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Despite an extraordinary effort by the district attorney’s office in Nashville, Tennessee, to reverse a murder conviction that its own prosecutors won more than two decades ago, the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals upheld Russell Maze’s conviction on Friday. The court said there was insufficient evidence to prove his innocence, even though the original medical examiner in the case — whose testimony helped secure the 2004 conviction — recanted last year, concluding that Maze’s son died of natural causes, not abuse. Maze, whose case was the subject of an in-depth article last year by ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, was accused of shaking his 5-week-old son, Alex, who later died.  The court’s 2-1 decision followed a sweeping, yearlong reinvestigation of the case by a special team within the DA’s office known as a conviction-review unit. After consulting with experts in pathology, radiology, neonatology and ophthalmology, the unit concluded that Alex died not from shaking but from an undiagnosed medical condition. Maze, now 60, was arrested after Alex became nonresponsive in the spring of 1999. He has been behind bars ever since and is serving a life sentence.  Maze stood trial twice, and in both proceedings, prosecutors presented evidence they said showed Alex was a victim of shaken baby syndrome. The diagnosing doctor, Suzanne Starling, told jurors that internal bleeding around Alex’s brain and eyes indicated that he endured a ferocious act of violence by shaking. “You would be appalled at what this looked like,” she testified at Maze’s first trial. So forceful was the shaking, she added, that “children who fall from three or four floors onto concrete will get a similar brain injury.” But in the years since Alex was rushed to the emergency room, doctors and researchers found that the symptoms once considered to be the hallmarks of shaken baby syndrome — brain swelling and bleeding around the brain and from the retina — are not always signs of abuse. Long regarded as definitive proof of shaking, they are now understood to have other causes, including accidental falls, illness, infection and congenital disorders. In March 2024, the conviction-review unit — along with attorneys for Maze and his wife, Kaye — presented their findings at a two-day evidentiary hearing. Kaye, who wasn’t home with her husband when their son became unresponsive in 1999, was nonetheless charged with aggravated assault. Told that an open criminal case could hinder her efforts to regain custody of her son, who did not die immediately, she entered an Alford plea to a reduced felony charge — a plea that allows defendants to accept punishment while maintaining their innocence.  At the hearing, District Attorney Glenn Funk urged the court to overturn their convictions. “Every single medical expert, using current science, confirms that Russell and Kaye Maze are actually innocent of the crimes for which they were convicted,” he said. “It is my duty as district attorney to ask the court to vacate these convictions.” The director of his office’s conviction-review unit, Sunny Eaton, was even blunter. “The state got this wrong,” she told Judge Steve Dozier. Dozier had a long history with the case, having presided over Maze’s trials, appeals and postconviction proceedings. (He also signed off on Kaye’s plea agreement, which spared her a prison sentence.) Medical experts testified at the 2024 hearing that Alex’s symptoms were the result of an undiagnosed medical condition. But Dozier gave this new testimony no more weight than the original testimony from witnesses like Starling, writing that it did not reflect a new scientific consensus — only “new ammunition in a ‘battle of the experts.’” The Court of Criminal Appeals’ decision on Friday upheld that ruling, determining that the Mazes “failed to establish that their scientific evidence is truly ‘new’ or that this evidence provides clear and convincing proof that Mr. Maze is actually innocent.” The opinion gave only perfunctory consideration to a watershed moment in the case: In September 2024, the original medical examiner, who determined Alex’s death to be a homicide, said he’d been wrong. Before reaching this conclusion, Dr. Bruce Levy reviewed medical records that the conviction-review unit provided to him — many of which he did not recall having seen before. They included Alex’s records from his premature birth until death and Kaye’s obstetric records, which offered essential context about the health challenges Alex (whose legal name was Bryan) faced before he stopped breathing. “I recant my trial testimony that Bryan Maze suffered from shaken baby syndrome,” Levy stated in a sworn affidavit. “If called to testify now, I would assert Bryan Maze’s brain, at the time of his death, showed no indication, to a reasonable degree of medical certainty, of prior trauma or abuse. Instead, the residual brain lesions viewed at autopsy more likely than not resulted from a natural disease process.” He went on to state that he would now classify the child’s manner of death as “natural.” Levy’s recantation appeared to carry particular weight with one of the three judges on the Court of Criminal Appeals who heard oral arguments in the Maze case. In a separate opinion accompanying Friday’s ruling, Judge Tom Greenholtz devoted 14 pages to arguing that Levy’s reassessment of the evidence demanded serious consideration. “When the state’s own chief medical examiner recants the very testimony that established the cause and manner of death, the effect is not just to raise new questions. If credited, it calls into doubt the foundation of the trial and the reliability of the post-conviction court’s findings, which relied on that same testimony.”  Greenholtz went further, adding, “Dr. Levy’s revised opinion is that no homicide occurred — that the child died of natural causes. This goes beyond mere disagreement among experts about the interpretation of ambiguous findings. It represents a determination by the State’s own chief forensic pathologist that the factual predicate for a homicide prosecution was absent.” Maze can apply for permission to appeal to the Tennessee Supreme Court, though the court grants review in only a small fraction

by Audrey Dutton 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. Three women become choked up as they deliver news in a video posted to social media. “We did it, everybody,” says Leslie Manookian, the woman in the middle. She is a driving force in a campaign that has chipped away at the foundations of modern public health in Idaho. The group had just gotten lawmakers to pass what she called the first true “medical freedom” bill in the nation. “It’s literally landmark,” Manookian said. “It is changing everything.” With Manookian in the video are two of her allies, the leaders of Health Freedom Idaho. It was April 4, hours after the governor signed the Idaho Medical Freedom Act into law. Watch Leslie Manookian and Allies Celebrate Idaho Medical Freedom Act (Health Freedom Idaho via Rumble) Watch video ➜ The act makes it illegal for state and local governments, private businesses, employers, schools and daycares to require anyone to take a vaccine or receive any other “medical intervention.” Whether the law will actually alter day-to-day life in Idaho is an open question, because Idaho already made it easy to get around the few existing vaccination requirements. But it could have a significant effect in other states, where rules aren’t already so relaxed. And it comes at a time when diseases once eradicated from the U.S. through vaccination are making a resurgence. The law runs against one of the hallmarks of modern public health: that a person’s full participation in society depends on their willingness to follow certain rules. (Want to send your child to public school? They’ll need a measles vaccine. Want to work in a retirement community during flu season? You might have to wear a mask.) The new Idaho law flips that on its head. It not only removes the obligation to follow such rules, it makes the rules themselves illegal. The new law sets Idaho apart from even conservative-leaning South Carolina, where two schools recently quarantined more than 150 unvaccinated children after measles arrived. A person can spread measles for four days before symptoms appear. During the South Carolina schools’ quarantine, five students began to show symptoms, but the quarantine kept them from spreading it, the health department said this month. That precaution would now be illegal in Idaho. Idaho’s law caught the attention of people who share Manookian’s belief that — contrary to hundreds of years of public health evidence and rigorous regulation in the U.S. — vaccines are worse than the diseases they prevent. It also caught the attention of people like Jennifer Herricks, a pro-vaccine advocate in Louisiana and advocacy director for American Families for Vaccines. Herricks and her counterparts in other states say that vaccine requirements have “done so much good for our kids and for our communities.” An analysis published last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that routine childhood vaccines prevented more than 1.1 million deaths and 32 million hospitalizations in the U.S. over three decades, saving $540 billion in direct costs and saving society about $2.7 trillion. The analysis was limited; it didn’t account for the lives and money saved by vaccines for flu or RSV, which kill and hospitalize babies and children each year. Idaho’s move was “pretty concerning,” Herricks said, “especially seeing the direction that everything is headed at the federal government.” The law is the culmination of a decade of anti-vaccine activism that got a boost from the pandemic. It’s rooted in a belief system that distrusts institutions — government health agencies, vaccine makers, medical societies and others — on the premise that those institutions seek only money and control. Manookian said in an interview that she believes one person should never be told to risk their health in “the theoretical” service of another. Now, Manookian and her allies have a new goal in their sights: to make Idaho’s legislation a nationwide standard. Idaho was already more permissive than other states when it came to vaccine rules. Parents since at least the 1990s could send unvaccinated children to school if they signed a form saying vaccination went against their religious or personal beliefs. That wasn’t good enough for Idahoans who describe themselves as advocates for health freedom. They worked to shift the paradigm, bit by bit, so that it can be easier now for parents to get a vaccine exemption than to show the school their child is actually vaccinated. In recent years, lawmakers ordered schools and daycare centers to tell parents about the exemptions allowed in Idaho whenever they communicate about immunizations. The state also decided to let parents exempt their kids by writing a note, instead of having to fill out a form — one that, in the past, required them to acknowledge the risks of going unvaccinated. (There is conflicting data on whether these changes truly affected vaccination rates or just led more parents to skip the trouble of handing in vaccine records. Starting in 2021, Idaho schools reported a steady drop in the share of kindergartners with documented vaccinations. Phone surveys of parents, by contrast, showed vaccination rates have been largely unchanged.) An enduring backlash against Idaho’s short-lived COVID-19 mandates gave Manookian’s movement more momentum, culminating this year in what she considered the ultimate step in Idaho’s evolution. Manookian had a previous career in finance in New York and London. She transitioned to work as a homeopath and advocate, ultimately returning to her home state of Idaho. The bill she came up with said that almost nobody can be required to have a vaccine or take any test or medical procedure or treatment in order to go to school, get a job or go about life how they’d like to. In practice, that would mean schools couldn’t send unvaccinated kids home, even during a measles outbreak, and private businesses and daycares couldn’t require people

by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Manuel Nieto Jr. and his sister had just pulled into a gas station to buy cigarettes and Gatorade when he noticed a sheriff’s deputy standing over two Latino men on the ground. Their north Phoenix neighborhood was on alert. Sheriff’s deputies had been targeting day-labor centers in the area and making traffic stops — arresting people who couldn’t prove their immigration status. They had one thing in common: They looked Latino. “No diga nada. Pídale un abogado,” Nieto’s sister, Velia Meraz, yelled to the detained men, according to court testimony. (“Don’t say anything. Ask for an attorney.”) The deputy warned Nieto and Meraz: “You need to get out of here, now.” Nieto drove around the corner to his dad’s auto repair shop as another deputy on a motorcycle followed him, siren and lights on, and patrol vehicles swarmed. Deputies approached — guns drawn. Nieto dialed 911 for help: Officers were harassing him, he would later testify in court. One pulled Nieto from his vehicle. Others pinned him to the ground and handcuffed him. Nieto’s father came running from his shop. “Let my children go,” Manuel Nieto Sr. said. “They’re U.S. citizens. What did they do wrong?” The raid that ensnared Nieto Jr. and Meraz 17 years ago was carried out under a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement program that grants local police powers to check immigration status during traffic stops and other routine encounters. The Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, under then-Sheriff Joe Arpaio, was among the first in the nation to test out ICE’s 287(g) task force program. Since President Donald Trump retook office in January, similar scenes of local officers joining in aggressive immigration arrests have multiplied as ICE has rapidly expanded the 287(g) task force program to deputize local police officers as de facto deportation agents. Moments after Manuel Nieto Sr. stormed out of his north Phoenix auto shop, the deputies left without arresting or citing his children. But Nieto Jr. and Meraz didn’t move on. They joined three other county residents in suing the sheriff’s office, accusing deputies of targeting them solely because they were Latino. A federal judge agreed that the task force’s traffic stops and raids on Hispanic neighborhoods, day-labor centers and other businesses had violated Latinos’ civil and constitutional rights. Even after the ruling, the judge found Arpaio continued to detain people based solely on suspected civil immigration violations. The U.S. Department of Justice also conducted a civil rights investigation into the sheriff’s office’s discriminatory practices, and ICE ended Arpaio’s 287(g) agreement. In 2012, ICE suspended all local police deportation task forces nationwide, only restarting them after Trump began his second term in January. Many Arizonans who lived through Arpaio’s 287(g)-fueled immigration-enforcement campaign see parallels between what happened in Maricopa County and what’s now playing out across the country as local officers join forces with ICE. They also foresee costly troubles for local agencies that follow in Maricopa County’s footsteps, including difficulty regaining the trust of Latino residents whose constitutional rights are violated by local officers. The White House and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions. Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica that he became a target of political persecution for helping enforce immigration laws, which he saw as part of his job. “I’d do it over again,” Arpaio said. “I tell everybody: I didn’t do anything wrong. I had a federal court who was biased against me. And all they could get me out on was a contempt of court? Think of that.” Meanwhile, Maricopa County continues to reckon with its time allowing deputies to act as immigration officers. Under a settlement agreement, the court mandated broad oversight of the sheriff’s office and appointed a monitor to track its compliance. Since then, the law enforcement agency has been required to meticulously document all interactions with the public. In the 12 years since, the department has yet to convince the judge that its deputies don’t racially profile Latino drivers and that it adequately investigates deputies’ alleged misconduct. Salvador Reza is a longtime community organizer who advocates for day laborers in Phoenix. He said his work put him in the crosshairs of Arpaio’s immigration enforcement, leading to his arrest for obstruction during a protest. (The county declined to pursue charges against him.) Because of what happened in Maricopa County, he believes Latinos, including in the communities whose police departments have joined forces with ICE, are now more likely to be racially profiled. “At that time, we were a laboratory,” Reza said. “They did the experiment, and basically now they’re implementing it at the national level.” Guadalupe, Arizona, where most residents are Latino or Native American, became one of Arpaio’s targets for immigration enforcement, which escalated under a 287(g) task force agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (Jesse Rieser for ProPublica) 368 Paragraphs on Required Reforms The lawsuit brought by Nieto Jr., Meraz and the other county residents became known as Melendres v. Arpaio — for Manuel de Jesus Melendres Ortega, a legal resident who was arrested in one of Arpaio’s sweeps. When U.S. District Judge G. Murray Snow certified it as a class-action suit in December 2011, he indicated racial profiling by the sheriff’s office had been so widespread it could have violated the constitutional rights of any Latino in Maricopa County, one-third of the population. The settlement contains 368 paragraphs outlining reforms. They range from creating a policy that bars racial profiling to developing a system that collects data on traffic stops to identify disparities in the race of motorists who are pulled over. To end court oversight, the sheriff’s office must be in “full and effective compliance” with the reforms continuously for three years. The department currently complies with more than 90% of the requirements, according to the monitor, but falls short in

by Rafael Carranza, Arizona Luminaria This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Arizona Luminaria. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Arizona law enforcement agencies are largely rejecting a fast-growing ICE program that lets local officers act as deportation agents — citing the experience of the state’s largest sheriff’s office, which was booted from the program in 2009 after a federal judge found deputies racially profiled and violated the constitutional rights of Latinos. Even in Republican-led communities known for backing immigration measures, law enforcement leaders are steering clear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s 287(g) task force program, which the Trump administration is using to enlist local officers in its mass deportation efforts. Of at least 106 municipal police departments, sheriff’s offices and county attorneys in the state, nine currently have agreements to cooperate with ICE in making arrests, as of Oct. 15. And only four Arizona departments have signed on since January, amid a national recruitment campaign that has prompted more than 900 agencies to join. The program’s explosive nationwide growth follows President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order that, among other things, called for local law enforcement to “perform the functions of immigration officers.” Local police have three ways of participating in the 287(g) program. The first two are through the Jail Enforcement and Warrant Service Officer models, which restrict local collaboration with ICE to people who’ve already been booked into their jails. The third way is through the Task Force Model, in which local officers “serve as a force multiplier” in federal immigration enforcement “during routine police duties,” according to ICE. ICE did not respond to Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica’s questions. Half of the agreements in Arizona are for jail enforcement, including the state’s prison system, the only statewide agency. It signed on in 2020. The Republican sheriffs of two Arizona counties that border Mexico, Yuma and Cochise, signed 287(g) warrant service agreements for their jails this year, along with Navajo County, in the far northeast part of the state. The only local agency in Arizona to sign a task force agreement since ICE revived them in January is the County Attorney’s Office of Pinal County, a Republican stronghold sandwiched between the Phoenix and Tucson metro areas. ICE, under the Obama administration, suspended all task force agreements in 2012. The move followed a Department of Justice investigation that found the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which had a task force agreement under former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, used “discriminatory policing practices including unlawful stops, detentions and arrests of Latinos.” In 2013, a federal judge ruled that under Arpaio the sheriff’s office had discriminated against Latinos during immigration enforcement operations, violating their Fourth and 14th amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures and to equal protection under the law, respectively. “I’ve never been guilty of anything,” Arpaio told Arizona Luminaria and ProPublica, despite the judge’s rulings. “They went after me. But that’s OK. And you can tell your audience I’ll do it again.” Pinal County Attorney Brad Miller, a Republican, said he intends to certify four deputies under the task force agreement he signed in August. Miller said these investigators will process immigration violations involving people they encounter during child abuse and drug investigations, instead of waiting on ICE officers. He said he does not foresee them participating in ICE raids. Miller prosecuted sex crimes in Maricopa County when Arpaio’s 287(g) task force agreement was in effect. He said he remembers the “chaos that ensued from that” and doesn’t want it repeated in Pinal County. “We have zero intention and we will not be participating in any immigration raids or task forces. I just want to make that clear.” Miller said he spoke with federal officials his agency works with before signing the task force agreement. “‘Would we be required to join specifically an immigration task force?’ That was my first question, and the answer came back as no,” he said. “If that were one of the prerequisites, I was not going to do the program.” Starting in October, ICE began reimbursing local agencies with task force agreements for the salaries of certified officers and paying “performance awards” of up to $1,000 per officer. Miller said money didn’t influence his decision. None of his four deputies will be assigned full time to the 287(g) agreement, he said, only as needed in the course of their other task force investigations. Santa Cruz County Sheriff David Hathaway, a Democrat, believes the financial incentives are a federal ploy to pull local officers away from their everyday duties and direct them to immigration enforcement. “I consider the program to be illegal,” said Hathaway, whose county shares a border with Mexico. He bases this view on court rulings on Arizona’s landmark 2010 anti-illegal immigration law. The “show me your papers” law was the toughest state immigration law in the nation at the time. But the Supreme Court struck down most of its provisions, leaving in place only one that allows local police to check immigration status as long as it doesn’t prolong the public’s interaction with officers. “The Supreme Court said this is not in the realm of local law enforcement,” Hathaway said. “This is entirely a federal issue.” States including Texas and Florida have since enacted laws to more aggressively curb illegal immigration. Florida was also among the first to require all county law enforcement agencies to sign on to the 287(g) program. Other states, largely in the Southeast, have followed suit. Arizona’s Republican-controlled Legislature this year passed a similar requirement for its local law enforcement agencies called the Arizona ICE Act. But the state’s Democratic governor, Katie Hobbs, vetoed it. Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos, a Democrat who runs southern Arizona’s largest sheriff’s department, has vowed not to involve his deputies in deportation arrests. The county shares a 130-mile border with Mexico. Nanos has said his department is instead focused on preventing crime, and to do that it’s imperative his deputies build

by Andy Kroll ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Join us Nov. 5 for a virtual discussion about our yearlong investigation into Russell Vought. Register now. On the second day of the federal government shutdown, President Donald Trump shared an AI-generated video set to the classic song “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” by Blue Öyster Cult. The star of that video, which quickly went viral, was Russell Vought, the president’s top budget adviser. More than that, Vought is the architect of Trump’s broader plan to fire civil servants, freeze government programs and dismantle entire agencies, and he’s a big reason the second Trump administration has been more effective at accomplishing its goals than the first. In the video shared by Trump, Vought appeared as the scythe-wielding Grim Reaper of Washington, D.C. Vought’s title is director of the Office of Management and Budget. The OMB directorship is one of the most powerful jobs in Washington, and Vought has used his position to wage a quiet war to change the shape of the entire U.S. government. In Vought’s hands, OMB has acted as a choke point for the funding that Congress approves and agencies rely on to run the government. While he tends to operate behind the scenes as much as possible, his influence in Trump’s second administration is so pronounced that people have described him as akin to a shadow president. Here are some of the key things you should know about Vought. Read ProPublica’s full investigation here. (Vought declined to be interviewed for the article. A spokesperson for him at OMB would not comment on the record in response to a detailed list of questions.) 1. Vought went from the mail room to becoming the chief antagonist of his own party. A native of Trumbull, Connecticut, and the son of an electrician father and a mother who spent decades in public education before helping to launch a Christian school, Vought got his first job in D.C. politics working in the mail room for Republican Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas, a fierce budget hawk known for criticizing members of his own party for breaking what he viewed as core conservative principles. As Vought rose through the GOP ranks, eventually going on to advise then-Rep. Mike Pence, he grew disillusioned with members of his party who claimed to care about balanced budgets and spending cuts yet voted to approve bills loaded with pork-barrel spending and corporate giveaways. In 2010, he quit Congress and helped launch an offshoot of the Heritage Foundation think tank called Heritage Action for America, which was tasked with strong-arming congressional Republicans to act more conservatively. “I think he thought the Republican leadership was a bigger impediment to conservative causes than Democrats were,” a former Capitol Hill colleague of Vought’s said. 2. OMB’s massive power supercharges Vought’s influence. While the Office of Management and Budget is part of the White House, Vought is a member of Trump’s cabinet along with the secretary of defense and attorney general. OMB director has little of the cachet of those jobs, but it plays a vital role. Every penny appropriated by Congress first passes through the OMB. It also reviews all significant regulations proposed by federal agencies, vets executive orders before the president signs them and issues workplace policies for more than 2 million federal employees. “Every goddam thing in the executive branch goes through OMB,” explained Sam Bagenstos, a former OMB official during the Biden administration. 3. Vought’s early work at OMB helped lead to Trump’s first impeachment. This isn’t Vought’s first stint as OMB director; he held the same position during the first Trump administration. In 2019, after the Trump White House pressured Ukraine’s government to investigate then-candidate Joe Biden and his son Hunter, it asked Vought, then acting director, to freeze $214 million in congressionally approved security assistance for Ukraine. He obliged. This impoundment, later deemed illegal by the Government Accountability Office, would trigger congressional investigations and, ultimately, Trump’s first impeachment. During that process, Vought refused to cooperate with investigators, calling the probe a “sham process that is designed to relitigate the last election.” After the attempt to freeze the Ukraine funds ultimately failed, Vought and Mark Paoletta, an attorney and close ally of Vought’s, spent the years between Trump’s presidencies developing a legal argument that not only are such impoundments legal, but there is a long history of presidents using the power. (Legal experts have disputed Vought’s version of that history.) 4. Vought played a surprising role in popularizing the phrase “woke and weaponized.” In 2021, Vought launched the Center for Renewing America, a think tank devoted to keeping the MAGA movement alive and preparing for a second Trump presidency. According to previously unreported recordings obtained by ProPublica, Vought accepted an assignment from Trump to come up with a way for conservatives to counter Black Lives Matter. He popularized the concept of “woke and weaponized” government — a phrase embraced by GOP politicians and activists to disparagingly label policies, people and even agencies that didn’t fit with the MAGA agenda. “If you’re watching television and the words ‘woke and weaponized’ come out of a politician’s mouth, you can know that this is coming … from the strategies we’re putting out,” Vought boasted in a recording obtained by ProPublica. When Vought’s think tank released a federal budget blueprint in 2022, calling for $9 trillion in cuts over 10 years, the word “woke” appeared 77 times across its 103 pages. 5. Vought’s vision for what would become Project 2025 began during Trump’s first term. In 2017, while an adviser at OMB, Vought played a lead role in trying to implement a Trump executive order that called for a top-to-bottom reorganization of the federal government. A former OMB senior staffer said Vought initially wanted to eliminate the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and to fold the Department of Education and the

by Megan O’Matz 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. In just over eight months, the second Trump administration has made a rapid succession of political hires and policy decisions at the U.S. Department of Education that could spur profound changes in the way schools are operated and children learn. After years of advocating to expand private and religious education and homeschooling, using tax dollars, a cadre of conservative activists is in a position to push forward its agenda. Some of its policies are already undermining public schools, which it has denigrated as unsuccessful and out of step with Christian values, a ProPublica investigation found. In many communities, public schools are valued hubs for community life and services, including meals, socializing and counseling. More than 80% of students are enrolled in traditional public schools, which must serve all children, including those with disabilities. The administration, however, views public schools as a monopoly that should be broken up. “Millions of young Americans are trapped in failing schools, subjected to radical anti-American ideology,” Education Department Secretary Linda McMahon claimed immediately after taking office. She and others in the administration believe that progressive activists have led schools to focus too much on “woke” policies rather than on rigorous academic standards. Agency officials and spokespeople declined to speak to ProPublica. Here are five ways the Education Department under McMahon is creating profound change in public schools. 1. Encouraging an exodus McMahon and President Donald Trump want to expand tax-funded school choice options, giving more families the financial means to leave public schools. Trump pushed Congress to pass, and signed into law, a new federal tax credit to finance the first national school voucher program, set to open to families on Jan. 1, 2027. The Education Department has also encouraged school districts to spend some federal money meant for disadvantaged students on services from private providers and on children from low-income families who live within district boundaries but attend private schools. Public school leaders say they’ve already watched students transfer out to private and charter schools in recent years — and with them, they’ve lost essential per-pupil funding. They worry that voucher expansion will cause further damage to their budgets and threaten their survival. Occasionally, McMahon has spoken positively of public schools — for example, praising some for literacy gains. But more often, and more emphatically, she portrays them as unsuccessful, as do her advisers. Education Department adviser Lindsey Burke came from The Heritage Foundation, where she co-authored the education chapter of Project 2025, the policy playbook for the Trump administration. It calls for tax-funded education accounts so parents can customize their children’s schooling. Years ago, Burke said she hoped that one day “we will marvel at the fact that we once assigned children to government-run schools consigning the poorest to schools that were often failing and sometimes unsafe.” 2. Cutting federal funding In a move that affects public school students across the country, the department has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in grant funding for a variety of programs, including for mental health professionals and for training and supporting new teachers. More cuts are likely. The administration’s proposed education budget for fiscal 2026 calls for combining 18 existing grant programs — including funds for rural schools and homeless students — into a single $2 billion block grant to be allocated to states. That is about $4.5 billion less than if the grants survived alone. Overall, the Trump administration has proposed reducing federal spending on education by 15% in the 2026 budget. Congress has not passed a budget yet, and the government is shut down. 3. Injecting God into the classroom Department officials have decried what they view as liberal indoctrination in public schools — what one top leader describes as a “Marxist and anti-God and anti-family agenda.” They now are pursuing policies that align with conservative Christian values, including opposing protections for transgender students and restricting materials about sexuality. Early this year, the department notified schools it would follow Trump’s executive order stipulating that there are “two sexes, male and female.” McMahon has made Meg Kilgannon, who advocates for more Christian leadership in school districts, a top adviser. Kilgannon has decried the removal of spirituality as a topic from classrooms, arguing that “if we’re not going to discuss our identity as Christians,” schools will push “racial identities” and “sexual identities” on students instead. In a speech on Sept. 8 at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., Trump announced that the Education Department “will soon issue new guidance protecting the right to prayer in our public schools.” He said that the Bible is “an important part of the American story” and that he intends to “protect the Judeo-Christian principles of our founding, and we will protect them with vigor.” 4. Promoting curriculum choices The federal government historically has not dictated curriculum choices, and McMahon has stressed that she thinks what is taught in schools is best left to local communities. Yet the Education Department is prioritizing patriotic education, promoting civics lessons that present American history and the nation’s founding principles in an “inspiring” manner. History should portray an “ennobling characterization” of the country’s past, the department said. Critics contend that the administration’s aim is to present a sanitized version of history, downplaying bitter episodes, including racial oppression and sexism. The department has directed states and districts to avoid material that could make white students feel “intrinsic guilt” based on the oppressive acts of past generations. McMahon also supported the rights of parents to pull their children out of classes they find objectionable, such as those involving books with gay characters or themes. 5. Weakening civil rights protections The department is using its Office for Civil Rights to press public schools to drop programs and policies designed to help Black or Hispanic students. The office has launched investigations against school districts for teaching

by Anjeanette Damon, ProPublica, and Dayvid Figler, City Cast Las Vegas 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. Nevada state regulators have accused Elon Musk’s Boring Co. of violating environmental regulations nearly 800 times in the last two years as it digs a sprawling tunnel network beneath Las Vegas for its Tesla-powered “people mover.” The company’s alleged violations include starting to dig without approval, releasing untreated water onto city streets and spilling muck from its trucks, according to a new document obtained by City Cast Las Vegas and ProPublica. The Sept. 22 cease-and-desist letter from the state Bureau of Water Pollution Control alleged repeated violations of a settlement agreement that the company had entered into after being fined five years ago for discharging groundwater into storm drains without a permit. That agreement, signed by a Boring executive in 2022, was intended to compel the company to comply with state water pollution laws. Instead, state inspectors documented nearly 100 alleged new violations of the agreement. The letter also accuses the company of failing to hire an independent environmental manager to regularly inspect its construction sites. State regulators counted 689 missed inspections. The Boring Co. is disputing the violation letter, a state spokesperson said. The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection could have fined the company more than $3 million under the 2022 agreement, which allowed for daily penalties to be assessed. But regulators knocked down the total penalty to $242,800. For example, the bulk of the total possible fine was linked to the alleged missed inspections, but the agency chose to levy just a $10,000 penalty for each of the company’s 11 permits. “Given the extraordinary number of violations, NDEP has decided to exercise its discretion to reduce the penalty to two $5,000 violations per permit, which it believes offers a reasonable penalty that will still serve to deter future non-compliance conduct,” regulators wrote in the letter. Payment of the penalty isn’t required until after the dispute resolution process is complete, a state spokesperson said. In the letter, the agency reminded the company that it “reserves the right to direct TBC to cease and desist construction activities” under the agreement. In the past, Musk has espoused paying penalties rather than waiting for approvals as a way of doing business. ​​“Environmental regulations are, in my view, largely terrible,” he said at an event with the libertarian Cato Institute last year. “You have to get permission in advance, as opposed to, say, paying a penalty if you do something wrong, which I think would be much more effective.” Neither Musk nor Boring responded to requests for comment for this story. The Sept. 22 letter documents the latest in a string of alleged violations of state and local regulations by The Boring Co. since it began construction in 2019 of the Loop project, which uses driver-operated Teslas to move people through the tunnels. The project, initially a 0.8-mile underground route connecting the sections of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority campus to each other, has grown to a planned 68 miles of tunnels and 104 stations across the Las Vegas Valley. It’s carried out in partnership with the LVCVA, the tourism board best known for the “What Happens Here, Stays Here” slogan. Boring uses a machine known as Prufrock to dig the 12-foot-diameter tunnels, applying chemical accelerants as part of the process. For each foot the company bores, it removes about 6 cubic yards of soil along with any groundwater, according to a company document prepared for state environmental officials. Because it is privately funded and receives no federal money, the project is exempt from many exhaustive governmental vetting and environmental analysis requirements. But it is required to obtain state permits to ensure the waste does not contaminate the environment or local water sources. A January story by ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas documented how the company worked to escape county and state oversight requirements by arguing its project didn’t fit under existing regulations and promising to hold itself accountable through independent audits — all while being cited for permitting and water pollution violations in 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. Last year, the company successfully lobbied to be exempted from holding a county “amusement and transportation system” permit, arguing instead for an oversight plan that removed multiple layers of inspection. Workers have complained of chemical burns from the waste material generated by the tunneling process, and firefighters must decontaminate their equipment after conducting rescues from the project sites. The company was fined more than $112,000 by Nevada’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration in late 2023 after workers complained of “ankle-deep” water in the tunnels, muck spills and burns. The Boring Co. has contested the violations. Just last month, a construction worker suffered a “crush injury” after being pinned between two 4,000-foot pipes, according to police records. Firefighters used a crane to extract him from the tunnel opening. After ProPublica and City Cast Las Vegas published their January story, both the CEO and the chairman of the LVCVA board criticized the reporting, arguing the project is well-regulated. As an example, LVCVA CEO Steve Hill cited the delayed opening of a Loop station by local officials who were concerned that fire safety requirements weren’t adequate. Board chair Jim Gibson, who is also a Clark County commissioner, agreed the project is appropriately regulated. “We wouldn’t have given approvals if we determined things weren’t the way they ought to be and what it needs to be for public safety reasons,” Gibson said, according to the Las Vegas Review Journal. “Our sense is we’ve done what we need to do to protect the public.” Asked for a response to the new proposed fines, an LVCVA spokesperson said, “We won’t be participating in this story.” The repeated allegations that the company is violating regulations — including the bespoke regulatory arrangement agreed to by the