ProPublica

by Renee Dudley, with research by Doris Burke ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Microsoft, as a provider of cloud services to the U.S. government, is required to regularly submit security plans to officials describing how the company will protect federal computer systems. Yet in a 2025 submission to the Defense Department, the tech giant left out key details, including its use of employees based in China, the top cyber adversary of the U.S., to work on highly sensitive department systems, according to a copy obtained by ProPublica. In fact, the Microsoft plan viewed by ProPublica makes no reference to the company’s China-based operations or foreign engineers at all. The document belies Microsoft’s repeated assertions that it disclosed the arrangement to the federal government, showing exactly what was left out as it sold its security plan to the Defense Department. The Pentagon has been investigating the use of foreign personnel by IT contractors in the wake of reporting by ProPublica last month that exposed Microsoft’s practice. Our work detailed how Microsoft relies on “digital escorts” — U.S. personnel with security clearances — to supervise the foreign engineers who maintain the Defense Department’s cloud systems. The department requires that people handling sensitive data be U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Microsoft’s security plan, dated Feb. 28 and submitted to the department’s IT agency, distinguishes between personnel who have undergone and passed background screenings to access its Azure Government cloud platform and those who have not. But it omits the fact that workers who have not been screened include non-U.S. citizens based in foreign countries. “Whenever non-screened personnel request access to Azure Government, an operator who has been screened and has access to Azure Government provides escorted access,” the company said in its plan. The document also fails to disclose that the screened digital escorts can be contractors hired by a staffing company, not Microsoft employees. ProPublica found that escorts, in many cases former military personnel selected because they possess active security clearances, often lack the expertise needed to supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. Microsoft has told ProPublica that escorts “are provided specific training on protecting sensitive data” and preventing harm. Microsoft’s reference to the escort model comes two-thirds of the way into the 125-page document, known as a “System Security Plan,” in several paragraphs under the heading “Escorted Access.” Government officials are supposed to evaluate these plans to determine whether the security measures disclosed in them are acceptable. In interviews with ProPublica, Microsoft has maintained that it disclosed the digital escorting arrangement in the plan, and that the government approved it. But Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other government officials have expressed shock and outrage over the model, raising questions about what, exactly, the company disclosed as it sought to win and keep government cloud computing contracts. None of the parties involved, including Microsoft and the Defense Department, commented on the omissions in this year’s security plan. But former federal officials now say that the obliqueness of the disclosure, which ProPublica is reporting for the first time, may explain that disconnect and likely contributed to the government’s acceptance of the practice. Microsoft previously told ProPublica that its security documentation to the government, going back years, contained similar wording regarding escorts. Former Defense Department Chief Information Officer John Sherman, who said he was unfamiliar with the digital escorting process before ProPublica’s reporting, called it a “case of not asking the perfect question to the vendor, with every conceivable prohibited condition spelled out.” In a LinkedIn post about ProPublica’s investigation, Sherman said such a question “would’ve smoked out this crazy practice of ‘digital escorts.’” His post continued: “The DoD can’t be exposed in this way. The company needs to admit this was wrong and commit to not doing things that don’t pass a common sense test.” Experts have said allowing China-based personnel to perform technical support and maintenance on U.S. government computer systems poses major security risks. Laws in China grant the country’s officials broad authority to collect data, and experts say it is difficult for any Chinese citizen or company to meaningfully resist a direct request from security forces or law enforcement. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has deemed China the “most active and persistent cyber threat to U.S. Government, private-sector, and critical infrastructure networks.” Following ProPublica’s reporting last month, Microsoft said that it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud computing systems. The company did not respond directly to questions from ProPublica about the security plan and instead issued a statement defending the escort practice. “Escorted sessions were tightly monitored and supplemented by layers of security mitigations,” the statement said. “Based on the feedback we’ve received, however, we have updated our processes to prevent any involvement of China based engineers.” Sen. Tom Cotton, a Republican who chairs the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, wrote to Hegseth last month suggesting that the Defense Department needed to strengthen oversight of its contractors and that current processes “fail to account for the growing Chinese threat.” “As we learn more about these ‘digital escorts’ and other unwise — and outrageous — practices used by some DoD partners, it is clear the Department and Congress will need to take further action,” Cotton wrote. He continued: “We must put in place the protocols and processes to adopt innovative technology quickly, effectively, and safely.” Since 2011, the government has used the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, known as FedRAMP, to evaluate the security practices of commercial companies that want to sell cloud services to the federal government. The Defense Department also has its own guidelines, which include the citizenship requirement for people handling sensitive data. Both FedRAMP and the Defense Department rely on “third party assessment organizations” to evaluate whether vendors meet the government’s cloud security requirements. While the government considers these organizations “independent,” they are hired and paid directly by the

by Pratheek Rebala, Annie Waldman and Brandon Roberts ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The Trump administration has refused to reveal how many workers have left federal health agencies amid a massive purge. Without official figures, ProPublica turned to a federal employee directory to quantify the impact. Several news outlets — including ProPublica — have used this directory to show who is entering and leaving the federal government, spot political appointments and identify members of the Department of Government Efficiency. According to multiple former and current employees and health agency documents, the HHS employee directory helps workers locate and authenticate their colleagues. HHS did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions. To understand staffing changes over time, ProPublica has been regularly archiving the HHS directory since before President Donald Trump returned to office. Unlike official government worker datasets, which are often months out of date and incomplete, directory data provides a more current picture of who is, and isn’t, employed at the nation’s largest health agencies. The HHS directory covers staff in the department’s main office and across more than a dozen health agencies and institutions, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health. The directory provides a worker’s name, email address, agency, office and job title. Some employees are flagged as “non-government,” indicating they may be working on contract or have another temporary status. While official HHS employment figures suggest its workforce is about 82,000 employees, the directory contained nearly 140,000 entries. The difference is explained by nongovernment workers such as contractors, fellows, interns and guest researchers. Roughly 30,000 records in the directory were explicitly marked as nongovernment, but this label was far from comprehensive. We found hundreds of workers who had titles that suggested they were contractors but were not flagged as nongovernment. While these workers were not directly employed by the government as civil servants, we included them in our analysis because they are crucial to agency operations, particularly at research-heavy institutions such as the NIH, FDA and CDC. We excluded interns, students and volunteers, as well as directory entries that were tied to group mailboxes or conference rooms rather than individual people. To analyze turnover, we tracked when a worker’s email address first appeared and last appeared. When an email address disappeared, we marked it as a departure. When a new one appeared, we marked it as a hire. To quantify cuts to the workforce, we counted the number of entries that appeared in the directory before Jan. 25 and disappeared on or after that date. We chose Jan. 25 to account for delays we observed in updates to the directory. Starting the analysis a few days after Trump was sworn in should exclude most political appointees who left at the end of the Biden administration from our analysis, but there may be cases where a political appointee was dropped from the directory after this date. Our analysis includes departures through Aug. 16. While our analysis is intended to understand workforce cuts, not all departures are layoffs. Workers may have left for other reasons, including retirements, resignations, buyouts and contract cuts. To test the directory’s accuracy, we spot-checked employment status using LinkedIn, other open-source records and interviews. While we did not find up-to-date, publicly available profiles that matched the directory for every person we searched, we were able to confirm the employment status for dozens of current and former workers. Some high-profile departures enabled us to test our methodology: Dr. Vinay Prasad, who was appointed to lead the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research in May, left the agency in July and resumed his role again in August. The directory data accurately reflected each of these employment changes. We also wanted to understand the role of the lost workers and how their departures would affect their agencies. For this, we relied on an “organization” field in the directory, which allowed us to link employees to their specific office within HHS using public organization charts. At large agencies, this field proved incredibly valuable to understanding the exact divisions where the losses took place. Job titles in the directory are inconsistent, so we used a local large language model classifier to assign each title into one of four major groups: science/health, regulators/compliance, tech/IT and other. We manually reviewed the job titles in each category and looked up former employees on LinkedIn to confirm their employment status and nature of the work they performed. Our totals for the NIH are an undercount because 78% of entries there do not list a role. We relied on workers’ most recently listed role, which may reflect a job a person had for only a short time. The employee directory is the best data we have access to, but it is not without limitations. Our understanding is that each record represents an individual worker. There are some cases where our analysis counts a worker twice because they were seen in two agencies or had multiple email addresses, likely due to a name change or clerical fix. Our review of these records suggests these types of duplicates are uncommon. Our rigorous review found some instances where the directory is not up to date. We excluded the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services from our analysis because its directory has not received regular updates. We also excluded the Indian Health Service because it has an abnormally high rate of churn. We are not counting about 2,500 entries that can be found in search but that are missing a detailed record or do not list an email. Sophie Chou contributed data reporting.

by Drew Shaw, Fort Worth Report ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Officials in a large North Texas county decided this week to cut more than 100 Election Day polling sites and reduce the number of early voting locations, amid growing concern about GOP efforts to limit voting access ahead of next year’s midterm elections. The 3-2 vote on Tuesday by commissioners in Tarrant County, which includes Fort Worth, came one day after President Donald Trump vowed to end the use of mail-in ballots. The president lacks the unilateral power to decide how individual states run elections, but his declaration speaks to long-brewing and unfounded claims by some conservatives that the country’s electoral system is insecure and vulnerable to widespread fraud. Trump has repeatedly and falsely asserted that he won the 2020 presidential election instead of Joe Biden. Tarrant County Judge Tim O’Hare, who heads up the commissioners court, has also raised numerous questions about the security of local elections, helping to launch an electoral integrity unit in the county after he became judge in 2022. As of last summer, however, the unit had received fewer than 100 allegations of voter fraud. He and fellow Republican commissioners also cut funding to provide free bus rides to the polls for low-income residents. “I don’t believe it’s the county government’s responsibility to try to get more people out to the polls,” O’Hare said at the time. And commissioners prohibited outside organizations from registering voters inside county buildings after Tarrant County GOP leaders raised concerns about what they said were left-leaning groups holding registration drives. (ProPublica and The Texas Tribune have previously written about O’Hare’s political influence in North Texas.) On Tuesday, O’Hare voted with the two Republican commissioners on the court to reduce the number of polling sites in the county to 216, down from 331 in 2023. The decision also cut down the number of early voting sites. County officials said the move was to save money, as they historically see low voter turnout in nonpresidential elections. Throughout the meeting, O’Hare repeatedly emphasized that the cuts were intended to make the election more efficient. He argued that both the switch to county-wide voting in 2019, which allows voters to cast a ballot at any polling site in the county, and the expected low turnout made the cuts appropriate. “I would venture to guess 99% of the public cannot name a single thing on (the 2025 ballot),” he said during the meeting. Fewer voting sites means fewer voters, Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston, told the Report. “If you move a polling place farther away from someone’s house, then they’re less likely to vote because you’ve increased the cost of voting,” said Rottinghaus, who has studied poll placement and its impact on turnout. “The cost can be your time. It can be your gas.” The county’s move falls in line with a national trend that generally sees Republican-led states and localities “restrain and restrict” how voting operates — often in the name of discouraging illegal voting or, in Tarrant County’s recent case, cutting costs, Rottinghaus said. This could look like reducing voting locations or shortening early voting hours, he said. Texas has led multiple efforts to make going to the polls more difficult, he said, such as making mail-in ballots harder to obtain and requiring photo IDs when casting a ballot. No single law dramatically impacts voter turnout, Rottinghaus said, rather, it’s the collective of ever-changing policies that can discourage people from voting. “The more you move around how voting occurs, like the hours and the locations, the harder it is for voters to understand exactly what they’re supposed to do and when,” he said. “A confused voter is usually a nonvoter.” This is not the first time Tarrant County has been at the forefront of changing political headwinds. Earlier this summer, the commissioners, led by O’Hare, voted along party lines to redraw the county precincts; such changes usually happen after the decennial census rather than in the middle of the decade. O’Hare admitted the goal of the redrawn maps was to favor Republican candidates. “This is about Republican versus Democrat, period,” O’Hare told Dallas television station WFAA ahead of the commissioners’ June 3 vote. “If it passes with one of the maps that I would want to see pass, it’s a very strong likelihood that we will have three Republicans on the Commissioners Court.” In July, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott added redistricting to the agenda of a special legislative session — a step he was apparently reluctant to take until he received a call from Trump to discuss the issue, the Tribune reported. The proposal has sparked a national fight over the redrawing of congressional maps. On Wednesday, the GOP-led Texas House took an initial vote adopting a new map designed to increase the number of Republican seats in the U.S. Congress. Abbott has also fanned concerns about allegations of illegal voting, last year announcing the removal of more than 1 million ineligible voters from the state’s rolls, including more than 6,500 potential noncitizens. An investigation by ProPublica, the Tribune and Votebeat, however, found that the number of alleged noncitizens the governor cited was likely inflated and, in some cases, wrong. Concerns About the Cuts More than three dozen speakers at Tuesday’s meeting denounced the move to cut polling sites and early voting locations, with some raising concerns that it amounted to the suppression of Black, Hispanic and college-age voters. Several speakers called the cuts a more extreme version of O’Hare’s failed effort to remove eight early voting locations at colleges last year. Only one person spoke in favor of the reductions. Sabrina Ball, who opposed reducing the polling sites, said she has worked as an election judge in Republican Commissioner Manny Ramirez’s district in northwest Tarrant County. She said she’s seen firsthand people working hard to find the time

by Sharon Lerner ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Erin McCanlies was listening to the radio one morning in April when she heard Robert F. Kennedy Jr. promising to find the cause of autism by September. The secretary of Health and Human Services said he believed an environmental toxin was responsible for the dramatic increase in the condition and vowed to gather “the most credible scientists from all over the world” to solve the mystery. Nothing like that has ever been done before, he told an interviewer. McCanlies was stunned. The work had been done. “That’s exactly what I’ve been doing!” she said to her husband, Fred. As an epidemiologist at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, which Kennedy oversees, McCanlies had spent much of the past two decades studying how parents’ exposure to workplace chemicals affects the chance that they will have a child with autism. Just three weeks earlier, she’d been finalizing her fourth major paper on the topic when Kennedy eliminated her entire division. Kennedy has also overseen tens of millions of dollars in cuts to federal funding for research on autism, including its environmental causes. For 20 years, Kennedy has espoused the debunked theory that autism is caused by vaccines, dismissing evidence to the contrary by arguing that vaccine manufacturers, researchers and regulators all have an interest in obscuring their harms. He remains skeptical of the scientists who have been funded by his own agency to study the neurodevelopmental condition. “We need to stop trusting the experts,” he told right-wing host Tucker Carlson in a June interview, going on to suggest that previous studies that found no relationship between vaccines and autism were marred by “trickery” and researchers’ self-interest. In contrast, Kennedy told Carlson that under his leadership, and with a new, federally funded $50 million autism research initiative, “We’re going to get real studies done for the first time.” Some autism researchers fear that the effort will manipulate data to blame the condition on vaccines. “Kennedy has never expressed an open mind, an open attitude towards what are the fundamental causes of autism,” said Helen Tager-Flusberg, a Boston University psychologist who founded a coalition of scientists concerned about his approach to autism. In a June statement, the group said the initiative lacks transparency and that Kennedy “casually ignores decades of high quality research that preceded his oversight.” As Kennedy promotes his new initiative, ProPublica has found that he has also taken aim at the traditional scientific approach to autism, shutting down McCanlies’ lab and stripping funding from more than 50 autism-related studies. Meanwhile, he has stood by as the Trump administration encourages the departure of hundreds of federal employees with experience studying the harm caused by environmental threats and rolls back protections from pollution and chemicals, including some linked to autism. Kennedy did not respond to requests for an interview, and an HHS spokesperson did not answer specific questions from ProPublica, including those related to the concerns of the coalition of autism scientists. “Under the leadership of Secretary Kennedy, HHS is taking action on autism as the public health emergency it is,” the spokesperson wrote. “NIH is fully committed to leaving no stone unturned in confronting this catastrophic epidemic — employing only gold-standard, evidence-based science. The Department will follow the science, wherever it leads.” Genetic factors account for a significant portion of autism cases. Research like the kind McCanlies and other government-funded scientists have conducted over the past two decades has established that environmental factors have a role, too, and can combine with genetics. Multiple factors can even converge within the same individual. Some of those environmental risks could be reduced by the very measures the Trump administration is rolling back. Kennedy would have been well positioned to advocate for researchers looking into the environmental causes of autism while sitting on President Donald Trump’s cabinet. The nephew of President John F. Kennedy and son of his former attorney general, Bobby, Kennedy spent decades as an attorney battling some of the world’s most notorious corporate polluters. Once heralded by Time Magazine as one of the “heroes for the planet,” he railed against actions by the first Trump administration, complaining in his 2017 introduction to the book “Climate in Crisis” that 33 years’ worth of his work was “reduced to ruins as the president mounted his assault on science and environmental protection.” But recently he has remained publicly silent as the Environmental Protection Agency halts research and weakens regulations on air pollution and chemicals, including some McCanlies and her colleagues have identified as possible factors in the development of autism. “I don’t think he’s aware of my work,” McCanlies said, “or most of the literature that’s been published on what the causes of autism are.” McCanlies was studying how a toxic chemical, beryllium, causes chronic lung inflammation in workers when she began to think seriously about autism. It was 2005, and her college-age stepson had a job shadowing children with autism. As he described helping them navigate playground dynamics, reminding them to return a wave or a greeting, McCanlies wondered whether their behaviors might be tied to chemicals their parents had encountered on the job. Could the exposures have altered genes their parents passed down? Could they have infiltrated the kids’ developing brains through the womb or through breast milk? The questions remained abstract until McCanlies met another researcher named Irva Hertz-Picciotto, who had a unique data set. She had collected detailed information on the occupations of two large groups of parents: those who had children with autism and those whose kids developed neurotypically. Comparing the groups’ chemical exposures before their children were born could help illuminate causes of the condition, McCanlies realized. Hertz-Picciotto, an environmental epidemiologist based at the University of California, Davis, was a pioneer in the search for the causes of autism. In 2009, she published a much-cited paper highlighting a sevenfold increase in diagnoses

by Avi Asher-Schapiro and Christopher Bing It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk. Halimi thought his son was joking. It was April Fools’ Day after all. Musk had been assigned a big job in the Trump administration, running the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency that was established to comb through the government to root out waste and fraud. Halimi had a much smaller job, working on a contract for the United States Institute of Peace, an independent nonprofit funded by Congress that promotes conflict resolution efforts around the world, including in Halimi’s native Afghanistan. There was no way, he thought to himself, that someone like him would have landed on Musk’s radar. But Halimi’s son was not joking. He told Halimi to go online and see for himself. The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly. “United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants. Below that, thousands of comments tumbled in, calling him a terrorist and a grifter. Republican U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia later chimed in to congratulate Musk for discovering that “the federal government is paying the Taliban and they covered it up.” Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America. It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders. In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out. And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles. This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution. The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite. ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential. Among other tasks, it involved a program gathering information on the ground about living conditions for Afghan women, who are largely barred from education past primary school or from having a role in public life. Partly because of Halimi’s contentious history with the Taliban, the militants might equate his work at USIP to espionage and severely punish anyone involved with it. By exposing him, Musk and his team endangered those working with Halimi, as well his relatives who were still in Afghanistan. The White House and Musk did not respond to requests for comment. Halimi was forced to flee Afghanistan in 2021. “I had no choice,” he said. (For ProPublica) Multiple senior government officials at the State Department were warned about the danger that DOGE’s callout posed to Halimi’s family, according to two USIP staffers interviewed by ProPublica. They were trying to stop the damage from spreading. But Musk’s crew was then locked in a pitched battle for control of USIP. The misleading narrative about Halimi became central to DOGE’s argument; American foreign aid was corrupt and even, at times, funding America’s enemies — and that’s why DOGE had to take over. Those battles were playing out across the government at the time. DOGE often won, but ultimately Musk’s tenure was short-lived. He resigned from DOGE at the end of May, shortly before a public falling-out with Trump. DOGE’s hard-charging takeovers of government agencies brought chaos and confusion and left many qualified bureaucrats jobless. But Halimi risked losing a lot more. Shortly after Halimi spoke to his son, a flood of threatening messages began appearing on his phone. The most ominous came from members of the Taliban. Just as Halimi had worried, they accused him of being a thief and traitor, which could be like a death sentence for anyone connected to him back home. “My family was in great danger,” Halimi thought to himself. About a week after DOGE outed him, Halimi’s worst fears were realized. Taliban intelligence agents in Kabul descended on the homes of his relatives and detained three of his family members. They were blindfolded, thrown into the backs of 4×4 pickup trucks and driven to a small remote prison. They were held incommunicado over several days

by Wendi C. Thomas, MLK50: Justice Through Journalism This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with MLK50. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Marilyn Gooch was already skeptical about one of her newest neighbors, xAI’s supercomputing facility, when her cousin walked across the street in June with a blue mailer from the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. Her cousin didn’t know what to make of the postcard featuring the logos of nine local, state and federal agencies and the chamber’s assurance that billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company operated “in full compliance with all applicable federal, state, and local regulations and oversight.” The facility — part of Musk’s bid to dominate the AI market — opened at a breakneck pace almost a year before, brought to Memphis, Tennessee, largely due to the efforts of the local Chamber of Commerce. Across the country, communities are grappling with the boom of data centers and supercomputing facilities, which consume voracious amounts of electricity and water and can emit smog-producing pollutants. In places from Maricopa County, Arizona, to Prince William County, Virginia, residents have used zoning restrictions as a means to keep supercomputers at bay — an option not available to Memphians because the xAI building was already zoned for industrial use. Since the opening of the xAI supercomputing facility, Gooch had joined residents and environmental justice advocates sounding off at meetings about potential health impacts of xAI. She learned about the area’s already high concentration of toxic emissions from nearby industrial plants, including an oil refinery, and the county’s high asthma rates. Of greatest concern: the emissions from the dozens of methane gas turbines — each roughly the size of a semitrailer — that were initially used to power xAI’s new facility located less than 2 miles from her home in southwest Memphis. Based on its analysis of county health ordinances and federal regulations, the Southern Environmental Law Center has asserted in multiple official and legal documents that these turbines violated the Clean Air Act and should never have been allowed; the Shelby County Health Department disagrees. Gooch saw the mailer as an attempt to quiet their concerns. First image: Heat shimmers above gas turbines at the Memphis, Tennessee, xAI site in April. Second image: Marilyn Gooch. (First image: Ariel J. Cobbert for MLK50. Second image: Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America.) In the face of intense public opposition, the chamber has gone to unusual lengths to promote xAI, whose $12 billion investment the chamber believes will transform the shrinking city into a global hub of technological innovation. The chamber wants Memphis to be known as part of the “Digital Delta,” expanding beyond its blue-collar identity as the distribution capital of the country and FedEx headquarters. This all-out push includes a five-member special operations team to provide what it calls “round-the-clock concierge service” to ensure “seamless execution of the company’s rapid expansion plans.” The chamber also managed xAI’s PR efforts, and while it has not held open public meetings about xAI, it hosted at least 12 invitation-only meetings to tout the project’s benefits to Memphis. And the chamber sent its first mailer in recent memory, which spread incorrect information about the governmental oversight in place to monitor Musk’s new facility. Former chamber president Beverly Robertson said she can’t recall another instance of the chamber doing such a full-court press for a company — but then again, she and others noted, Memphis has never attracted a company of xAI’s scale. The public had no input into the opening of the facility in their community. As a private business, xAI had no obligation to seek community feedback, the chamber has said. And because xAI did not seek or receive tax incentives, it wasn’t subject to review from government bodies or elected officials, some of whom learned about xAI’s arrival from the news. The community’s lone chance to hear from xAI in person came in April during a heated health department hearing about residents’ concerns over the gas turbines. Brent Mayo, an xAI executive, read a statement about the company’s plans to meet the highest emissions standards. He left before the public comment period began. An xAI spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment about the chamber’s mailer or to questions about the number of gas turbines powering the supercomputer. The Chamber of Commerce announced xAI’s arrival with a page on its website titled “xAI Marks Its Spot in Memphis” over a photo of Mayo, center, flanked by chamber employees. (Screenshot by MLK50) In this reliably Democratic and majority-Black city, some residents were upset by Musk’s alignment with President Donald Trump, his brief tenure as the chainsaw-wielding head of the Department of Government Efficiency, and the antisemitic and racist posts from xAI’s chatbot Grok, which is powered by the supercomputer known as Colossus. In response to this criticism, the chamber says it defends projects, not people. But what dominated the civic discussion was potential damage to the region’s air from xAI’s temporary turbines, especially the nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde they can emit, which contribute to smog. Even with brief exposure, smog increases the risk of respiratory problems, asthma and heart diseases, according to the World Health Organization. The mailers sent in mid-June to residents in at least two neighborhoods, including Gooch’s, appeared to be addressing those fears, asserting that the chamber “will continue to prioritize compliance with existing standards and policies.” For seven generations, Gooch’s family has lived in Boxtown, a Black neighborhood in southwest Memphis. Environmental justice activists say Boxtown has been plagued for decades by pollution from nearby industrial plants. In Gooch’s ZIP code, the median household income is just shy of $37,000 and the poverty rate is twice that of the city as a whole. Boxtown residents gathered for a National Night Out event in the neighborhood in August. (Kevin Wurm/MLK50/CatchLight Local/Report for America) Gooch took the mailer from her cousin and scanned the alphabet soup of agency acronyms for the nine

by Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala, illustrations by Sam Green for ProPublica When the Trump administration announced massive cuts to federal health agencies earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was getting rid of excess administrators who were larding the government with bureaucratic bloat. But a groundbreaking data analysis by ProPublica shows the administration has cut deeper than it has acknowledged. Though Kennedy said he would add scientists to the workforce, agencies have lost thousands of them, along with colleagues who those scientists depended on to dispatch checks, fix computers and order lab supplies, enabling them to do their jobs. Done in the name of government efficiency, these reductions have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions, ProPublica found, according to interviews with more than three dozen former and current federal employees. Over 20,500 Workers Lost as of Aug. 16 Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens. Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses or the mice needed to test vaccines. And less than five years after a pandemic killed more than a million Americans, scientists who study infectious diseases are struggling to pay for saline solution, gloves and blood to feed lab mosquitos. The Trump administration has refused to say how many workers have been lost so far. But ProPublica’s analysis reveals the cuts in unprecedented detail. Who HHS Has Lost Since January More than 3,000 scientists and public health specialists are gone. Over 1,000 regulators and safety inspectors have also left. In total, more than 20,500 workers, or about 18% of the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce, have left or been pushed out, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal worker departures using public information from the HHS employee directory. The analysis is an undercount — it doesn’t include the hundreds or even thousands of workers who have received layoff notices but remain on administrative leave. No health agency has been spared, with some important divisions losing more than 1 in 5 workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in charge of public health, lost 15% of its staff; the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, 16%; and the Food and Drug Administration, which ensures the safety of most of what goes into people’s bodies — from baby formula to cancer drugs to hip implants — 21%. Thousands of these employees were laid off or had their contracts cut, while some took buyouts or retired earlier than anticipated. Divisions have experienced a brain drain of epic proportions, ProPublica found, losing senior leaders behind some of the biggest health initiatives of the modern era, like the rapid rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine. Many of the cuts contradict what the administration has said about its priorities. The secretary who has questioned the safety of vaccines has pushed out scores of regulators who work to make vaccines safe. And while he has declared a new era in the fight against chronic disease, he has decimated a center dedicated to that very goal. Division leaders and staffers told ProPublica the cuts will lead their agencies to neglect their duties: Federal researchers will conduct fewer clinical trials and studies, regulators will conduct fewer or less-thorough inspections of egg farms and foreign drug factories, and public health specialists will be less prepared to combat outbreaks of deadly viruses. With exit and severance packages pending, many former and current workers would only speak anonymously, out of fear of retribution. HHS did not dispute the findings of ProPublica’s analysis and didn’t directly respond to questions about the consequences of the cuts of thousands of scientists, public health specialists and safety inspectors. HHS also did not respond to our questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions. A spokesperson for the department said the idea that Kennedy is weakening public health is “dishonest.” “Yes, we’ve made cuts — to bloated bureaucracies that were long overdue for accountability,” the spokesperson said in an email. “At the same time, we are working to redirect resources to science that delivers measurable impact, rebuilds public trust, and helps Make America Healthy Again.” Former health secretary Xavier Becerra, who served under President Joseph Biden until earlier this year, called the cuts reckless. “Public health isn’t a luxury — it’s a core function of government,” he said. “This hollowing out of expertise could leave us dangerously exposed. It takes years to build a professional workforce with the technical knowledge and public trust these roles require. Once you lose that, it’s not easy to get back.” REGULATORS LOST Spotlight: The Food and Drug Administration When HHS announced the federal worker cuts, the department said that the FDA’s safety inspectors and reviewers overseeing food, drugs and medical devices would be spared. However, ProPublica has found that the FDA has lost more than 400 workers who support inspections of everything from dairy farms to seafood processors to blood banks, and who ensure that companies follow federal regulations. More than a third of them worked at its Office of Inspections and Investigations, which serves as the “eyes and ears” of the agency. More than 240 consumer safety specialists have left across the agency, including nearly 40 workers responsible for safeguarding food, plus about 220 chemists, biologists and toxicologists. 21% of FDA Workers Have Left The Food and Drug Administration, the primary agency responsible for regulating food, drugs and vaccines, has lost over 900 scientists and health experts since January, along with over 500 regulators, investigators and compliance workers. Many of the investigators who left had honed their skills over years of field visits and inspections, developing a sixth sense for possible violations. “I could walk into a plant and within five minutes could tell you if there was a rodent problem,” said a former division director at

by Robert T. Garrett for 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. On July 7, the Justice Department sent a harshly written letter threatening to sue the staunchly Republican state of Texas, notwithstanding its efforts to help elect Donald Trump and the fact that the president had singled out its leaders as key allies in his immigration crackdown. The letter decried the congressional map previously passed by the state’s Republican-led Legislature as “unconstitutional racial gerrymanders.” It demanded that Gov. Greg Abbott and state Attorney General Ken Paxton respond the same day with a plan to comply. Otherwise, the Justice Department said, it reserved “the right to seek legal action against the state.” Despite its adversarial tone, the letter was hardly unwelcome. In fact, it was just the opposite. It set in motion a chain of events that gave Abbott and Paxton the political cover needed to provide Trump with exactly what he wanted: a mid-decade redrawing of district lines designed to ease that path for his party to maintain control of Congress after the 2026 midterm elections. Republican lawmakers prioritized passage of the new political map above nearly all other legislation during the state’s second special session, including disaster preparedness and relief for victims of the July 4 flooding that killed more than 130 Texans. The new congressional boundaries, crafted to net Republicans up to five more seats, drew an immediate legal challenge from a coalition of Black and Latino voters who, on Saturday morning, alleged that it discriminates against nonwhite voters. Abbott is expected to sign it into law this week. “The One Big Beautiful Map has passed the Senate and is on its way to my desk, where it will be swiftly signed into law,” Abbott said in a statement on Saturday. “I promised we would get this done, and delivered on that promise.” The series of events is part of a larger trend this summer of the Trump administration using legal action or the threat of the courts to seemingly coerce Republican governors and other politically aligned defendants to do precisely what he wants them to do. The strategy has allowed his administration to sidestep state legislatures and Congress, according to legal experts and critics. In some cases, it has allowed red states to achieve a politically valuable goal they’d wanted all along. In Texas, Trump has been met with state leaders who have been willing, if not eager, collaborators in carrying out his agenda. Over the past three months, the Trump administration has employed a series of legal tactics in the state to achieve a desired outcome. It filed a federal lawsuit and, in one day, killed a decades-old law allowing Texas students who were not U.S. citizens or permanent residents to receive in-state tuition at public colleges and universities if they met specific criteria. The move came just two days after bills to repeal the law failed to pass the state Legislature. The Trump administration also maneuvered within the court system, reaching an agreement to settle a lawsuit against the federal government that effectively gutted a ban on churches participating in political campaigns. Trump has long opposed the ban, which he vowed to end, but the president lacked congressional support for such a move. On redistricting, Trump used his heft within the party to force the state Legislature to redraw the typically once-a-decade political map it had approved just four years earlier, leading to a standoff with the governors of Democratic states. Last week, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed measures that will ask voters in his state to approve five new districts that would favor Democrats in direct response to Texas’ redistricting. Trump is not the first president to use a “sue and settle” strategy. Republicans complained bitterly about the Obama administration encouraging liberal groups and Democratic state attorneys general to file suits against the Environmental Protection Agency, which then led to the rapid adoption of consent agreements for more stringent enforcement of environmental policies than Congress was likely to pass, said Marquette University law professor Paul Nolette. But Trump’s strategy, Nollette said, is even more aggressive. Justice Department spokesperson Natalie Baldassarre and Andrew Mahaleris, an Abbott spokesperson, declined to respond to questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The White House acknowledged an email seeking comment, but did not provide one. Taken together, Trump’s legal strategies in Texas this summer show a win-at-all-costs mindset that is trampling on legal norms, said University of Texas law professor Sanford Levinson. He is among several legal scholars and lawyers representing civil rights and religious liberty groups who told ProPublica and the Tribune they fear the administration’s strategy to bypass the checks provided by the legislative and judicial branches of government will cause lasting harm. “One ought to be extremely disturbed by this thoroughly authoritarian administration,” said Levinson, who has taught constitutional law for 45 years. He added that through such initiatives, Trump is “trying to enforce the ‘Führerprinzip’ of absolute loyalty to himself, rather than to abstract constitutional norms.” “What is truly incredible is the extent to which the GOP has fallen in line,” Levinson said. U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Texas in federal court over the Texas Dream Act, which allowed undocumented students to get in-state tuition at Texas universities. (Ken Cedeno/Reuters) “New Level” The first clear sign that the administration was working with the state’s Republican leadership to bypass lawmakers was its successful June 4 effort to nullify the Texas Dream Act. The 2001 law granted in-state tuition at public colleges and universities to students who lived in the state for three years and graduated from a Texas high school, even if they were not permanent

by Richard A. Webster, Verite News This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Verite News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. When Lloyd Gray stood trial for rape in 1980, two jurors didn’t believe he was guilty and voted to acquit. Today, a split-jury verdict would mean a mistrial and possibly Gray’s freedom. But back then, in Louisiana, it resulted in a life sentence for the 19-year-old from Tunica, a rural community nestled on the banks of the Mississippi River. Gray, who has always maintained his innocence, spent the next four decades in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. During that time he lost everything, he said. From behind bars, he learned that his mother, who for a time was a guard at the prison where he was being held, had dementia and died in 2020. Prison officials refused to allow him to attend her funeral. That same year the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that nonunanimous jury verdicts, legal in only Louisiana and Oregon, were unconstitutional and based on an inherently racist law designed to uphold white supremacy. Going forward, there would be no more Lloyd Grays. But in fact, there are more than 1,000 people in Louisiana like Gray, convicted by split juries and still imprisoned, according to the Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based nonprofit focused on criminal justice reform. Although the Supreme Court says cases like theirs are unconstitutional going forward, it left the decision about what to do with those convicted long ago to the states. And Louisiana alone says they should stay behind bars. Two years after the U.S. Supreme Court decision, the Louisiana State Supreme Court declined to grant new trials for those prisoners, acquiescing to local prosecutors who feared that retrying hundreds of decades-old cases would tie up state courts. The conservative state Legislature, meanwhile, has repeatedly rejected bills that would have required a reexamination of their cases. That left one very narrow path for Gray and others like him, mostly Black men, to have their cases revisited. If they could credibly argue that their convictions were secured illegally — if there was race-based discrimination in the case, for example — they could strike a plea deal with a prosecutor, securing their release. But a new state law, passed last year at the urging of Republican Gov. Jeff Landry, limited local prosecutors’ ability to broker such deals, cutting off the last remaining avenue of relief for those imprisoned by nonunanimous juries. The key problem, legal experts say, is that the Supreme Court did not make its 2020 ruling retroactive as it did in Montgomery v. Louisiana, a 2016 case in which the justices found that mandatory life sentences without parole for juveniles should be banned going forward as well as for those already convicted. What’s more, in a separate decision in 2021, the court ruled that its 2020 opinion did not apply to older cases, like Gray’s, that had already gone through the regular state appeals process. However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for the court’s majority, Oregon and Louisiana were still free to offer retroactive relief on their own. In contrast to Louisiana, Oregon’s Supreme Court vacated every split-jury conviction in the state, after which prosecutors offered plea deals with reduced sentences to the majority of those prisoners convicted by nonunanimous juries. Verite News and ProPublica estimated about 760 prisoners were convicted by nonunanimous juries based on a 2018 list provided by the Oregon Department of Justice of people who had filed lawsuits claiming their convictions were unconstitutional. “There are a lot of injustices in our legal system we can’t fix. And yet, here is this issue that is so clear and obvious that it’s on all of us to do the right thing,” said Aliza Kaplan, a professor at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon, who fought for years to end the state’s split-jury system. “When I look at Louisiana, it’s really heartbreaking.” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry outside the U.S. Supreme Court. Louisiana is the only state that says prisoners convicted long ago by split juries should remain behind bars. (Francis Chung/POLITICO via AP Images) The Landry administration did not respond to requests for comment. Zach Daniels, executive director of the Louisiana District Attorneys Association, said the group, which backed Landry’s law, has attempted to reach a compromise with criminal justice reformers who want all past split-jury verdicts overturned. This included an alternative that would give those convicted by nonunanimous juries the opportunity to apply for parole instead of having their cases either vacated or reexamined. But some lawmakers and criminal justice reform advocates rejected that option because they did not view the opportunity to be heard by a special parole committee appointed by Landry, as the plan called for, a compromise for people imprisoned unconstitutionally. Gray’s case for freedom is particularly strong, his attorneys said, because there is good evidence that racial animus led to his conviction. They discovered last year that the two jurors who had voted to acquit were Black — a fact that doesn’t appear in the court records. And that someone had drawn a swastika on the upper right hand corner of the original district attorney’s case file. In addition, the lone surviving family member of the victim told the district attorney’s office he is “fully supportive” of Gray’s release. He could not be reached for comment. The New Orleans District Attorney’s Office had been in discussions with Gray’s legal team about a potential deal to secure his release before Landry’s 2023 election. But the governor’s new law constraining prosecutors from making such deals could ensure that Gray spends the remainder of his days in Angola. His current case before the court will next be considered Tuesday at Orleans Parish Criminal District Court, where a judge will decide whether Landry’s law applies in Gray’s case. “When you’re sent to prison with a life sentence, they send you here to die,” said

by Doug Bock Clark ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Heather Honey, a high-profile denier of Donald Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, has been appointed to a senior position in the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which she’ll help oversee the nation’s election infrastructure. Honey is a protege of Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election results. In 2024, ProPublica reported that Honey had played a key role in Mitchell’s behind-the-scenes effort to change Georgia’s election rules to allow Republican officials to contest a potential Trump loss in that year’s presidential race. Honey also promoted election conspiracy theories, including one Trump cited in a speech to his followers before they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Though states do the on-the-ground work of running elections, DHS supports them with tasks beyond their capacities, such as protecting IT infrastructure and voter databases from foreign intrusions. The agency, with bipartisan support, took on this role in the aftermath of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Experts on voting and state election officials warned that Honey’s appointment as DHS’ deputy assistant secretary of election integrity could erode trust between state and federal officials, prompting states not to share information with the agency. “We are witnessing a dangerous trend: the elevation of known bad-faith actors like Heather Honey,” said Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, in a statement, citing Honey’s “well-documented history of spreading election lies that have been debunked in court.” Fontes called her involvement with DHS “deeply troubling” and said “when the agency gives a platform to individuals who have actively worked to erode public trust, it becomes harder to view DHS as a reliable partner in election security.” A DHS spokesperson did not answer questions from ProPublica on Honey’s appointment or the exact nature of her responsibilities. Honey didn’t respond to calls or emails. The White House also didn’t respond to a request for comment. Her name is listed on the organization’s leadership structure online, and her appointment was first reported by the website Democracy Docket. In the first Trump administration, the federal government set up programs designed to shield U.S. elections from foreign interference, including the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, an arm of DHS. But Trump soured on this and other initiatives after the director of CISA publicly rebutted his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Since the start of the second Trump presidency, the administration has gutted those programs, cutting hundreds of employees at CISA. Its director, Chris Krebs, is now under federal investigation, DHS has said; Krebs told CNN that the investigation appeared to be an act of political retribution. The Justice Department has also rolled back a program aimed at combatting foreign influence campaigns. Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote in a memorandum that the Justice Department’s program was disbanded to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonprofit focused on building trust in American elections, said the cuts had dismantled “nearly all” of DHS’ capacity to protect election infrastructure. He said state elections officials feared that Honey’s appointment, combined with the program cuts, signaled the Trump administration’s intent to eliminate bulwarks of fair U.S. elections. “The hiring of an election conspiracy theorist with no election knowledge or expertise is the culmination of this reversal,” Becker said. “DHS now appears poised to become a primary amplifier of false election conspiracies pushed by our enemies.” Two sources familiar with Honey’s hiring at DHS said she began working for the agency last week. An organizational chart dated Aug. 18 on the department’s website identifies her as a leader in the agency’s Office of Strategy, Policy and Plans. Her position wasn’t on a version of the website archived in July, and officials in former administrations said that there’s been no such job previously. It’s not clear yet what Honey will oversee, but former DHS officials said that deputy assistant secretaries are typically the agency’s top experts in their subject areas. They’re often involved in drafting executive orders and crafting policies. They also serve as liaisons to the White House and the National Security Council. Since Honey started, Trump has announced “a movement to get rid of” mail-in ballots and voting machines via executive order, though a top aide subsequently said the administration would pursue those goals through legislative action. DHS has also threatened to cut off about $28 million in grants to help states prepare for terrorism and disasters if they don’t change voting rules to conform to the administration’s priorities, NPR has reported. Honey’s duties likely would include helping to organize the government’s policy responses if foreign actors make intrusions into the nation’s election systems, former officials said. To do this, and to assess the security of election infrastructure, someone in her position would typically have access to classified information, including the government’s election-related intelligence. Experts expressed concern about Honey’s portfolio, given her history of spreading misinformation. “Heather Honey’s past misleading claims about vote counts in Pennsylvania, among other things, have helped fuel false conspiracy theories about stolen elections,” said Larry Norden, an election expert at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, a nonpartisan law and policy group. Before becoming swept up in the “Stop the Steal” movement, Honey had no experience in the federal government or as an election administrator, working as a Pennsylvania-based private investigator. After the 2020 election, she became a contractor for a Republican-backed audit seeking proof of fraud in ballots cast in Maricopa County, Arizona. According to emails between employees working on the review, which ended up reaffirming Biden’s win, Honey helped draft the final report. Since then, Honey has led at least three organizations devoted to transforming election systems in ways championed by conservatives, such as tightening eligibility