it would lead him to do something he had never done before. “Based on the indisputable medical facts, we are unsure why anyone would assert that any part of the insured’s inpatient behavioral health treatment was ‘not medically necessary,’” the appeal letter argued. The battle playing out on the pages before him began in March of 2024. Highmark Blue Cross Blue Shield had refused to pay for a North Carolina man’s monthlong treatment at a psychiatric hospital. The man had been suffering escalating mental health issues, culminating in back-to-back suicide attempts. But using a designation insurers commonly employ when denying coverage, doctors working for Highmark determined the care was not “medically necessary.” Insurance companies deny hundreds of millions of claims a year, and only a tiny percentage of people appeal them. Even fewer take the process to the very end, appealing to a third-party, or external, reviewer like Goldenberg. A recent report found that, on average, less than 1 out of every 10,000 people eligible for an external review actually requested one. Goldenberg, who is based in Cleveland, had initially picked up the extra job a few years ago to help pay down the massive student debt he and his wife, a family doctor, had accumulated during medical school. External reviewers like Dr. Neal Goldenberg have the power to overrule an insurer’s decision to deny coverage for patient care and to force insurance companies to pay for treatment. In that role, he has the power to overrule an insurer’s decision to deny a patient coverage and force the company to pay for treatment. Few things anger him as much as patients being denied the care they needed, which compelled him to continue doing the reviews even after the student loans were paid off. Attached to the appeal letter were nearly 200 pages of records organized by headings and numbers. There was even a glossary of diagnosis codes that are used for billing. Goldenberg’s first thought was that a lawyer had put together the appeal. But the name on the bottom of the letter didn’t belong to a law firm. He spent the next hour and a half reading the file: records from eight separate medical providers; research on suicidal ideation; letters from two psychiatrists supporting the appeal, including one that described the patient’s depression and stress as causing “psychological suffering and functional impact.” Then he did something he hadn’t done in the six years he’s been reviewing cases. He called the name at the bottom of the letter: Teressa Sutton-Schulman. The line rang several times before going to voicemail. “Hello. My name is Neal Goldenberg. I am reviewing an insurance claim for your husband,” he began. Teressa Sutton-Schulman and her husband on their wedding day Sutton-Schulman’s husband, who ProPublica is identifying by his middle initial “L,” had always been anxious and more than a little obsessive. As an adult, financial matters, especially, threw him into a panic and eventually sent him to therapy. By January of last year, after deciding that the therapy wasn’t working, he made an appointment with his primary care doctor, who prescribed him an antidepressant and antianxiety medication. After a few days, L called the doctor to say he felt worse. A panic attack landed him in the emergency room about a week later. Right before Valentine’s Day, he met with a psychiatrist. The way his mind had begun to shuffle through worst-case scenarios was something Sutton-Schulman hadn’t witnessed before. They met at Georgia Tech. L had noticed her at a party. When he walked up to her, she told him she was waiting for someone. “I could be someone,” he responded without missing a beat. She was drawn to his humor and charm. As an introvert, Sutton-Schulman marveled at the way his presence filled a room, floating between people and the things they talked about with ease. He considered her his rock, his best friend, the person he loved most in this world. They shared a mutual admiration for each other’s intellect and drive. He skewed nerdy, playing Dungeons & Dragons in his downtime. Not that he had much. As a rising star in the world of software engineering, work consumed him. He craved success the same way he pushed the boundaries of technology — relentlessly. They decided not to have kids; they had each other and their work. In the early 2000s, they built a software consulting company together. Although Sutton-Schulman trained as a chemist, she went back to school to become a paralegal and the company’s in-house legal expert. More than 20 years into their marriage, they still held hands like it was their first date. When they entered their 50s and faced the prospect of growing old in their three-story house, they decided to buy a ranch home in the same small North Carolina town outside of Raleigh that they had lived in for more than two decades. That decision would forever alter their lives. After more than 20 years of marriage, Sutton-Schulman and L bought a ranch home outside of Raleigh, North Carolina. The pandemic’s housing market, with its skyrocketing prices and houses that sold before they even went on the market, exacerbated his stress. The couple put offers on half a dozen houses. They lost $25,000 in earnest