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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

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 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 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