ProPublica

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. Since last year, ProPublica has been reporting on the troubled system for death investigations in Idaho, where a person’s cause of death is determined by elected coroners with no oversight or state support and, often, little training or education. The failures documented by ProPublica left parents without answers in their baby’s sudden death and let clues vanish in the death of a woman whose family suspected foul play by her husband, a man later charged with killing his next wife. The Idaho Office of Performance Evaluations in January sent the state’s coroners a formal survey about their work, drawing responses from just over half. The office told coroners that it wouldn’t attach names to their responses when it made the survey results public, and some gave unvarnished critiques. “The coroner system in Idaho is broken and a joke,” one wrote. They also took the opportunity to plead for help, for changes they believe could transform Idaho into a place where death investigations consistently meet national standards. Idaho coroners are elected to an office under county government control and funded by county budgets. Idaho politics have traditionally held the independence of local government as sacrosanct. This year’s state survey — and subsequent interviews by ProPublica — revealed a twist: Many coroners believe the state’s hands-off approach is outdated and harmful, making the quality of a person’s death investigation vary based on the county. These local officials want the state to get involved, and they want it badly. Jimmy Roberts of Bingham County, an agricultural area in eastern Idaho, is one such coroner. He worked with two interns in his office to draft a 118-page white paper that highlighted failure points in Idaho’s coroner system and described how states like Indiana and Arkansas addressed the same problems. In Indiana, as in Idaho, the county coroner is a constitutional elected office. But coroners in Indiana are subject to a suite of state laws that spell out what they must do. The policies that Roberts highlighted from those states include creating a state training council for coroners, defining in law which cases must be autopsied, raising money for coroners through fees on death certificates or paying for toxicology costs through alcohol taxes, and giving coroners “first responder” status so they can access mental health care for themselves and get a supply of naloxone for reviving people who overdose. Still, it’s unclear whether ideas like these will gain traction in Idaho after nearly 70 years of warnings and inaction on coroners. Gov. Brad Little’s criminal justice commission has begun to take a look at the coroner system, via a subcommittee it created this year that includes coroners, the state police forensics lab director, a state legislator and others — but no county commissioners have joined yet, leaving the group without input from the people who control coroner budgets. The subcommittee so far has drawn up a list of problems and brainstormed solutions — none of which it has endorsed — such as a state fund to help pay for autopsies, a forensic center in eastern Idaho to ramp up autopsy capacity or mandating autopsies in some child deaths. Coroners are not united in how to make the system better and what it will take to get there. Roberts, the Bingham County coroner, sent his 118-page report to fellow coroners and state legislators by email in October. But Roberts told ProPublica his offer to help the leaders of the Idaho State Association of County Coroners work on reform was “met with silence.” Jimmy Roberts, Bingham County’s coroner, in his office. He drafted a 118-page white paper that highlighted failure points in Idaho’s coroner system. (Natalie Behring for ProPublica) Torey Danner, the association’s president and a member of the governor’s subcommittee studying the issue, told ProPublica that his focus this year is on “low-hanging fruit” rather than major systemic changes. Asked about approaches that have gotten results in other states, he said he wants to review the root causes of Idaho’s problems before committing to any specific reform ideas, so that Idaho doesn’t unintentionally implement “Band-Aid” solutions in haste. Danner said he didn’t see Roberts’ 118-page report come through his email inbox in October but plans to read it after being contacted by ProPublica. He has not deeply studied the reforms in other states. “I haven’t taken the time because I haven’t had the time,” said Danner, one of the few coroners in Idaho to hold the job full time. “I mean, I’m still trying to do this and run my office, too.” Here are five concrete steps other Idaho coroners have suggested. 1. More autopsies Idaho has among the lowest autopsy rates in the U.S., with even worse rankings for autopsies in homicides and unexplained child deaths — and money is a factor. About 1 in 4 coroner’s offices answering this year’s survey said their budgets affect their ability to do autopsies. Madison County Coroner Sam Butikofer told ProPublica that when he took office in 2019, the county’s budget for grooming snowmobile trails was larger than the coroner’s. (County budget records confirm that.) Under Idaho’s current setup, each county sets an annual budget for its coroner’s office that estimates how many autopsies the coroner will have to order in the coming year. An autopsy in most parts of Idaho costs at least $2,300. Small counties in Idaho budget for less than a dozen a year, and a backcountry plane crash, a few unwitnessed deaths on the river, a spate of sudden infant deaths or the rare multiple homicide can quickly eat up the money that was set aside. Lacking the kind of funding other states use to help cover the cost of autopsies, Idaho coroners must decide between forgoing autopsies or blowing the budget and having to justify it to a

by Jennifer Berry Hawes 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. In the fall of 2016, as wind-stoked wildfires raced across parched forest and threatened lives around Gatlinburg, Tennessee, state and local officials went back and forth about blasting an evacuation order over the federal government’s emergency alert system. As they consulted one another, a critical 15 minutes slipped away. Cell service and electricity failed. Many people in the fire’s path could no longer receive the alert ultimately sent out. More than a dozen people died. A few months later, across the country, torrential storms drenched the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, flooding the area around San Jose’s Coyote Creek. Local officials there didn’t send alerts over the federal system, which can, among other things, sound a blaring alarm with evacuation orders on cellphones in geotargeted areas. “There was a general lack of institutional knowledge on how to utilize these communications technologies,” a review of the disaster later concluded. Fast-forward seven years and myriad disasters later. Last September, when Hurricane Helene barreled north from the Gulf of Mexico, very few officials in all of Western North Carolina sent alerts over the federal system ahead of the massive storm’s arrival to warn people of risks or suggest what they do. As ProPublica reported in May, emergency managers’ actions varied considerably across the region. Some hadn’t become authorized to use the federal Integrated Public Alert and Warning System. Others weren’t confident in using it. More than 100 people in North Carolina died. The threats have changed, as have the places. But over the past decade, the same story has played out over and over. The problem isn’t that there is no way to alert residents. It’s that officials too often don’t use it. ProPublica identified at least 15 federally declared major disasters since 2016 in which officials in the most-harmed communities failed to send alerts over IPAWS — or sent them only after people were already in the throes of deadly flooding, wildfires or mudslides. Formal reviews after disasters have repeatedly faulted local authorities for not being prepared to send targeted IPAWS alerts — which can broadcast to cellphones, weather radios, and radio and TV stations — or sending them too late or with inadequate guidance. In 2023, a CBS News investigation similarly found that emergency alerts came too late or not at all. Yet the same problems have persisted during recent catastrophic disasters, Hurricane Helene in North Carolina and the flash floods in Texas among them. Each time these failures occur, journalists and others examining what went wrong “tend to treat it as though it’s a new problem,” said Hamilton Bean, a University of Colorado Denver professor who is among the country’s top researchers of public alert and warning systems. “In fact, it is the same problem we’ve seen again and again since at least 2017.” Local emergency managers sit at the center of alerting decisions. They are supposed to prepare their communities for disasters and guide the response when they hit. But some fear sending too many alerts to a weary public. Many are busy juggling myriad other duties in small, resource-strapped offices. More than a few face political headwinds. “There is a certain reluctance to send emergency messages out,” said Steven Kuhr, former emergency management director for New York state who now runs a crisis management consulting firm. Counterparts in the profession have lost their jobs and faced public backlash for sounding alarms, only to see the predicted disaster fizzle. “You don’t want to get it wrong.” Perhaps no major disaster in recent years underscores what’s at stake more than the July 4 flooding in Central Texas. Officials in Kerr County failed to adequately alert residents, tourists and the hundreds of children slumbering in summer camp cabins about raging flash floodwaters barrelling down the Guadalupe River. They sent no emergency alerts over IPAWS warning people of the threat or suggesting what they do until hours into the disaster. Instead, as people awoke to flash floods encircling their homes and to children shrieking in terror, key county leaders were asleep or out of town. Even once roused, they sent no IPAWS alerts of their own. More than 100 people — a third of them children — died. Kelly McKinney is a former deputy commissioner at New York City’s emergency management office, where he led the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy, among other disasters. To him, skipping alerts indicates a lack of training and planning. “As a profession, we have to get our act together,” McKinney said. “We have to emerge from our complacency.” Failure to Initiate Terrie Burns stands in the middle of her destroyed home in Santa Rosa, California, during the Sonoma County wildfires in 2017. The state conducted an audit of the county’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. (Michael Macor/San Francisco Chronicle via AP) Flash back eight years to 2017, when wildfires threatened Sonoma County in Northern California. Officials sent no alerts to cellphones via IPAWS telling residents what was happening or what actions to take. They feared people outside of an intended evacuation area might get the alert, causing traffic congestion. Two dozen people died. The local sheriff conceded, “In hindsight, we should have used every tool we had.” California conducted an audit of Sonoma County’s response to the fires and found local officials did not issue IPAWS phone alerts due to “limited understanding” of how to use the system. It’s the type of mistake repeated across the country. Among the 15 major disasters ProPublica identified, reviews of local officials’ actions have been completed for 11. Nine of them identified a lack of training or planning — or both — in sending alerts as a key problem. Some, like Sonoma officials, have taken

by Jeremy Kohler 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. In late July, Missouri state troopers walked into St. Louis County government headquarters and seized the cellphone of one of the most prominent Democratic officials in this solidly red state. Two days later, a grand jury indicted Sam Page, the St. Louis County executive. Acting as a special prosecutor, Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, a Republican, secured two felony counts of stealing by deceit and two election-law violations. For Bailey, bringing felony charges against the leader of the state’s biggest blue stronghold added to the resume of a MAGA warrior who had already interviewed for a key position in President Donald Trump’s administration. Less than three weeks later, Trump tapped Bailey to help run the FBI. He’ll serve as co-deputy director with Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent and conservative podcast host. Bailey said he’ll resign as Missouri’s attorney general on Sept. 8 to take the post. A spokesperson said he was not taking questions from the media. The case against Page was the latest in a string of legal strikes against Democrats by Bailey, bringing the full weight of the state on a political adversary. It wasn’t about bribery or self-dealing. Page, the top elected official in a county with about 1 million residents, wasn’t accused of stealing a dime for himself. Instead, the charges turned on something mundane: the printing and mailing of flyers weeks before about a measure on the ballot in April — the kind of informational material local governments often send to voters and the sort of action that experts said had never led to criminal charges in Missouri. The election asked voters to give the County Council the power to fire the county’s department heads and its top attorney. Page spent more than $25,000 of taxpayer money to print and mail flyers to voters outlining the measure. The flyer at issue did not overtly tell voters to vote no, but it listed groups that opposed it, including the police board and NAACP, and it quoted a state judge’s ruling that the ballot language was misleading and unfair. It also suggested that a yes vote would allow directors to be fired for political reasons or in emergencies and that a no vote would maintain stable leadership. Documents filed in the case against Page also showed that he did not follow a county lawyer’s advice to make some changes to the flyer. Bailey alleged that the flyer crossed the line from providing information, which is legal, to urging a no vote, which he said was an unlawful use of tax dollars — and, in his view, grounds to seek felony charges. If convicted on the most serious count, Page could face three to 10 years in prison and $10,000 in fines. He could also face removal from office and sanctions against his medical license; he’s an anesthesiologist, though he doesn’t currently practice full time. “Public officials must follow the law,” Bailey wrote in a news release, “and my Office will work to ensure that they always do.” The playbook was familiar: Trump has talked about arresting California Gov. Gavin Newsom and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. Federal agents just raided the home of John Bolton, the former national security adviser in the first Trump administration and a prominent Trump critic. Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed Ed Martin, who had worked as an attorney in Missouri, to head the U.S. Department of Justice’s Weaponization Working Group and to investigate two prominent Democrats, New York Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff of California, on allegations of mortgage fraud. “Bailey really was auditioning for that role, or something like it, and what better way to show loyalty than to do exactly what Trump wants on the federal level, but replicated on the state level,” said Paul Nolette, the director of the Les Aspin Center for Government at Marquette University. “It’s a template for what type of approach Bailey is going to take on the federal level. Political opponents are going to get targeted.” Bailey has called himself a defender of the rule of law, portraying his high-profile lawsuits and investigations in Missouri as necessary to protect the state from what he has described as illegal or unconstitutional actions by the federal government and abandonment of the rule of law by the left. St. Louis County Executive Sam Page (Jeff Roberson/AP Images) Page became county executive in 2019 after a federal corruption case toppled his predecessor, Steve Stenger. Page had led a bipartisan bloc on the County Council against Stenger, who was sentenced to nearly four years in federal prison for a pay-to-play scheme that steered county contracts to political donors. (St. Louis County wraps around — but does not include — the much smaller independent city of St. Louis.) The cooperative spirit collapsed as Page set St. Louis County on the aggressive end of Missouri’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, issuing early emergency orders limiting gatherings and indoor dining. That stance put him at odds with state officials who were moving to curb local power. Despite this and other political battles, Page has twice won countywide elections — first in 2020 to finish Stenger’s term, then in 2022 to a full four-year term. He has said he will decide by the end of the year whether to run again in 2026. He is scheduled to be arraigned on Friday. “I don’t think I did anything wrong,” he said in brief remarks to local news reporters at a ribbon-cutting for a county road project. A Page spokesperson referred questions to his lawyer, Jeff Jensen, a former U.S. attorney in Missouri during Trump’s first term. Jensen did not respond to requests for comment. Many have questioned the legitimacy of the case and whether Bailey’s successor, Catherine Hanaway, will see it

by Peter Elkind, ProPublica, and Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. When Los Angeles attorney Leo Terrell, a legal commentator, lifelong Democrat and fiery fixture on Fox News, announced on the network’s “Hannity” show that he was voting for Donald Trump in 2020, the MAGA universe went wild. Oliver North hailed him on his “Real American Heroes” podcast. Fox News signed him on as a paid contributor, at a six-figure salary. Terrell, meanwhile, rebranded himself as “Leo 2.0,” complete with red Trump-style caps he offered for sale online. Leo 1.0 had slammed Trump for cozying up to white supremacists, blamed him for a surge in violent attacks on Jews and donated to Democrats. Leo 2.0? He attacked “DEI nonsense,” compared Black Lives Matter to ISIS and declared the 2020 election was “stolen from President Trump and America!” In January, Terrell was rewarded for his loyalty when President-elect Trump, praising him as a “highly respected civil rights attorney and political analyst” with an “incredibly successful career,” named him senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department. Terrell assumed his marquee role a month later: as head of the multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Leo Terrell celebrated his appointment as senior counsel to the assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in an Instagram post on Jan. 23. (Screenshot by ProPublica) As a Black, Christian former Democrat with little previous engagement with Jewish causes, Terrell, now 70, seemed an improbable pick to lead the effort to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” as the task force announcement put it. But his zealous conversion and penchant for media bombast made him a perfect bullhorn for the task force’s actual mission: to strong-arm colleges into stripping away any vestige of “wokeness” in their hiring, admissions, classes and research. In service of that goal, the government has abandoned due process in favor of media warfare, preemptive declarations of guilt and freezes on billions in critical federal funding. Terrell has become an invaluable player in this extraordinary pressure campaign. Before most of the task force’s investigations had even launched, he publicly promised “massive lawsuits” against “Jew-hating” universities, including Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles and dozens of others. So far, the campaign has been effective. To preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, Columbia and Brown have struck deals with the administration that cost them $220 million and $50 million, respectively, and go far beyond pledging tougher action to combat antisemitism. Columbia agreed to open academic programs and admissions decisions to outside monitoring. Brown pledged to ban transgender women from single-sex spaces and women’s sports. Harvard has sued the administration to try to unfreeze $2.6 billion in federal research funds, but it’s also trying to negotiate a settlement. Meanwhile, colleges nationwide are eliminating any remaining vestiges of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and shuttering multicultural centers lest the government come after them. Amid the upheaval Trump’s task force has helped to sow, the history, motivations and behavior of its blustery leader have gone largely unexamined. ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed dozens of people whose paths have intersected with Terrell’s and reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and financial records related to his career and life. The portrait that emerged is dramatically at odds with Trump’s description of a “highly respected” and “incredibly successful” attorney. Peers in civil rights law said they always considered Terrell a minor player. Documents reveal a distinctly mixed legal track record, marred by malpractice suits, client disputes and mishandling a criminal case so badly that a federal appeals court lambasted his work as “woeful.” Until his MAGA conversion, Terrell was beset by a litany of financial troubles, including nearly $400,000 in unpaid federal taxes, a personal bankruptcy filing and a trail of court judgments and liens brought by small businesses that worked for his law firm. Current and former lawyers at the Justice Department say Terrell is less engaged with assessing cases or negotiating settlements than he is with scaring universities into submission. They say he’s voiced open disdain for what he calls “lawyer talk,” berating career staff who try to follow proper procedures for investigating civil rights complaints. Despite his appetite for media attention, Terrell has volunteered little about himself. Friends and neighbors recall him walking a dog and bicycling and his fondness for golf. In the “about the author” section for a self-published book, he wrote: “In his spare time, Mr. Terrell likes to work. His hobbies are work and working.” Terrell declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to written questions. In a brief phone conversation with a reporter, he explained, “I don’t do interviews with my life.” Told some details of our reporting, he added, “I’m not going to comment on anything,” and, finally, “I’m going to hang up respectfully.” It is unclear whether Terrell’s previous troubles turned up in administration vetting for his current job. Officials at the Justice Department and White House did not respond to questions about Terrell’s role or his background. Jewish activists are divided on Terrell’s approach, with some lauding it for rooting out anti-Jewish sentiment that emerged on campuses during pro-Palestinian protests and others bemoaning how he’s weaponized antisemitism. Kenneth Marcus, an Education Department official in the first Trump administration who has spent years agitating for stronger federal action against campus antisemitism, is a fan. “What the president has gotten in Terrell,” Marcus said, “is someone with unique skills in delivering public messaging.” Although President Donald Trump has described Terrell as a “highly respected” and “incredibly successful” attorney, peers in civil rights law said they always considered him a minor player. (Christian Monterrosa/Bloomberg via Getty Images) That messaging is camouflage, according to Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for

by Tim Golden ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. More than two decades after victims of the 9/11 attacks began trying to hold the government of Saudi Arabia responsible for helping the Qaida terrorists who carried out the plot, a federal judge has ruled that a civil lawsuit against the kingdom can go to trial. The decision on Thursday, by Judge George B. Daniels of the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, represents a crucial victory for survivors of the attacks and relatives of the 2,977 people who were killed. “This is a historic win for the families,” said a spokesperson for the families, Brett Eagleson, whose father was killed in the World Trade Center. “The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is going to be held accountable.” A spokesperson for the Saudi Embassy in Washington, Fahad Nazer, did not respond to requests for comment on the judge’s ruling. The Saudi kingdom, which has long rejected the plaintiffs’ claims, could still appeal Daniels’ decision under special protections that are afforded to foreign governments in federal law, legal experts said. However, they added that the Saudi government might be willing to consider a settlement with the plaintiffs to avoid the scrutiny of a major trial and the expansive discovery of information that it would bring. Already, information uncovered by plaintiffs has rewritten the history of the Sept. 11 plot as it was presented in the years after the attacks by the George W. Bush administration and the bipartisan 9/11 Commission. Most significantly, the plaintiffs’ evidence has undermined the FBI’s conclusion that two Saudi officials in Southern California — one a part-time spy, the other a religious official with diplomatic status — acted “unwittingly” when they helped the first Qaida hijackers who arrived in the United States. In an email, the FBI also declined to comment on the judge’s ruling. It has long been established that in the years before 9/11, some members of the Saudi royal family and some powerful Saudi officials had supported militant Islamist movements and gave money to Islamic charities that in turn helped finance al-Qaida and other extremist groups. However, both the FBI and the CIA emphasized in the aftermath of the attacks that the Saudi royal family was an enemy of al-Qaida and its banished leader, Osama bin Laden, and that senior officials of the government had not assisted the group. The litigation in New York focused on the roles of two lower-level Saudi officials living in the United States. One, Omar al-Bayoumi, was a middle-aged graduate student in San Diego who had long worked for the Saudi civil aviation agency. The other, Fahad al-Thumairy, was a religious official serving in Los Angeles as an imam at a new Saudi-funded mosque and as a diplomat at the Saudi Consulate. The FBI quickly determined that Bayoumi met the first two hijackers near the mosque soon after they flew into Los Angeles in January 2000 and that he helped them rent an apartment in San Diego, open a bank account and buy a car. Bayoumi also introduced the two jihadists — who knew no one in the United States, spoke virtually no English and had no experience of living in the West — to a group of Muslim men who provided them with crucial support over the months that they lived in the city. Bayoumi moved his family to Birmingham, England, in the summer of 2001. Within days of the attacks, he was detained and questioned by the British police at the FBI’s request before being allowed to return to Saudi Arabia. In a search of Bayoumi’s home, the British authorities turned up documents, notebooks, videotapes and computer files that they shared with the FBI, officials said. But only in the last two years did lawyers for the 9/11 families obtain much of that cache — and then only from the British government. From the start, U.S. investigators were skeptical of Bayoumi’s account. In the end, though, the FBI largely accepted his claims that he met the two Qaida operatives by chance, helped them as he would any compatriots and had no idea of their terrorist plans. Both Bayoumi and the Saudi government insisted repeatedly that he had no ties to Saudi intelligence. Despite the efforts of a small group of FBI agents to pursue the case, it was eventually closed by the bureau. The civil lawsuit nearly died in 2016, when President Barack Obama vetoed legislation to carve out an exception to the sovereign immunity of foreign governments and permit the families to sue the Saudi kingdom. Congress overrode that veto, however, allowing the suit to go forward. President Donald Trump later blocked the families from obtaining classified government documents on the 9/11 investigations, claiming they were state secrets. President Joe Biden later reversed that stance and declassified documents that included reporting confirming that Bayoumi was a part-time agent of the Saudi intelligence service. The evidence that plaintiffs’ lawyers obtained from the British government has proved even more powerful. It included videotapes in which Bayoumi was filmed touring Washington before the 9/11 attacks with two visiting Saudi religious officials who had extensive ties to militants. In one of the tapes, he filmed the U.S. Capitol, describing its layout and security to an unidentified audience. Lawyers for the plaintiffs suggested that Bayoumi and his companions were “casing” the target for Qaida plotters; the Saudi government insisted in court that it was a tourist video. In his ruling, Daniels noted that the two sides had different interpretations of almost every piece of evidence. But he endorsed the plaintiffs’ views of several key exhibits, including a diagram of an airplane found in one of Bayoumi’s notebooks. Citing aviation experts, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said the drawing and the calculations beside it showed how a plane might hit an object on the ground. The Saudis’ lawyers suggested that Bayoumi had drawn it while helping his son

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom, and Yilun Cheng, Houston Chronicle 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 Newsroom, the Houston Chronicle and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas. The devastating flooding in Houston caused by Hurricane Harvey in 2017 killed dozens of people, inundated hundreds of thousands of homes and left the community desperate for a solution. Since then, local flood experts have extensively studied the possibility of a multibillion-dollar tunnel system across Harris County, where Houston is located. Studies have focused on the construction of pipelines, 30 to 40 feet in diameter, that could ferry massive amounts of water out to the Gulf in the event of a storm. Now, after years of research and discussion, Elon Musk wants a piece of the project. An investigation by The Texas Newsroom and the Houston Chronicle has found that the billionaire, in partnership with Houston-area Rep. Wesley Hunt, has spent months aggressively pushing state and local officials to hire Musk’s Boring Co. to build two narrower, 12-foot tunnels around one major watershed. That could be a potentially cheaper, but, at least one expert said, less effective solution to the region’s historic flooding woes. Hunt’s team has said the Boring project would cost $760 million and involve the company getting 15% of the cost up front from state and local coffers. Within two months of this push, the Harris County Commissioners Court unanimously voted to study a pilot program that included a look at smaller tunnels, with specifications similar to what Boring had pitched. The commissioners court, made up of five elected members including a county judge, oversees the county’s budget. Both Musk and Hunt stand to benefit should Boring be selected to build any part of the project. Hunt is reportedly considering a challenge to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in next year’s Republican Senate primary. And landing a job like this would also be a significant win for Boring, which has not completed a major public project in Texas and faces criticisms for its ventures elsewhere. The discussions about the Boring pitch have happened mostly out of the public eye. Hunt mentioned the project in passing at a town hall in Houston in February. Since then, he has refused to answer the newsrooms’ questions about when Musk sold him on the idea and why he became its pitchman. Efforts to reach Musk and representatives with Boring were unsuccessful. Experts and some local officials question whether Musk and his company are the right pick for the job. The Boring Co. has focused on transportation tunnels, not flood mitigation. “If you build a smaller tunnel, OK, it’ll be cheaper, but it can carry less water,” said Larry Dunbar, a veteran water resources engineer who has advised Houston-area governmental agencies on drainage issues. “So what have you saved? Have you reduced the flooding upstream by an inch? And are you going to spend multimillions of dollars to do that? Well, maybe that’s not worth it.” In response to the newsrooms’ questions, state and local officials said no public money has been allocated to Boring. County officials added that they have not chosen a tunnel contractor and any process to do so would follow normal procurement rules. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, whose staff met with Hunt’s team during the legislative session to discuss the proposal, remains open to the idea. As president of the Texas Senate with close ties to President Donald Trump, he is a powerful ally. “If Elon Musk and the Boring Company, or any other company, can build two massive tunnels under the Houston bayous in a few years to save the city from flooding, I am always going to be interested to listen,” Patrick, a Republican, told the newsrooms. “The truth is, Elon Musk is one of the only people in the world who could accomplish this.” Then-candidate Wesley Hunt, now a Republican representative, speaks with volunteers before they campaign on his behalf in 2020. (Mark Mulligan/Houston Chronicle) The Pitch Process Begins In 2022, the Harris County Flood Control District released findings from its yearslong tunnel study, which has so far cost nearly $3 million in local and federal funds. The idea was to build eight tunnels, totalling around 130 miles in length, according to the report. The tunnels would be huge, wide enough for a container ship, and buried 40 to 140 feet underground, depending on the location. Austin and San Antonio have similar systems, although on a smaller scale. The Buffalo Bayou segment of the Houston project — which Boring has proposed to build — is a centerpiece of the design and would run through the city’s core and some of its most developed neighborhoods. The county estimated it would cost $4.6 billion. The total cost for the system was projected to be $30 billion, funded by a potential mix of federal, state and local dollars, and the timeline was 10 to 15 years to complete construction. Given the scope and complexity of the project, the Army Corps of Engineers has been involved in discussions about the tunnels since the beginning. The corps also has jurisdiction over the two federal reservoirs in the area. Eight years after Harvey, however, the tunnel project has not broken ground. Hunt has accused the Army Corps of “​​dragging their feet a little bit” because its study of the tunnel system has been delayed. In December, Congress ordered the Corps to finish the analysis. Hunt hailed the decision, but to date the Army Corps has not completed the study. Just two months later, however, his staffers and Musk’s team started shopping Boring’s proposal to politicians across the state. Emails, text messages and policy memos the newsrooms obtained through public records requests show Hunt’s chief of staff, James Kyrkanides, repeatedly attempted to obtain public money on behalf of Boring. The

by Kyle Hopkins, Anchorage Daily News This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with the Anchorage Daily News. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Leaders in Alaska and elsewhere have repeatedly promised action in recent years to address the nation’s chronic failure to solve the murder or disappearance of Indigenous people. Federal legislation backed by Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski called for improving data collection and information sharing among law enforcement and tribes. Gov. Mike Dunleavy said again and again and as recently as May 5 that the state government would work with Alaska Natives to address the crisis. “My administration will continue to support law enforcement, victim advocacy groups, Alaska Native Tribes and other entities working together to solve these cases and bring closure to victims’ families,” Dunleavy said in a news release last year. Yet when an Alaska Native group asked state law enforcement officials in June for one of the most fundamental pieces of data needed to understand the issue — a list of murders investigated by state police — the state said no. Charlene Aqpik Apok launched Data for Indigenous Justice in 2020 after trying to collect the names of missing and murdered Indigenous people to read at a rally, only to discover no government agency had been keeping track. Over time, the nonprofit built its own homegrown database with the help of villagers, friends and family across the state. In 2023, the state started publishing a list quarterly with names of Indigenous people reported missing. But the state still does not issue a list for the other key piece of the group’s efforts: Indigenous people who have been killed. So on June 4, the nonprofit filed two public records requests with the Alaska Department of Public Safety concerning homicide cases the agency had investigated since 2022. The group asked first for victims of all races and then for those identified as Alaska Native. Apok said she didn’t think the request was controversial or complicated. But the state rejected the requests a week later. The agency said fulfilling the request would take “several hours” and cited a state regulation allowing a denial if providing information to a requester would require employees to “compile or summarize” existing public records. “We do not keep lists of victims of any type of crime, including homicide victims, and to fulfil this request DPS would have to manually review incident reports from multiple years to create a record that matched what you are looking for,” Austin McDaniel, communications director for the department, wrote to the nonprofit. McDaniel offered no direct response when the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica asked why the agency could not retrieve homicide records with a simple database query or why, even if the work required manual review and wasn’t required under state law, the agency didn’t simply create a list of homicide victims. (Alaska’s public records law says any records that take state employees fewer than five hours to produce shall be provided for free, and the state can choose to waive research fees if providing records would serve the public interest. Even if an agency needs to create a new record, as McDaniel asserted in his denial, it’s allowed to “if the public agency can do so without impairing its functioning.”) Data for Indigenous Justice appealed the denial to the head of the department, Public Safety Commissioner James Cockrell, who decided in favor of the agency. The nonprofit’s records request and the state’s denial revealed that Alaska, four years after creating a council on murdered and missing Indigenous people, cannot readily identify murder cases involving Indigenous victims. The state now employs four investigators who focus on such cases. “How do they know which cases are Alaska Native or Indigenous people for their MMIP investigators if they cannot do a simple pull of the demographics that we are talking about?” Apok said. Apok said tracking complete and accurate data on Indigenous people who have disappeared or been killed matters because otherwise, law enforcement can shrug off individual cases and deny the scale of the problem. “That’s the power of data. That’s the power of collective information,” she said. Grace Norton holds a photo of her niece, Ashley Johnson-Barr, who was murdered in Kotzebue, Alaska, in 2018. Kotzebue residents walked along Shore Avenue and scattered rose petals in remembrance of missing and murdered Indigenous people in 2023. (Marc Lester/ADN) In lieu of answering detailed questions for this story, McDaniel provided a one-page response saying that the department receives thousands of records requests each year. He said the agency is a “leader in data transparency” for missing and murdered Indigenous people, adding that “to imply that we are not invested in this work due to the denial of one records request from an advocacy group is absurd.” He cited as examples of transparency the department’s publication of information about missing Indigenous people and its provision of law enforcement data to tribal governments in support of their requests for federal grants. Anchorage, which runs the state’s largest municipal police department, recently reversed a policy that withheld the identities of certain homicide victims. The police chief released the records after Daily News reporting revealed the policy had no basis in law and was opposed by some victims’ rights advocates. State troopers, meanwhile, handle about 38% of all murders in Alaska, according to statistics that law enforcement reports each year. From 2019 to 2023, the most recent data available, troopers investigated an average of 22 murders each year. That means the agency would likely need to review just a few dozen reports to provide the requested names. Watershed reports published in Canada in 2017 and by the Seattle-based Urban Indian Health Institute in 2018 revealed the scope of the crisis of missing and murdered people from Indigenous communities. Those reports, Apok said, “named exactly what a lot of us were seeing and feeling, where we didn’t know our experiences were part

Photography and text by Adriana Loureiro Fernández for ProPublica Leer en español. ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Mireya Sandia was lying on the bed with her eyes wide open. Her skin was pale, her white hair nearly gone. She had been diagnosed with breast cancer years earlier, and more recently it had spread to her brain and affected her speech. When we first met, in May, she waved me closer, grabbed my hand with a surprisingly strong grip and said, as best she could: “I want to see my son again.” Then she began to cry. With a knot in my throat, I held her hand, fearing that there would not be enough time for her to see her only son, Wilmer Vega Sandia. Her health was what led her son to migrate to the United States. His detention and later deportation to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador, known as CECOT, had, in turn, led me to her bedroom in a small village in the Andes. Over the past four months, as part of a ProPublica-led investigation in collaboration with The Texas Tribune, Alianza Rebelde Investiga (Rebel Alliance Investigates) and Cazadores de Fake News (Fake News Hunters), I have documented in photographs the lives of five families whose sons had been imprisoned in El Salvador, as well as their return to Venezuela, where I am from. I had visited with mothers like Mireya Sandia and other relatives to see how the absence of their loved ones had affected them. I walked beside them when they protested on the streets of Caracas, Venezuela’s capital. I saw them as their hopes grew when there was word that the negotiations for the men’s return were ongoing, and I saw them again when those hopes were deflated after the first negotiations failed. I documented the homecomings, when the men were abruptly flown back. Lina Ramos Hidalgo sits in the bedroom that used to belong to her son Juan José Ramos Ramos while he was detained in CECOT. First image: Mireya Sandia cries after eating lunch at her home while her son, Wilmer, was held in CECOT. Sandia has breast cancer, which has spread to her brain. Second image: Doris Sandia, Wilmer’s aunt, in her home. Crisálida Bastidas plays with her grandson Jared at her home in El Tocuyo, Venezuela, while her son José Manuel Ramos Bastidas was detained in CECOT. Lina Ramos lived in a humble neighborhood on the outskirts of Caracas and attended several marches that I photographed. I knew how tight money was for the family and the incredible effort it took for her to advocate for her son, Juan José Ramos Ramos. Lina told me that she had to crowdfund and get donations from her church, family and neighbors to afford a $2 round-trip bus ticket to the capital. The anguish of his imprisonment, she told me, didn’t let her sit still. Crisálida Bastidas’ home was also modest. Imagine a tiny kitchen in the left corner and, on the opposite wall, two big beds beside one another for several people to sleep on. Her son José Manuel Ramos Bastidas had been in CECOT for more than three months by the time we met, and I could see her hope vanishing as his imprisonment stretched on. Her sadness was visible, and she looked exhausted. She told me that she couldn’t sleep unless her 1-year-old grandson Jared was with her, the two of them nestled together, with a picture of José Manuel as a child hanging above the bed. The two were identical as children, and she clung to her grandson to feel near to her own son. As more time passed, they sometimes slipped into speaking about their sons in the past tense. Then they’d quickly correct themselves and say, “He’s alive.” I remember one mother on her knees, crying and asking, “Please make this stop.” Carmen Bonilla waits for her son to arrive near their house in Valencia, Venezuela. Zoe Martínez plays with balloons used to decorate the house to celebrate the return of her uncle Juan Ramos. Lina Ramos, center, hugs family members during a march in Caracas to celebrate the release of her son and other Venezuelan men held in CECOT. One morning, I got a call telling me that the men were coming home. It was one of the many mothers I had met in the past few months. I was wary, because this was not the first time I had gotten a call like that, and I always worried what disappointment would do to them. Doris Sandia, Wilmer’s aunt, called me and asked several times if I was sure the men were coming home. She was wary of getting her heart broken again. But this time it was true. By the time I got out of the house, families that could afford to come to Caracas were already marching downtown. This time they were celebrating. I ran into Lina Ramos and almost didn’t recognize her. She had a wide smile that I had never seen before. She hugged me tight, relieved to see a familiar face behind dozens of cameras. I walked next to her for miles. The next day I was at Lina’s house at sunrise, waiting to finally photograph her son. Lina had gotten $20 in donations from family members and neighbors, and she used that money to decorate her house. She made stewed chicken with rice and plantains, her son’s favorite. Lina didn’t want to take any phone calls, to keep the line clear in case Juan called. She wouldn’t leave the house because rumors had gone around that if nobody was home, the police officers escorting the men wouldn’t drop them off. Lina was forced to stand still for the first time in four months. Lina’s granddaughters grabbed me by the hand and took me to help them pick flowers to welcome their uncle.

by Cassandra Jaramillo ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Seven years ago, when President Donald Trump signed the Preventing Maternal Deaths Act into law, it was hailed as a crucial step toward addressing the nation’s maternal mortality crisis. The law pumped tens of millions of dollars a year into a program to help fund state committees that review maternal deaths and identify their causes. The committees’ findings have led to new protocols to prevent hemorrhage, sepsis and suicide. Federal money has allowed some states to establish panels for the first time. The committees’ work only became more urgent after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Last year, Georgia’s committee determined the state’s abortion ban contributed to the preventable death of 41-year-old Candi Miller. But now the program that enabled this progress — known as Enhancing Reviews and Surveillance to Eliminate Maternal Mortality, or ERASE MM — is in danger, maternal health advocates say. The program’s funding expires on Sept. 30, and efforts to renew it have thus far not succeeded. Congress included money to extend ERASE MM in a broader stopgap funding measure that almost passed in December 2024 before being scuttled by Republican opposition. The program isn’t paid for in the Trump administration’s budget proposal for 2026. Late last week, the Senate Appropriations Committee introduced a bill to fund the Department of Health and Human Services for the next fiscal year that includes money for ERASE MM, but the measure hasn’t moved forward yet. Adrienne Griffen, executive director of the Maternal Mental Health Leadership Alliance, said she fears how little attention the program’s fraught future has drawn amid waves of layoffs at federal health agencies and ferocious debate over impending Medicaid cuts. “We were concerned when the president’s budget did not include these programs,” Griffen said. “While we are happy with the progress, there is still a lot that needs to happen.” The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is responsible for awarding ERASE MM grants and guiding the work of state maternal mortality committees, didn’t answer specific questions from ProPublica about the future of the program. Andrew Nixon, communications director for HHS, the CDC’s parent agency, said in a statement that HHS “is committed to improving maternal and infant health outcomes.” “We are currently reviewing the maternal and infant health portfolio to identify the most effective ways to collect and analyze data and improve the health and safety of mothers and infants,” the statement said. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. didn’t respond to requests for comment on whether advocates’ concerns are warranted. The Trump administration’s budget proposal jettisons not only ERASE MM but a slate of programs known as the Safe Motherhood initiative, which aims to reduce risks such as premature births and infections that affect mothers and infants. All previously had bipartisan support. That’s left some members of Congress mystified about why their funding is in jeopardy. At a June budget hearing, Rep. Greg Landsman, D-Ohio, pressed Kennedy on why the administration had proposed eliminating the programs, including ERASE MM. “I genuinely believed this was zeroed out either accidentally or by some sort of oversight,” Landsman said, asking Kennedy to work with members of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce to restore funding. After their exchange at the hearing, Landsman told ProPublica that Kennedy had agreed to meet to discuss restoring the funding. “We want to save this investment,” he said. “It’s critical for expecting moms.” ERASE MM came about in 2019 after reporting by ProPublica and others showed that hundreds of American women were dying each year from preventable causes related to pregnancy. U.S. maternal mortality rates had risen sharply over two decades as rates in other affluent nations had dropped. Other countries, particularly the United Kingdom, had reliable national data on maternal mortality, as well as robust case-review systems designed to turn information into improvements in care. In the U.S., by contrast, only two-thirds of states had review processes at all and even those sometimes went years between reports or operated inconsistently. ERASE MM was designed to plug these holes, ensuring that lessons from maternal deaths didn’t go unlearned. Over the last five years, the CDC has distributed nearly $90 million to fund the work of state review committees. At least by federal standards, the program is relatively inexpensive; it divvied up a total of about $40 million last year between 46 states, an average of $870,000 apiece. The members of maternal mortality review committees — usually a mix of physicians, nurses, mental health professionals and advocates — volunteer their time. ERASE MM grants typically pay to hire the staffers who gather records from hospitals, medical examiners, police and other agencies and abstractors who redact private information from case summaries. Committees are advisory in nature, but their findings have made a difference, advocates say. In recent years, many states have developed mental health initiatives for pregnant people and new mothers based on maternal mortality reviews. Recommendations by New Hampshire’s committee, for example, led to a program in which OB-GYNs collaborate with psychiatrists on treatments for post-partum depression or substance use disorder. In Indiana, which used ERASE MM funds to establish a maternal mortality review committee in 2018, the panel’s work spurred state officials to expand an initiative to have nurses make post-partum home visits to new mothers. Indiana is one of at least five states that rely entirely on federal dollars to pay for their maternal mortality reviews (the others are South Carolina, Iowa, Missouri and Utah). Committee members in several states expressed alarm that this money may evaporate. Before ERASE MM, Utah had a joint committee that reviewed both infant and maternal deaths, said Dr. Marcela Smid, a maternal-fetal health specialist. Utah set up a maternal mortality review committee for the first time in 2019 using funds from ERASE MM, which Smid chairs. It found increasing numbers of maternal deaths by

by David Armstrong, Eric Umansky and Vernal Coleman ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. Veterans hospitals are struggling to replace hundreds of doctors and nurses who have left the health care system this year as the Trump administration pursues its pledge to simultaneously slash Department of Veterans Affairs staff and improve care. Many job applicants are turning down offers, worried that the positions are not stable and uneasy with the overall direction of the agency, according to internal documents examined by ProPublica. The records show nearly 4 in 10 of the roughly 2,000 doctors offered jobs from January through March of this year turned them down. That is quadruple the rate of doctors rejecting offers during the same time period last year. The VA in March said it intended to cut its workforce by at least 70,000 people. The news sparked alarm that the cuts would hurt patient care, prompting public reassurances from VA Secretary Doug Collins that front-line health care staff would be immune from the proposed layoffs. Last month, department officials updated their plans and said they would reduce the workforce by 30,000 by the end of the fiscal year, which is Sept. 30. So many staffers had left voluntarily, the agency said in a press release, that mass layoffs would not be necessary. “VA is headed in the right direction,” Collins said in a statement. But a review of hundreds of internal staffing records, along with interviews with veterans and employees, reveal a far less rosy picture of how staffing is affecting veterans’ care. After six years of adding medical staff, the VA this year is down more than 600 doctors and about 1,900 nurses. The number of doctors on staff has declined each month since President Donald Trump took office. The agency also lost twice as many nurses as it hired between January and June, records viewed by ProPublica show. In response to questions, a VA spokesperson did not dispute numbers about staff losses at centers across the country but accused ProPublica of bias and of “cherry-picking issues that are mostly routine.” Agency spokesperson Peter Kasperowicz said that the department is “working to address” the number of doctors declining job offers by speeding up the hiring process and that the agency “has several strategies to navigate shortages,” including referring veterans to private providers and telehealth appointments. A nationwide shortage of health care workers has made hiring and retention difficult, he said. Kasperowicz said that the recent changes at the agency have not compromised care and that wait times are getting better after worsening under President Joe Biden. While wait times for primary, mental health and specialty care for existing patients did increase during Biden’s presidency, the VA’s statistics show only slight reductions since Trump took office in January. However, appointment wait times for new patients seeking primary and specialty care have slightly increased, according to a report obtained by ProPublica. As of early July, the average wait time nationally to schedule outpatient surgery appointments for new patients was 41 days, which is 13 days higher than the goal set by the VA and nearly two days longer than a year ago. In some locations, the waits for appointments are even longer. At the Togus VA Medical Center in Augusta, Maine, internal records show that there is a two-month wait for primary care appointments, which is triple the VA’s goal and 38 days longer than it was at this time last year. The wife of a disabled Marine veteran who receives care at the facility told ProPublica that it has become harder in recent months to schedule appointments and to get timely care. Her husband, she said, served in Somalia and is completely disabled. He has not had a primary care doctor assigned to him for months after his previous doctor left over the winter, she said. “He has no person who is in charge of his health care,” said the woman, who did not want to be named because of fears her comments might affect benefits for her husband. “It was never like this before. There’s a lack of staff, empty rooms, locked doors. It feels like something that’s not healthy.” Kasperowicz said the VA is taking “aggressive action” to recruit primary care doctors in Maine and anticipates hiring two new doctors by the end of the year. Nationwide, records reviewed by ProPublica show, the vacancy rate for doctors at the VA was 13.7% in May, up from 12% in May of 2024. Kasperowicz said those rates are in line with historical averages for the agency. But while the vacancy rate decreased over the first five months of 2024, it has risen in 2025. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., who has been critical of Collins’ stewardship, has argued that the VA is heading in a dangerous new direction. He said that ProPublica’s findings reinforce his concerns about “damaging and dangerous impacts” from cuts and staffing reductions. “Dedicated professionals are fleeing — and recruitment is flagging — because of toxic work conditions and draconian funding cuts and firings,” he told ProPublica. “We’ve warned repeatedly about these results — shocking, but not surprising.” In the VA’s Texas region, which covers most of the state, officials reported in an internal presentation in June that approximately 90 people had turned down job offers “due to the uncertainty of reorganization” and noted that low morale was causing existing employees to not recommend working at the medical centers. Anthony Martinez, a retired Army captain who did tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, said he has witnessed a downgrade in care at the Temple, Texas, VA facility. He said that the hospital has lost records of his recent allergy shots, which he now has to repeat, and he has to wait longer for appointments. “Problems have always existed but not to this degree,” Martinez said. Martinez, who runs a local nonprofit for veterans, said he’s heard