by Abrahm Lustgarten

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On July 4, the broken remnants of a powerful tropical storm spun off the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico so heavy with moisture that it seemed to stagger under its load. Then, colliding with another soggy system sliding north off the Pacific, the storm wobbled and its clouds tipped, waterboarding south central Texas with an extraordinary 20 inches of rain. In the predawn blackness, the Guadalupe River, which drains from the Hill Country, rose by more than 26 vertical feet in just 45 minutes, jumping its banks and hurtling downstream, killing 109 people, including at least 27 children at a summer camp located inside a federally designated floodway.

Over the days and weeks to come there will be tireless — and warranted — analysis of who is to blame for this heart-wrenching loss. Should Kerr County, where most of the deaths occurred, have installed warning sirens along that stretch of the waterway, and why were children allowed to sleep in an area prone to high-velocity flash flooding? Why were urgent updates apparently only conveyed by cellphone and online in a rural area with limited connectivity? Did the National Weather Service, enduring steep budget cuts under the current administration, adequately forecast this storm?

Those questions are critical. But so is a far larger concern: The rapid onset of disruptive climate change — driven by the burning of oil, gasoline and coal — is making disasters like this one more common, more deadly and far more costly to Americans, even as the federal government is running away from the policies and research that might begin to address it.

President Lyndon B. Johnson was briefed in 1965 that a climate crisis was being caused by burning fossil fuels and was warned that it would create the conditions for intensifying storms and extreme events, and this country — including 10 more presidents — has debated how to respond to that warning ever since. Still, it took decades for the slow-motion change to grow large enough to affect people’s everyday lives and safety and for the world to reach the stage it is in now: an age of climate-driven chaos, where the past is no longer prologue and the specific challenges of the future might be foreseeable but are less predictable.

Climate change doesn’t chart a linear path where each day is warmer than the last. Rather, science suggests that we’re now in an age of discontinuity, with heat one day and hail the next and with more dramatic extremes. Across the planet, dry places are getting drier while wet places are getting wetter. The jet stream — the band of air that circulates through the Northern Hemisphere — is slowing to a near stall at times, weaving off its tracks, causing unprecedented events like polar vortexes drawing arctic air far south. Meanwhile the heat is sucking moisture from the drought-plagued plains of Kansas only to dump it over Spain, contributing to last year’s cataclysmic floods.

We saw something similar when Hurricane Harvey dumped as much as 60 inches of rain on parts of Texas in 2017 and when Hurricane Helene devastated North Carolina last year — and countless times in between. We witnessed it again in Texas this past weekend. Warmer oceans evaporate faster, and warmer air holds more water, transporting it in the form of humidity across the atmosphere, until it can’t hold it any longer and it falls. Meteorologists estimate that the atmosphere had reached its capacity for moisture before the storm struck.

The disaster comes during a week in which extreme heat and extreme weather have battered the planet. Parts of northern Spain and southern France are burning out of control, as are parts of California. In the past 72 hours, storms have torn the roofs off of five-story apartment buildings in Slovakia, while intense rainfall has turned streets into rivers in southern Italy. Same story in Lombok, Indonesia, where cars floated like buoys, and in eastern China, where an inland typhoon-like storm sent furniture blowing down the streets like so many sheafs of paper. Léon, Mexico, was battered by hail so thick on Monday it covered the city in white. And North Carolina is, again, enduring 10 inches of rainfall.

There is no longer much debate that climate change is making many of these events demonstrably worse. Scientists conducting a rapid analysis of last week’s extreme heat wave that spread across Europe have concluded that human-caused warming killed roughly 1,500 more people than might have otherwise perished. Early reports suggest that the flooding in Texas, too, was substantially influenced by climate change. According to a preliminary analysis by ClimaMeter, a joint project of the European Union and the French National Centre for Scientific Research, the weather in Texas was 7% wetter on July 4 than it was before climate change warmed that part of the state, and natural variability alone cannot explain “this very exceptional meteorological condition.”

That the United States once again is reeling from familiar but alarming headlines and body counts should not be a surprise by now. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the number of extreme weather disasters has jumped fivefold worldwide over the past 50 years, and the number of deaths has nearly tripled. In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars, the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation. These storms have now cost Americans nearly $3 trillion. Meanwhile, the number of annual major disasters has grown sevenfold. Fatalities in billion-dollar storms last year alone were nearly equal to the number of such deaths counted by the federal government in the 20 years between 1980 and 2000.

The most worrisome fact, though, may be that the warming of the planet has scarcely begun. Just as each step up on the Richter scale represents a massive increase in the force of an earthquake, the damage caused by the next 1 or 2 degrees Celsius of warming stands to be far greater than that caused by the 1.5 degrees we have so far endured. The world’s leading scientists, the United Nations panel on climate change and even many global energy experts warn that we face something akin to our last chance before it is too late to curtail a runaway crisis. It’s one reason our predictions and modeling capabilities are becoming an essential, lifesaving mechanism of national defense.

What is extraordinary is that at such a volatile moment, President Donald Trump’s administration would choose not just to minimize the climate danger — and thus the suffering of the people affected by it — but to revoke funding for the very data collection and research that would help the country better understand and prepare for this moment.

Over the past couple of months, the administration has defunded much of the operations of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the nation’s chief climate and scientific agency responsible for weather forecasting, as well as the cutting-edge earth systems research at places like Princeton University, which is essential to modeling an aberrant future. It has canceled the nation’s seminal scientific assessment of climate change and risk. The administration has defunded the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s core program paying for infrastructure projects meant to prevent major disasters from causing harm, and it has threatened to eliminate FEMA itself, the main federal agency charged with helping Americans after a climate emergency like the Texas floods. It has — as of last week — signed legislation that unravels the federal programs meant to slow warming by helping the country’s industries transition to cleaner energy. And it has even stopped the reporting of the cost of disasters, stating that doing so is “in alignment with evolving priorities” of the administration. It is as if the administration hopes that making the price tag for the Kerr County flooding invisible would make the events unfolding there seem less devastating.

Given the abandonment of policy that might forestall more severe events like the Texas floods by reducing the emissions that cause them, Americans are left to the daunting task of adapting. In Texas, it is critical to ask whether the protocols in place at the time of the storm were good enough. This week is not the first time that children have died in a flash flood along the Guadalupe River, and reports suggest county officials struggled to raise money and then declined to install a warning system in 2018 in order to save approximately $1 million. But the country faces a larger and more daunting challenge, because this disaster — like the firestorms in Los Angeles and the hurricanes repeatedly pummeling Florida and the southeast — once again raises the question of where people can continue to safely live. It might be that in an era of what researchers are calling “mega rain” events, a flood plain should now be off-limits.

by Jeremy Lindenfeld, Capital & Main

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Capital & Main, a 2022-2023 LRN partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

In January, Katie Clark’s one-bedroom rental of more than 15 years, and nearly everything inside, was incinerated by Los Angeles County’s Eaton fire, one of the most destructive wildfires in California history. For her troubles, she received a one-time payment of $770 from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which she used to replace clothes, food and a crate for her dog. While it was only a fraction of what she needed, the money was at least available while she waited for other funding.

As an organizer with the Altadena Tenants Union who has been helping renters with their FEMA applications, Clark knows just how common her experience has been for fire survivors. She believes federal and local agencies severely underestimated the need and cost of housing for the 150,000 people displaced by the fires, leaving many still struggling to recover. A FEMA spokesperson denied the accusation, saying the agency’s “ongoing assessments indicate that the current Rental Assistance program is effectively meeting the housing needs of survivors eligible for FEMA assistance.”

The disaster response “has been so shockingly bad,” Clark said, but she recognizes that without FEMA’s help in responding to fires that killed at least 30 people and destroyed more than 16,000 structures, “it could have been so, so, so much worse.”

“We would have seen a whole lot more people left to their own devices. And what that would mean is homelessness. It would mean people just abandoned,” Clark said.

Even before President Donald Trump and Gov. Gavin Newsom squared off over Trump’s decision to send National Guard troops to quell immigration protests, before Newsom likened Trump to a dictator and Trump endorsed the idea of arresting the governor, the question of how much California could continue to rely on FEMA was front and center.

It’s a critical question in a state — with its earthquakes, wildfires, floods, drought and extreme heat — that frequently suffers some of the costliest disasters in the country.

Since Trump’s inauguration, his administration has floated sweeping proposals that would slash FEMA dollars and make disasters harder to declare. This has left both blue and red states wrestling with scenarios in which they must pay for what FEMA will not. States have long counted on FEMA to cover at least 75% of declared major disaster response and recovery costs.

In just the past few months, FEMA has denied federal assistance for devastating floods in West Virginia and a destructive windstorm in Washington. The agency approved such funding for deadly tornadoes in Arkansas after Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appealed an initial denial and personally begged the president for help.

Last month, ProPublica reported that FEMA missed a May deadline to open the application process for many grants, including funding that states rely on to pay for basic emergency management operations. The delay, which the agency has not explained, appears to have little precedent.

In California, Trump has cast doubt on whether he will approve the $40 billion Newsom has requested to help pay for recovery costs associated with the fires, including $16.8 billion from FEMA to rebuild property, infrastructure and remove debris. That’s on top of the almost $140 million the agency has already provided to individual survivors.

The president told reporters last month that states need to be weaned off FEMA and that the federal government will start distributing less federal aid after hurricane season ends in November.

The questions now are: How much will be approved? Will it be enough? And, if not, what then?

A FEMA spokesperson did not directly respond to questions from Capital & Main about anticipated funding cuts and potential impacts on state and local communities, but said the agency “asserts that disasters are best managed when they’re federally supported, state managed and locally executed.”

The uncertainty makes it “very hard” to plan, said Heather Gonzalez, principal fiscal and policy analyst for emergency services at California’s Legislative Analyst’s Office. “The little bean-counters in the back are stressing out right now trying to figure out ‘what are we going to have to work with?’”

The recent “dust-ups” between Newsom and Trump, she said, have only underscored the unpredictability. For his part, Newsom said he prefers the “open hand” of cooperation over the “closed fist” of fighting when it comes to disaster response.

“Emergency preparedness and emergency planning, recovery and renewal — period, full stop — that should be nonpolitical,” he said on Monday, which marked six months since the fires.

A firefighter battles a blaze in Altadena during the Eaton Fire. (Jeremy Lindenfeld/Capital & Main) The Rising Cost of Disasters

Since at least the 1980s, California has endured a rapidly growing number of billion-dollar disasters, with 18 occurring between 2015 and 2024 alone.

As the frequency and severity of California’s disasters increase, so too does its reliance on federal assistance to respond. In the aftermath of January’s Eaton and Palisades fires — the second and third most destructive wildfires in California history, respectively — FEMA has already provided $139 million for everything from home repair costs to medical expenses, and the agency “has allocated billions of dollars for debris removal,” according to a FEMA spokesperson. Over 5,000 properties have already been cleared of ash and fire debris.

The ruins of a bank that was destroyed in the Palisades Fire in Pacific Palisades. The wildfire was the third most destructive in California history. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

Los Angeles County Office of Emergency Management Communications Director Emily Montanez said recovery efforts for the fires likely won’t be complete for many years and are heavily dependent on FEMA.

“After the Northridge earthquake in 1994, FEMA had field offices here for 28 years,” Montanez said. “We see this as being no different. This was way more devastation, way more impact. So this could be years, definitely decades.”

While Montanez acknowledged that potential “gaps” in disaster response efforts leave some survivors without sufficient resources, she said that the recent operations coordinated between FEMA and local agencies in Los Angeles have mostly been efficient and successful.

FEMA’s federal assistance supplements California’s own disaster response and mitigation resources like those allocated to the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services, which was allotted $4.4 billion in the May revision of the state’s 2025-26 budget. When the office’s funding does not cover all disaster costs, California can also pull from a number of its reserves, including the Budget Stabilization Account and Special Fund for Economic Uncertainties.

Newsom told Capital & Main on Monday that the state has increased its discretionary reserves as a direct consequence of Trump’s ongoing threats to FEMA, though he admitted that even that increased investment wouldn’t make up for the potential loss in federal funding.

California “can’t backfill the elimination of FEMA,” Newsom said. “There’s no state in America [that can], even the most endowed state — $4.1 trillion a year economy — largest in the nation, fourth largest in the world.”

And California’s $12 billion budget deficit will make backfilling the office’s shortfall especially difficult the next time a major disaster strikes, according to Laurie Schoeman, senior adviser on climate resilience to former President Joe Biden.

That will be made even harder if the still-unfinalized proposals outlined in an internal FEMA memo are implemented, according to Schoeman. One of the reforms floated in the memo caps the proportion of recovery costs covered by the federal government at the current baseline of 75%. Under current rules, the president can increase FEMA’s cost share up to 100%, as Biden did for the Los Angeles fires less than two weeks before he left office.

Another proposal quadruples the amount of damage that needs to be suffered in a disaster before FEMA awards any public assistance grants for infrastructure repair and debris removal. That would hike California’s damage threshold from roughly $75 million to nearly $300 million per disaster.

Had just that second reform been in place between 2008 and 2024, California would have received 26% less in public assistance funding from FEMA, a loss of nearly $2 billion, according to a May analysis by the Urban Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.

Such reduced funding during future events would cause an “apocalyptic scenario” where California communities would struggle to afford the cost of running shelters and paying for emergency responders to rescue disaster victims, according to Sarah Labowitz, a senior fellow in the Sustainability, Climate, and Geopolitics Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Yet already, significant damage has been done, Schoeman said.

In April, the Trump administration canceled the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities program, a FEMA initiative dedicated to funding disaster-preparedness projects. Over $880 million in federal funding was rescinded, including a $35 million grant in California’s Napa County largely dedicated to wildfire prevention work. The administration declined to respond to Capital & Main’s request for comment, referring questions to FEMA. An agency spokesperson said that its approach to disaster preparedness mirrors that of disaster response: FEMA will play a supporting role.

“All types of preparedness start with families, individuals and local and state officials ahead of any emergency and disaster,” a statement from the agency said.

The rescinded federal funding risks undermining communities’ abilities to protect against future disasters, Schoeman said, and undoes work accomplished under Trump’s first term.

“They’re just cutting these projects even though they have proven benefit cost analyses in place,” Schoeman said. “The BRIC program was started under the Trump administration … so it feels like the administration is going to cut their own leg off.”

Smoke drifts over Will Rogers State Beach and the Pacific Ocean during the Palisades Fire. (Jeremy Lindenfeld/Capital & Main)

Clark said she is already struggling to get help. She said her insurance provider has so far withheld over $25,000 due to disagreements over whether her transitional housing qualifies as temporary, and her applications for additional FEMA assistance have been denied due to her technically being insured. Some wealthier survivors had “the insulation and resiliency that economic resources give you,” while others had to depend on nonprofits or the kind of government assistance that is now at risk to afford transitional housing.

“If you don’t have those economic resources, your only option is to turn to either philanthropy or the state,” Clark said. “If neither of those are available, then tough luck.”

by ProPublica

ProPublica announced on Tuesday that Chris Alcantara has joined the graphics team as a graphics editor. In this role, Alcantara will develop, design and build charts, maps, data visualizations and visual stories.

Alcantara comes to ProPublica from The Washington Post, where he was a graphics reporter for almost 10 years and published ambitious data visualizations and interactives that covered a range of national and world news. He also built reporting tools and programs that helped collect and analyze data, as well as led production of data pipelines for the U.S. presidential and midterm elections and the Olympic Games.

Before the Post, Alcantara was an interactive news developer at the Miami Herald, where he created interactive stories and data-driven graphics, as part of a three-person visuals team, and contributed data reporting to the newspaper’s investigations team.

“I couldn’t be more excited to welcome Chris to the graphics team,” said Lena Groeger, graphics director. “Chris brings over a decade of experience creating data visualizations that clarify complex topics and reveal important findings through visual storytelling. We can’t wait to get started.”

“ProPublica does valuable work,” Alcantara said, “and I’m grateful for the opportunity to join the team and eager to contribute visual storytelling to the newsroom’s investigations.”

by Abe Streep

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.

On Monday, June 23, a crowd of about 2,000 people surrounded the Eldorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet had come for a meeting of the Western Governors’ Association. “Not for sale!” the crowd boomed. “Not one acre!” There were ranchers and writers in attendance, as well as employees of Los Alamos National Laboratory, all of whom use public land to hike, hunt and fish. Inside the hotel ballroom where the governors had gathered, Michelle Lujan Grisham, the New Mexico governor, apologized for the noise but not the message. “New Mexicans are really loud,” she said.

On the street, one sign read “Defend Public Lands,” with an image of an assault rifle. Others bore creative and bilingual profanities directed at Trump, Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who oversees most of the country’s public acreage, and Sen. Mike Lee, the Republican from Utah, who on June 11 had proposed a large-scale selloff of public lands. Lee, who chairs the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, was not in Santa Fe, so the crowd focused on Burgum, who earlier that afternoon had addressed the governors about energy dominance and artificial intelligence. “Show your face!” the crowd chanted. But he had already departed the hotel through a back door. That night, a hunting group projected an image of him on the exterior wall of the hotel. “Burgled by Burgum,” it read.

In the weeks before the meeting, the possibility of selling off large swaths of public lands had seemed as likely as at any time since the Reagan administration. On June 11, Lee had introduced an amendment to the megabill Congress was debating to reconcile the national budget. The amendment mandated the sale of up to 3 million acres of land controlled by the U.S. Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management, with the vast majority of proceeds going to pay for tax cuts. Although Lee had framed his measure as a solution to the West’s acute lack of affordable housing, it would have allowed developers to select the land they most desired. Under the amendment’s original language, the ultimate power to nominate parcels for sale fell to Burgum and Brooke Rollins, head of the Department of Agriculture, which oversees the U.S. Forest Service.

In the days after the Santa Fe protest, the outcry from hunting and outdoor recreation groups escalated across the West and the Senate parliamentarian ruled that Lee’s amendment violated the chamber’s rules. Republican lawmakers from Montana opposed the amendment; Burgum also distanced himself from it. (“It doesn’t matter to me at all if it’s part of this bill,” he told a reporter on June 26.)

By the time Burgum made his comments, Lee’s effort seemed doomed, and days later he announced that he was removing the amendment; public land advocates celebrated. “This win belongs to the hunters, anglers, and public landowners,” wrote Patrick Berry, the president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers. But the celebration may have been premature. In a social media post announcing his decision, Lee indicated that he would revisit the issue: “I continue to believe the federal government owns far too much land,” he wrote. And powerful forces still support privatization. At the Santa Fe gathering, Rollins had been asked during a press conference about the effort to sell federal land. She told reporters she wasn’t familiar with the specifics of Lee’s amendment but supported his broader vision and suggested such efforts will continue regardless of the fate of the amendment. “Half of the land in the West is owned by the federal government,” said Rollins. “Is that really the right solution for the American people?”

Protestors gather outside the Eldorado Hotel & Spa in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where the Western Governors’ Association conference was held in June. (Dave Cox/Searchlight New Mexico)

The circumstances that led to Lee’s proposal continue to simmer. The American West has an acute lack of affordable and attainable housing. According to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, Colorado, with a population of 6 million, is lacking 175,000 rental units for people who earn up to 50% of area median income. New Mexico, which has one-third of Colorado’s population, is lacking 52,000 such rentals; Utah, 61,000. But nowhere is the issue as acute as in Nevada, where Las Vegas and Reno are encircled by public land. The state of 3.27 million is estimated to lack 118,000 such rentals.

The lack of housing emerged as a lever for Lee, who has sought to challenge federal control of public lands since he was first elected to the Senate in 2010. A year after winning his seat, he introduced a bill to sell a limited amount of public land, saying, “There is no critical need for the federal government to hold onto it.” In 2013, he and others in his state’s delegation wrote a letter demanding the transfer of federal lands to Utah and angrily accusing the Bureau of Land Management, which manages 245 million acres nationwide, of “obvious abuse.” And in a 2018 address at a think tank, he compared federal land managers — and people who recreate on public acreage — to feudal lords, ruling from far-off kingdoms on the coasts. He also denounced “elite publications” that advocated for the protection of public lands, and he used the language of political war to describe the conflict over federal land: “It will take years, and the fight will be brutal.” (Lee’s office did not respond to detailed questions from ProPublica.)

But this spring, Lee found support from unlikely places: the coastal elites he previously railed against seemed open to some of his ideas. The arguments in favor of privatization and development use a word of the season: abundance. Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book of the same name argues that burdensome regulatory processes have crushed the American housing market. While the authors focus on increasing supply in urban areas, in April, The New York Times ran an op-ed calling for building housing on public lands. That same week, the Times Magazine, in a piece titled “Why America Should Sprawl,” framed outward growth, including through the sale of public lands, as all but inevitable. The American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank, has estimated that the nation could build 3 million homes by opening federal land. In December, AEI leaders advocated for federal land sales in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, promising that disposal could “usher in housing abundance and prosperity.”

When pitching his land-sale bill, Lee adopted a more moderate tone than in years past, focusing squarely on housing. On June 20, he posted on X, “This is to help American families afford a home.” On June 23: “Housing prices are crushing families.” The next day: “This land must go to American families.”

But it’s challenging to build affordable housing on public land for a host of reasons, among them the high cost of infrastructure such as water pipelines and the cumbersome bureaucratic processes involving land agencies. But a primary obstacle is the price of that land itself: When it’s sold at market rate, it’s extremely difficult for developers to create affordable homes. “High land costs alone can kill an otherwise great affordable housing project,” said Waldon Swenson, vice president of corporate affairs for Nevada HAND, which builds affordable rental housing.

In fact, past public land sales have created very little affordable housing. There’s just one prominent test case, in Nevada, where a 1998 law enables the sale of federal land at market rate in the Las Vegas Valley and at steeply discounted prices throughout the state if it’s to be used for affordable housing. Though municipalities can buy BLM land at $100 per acre to create affordable housing, the law has so far created just about 850 affordable units on 30 acres of land. By contrast, the law’s market-value mechanism has enabled the sale of more than 17,000 acres of land at an average of more than $200,000 per acre. In March, the BLM sold 42 acres for $16.6 million. Meanwhile, according to a recent analysis, rents in Clark and Washoe counties have respectively risen by 56% and 47% since 2018.

Lee’s amendment did little to address these issues and lacked any definition of affordable or attainable housing. Furthermore, it allowed private developers to nominate parcels for sale — at market rate only. “It would be an unmitigated disaster,” wrote Mark Squillace, a professor of natural resources law at the University of Colorado law school. John Leshy, a former solicitor for the Department of the Interior during the Clinton administration and an emeritus professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco, said that the bill was “not a well-designed scheme to get more acres out there built with affordable houses.” Leshy, the author of “Our Common Ground: A History of America’s Public Lands,” added, “I think it is just a ploy to get your toe in the door to start selling off lots of federal land.”

New houses were going up in Henderson, Nevada, in February. A 1998 law allows the sale of federal land at market rate in the Las Vegas Valley and at deep discounts throughout the state if it’s to be used for affordable housing, which has led to the construction of some new units. (Sam Morris/Las Vegas Review-Journal/Tribune News Service/Getty Images)

Congress’ stance toward public land shifted as settlers moved westward, violently displacing tribal nations. During the homesteading era, the General Land Office — a precursor to the BLM — was tasked with disposing of federal lands to states. But in the late 19th century, states began to request that Congress set aside lands for national forests. As a condition of its statehood, in 1896 Utah relinquished any claim to ownership of “unappropriated public lands” — an acknowledgment that appears in its state Constitution. As the conservation movement took off in the early 20th century, lawmakers and presidents set aside more public land. In 1976, Congress passed the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, which codified the BLM’s role in stewarding lands and declared that they would remain public unless their sale served “the national interest.”

Lee has lamented the impact of those historic changes on Utah, where 42% of the state is BLM land, saying in a 2018 speech, “Manifest destiny had left us behind, in some respects.”

A movement in the 1970s tried to reverse those historical currents when Western ranchers and lawmakers calling themselves “Sagebrush Rebels” sought to claim federal lands for states. They found sympathetic ears in Washington, D.C.: Ronald Reagan, during a 1980 campaign stop in Salt Lake City, said, “Count me in as a rebel.” Once elected, he nominated as secretary of the Interior James Watt, an attorney who favored transfer of public lands to the states. Reagan also came to rely on an economic adviser named Steve H. Hanke, who arrived at the White House from Johns Hopkins University. Hanke was more strident about getting rid of public lands than Watt; he has written that public lands “represent a huge socialist anomaly in America’s capitalist system.”

Hanke helped drive an ambitious effort to dispose of national forests and grazing lands, and in 1982 the Interior Department announced plans to sell millions of acres — as much as 5% of the public estate — in order to reduce the national debt. Hanke later joined The Heritage Foundation, entrenching the idea of privatizing lands at the conservative think tank and predicting that Americans would come around to his way of thinking. Since then, the foundation has regularly advocated for selling public lands. (The foundation did not respond to inquiries from ProPublica.)

Lee is deeply tied into The Heritage Foundation, which he has called “a guiding light for generations.” In 2016, The Heritage Foundation suggested that Trump nominate Lee to the Supreme Court. Among Utah’s leadership, his positions on federal land are widely held. Last year, the state attorney general filed suit to the United States Supreme Court, seeking to seize 18.5 million acres of federal public land. The court declined to hear the case.

Public lands are popular, especially among hunters, hikers and off-roaders, and periodic efforts to sell them have incurred wrath. In 2017, Jason Chaffetz, the former Utah representative, retracted a disposal bill after a backlash. Last December, a survey of 500 Utah voters commissioned by the nonprofit Grand Canyon Trust found that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans supported preserving national monuments in the state. In its preelection policy recommendation known as Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation called for the privatization of everything from public education, using school-choice programs, to Medicare, by automatically enrolling patients in insurer-run plans. But it notably didn’t call for the privatization of the public estate.

Instead, Lee has recently focused the debate on affordable housing. In 2022 and 2023, Lee introduced legislation to sell Western lands called the HOUSES Act. The bill was more prescriptive than his reconciliation amendment: It only allowed states and municipalities to nominate lands for disposal, rather than developers, and it required that 85% of nominated parcels be developed as residential housing, at a minimum of four homes per acre, or as parks. But like his amendment to the reconciliation bill, Lee’s HOUSES Act lacked a definition of affordable housing, and critics suggested that it would lead to the building of mansions. In both 2022 and 2023, when Lee reintroduced the bill, it did not pass out of committee.

But it caught the attention of Kevin Corinth, then the staff director on the Joint Economic Committee, which advises Congress on financial matters. After leaving the Capitol, Corinth joined the American Enterprise Institute, which began focusing on building housing on federal lands. This March, AEI held an event with powerful developers to discuss its ideas, which it called “Homesteading 2.0.” Edward Pinto, a former Fannie Mae executive who helps oversee AEI’s housing research, said during the event that the proposal “grew out of an effort that Sen. Lee undertook with the HOUSES Act.”

AEI advocates for dense development of single-family homes, but its ultimate vision remains opaque: The group has spoken of creating unregulated “freedom cities” far from existing infrastructure, and its proposals for 3 million houses seem ambitious. Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit group in Montana, published an analysis finding that existing public land could support less than 700,000 new homes; Nicholas Irwin, the research director for the University of Nevada, Las Vegas’ Lied Center for Real Estate, said he found Headwaters’ numbers more convincing.

When I asked Pinto for a real-world example that illustrates his hopes for the West, he pointed to Summerlin, a planned community in Las Vegas, and Teravalis, a forthcoming development in Buckeye, Arizona, a rapidly expanding city at Phoenix’s edge. Both are owned by Howard Hughes Holdings, a developer based in Texas.

Housing in Summerlin is not easily attainable — its median home price approaches $700,000. Teravalis, meanwhile, was first proposed more than 20 years ago and has been beset by delays, in part due to ongoing litigation with the state, which claims that the developer has not proven that it can obtain a sufficient water supply. A spokesperson for Howard Hughes Holdings, which bought the development in 2021, wrote that the company is “working with local stakeholders around long-term water policy to support the full build out of Teravalis for more than 300,000 residents over several decades.”

Earlier this year, Pershing Square Holdings, which is controlled by the billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, purchased $900 million of stock in the company. (Ackman, a prominent supporter of Trump’s 2024 campaign, is now the executive chairman of Hughes’ board of directors. Through a spokesperson, he declined to comment for this article.)

Teravalis’ first lots sold for a steep $777,000 per acre without homes on them, and Hughes’ plans are for 2.8 dwellings per acre — less than a quarter of the figure that Pinto cited as ideal for naturally affordable housing. Hughes is currently planning a grand opening for November. The company did not say how much homes would cost, but a spokesperson wrote in a statement, “The need for new housing in the Phoenix West Valley is urgent, and Teravalis will help meet that demand.”

Edward Pinto of the American Enterprise Institute cited Teravalis, a planned community in Buckeye, Arizona, as the kind of development that could be built with sales of more public lands. (Adriana Zehbrauskas/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

When given the option, developers often pursue the profit margins of high-end housing. In 1998, Congress passed a law, the Southern Nevada Public Lands Management Act, that allows any of the state’s municipalities to request the sale of federal lands for affordable housing. (SNPLMA relies on the Department of Housing and Urban Development to define affordable housing, which it says are units within reach of those making up to 80% of the area’s median income.) Still, to date, only about 900 acres have been set aside for affordable housing projects under the law — and only 30 of those acres have been developed into homes where low-income residents can actually live.

It’s unclear why so few affordable housing projects have been built at a time when they are so desperately needed. Clark County Commissioner Marilyn Kirkpatrick attributed it to bureaucratic delays: “It’s taken a long time to get through the process with the BLM.” According to Maurice Page, executive director of the Nevada Housing Coalition, the average time the BLM takes to review projects has recently dropped — from between three and five years to one. Only at that point can a developer close a deal. Tina Frias, CEO of the Southern Nevada Home Builders Association, said such delays can be crippling.

In 2023, the BLM began selling Nevada land for affordable housing for $100 per acre. (Previous SNPLMA affordable housing sales had averaged nearly $35,000 per acre.) Still, local authorities have not requested the transfer of many parcels in recent years. According to the BLM, only three new affordable housing projects are moving toward approval.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the agency wrote, “BLM Nevada can only offer land after it has been nominated by an eligible entity and BLM has confirmed that there are no encumbrances or restrictions on the parcel. In many cases, the restrictions referenced by stakeholders originate with the nominating entities themselves.”

SNPLMA’s affordable housing mechanism is also poorly understood. Alexis Hill, the chair of Washoe County’s board of commissioners, which includes Reno, told me she didn’t know whether the affordable housing provision applied there. (It does.) When I asked Biden’s former BLM director, Tracy Stone-Manning, who now leads The Wilderness Society, whether the $100-per-acre provision was applicable statewide, she said she did not know. Squillace, the Colorado law professor, also admitted he wasn’t sure how widely the provision applied.

Steve Aichroth, the administrator of the Nevada Housing Division, acknowledged a disconnect between agencies. His office is hiring an official to work with municipalities and the BLM. “If you came back to us in about a year we’d have better answers,” he said.

In the meantime, both of the state’s Democratic senators, Jacky Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto, have proposed legislation that would open federal acreage for housing and transfer it to trust land for tribal nations — while protecting other territory for conservation. The governor, Joe Lombardo, a Republican, recently signed a bill to invest $183 million of state money in developing housing for lower- and middle-class residents. Elsewhere in the West, New Mexico is leasing state lands to develop apartments. In Utah, the state housing office is encouraging cities to change zoning requirements to increase density; it is also using public funds to finance private developments and looking to build on state lands. Before Lee pulled his amendment, I spoke with Steve Waldrip, who directs housing strategy for Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. During our conversation, Waldrip expressed concern that the hyperpoliticized debate around a broad federal land sell-off was hampering focused efforts to alleviate the region’s housing crisis. “There’s no silver bullet that’s going to solve the affordability crisis,” he said.

But some continue to believe a simple solution exists. After Lee’s amendment died, I spoke with Pinto, who directs AEI’s efforts to push for housing on federal lands. He struck a conciliatory tone, given the political climate. (The sweeping GOP bill passed Thursday without Lee’s amendment.) At the moment, Pinto said, there doesn’t appear to be an easy route to sell large swaths of public land for development. “The path forward is to have a much more targeted approach.”

In Nevada, such a thing is already happening. Last year Clark County bought 20 acres from the BLM for $2,000, and the county’s plan is to turn that land into single-family houses for first-time homebuyers. This spring, a new affordable housing development opened in Las Vegas — an apartment complex for people 55 and older with rent starting at $573. The project was built by a developer called Ovation on former public land that was transferred through SNPLMA. It had taken a while — the deal was first proposed in February 2020. But recently, the pace of transfers has picked up. Ovation says it’s also working on a similar project in the city of Henderson. It was nominated for BLM approval last February and, according to Jess Molasky, the company’s chief operating officer, “We hope to be in the ground in the first quarter of next year.”

Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

by Victoria Malis, Katherine Dailey and Sadie Leite, Medill Investigative Lab, and Debbie Cenziper and Megan Rose, ProPublica

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

Inspectors charged with safeguarding America’s drug supply say they are reeling from deep cuts at the Food and Drug Administration despite promises by the Trump administration to preserve the work of the agency’s investigative force.

Dozens of people who help coordinate travel for complex inspections of foreign drug-making factories have been let go, and though some have since been rehired, inspectors said the ongoing strain of policing an industry spread across more than 90 countries has exhausted staff and could compromise the safety of medications used by millions of people.

For years, inspectors have uncovered dirty equipment, contaminated supplies and fraudulent testing records in some overseas factories — serious safety and quality breaches that can sicken or kill consumers. Last month, ProPublica reported that a generic immunosuppression drug for transplant patients could dissolve too quickly when ingested, increasing the risk of kidney failure. The drug was made at an Indian factory with a history of quality violations that was banned from the U.S. market. The company previously told ProPublica it believes the medication is safe.

In April, more than 3,500 FDA employees were laid off under U.S. Department and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a roughly 15% reduction in force. “We aren’t just reducing bureaucratic sprawl. We are realigning the organization with its core mission and our new priorities in reversing the chronic disease epidemic,” Kennedy said.

At the time, the agency said the reductions would not impact inspectors. Kennedy has since announced that HHS would reverse 20% of the cuts across the agency. Amid news reports describing the layoffs at the FDA, Kennedy did not specify how many people would be reinstated.

ProPublica spoke to 10 current and former FDA staff members and leaders in recent weeks, including inspectors who said that the loss of support staff has slowed critical investigations and that little relief has materialized. Most declined to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly or feared backlash within the industry as they search for new jobs.

One veteran drug inspector said nearly 70 people who helped arrange travel, budgets, translators and contingency plans for investigations were laid off. Only about one-third have been brought back, forcing a handful of busy managers to coordinate travel clearances and visas for inspections that can span weeks and include stops in multiple countries.

“It’s difficult to get inspections done,” the investigator said. “The pace has slowed down. You can’t inspect as many sites.”

In an email, an HHS spokesperson said inspections have not been affected by downsizing. The agency did not address questions about how many people have been let go or reinstated or whether additional help will be brought on.

“To be clear, FDA inspectors were not impacted, and this critical work continues,” the agency said.

Two former FDA commissioners and the agency’s longtime head of drug safety, however, said that the loss of support staff has undermined one of the FDA’s most essential missions at a time when Americans get most of their generic drugs from overseas manufacturers. That includes chemotherapy treatments, sedatives, antibiotics and medications on hospital crash carts.

“It’s like saying, ‘Oh we didn’t fire any of the doctors or nurses at the hospital, but we fired all the lab techs, all the orderlies, all the phlebotomists … oh, but the doctors and nurses are still left so it’s fine,’” said Janet Woodcock, who ran the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research for more than two decades and retired in 2004. “A lot of the connective tissue that deals with drug safety and similar things are going to be missing.”

Beyond the staff cuts, the departures of some longtime investigators and leaders in recent months have left less experienced people tasked with rooting out dangerous and sometimes deceptive manufacturing practices.

The investigative unit, which looks into potential safety issues with drugs, vaccines, medical devices and other products, has had a retention problem for years. Inspectors leave so often that even with hiring blitzes, the FDA has been unable to get ahead.

Between 2022 and 2024, the agency hired 105 inspectors but about the same number left, leaving the inspection pool with about 230 people, according to the Government Accountability Office, the watchdog arm of Congress.

About one-third did not have the experience to conduct independent foreign inspections, the GAO found.

Two FDA inspectors said the agency needs an additional 100 to 200 experienced investigators to do the work.

The job can be grueling. Some inspectors who travel to overseas drug-making factories can be away for as long as 15 weeks a year. Some have described threats of violence by company managers, days on planes and trains in oppressive heat and long nights preparing inspection reports before they head to the next stop.

The loss of experienced investigators and cuts to support staff have also hamstrung other inspectors.

“I am in utter shock that they don’t support and promote those of us who can do a decent inspection,” said one investigator who scrutinizes factories that produce vaccines, cell therapies and other biological products. “You’re adding to the chaos.”

Dozens of employees who handled technology support, facilities, supplies and equipment were dismissed as well, snarling some day-to-day operations at the agency. One current employee recalled how a colleague couldn’t find replacement batteries for a computer mouse and how another locked herself out of her office and couldn’t get back in because there was no one to open the door.

Even before the layoffs, the FDA’s investigative force struggled to monitor drug-making factories in countries that include India and China, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic, raising alarms in Congress that serious manufacturing lapses may have gone unchecked. The FDA received more than 1 million reports from doctors, patients and others in 2023 about product quality issues or consumers who had adverse reactions to drugs, FDA data shows.

“Things will be missed,” former FDA inspector Patrick Stone said about the layoffs. “We are going to have a lot less safe drugs.”

The Trump administration has said little about the layoffs in recent weeks, though Kennedy told Congress late last month that more than 900 employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Institutes of Health had been reinstated.

The FDA announced in May that it would expand the use of unannounced inspections at overseas factories, a move that some members of Congress have been pushing for years. And FDA Commissioner Marty Makary announced that a new AI tool known as Elsa would help identify inspection targets.

Current and former employees others say that won’t make up for the losses.

“You can’t just expect the inspector to take care of all the complexities of organizing their trips overseas,” said former FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, who served under the Obama administration. “Even though it might be said we’ve kept the inspectors, that doesn’t mean that they’ve kept the infrastructure … that actually supports safe and meaningful inspections.”

Brandon Roberts contributed data analysis.

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom

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 and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk’s team of Texas lobbyists during the 2025 legislative session did not rival those of huge energy and telecommunications companies, which typically employ dozens of people to represent them. But Musk and his companies still hired more lobbyists this year than any other since 2021, according to data from the Texas Ethics Commission.

Musk, the billionaire businessman behind carmaker Tesla and aerospace company SpaceX, influenced several new Texas laws this year. How his lobbyists came about these wins, however, is more of a mystery.

His lobbyists, who represented Tesla, SpaceX and the social media giant X Corp., spent tens of thousands of dollars on things like gifts and meals for Texas elected officials and others during the session, according to an analysis of state ethics data. In most cases, Texas transparency laws do not require lobbyists to disclose which politicians they wined and dined or on behalf of which clients.

The Texas Newsroom reached out to all 12 of Musk’s lobbyists registered with the state this session. Only one, Carrie Simmons, a lobbyist who counts Tesla among her clients, responded, but she declined to be interviewed. She said only Musk’s companies could comment on their work this session.

Emails sent to Musk’s companies and to Musk himself were not returned.

The Texas Newsroom was able to find hints of some of their actions in records obtained from Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and state Sen. Adam Hinojosa. Other documents detailing their deeper connections are hidden from disclosure by state laws.

Ethics experts said the responsibility to improve transparency lies with Texas lawmakers. State law provides a “base level of transparency” for the public on who lobbyists are and who they represent, said Andrew Cates, a former lobbyist who wrote a guide on state ethics rules.

“Beyond that, the Legislature simply has not prioritized enough transparency in how the dollars are actually being spent on legislators on a regular basis. But that’s not the lobby’s fault, it’s the Legislature’s,” Cates said.

Tom Forbes, president of the Professional Advocacy Association of Texas, a statewide lobbyist organization, said while lobbyists sometimes get a bad rap, they play a critical role for lawmakers trying to make decisions on complex policies. He told The Texas Newsroom that his group is “agnostic” about making reporting requirements more stringent but will follow any changes the state implements.

“Our association is going to comply with whatever law the Legislature passes,” Forbes said.

Who did Musk hire and who did they lobby?

Eight of Musk’s lobbyists worked for SpaceX, according to filings with the Ethics Commission. Tesla had four, one of whom also worked for X.

Musk’s lobbyists include former advisers and staffers for Gov. Greg Abbott, among them Mike Toomey and Reed Clay. Another lobbyist, Will McAdams, once sat on the Public Utility Commission of Texas, which regulates the state’s electric, telecommunications, and water and sewer utilities.

All but one lobbyist had other clients for whom they were also working, making it more difficult to track exactly how much spending went to further Musk’s agenda. Benjamin Lancaster, a former legislative staffer, was only on SpaceX’s payroll.

Lobbyists are not required to report their exact salaries, only a pay range. According to Ethics Commission data, Musk pledged to pay somewhere between about $400,000 to nearly $1 million in total to his lobbyists for their work this year. Half of them could rake in more than $110,000 each working for Musk’s companies.

Each month, lobbyists report their total spending. But state rules don’t require them to disclose who was on the receiving end unless the lobbyist shelled out more than $132.60 on one person in a single day. This includes food and beverages, transportation, lodging or entertainment. Taxes and tips are not counted. The disclosure threshold for gifts is $110.

Lobbyists also don’t need to disclose exactly who attended events to which all legislators were invited, like catered lunches for the entire Texas House of Representatives or happy hours hosted off-site.

In practice, these rules mean a lobbyist could buy the same elected official a steak dinner every night. As long as the daily cost stays under that amount, they don’t need to say who got the free meal.

Musk’s lobbyists spent more than $46,000 on food and drink alone for elected officials and their staff, family and guests this year, according to state ethics records. None of them detailed which elected officials may have been on the receiving end, implying all of their spending remained beneath the daily threshold.

Jim Clancy, the former chair of the Ethics Commission, said it’s common for multiple lobbyists to divide a single bill in order to stay below the reporting threshold.

“They have 15 different credit cards in the deal to make sure that it’s all below the limit,” Clancy told The Texas Newsroom. “The Legislature has to change it. And if they did, they wouldn’t get to eat for free.”

A slate of ethics bills, including several to require transparency into who funds mass text messages for political campaigns, failed to become law this year, according to The Texas Tribune. Meanwhile, legislators approved a new law that will reduce the fine for former lawmakers who engage in illegal lobbying activity.

What do other records show?

While lobbyists are not required to disclose which bills they discuss in private meetings with officials and their staff, they must note their position if they choose to testify on a piece of legislation. This is how The Texas Newsroom identified the 13 bills on which Musk’s lobbyists took a public stance.

The Texas Newsroom was able to glean some additional insight on lobbyist influence from records received through public information requests.

Calendars for Hinojosa, a newly elected South Texas Republican who authored multiple bills that would benefit SpaceX and other aerospace companies, showed he or his staff had meetings scheduled with lobbyists or representatives from Musk’s rocket company at least three times in two months. Emails showed Patrick penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting SpaceX’s ability to increase the number of launches at its South Texas rocket site.

Patrick was also invited to take a tour of the Tesla Gigafactory outside Austin, these records showed, but it’s unclear if he went.

Neither Hinojosa nor Patrick responded to requests for an interview.

The Texas Senate declined to release other documents that could have shed light on how Musk’s companies interacted with elected officials. In denying their release, Senate Secretary Patsy Spaw said communications between state lawmakers and Texas residents are “confidential by law.”

The reason, she said, is “to ensure the right of citizens of the state to petition their state government without fear of harassment, retaliation or public ridicule.”

This could include emails with lobbyists.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

by Anna Clark

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

One summer day in 2017, a front-page story in the StarNews of Wilmington, North Carolina, shook up the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. The drinking water system, it said, was polluted with a contaminant commonly known as GenX, part of the family of “forever” PFAS chemicals.

It came from a Chemours plant in Fayetteville, near the winding Cape Fear River. Few knew about the contaminated water until the article described the discoveries of scientists from the Environmental Protection Agency and a state university. Given that certain types of PFAS have been linked to cancer, there was widespread anxiety over its potential danger.

In the onslaught of legal action and activism that followed, the EPA during President Donald Trump’s first term took an assertive stance, vowing to combat the spread of PFAS nationwide.

In its big-picture PFAS action plan from 2019, the agency said it would attack this complex problem on multiple fronts. It would, for example, consider limiting the presence of two of the best-known compounds — PFOA and PFOS — in drinking water. And, it said, it would find out more about the potential harm of GenX, which was virtually unregulated.

By the time Trump was sworn in for his second term, many of the plan’s suggestions had been put in place. After his first administration said PFOA and PFOS in drinking water should be regulated, standards were finalized under President Joe Biden. Four other types of PFAS, including GenX, were also tagged with limits.

But now, the second Trump administration is pulling back. The EPA said in May that it will delay enforcement on the drinking water limits for PFOA and PFOS until 2031, and it will rescind and reconsider the limits on the other four. Among those who challenged the standards in court is Chemours, which has argued that the EPA, under Biden, “used flawed science and didn’t follow proper rulemaking procedures” for GenX.

These EPA decisions under Trump are part of a slew of delays and course changes to PFAS policies that had been supported in his first term. Even though his earlier EPA pursued a measure that would help hold polluters accountable for cleaning up PFAS, the EPA of his second term has not yet committed to it. The agency also slowed down a process for finding out how industries have used the chemicals, a step prompted by a law signed by Trump in 2019.

At the same time, the EPA is hampering its ability to research pollutants — the kind of research that made it possible for its own scientists to investigate GenX. As the Trump administration seeks severe reductions in the EPA’s budget, the agency has terminated grants for PFAS studies and paralyzed its scientists with spending restrictions.

Pointing to earlier announcements on its approach to the chemicals, the EPA told ProPublica that it’s “committed to addressing PFAS in drinking water and ensuring that regulations issued under the Safe Drinking Water Act follow the law, follow the science, and can be implemented by water systems to strengthen public health protections.”

“If anything,” the agency added, “the Trump administration’s historic PFAS plan in 2019 laid the groundwork for the first steps to comprehensively address this contamination across media and we will continue to do so this term.”

In public appearances, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has pushed back on the suggestion that his agency weakened the drinking water limits on GenX and similar compounds. Future regulations imposed by his agency, he said, could be more or less stringent.

“What we want to do is follow the science, period,” he has said.

That sentiment perplexes scientists and environmental advocates, who say there is already persuasive evidence on the dangers of these chemicals that linger in the environment. The EPA reviewed GenX, for example, during both the first Trump and Biden administrations. In both 2018 and 2021, the agency pointed to animal studies linking it to cancer, as well as problems with kidneys, immune systems and, especially, livers. (Chemours has argued that certain animal studies have limited relevance to humans.)

Scientists and advocates also said it’s unclear what it means for the EPA to follow the science while diminishing its own ability to conduct research.

“I don’t understand why we would want to hamstring the agency that is designed to make sure we have clean air and clean water,” said Jamie DeWitt, a toxicologist in Oregon who worked with other scientists on Cape Fear River research. “I don’t understand it.”

The Cape Fear River runs near the Chemours plant in Fayetteville, North Carolina. (Ed Kashi/The New York Times/Redux Images) Delays, Confusion Over PFAS

Favored for their nonstick and liquid-resistant qualities, synthetic PFAS chemicals are widely used in products like raincoats, cookware and fast food wrappers. Manufacturers made the chemicals for decades without disclosing how certain types are toxic at extremely low levels, can accumulate in the body and will scarcely break down over time — hence the nickname “forever chemicals.”

The chemicals persist in soil and water too, making them complicated and costly to clean up, leading to a yearslong push to get such sites covered by the EPA’s Superfund program, which is designed to handle toxic swaths of land. During the first Trump administration, the EPA said it was taking steps toward designating the two legacy compounds, PFOA and PFOS, as “hazardous substances” under the Superfund program. Its liability provisions would help hold polluters responsible for the cost of cleaning up.

Moving forward with this designation process was a priority, according to the PFAS plan from Trump’s first term. Zeldin’s EPA describes that plan as “historic.” And, when he represented a Long Island district with PFAS problems in Congress, Zeldin voted for a bill that would have directed the EPA to take this step.

The designation became official under Biden. But business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and organizations representing the construction, recycling and chemical industries, sued. Project 2025, The Heritage Foundation’s playbook for the new administration, also questioned it.

Zeldin has said repeatedly that he wants to hold polluters accountable for PFAS, but his EPA requested three delays in the court case challenging the Superfund designation that helps make it possible.

The agency said in a recent motion it needed the latest pause because new leadership is still reviewing the issues and evaluating the designation in context of its “comprehensive strategy to address PFOA and PFOS.”

The EPA also delayed a rule requiring manufacturers and importers to report details about their PFAS use between 2011 and 2022. An annual bill that sets defense policy and spending, signed by Trump in his first term, had charged the EPA with developing such a process.

When Biden’s EPA finalized it, the agency said the rule would provide the largest-ever dataset of PFAS manufactured and used in the United States. It would help authorities understand their spread and determine what protections might be warranted.

Businesses were supposed to start reporting this month. But in a May 2 letter, a coalition of chemical companies petitioned the EPA to withdraw the deadline, reconsider the rule and issue a revised one with narrowed scope.

When the EPA delayed the rule less than two weeks later, it said it needed time to prepare for data collection and to consider changes to aspects of the rule.

In an email to ProPublica, the agency said it will address PFAS in many ways. Its approach, the agency said, is to give more time for compliance and to work with water systems to reduce PFAS exposure as quickly as feasible, “rather than issue violations and collect fees that don’t benefit public health.”

The court expects an update from the EPA in the Superfund designation case by Wednesday, and in the legal challenges to the drinking water standards by July 21. The EPA could continue defending the rules. It could ask the court for permission to reverse its position or to send the rules back to the agency for reconsideration. Or it could also ask for further pauses.

“It’s just a big unanswered question whether this administration and this EPA is going to be serious about enforcing anything,” said Robert Sussman, a former EPA official from the administrations of Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. As a lawyer, he now represents environmental groups that filed an amicus brief in PFAS cases.

Back in North Carolina, problems caused by the chemicals continue to play out.

A consent order between the state and Chemours required the manufacturer to drastically reduce the release of GenX and other PFAS into the environment. (The chemicals commonly called GenX refer to HFPO-DA and its ammonium salt, which are involved in the GenX processing aid technology owned by Chemours.)

Chemours told ProPublica that it invested more than $400 million to remediate and reduce PFAS emissions. It also noted that there are hundreds of PFAS users in North Carolina, “as evidenced by PFAS seen upstream and hundreds of miles away” from its Fayetteville plant “that cannot be traced back to the site.”

PFAS-riddled sea foam continues to wash up on the coastal beaches. Chemours and water utilities, meanwhile, are battling in court about who should cover the cost of upgrades to remove the chemicals from drinking water.

Community forums about PFAS draw triple-digit crowds, even when they’re held on a weeknight, said Emily Donovan, co-founder of the volunteer group Clean Cape Fear, which has intervened in federal litigation. In the fast-growing region, new residents are just learning about the chemicals, she said, and they’re angry.

“I feel like we’re walking backwards,” Donovan said. Pulling back from the drinking water standards, in particular, is “disrespectful to this community.”

“It’s one thing to say you’re going to focus on PFAS,” she added. “It’s another thing to never let it cross the finish line and become any meaningful regulation.”

A letter dated April 29, 2025, notifying Michigan State University about the termination of a grant for research into PFAS, one day after the EPA said in a press release that it was committed to combating PFAS contamination by, in part, “strengthening the science.” (Obtained by ProPublica) Research Under Fire

The EPA of Trump’s first term didn’t just call for more regulation of PFAS, it also stressed the importance of better understanding the forever chemicals through research and testing.

In a 2020 update to its PFAS action plan, the EPA highlighted its support for North Carolina’s investigation of GenX in the Cape Fear River. And it described its efforts to develop the science on PFAS issues affecting rural economies with “first-of-its-kind funding for the agriculture sector.”

Zeldin, too, has boasted about advancing PFAS research in an April news release. “This is just a start of the work we will do on PFAS to ensure Americans have the cleanest air, land, and water,” he said.

At about the same time, though, the agency terminated a host of congressionally appropriated grants for PFAS research, including over $15 million for projects focused on food and farmlands in places like Utah, Texas and Illinois.

Scientists at Michigan State University, for example, were investigating how PFAS interacts with water, soil, crops, livestock and biosolids, which are used for fertilizer. They timed their latest study to this year’s growing season, hired staff and partnered with a farm. Then the EPA canceled two grants.

In virtually identical letters, the agency said that each grant “no longer effectuates the program goals or agency priorities. The objectives of the award are no longer consistent with EPA funding priorities.”

The contrast between the agency’s words and actions raises questions about the process behind its decisions, said Cheryl Murphy, head of Michigan State’s Center for PFAS Research and co-lead of one of the projects.

“If you halt it right now,” she said, “what we’re doing is we’re undermining our ability to translate the science that we’re developing into some policy and guidance to help people minimize their exposure to PFAS.”

At least some of the researchers are appealing the terminations.

About a month after PFAS grants to research teams in Maine and Virginia were terminated for not being aligned with agency priorities, the agency reinstated them. The EPA told ProPublica that “there will be more updates on research-related grants in the future.”

Even if the Michigan State grants are reinstated, there could be lasting consequences, said Hui Li, the soil scientist who led both projects. “We will miss the season for this year,” he said in an email, “and could lose the livestock on the farm for the research.”

Federal researchers are also in limbo. Uncertainty, lost capacity and spending restrictions have stunted the work at an EPA lab in Duluth, Minnesota, that investigates PFAS and other potential hazards, according to several sources connected to it. As one source who works at the lab put it, “We don’t know how much longer we will be operating as is.”

The EPA told ProPublica that it’s “continuing to invest in research and labs, including Duluth, to advance the mission of protecting human health and the environment.”

Meanwhile, the agency is asking Congress to eliminate more than half of its own budget. That includes massive staffing cuts, and it would slash nearly all the money for two major programs that help states fund water and wastewater infrastructure. One dates back to President Ronald Reagan’s administration. The other was spotlighted in a paper by Trump’s first-term EPA, which said communities could use these funds to protect public health from PFAS. It trumpeted examples from places like Michigan and New Jersey.

The EPA lost 727 employees in voluntary separations between Jan. 1 and late June, according to numbers the agency provided to ProPublica. It said it received more than 2,600 applications for the second round of deferred resignations and voluntary early retirements.

“These are really technical, difficult jobs,” said Melanie Benesh, vice president for government affairs at the nonprofit Environmental Working Group. “And the EPA, by encouraging so many employees to leave, is also losing a lot of institutional knowledge and a lot of technical expertise.”

The shake-up also worries DeWitt, who was one of the scientists who helped investigate the Cape Fear River contamination and who has served on an EPA science advisory board. Her voice shook as she reflected on the EPA’s workforce, “some of the finest scientists I know,” and what their loss means for public well-being.

“Taking away this talent from our federal sector,” she said, will have “profound effects on the agency’s ability to protect people in the United States from hazardous chemicals in air, in water, in soil and potentially in food.”

by Lauren McGaughy, The Texas Newsroom

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 and The Texas Tribune as part of an initiative to report on how power is wielded in Texas.

Elon Musk was pleading.

It was April 2013, and Musk stood at a podium in a small committee room in the basement of the Texas Capitol. The Tesla CEO asked the legislators gathered before him to change state law, allowing him to bypass the state’s powerful car dealership lobby and sell his electric vehicles directly to the public.

He painted a bleak picture of what could happen if they didn’t give him his way.

“We would, I’m afraid, we would fail,” Musk told the assembled representatives. “So for us, it’s a matter of life or death.”

Clad in a dark suit instead of his now ubiquitous black T-shirt and baseball hat, the younger Musk was unable to persuade lawmakers in Austin. That year, the bill he wanted to pass died.

More than a decade later, however, Musk’s fortunes inside the Texas Capitol have changed — dramatically.

Musk is now not only one of the richest people in the world, who, until recently, was a key member of President Donald Trump’s second administration, but he’s also become one of the most powerful business and political figures in the state.

During this year’s legislative session, Musk’s lobbyists and representatives publicly advocated for almost a dozen bills that would benefit his companies. The Texas Newsroom identified these priorities by searching legislative records for committee testimony and other evidence of his public stances.

Musk wanted legislators to pass new laws that would make it faster and easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, like the kind Tesla makes, on their properties. He wanted them to create new crimes so people who fly drones or interfere with operations at his rocket company SpaceX can be arrested. And he wanted to change who controlled the highway and public beach near SpaceX’s South Texas site so he can launch his rockets according to his timeline.

Musk got them all.

In a Capitol where the vast majority of bills fail to pass, all but three of Musk’s public priorities will become law. The two bills his lobbyists openly opposed are dead, including a measure that would have regulated autonomous vehicles.

Musk made gains even on bills he didn’t publicly endorse. Texas lawmakers followed the tech giant’s lead by rewriting the state’s corporate laws and creating a new office modeled after the Department of Government Efficiency, the controversial effort he led in the Trump administration to cut federal spending.

By all accounts, Musk’s influence was great enough that he did not have to formally address lawmakers in person this session to make the case for any of his priorities.

Critics said these new laws will hand Musk’s companies more cash, more power and more protection from scrutiny as his business footprint continues to expand across Texas.

“The real harm is the influence of a private company on the decisions made by government,” Cyrus Reed, the conservation director for the Sierra Club’s Lone Star Chapter, told The Texas Newsroom. The Sierra Club is part of a group suing the state over SpaceX’s activities in South Texas.

Musk and his representatives did not respond to requests for an interview. He recently ended his run with DOGE, and his relationship with Trump has increasingly frayed.

Contrary to his slash-and-burn tactics in Washington, D.C., where he bulldozed his way onto the scene after Trump’s reelection, Musk has played the long game to amass power in Texas. He still hasn’t succeeded in changing Texas law to allow for Tesla direct sales, but that hasn’t stopped him from steadily investing his personal and professional capital in the state over more than a decade. Most of his businesses, including the tunneling firm The Boring Company, social media giant X and Tesla, are now headquartered here. While it’s still based in California, SpaceX operates production, testing and launch sites across Texas.

Musk has also moved his personal home to the state, reportedly securing properties in the Austin area and South Texas.

In the Texas Capitol, Musk’s power is subtle but undeniable.

Calendars and emails obtained by The Texas Newsroom through public information requests show his company’s representatives met regularly with lawmakers backing his priority bills and invited Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick to tour SpaceX. Patrick, who leads the state Senate, also penned a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration supporting the rocket company’s request to increase its launches in South Texas.

Texas politics, with its long history of outsize characters, has never seen the likes of Musk, said Rice University political scientist Mark Jones.

“Even in the heyday of the [George W.] Bush era, you couldn’t find somebody who had such dramatic wealth as Musk, who also had the same level of access and business interests here in Texas,” Jones told The Texas Newsroom. “Today, Elon Musk is arguably the most powerful and influential private citizen in the country.”

A mural of Elon Musk in downtown Brownsville, Texas (Michael Gonzalez for KUT News) “It’s All to Help Elon”

When lawmakers convened their 2025 legislative session in January, one of Musk’s top priorities was quickly clear. He wanted more control over the area around SpaceX’s launch site in South Texas.

Known as Starbase, the massive rocket testing and launch facility has come to dominate the small rural area between Brownsville, on the border, and the Gulf of Mexico. It is the launch site for Starship, the rocket meant to eventually take humans to Mars and the heart of Musk’s mission to make humans a multiplanetary species. The FAA recently gave SpaceX permission to increase Starship launches fivefold.

Although SpaceX owns most of the land around Starbase, county officials retained the authority over access to the adjacent public beach, called Boca Chica. The county worked closely with SpaceX to ensure the area was cleared ahead of launches, but the company’s leaders did not have ultimate control over the process.

That changed this year. First, Musk decided to incorporate the launch site as its own city. That happened on May 3, when the few residents who live in the area — most of whom The Texas Newsroom determined work for SpaceX — voted to create the new city of Starbase.

Musk then wanted state lawmakers to hand the new city the power to close Boca Chica Beach and the adjoining public highway during the week, a change the county officials opposed.

State Sen. Adam Hinojosa, a newly elected Republican who represents the area, authored the legislation to shift control to Starbase. Dozens of SpaceX employees got involved in the effort, submitting pages of identical comments to lawmakers in support.

Democrats succeeded in killing Hinojosa’s bill, prompting local activists to celebrate. Their victory was short-lived. Late in the session, lawmakers decided instead to shift some of this power to the Texas Space Commission, which facilitates the state’s space exploration agenda.

The new law states that the commission’s board can close highways and gulf beaches with the approval of a local municipality, which, in this case, is Starbase. SpaceX retains a connection to the commission itself: Kathy Lueders, who confirmed that she left her job as Starbase general manager last month, still sits on the Space Commission board. She directed additional questions to the commission.

The Space Commission declined to answer questions on SpaceX’s potential future involvement with these discussions.

“The way I view it is SpaceX wanted a certain amount of power,” said Reed, with the Sierra Club. “And at the end of the day, they didn’t quite get it, but they got something pretty close.”

The bill passed along largely partisan lines. Republican state Rep. Greg Bonnen, who authored the bill, did not respond to a request for comment about the role Starbase may play now that it will become law.

Lawmakers passed several more bills to benefit spaceports, the sites where spacecraft launch, like SpaceX.

While Texas is home to multiple spaceports, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, SpaceX dwarfs the rest in size and scope of influence across the state and country, boasting large federal government contracts and a growing satellite industry.

Hinojosa was an author or sponsor on most of these bills; he did not respond to multiple requests for an interview or comment for this story.

Other than the beach closure legislation, many passed with the support of Democrats.

At SpaceX’s urging, Texas lawmakers passed a measure to ban drones over spaceports. They also added spaceports to the state’s “critical infrastructure” facilities, which already include airports and military bases. The law will make it a felony to intentionally damage or interrupt the operation of any site where a spacecraft is tested or launched. Similar critical infrastructure laws have been used in other states to arrest people protesting oil and gas pipeline projects.

Bekah Hinojosa with the South Texas Environmental Justice Network, a local activist group, told The Texas Newsroom the new critical infrastructure law will let Musk “militarize our Boca Chica Beach for his dangerous rocket testing endeavors."

The Sierra Club and other groups from South Texas, including a local Indigenous tribe, are suing the state, arguing that closing Boca Chica violates an amendment to the Texas Constitution that protects access to public beaches.

The General Land Office, the main defendant in that suit, declined to comment. In court filings, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argues the state can still regulate beach access for public safety reasons and that it cannot be sued in this case because it has immunity. The case is pending at the Texas Supreme Court.

A rally at Boca Chica Beach against the incorporation of Starbase on May 3 (Michael Gonzalez for KUT News)

Legislators also passed two more new laws that will shield companies like SpaceX from public scrutiny and legal challenges.

One will exempt certain military and aerospace issues from public meetings laws, allowing elected officials in some cases to discuss these topics behind closed doors. The proposal was so concerning to residents who live close to SpaceX’s facility near Waco, where locals say the company’s rocket testing has spooked livestock and damaged homes, that they submitted a dozen comments against it.

This law went into effect on May 15.

Another new law will make it harder for crew members and certain other employees to sue space flight companies. This, like most new legislation approved this session, will become law on Sept. 1.

SpaceX’s only significant public defeat during this year’s legislative session was the failure of a bill it supported to give spaceports a tax cut. The measure would have cost nearly $14.5 million over five years, according to an official estimate from the Legislative Budget Board.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering and engineering mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, believes Texas is pandering to Musk.

“It’s all to help Elon,” said Jah, who added that his viewpoint is rooted in resisting policies that enable what he called “environmental plunder masked as ‘innovation.’” He has concerns that the state is investing in spaceports, most notably Musk’s, while carving out exceptions that prohibit public insight and input into what’s happening at those facilities.

“There’s this whole cloak of secrecy with whatever Elon is doing,” Jah said. “We will not and should not cease to launch satellites or explore space. But the way in which we do it matters a lot.”

“They Never Come Out of the Shadows”

This year, Tesla’s lobbyists publicly advocated against only two bills. Both died.

One was a GOP-authored proposal intended to create a buffer zone between homes and large-scale energy storage facilities like the kind Tesla sells.

The other bill would have imposed more regulations on the type of cars that Musk is rolling out as robotaxis in Texas, and would have required a public hearing if a collision involving an autonomous vehicle resulted in a fatality.

Bill author Rep. Terry Canales, an Edinburg Democrat, believes his legislation failed because it was not pro-industry enough.

“Tesla is the worst actor that I’ve ever dealt with in the Capitol. They’re subversive. They never come out of the shadows,” Canales told The Texas Newsroom. “Not only did I not hear from them, I didn’t expect to hear from them because that’s the way they operate.”

Lawmakers instead advanced a different bill, one with a lighter regulatory touch that was crafted with input from the autonomous vehicle industry.

It will require commercial operators, such as robotaxi and driverless big rig companies, to obtain authorization from the state. This approval can be revoked if the company’s vehicles endanger the public, including causing “serious bodily injury,” though it requires no public hearings in the case of a fatality, as Canales’ bill would have done. Autonomous vehicle companies will also have to develop plans for interacting with emergency responders.

Tesla took a neutral stance on the legislation. But the bill’s author, state Sen. Robert Nichols, R-Jacksonville, told The Texas Newsroom that Tesla’s team participated in work groups and stakeholder conversations with industry groups, trial lawyers and others.

Texas has been at the forefront of testing this technology for years, rolling out its first regulations in 2017. But with more autonomous vehicles hitting the streets, Nichols said it was time to clarify the rules and called his bill “a real opportunity here to actually improve safety.”

Nichols’ legislation initially died in the Texas House. But with less than a week before lawmakers packed up to go home, a House member added the entirety of Nichols’ bill as an amendment to another transportation bill, which will become law Sept. 1.

Tray Gober, a personal injury lawyer who handles vehicle crash cases in Austin, said it’s smart to get new regulations for autonomous vehicles on the books. But he worries that Texas is rushing to give its blessing to a technology that has not been fully tested.

“We’re not talking about rockets crashing into the ocean. We’re talking about cars crashing into other people,” he said, comparing Tesla to SpaceX. “There’s going to be people that are hurt during this process of improving these systems, and that’s unfortunate. I think it’s viewed as collateral damage by these companies.”

When asked about concerns that there could be fatalities as the number of driverless cars grows in Texas, Nichols said, “There probably will be. Eventually there will be. I would not doubt that.” But he pointed to studies showing autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers.

“If you start looking at the breakdown of the fatalities on the roads and the crashes and the wrecks, what causes them? It’s not equipment failure. It’s driver distraction,” he told The Texas Newsroom.

Critics of these studies argue their scope is too narrow to make conclusions about the safety of self-driving technology. Citing safety concerns, some local lawmakers asked Tesla’s robotaxi rollout in Austin to be delayed. The company continued with the launch but with human monitors in the passenger seats.

Many Democrats opposed Nichols’ proposal. But at least three other bills affecting Tesla got bipartisan support.

At times, the Sierra Club was fighting against Musk’s SpaceX bills while working with his Tesla lobbyists on clean energy legislation, said Reed, the club’s conservation director. For example, Tesla and the Sierra Club both supported legislation to create new fire standards for battery energy storage facilities and address the environmental and financial challenges associated with decommissioning them.

Tesla also backed a bill that had bipartisan support to make it easier for homeowners to install backup power generators, such as the company’s Powerwall.

Reed said Musk’s shift to the right has created interesting bedfellows, sometimes making it easier for Republicans to back some of the energy policies more traditionally associated with progressives.

He remarked, “It’s an interesting time in our country, right?”

Musk’s Indirect Influence A Tesla showroom in Austin on March 24 (Michael Minasi/KUT News)

For all the bills Musk pushed to see pass, he also indirectly influenced the creation of new laws on which he did not take a public stance.

Texas lawmakers created the state’s own DOGE office housed under the governor, the name an homage to Musk’s controversial federal cost-slashing effort in Washington, D.C.

Musk himself took no public role in creating the new office. But at a signing ceremony for the bill, Gov. Greg Abbott explained he was the inspiration.

Texas legislators also rewrote the state’s corporate laws after Musk raised concerns about business codes in other states. Authored by Republican state Sen. Bryan Hughes, the rewrite shields business leaders from lawsuits and establishes thresholds for the types of legal challenges shareholders can file.

Musk and his lobbyists never came out in support of the bill, but he has long complained that states needed to shore up protections for CEOs and other business leaders.

Musk began crusading on the issue after his $55 billion compensation package at Tesla was challenged in Delaware’s business courts. Musk moved many of his businesses elsewhere, including Texas, and publicly urged other companies to “get the hell out of Delaware.”

The legislation written in response was dubbed the “DExit” bill.

“Texas is much better than Delaware,” Musk posted on X in early April, just days after the bill passed the state Senate. “If Delaware doesn’t reform, it will lose all its corporate business.”

Last year, a Delaware judge ruled Musk’s pay package violated his fiduciary duties to the company’s stockholders. He won most of it back in a shareholder vote, but the judge again rejected his pay package in December.

In an interview, Hughes told The Texas Newsroom he heard input from different groups in crafting the Texas legislation and could not remember whether Musk’s companies were involved.

Abbott signed the DExit bill and a handful of other business bills into law on May 14. Standing behind him at a public ceremony marking the occasion were Hughes and a large group of business representatives.

Standing behind Hughes was a representative from Tesla.

Lauren McGaughy is a journalist with The Texas Newsroom, a collaboration among NPR and the public radio stations in Texas. She is based at KUT News in Austin. Reach her at lmcgaughy@kut.org. Sign up for KUT newsletters.

by Spencer Norris, New York Focus, and Joel Jacobs, ProPublica, graphics by Lucas Waldron, ProPublica

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with New York Focus, an investigative news outlet reporting on New York. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week, and sign up for New York Focus’ newsletter here.

Hotels have long been considered a last resort for sheltering people who’ve lost their housing. But over the past few years, they’ve become New York’s predominant response to homelessness outside New York City, a recent investigation by New York Focus and ProPublica found.

Social services agencies across the state now place nearly half of all individuals and families seeking shelter in hotels. Yet those placed in hotels often go without services that they’re supposed to receive in shelters, such as meals, help finding housing and sometimes child care so they can look for work.

The growing reliance on hotels has been driven by soaring rent, shelter closures and a spike in evictions that followed a moratorium during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The state Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance has known about the problem for years and even put rules to address the issue on its regulatory agenda. But the agency has failed to formally propose the rules or come up with a way to ensure people receive services they need.

Here are five charts to explain our investigation.

Statewide Spending on Hotels More Than Tripled From 2018 to 2024 Data source: Analysis of Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance data on emergency shelter payments. Years are fiscal years. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

The number of families and individuals placed in hotels doubled in the two years following the end of New York’s eviction moratorium in 2022. As the population in hotels shot up, so did the bill. Over that period, spending on hotels outside of New York City more than tripled to $110 million.

OTDA oversees the state’s county-run social services districts. The agency’s commissioner, Barbara Guinn, said that it prefers that counties use shelters, but that there aren’t enough beds for everyone who needs one. She said that the agency hadn’t studied the growth in hotel use.

Required Services in Shelters vs. Hotels Note: Requirements are for hotels outside of New York City. New York regulations state that hotels can be considered shelters, and thus mandated to provide services. But there aren’t any that are currently required to do so, Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance spokesperson Anthony Farmer said. Source: New York Codes, Rules and Regulations.

Despite the growth in spending, families placed in hotels aren’t promised the same services as people in shelters. New York requires family shelters to provide services like child care, assistance finding housing and three meals a day. But the regulations generally exempt hotels.

There’s an exception: A hotel is supposed to be considered a shelter if it “primarily” serves temporary housing recipients. OTDA spokesperson Anthony Farmer said that the agency interprets “primarily” to mean “exclusively, or almost exclusively,” and that no hotels currently meet that standard. An analysis of the agency’s data by New York Focus and ProPublica found that welfare recipients made up over half of the capacity for at least 16 hotels during fiscal year 2024.

Guinn said that social services offices have to work within the confines of what hotel owners will allow, and that counties try to provide services off-site.

The Number of Individuals and Families Housed in Hotels for More Than Six Months Nearly Tripled From 2022 to 2024 Data Source: Analysis of Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance data on emergency shelter payments. Years are fiscal years. Stays may not be continuous. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Not only are more people being placed in the hotels, but they are staying for much longer periods. The number of families and individuals spending at least six months out of the year in hotels nearly tripled from 2022 to 2024.

The lack of services leads to people getting stuck in the system, creating a snowball effect, said Steve Berg, chief policy officer for the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

“It’s this expanding problem,” he said. “A good shelter should be housing-focused. If they don’t have a pretty substantial effort to move people quickly back into housing and provide the services that are necessary to do that, the shelters quickly fill up, and then they just need more shelters.”

Farmer said via email that a lack of affordable housing contributes to the longer stays, and that counties can use other funding to help people move back into permanent housing.

New York Social Services Agencies Frequently Paid Hotels Over Fair Market Rent for a Two-Bedroom Apartment

Nearly half of all payments to hotels were for more than twice the counties’ FMR.

Data Source: Analysis of Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance data on emergency shelter payments; U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development fair market rent data for two-bedroom apartments in each county for federal fiscal year 2024. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

Many hotels are charging rates higher than rent for permanent housing.

The news organizations found that the overwhelming majority of hotel payments exceeded fair market rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the same county. (Fair market rent is defined by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development as the 40th percentile of rent plus utilities in the local housing market.) The rates charged were often more than twice that.

“We’re forced to rent hotel rooms across the state, and the operators of these places understand that,” said state Sen. Roxanne Persaud, a Democrat and chair of the chamber’s Social Services Committee. “The municipalities’ backs are against the wall. And so they must place the unhoused person or persons somewhere. And so that’s why you see the cost is skyrocketing, because people understand that it’s an easy way to make money off the government.”

More Than a Third of Hotels Used to Shelter Homeless People Were Out of Date on Social Services Inspections as of October 2024 Data Source: Analysis of Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance data on inspections of hotels and motels used for emergency shelter. (Lucas Waldron/ProPublica)

New York Focus and ProPublica found numerous examples of families with children living in sordid and dangerous conditions. Roaches, mold, broken windows and filthy linens were common. Some hotels were subject to over a hundred emergency calls a year for assaults, robberies, mental health crises, overdoses and other incidents.

Hotels sheltering homeless families are supposed to be inspected every six months by their county’s social services office. Yet data obtained from OTDA shows that many wind up behind schedule. As of October, about 40% of hotels were either out of date on their inspection or didn’t have one listed.

Farmer, the OTDA spokesperson, said that nearly all hotels were inspected within a year, and that some had stopped accepting welfare recipients.

Guinn, the commissioner, said that OTDA will formally propose rules this year clarifying that people in hotels must receive the same services as they would receive in shelters. She also said her agency will increase oversight of how social services offices are delivering those services.

by Jessica Lussenhop, and photography by Sarahbeth Maney

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 court, Dr. Nancy Harper comes across as professional and authoritative. Often she begins her testimony by explaining her subspeciality: child abuse pediatrics, which focuses on the diagnosis and documentation of signs of child abuse. Her role, she often reminds judges and juries, is solely medical. Whether or not to remove a child from their home, terminate the parent’s rights or, in the most serious cases, charge a caregiver criminally is not up to her.

According to Harper’s testimony, she and her team at the Otto Bremer Trust Center for Safe and Healthy Children in Minneapolis handle about 700 cases of suspected abuse each year. She has testified that 10% to 20% of those wind up confirmed for physical abuse, although it is difficult to determine if these figures are accurate since child protection cases are not public.

When Harper, the center’s director, and her team diagnose abuse, parents and caregivers often struggle to challenge those opinions. By Harper’s own estimation, she’s never been wrong.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a case where I thought it was abusive head trauma and the other specialist didn’t,” Harper testified in 2023, in the case of a day care provider charged with the death of a child in her care.

The defense attorney in the case pressed her: “Have you ever incorrectly diagnosed a child with abusive head trauma?”

“Not currently to my recollection,” she answered.

But in a handful of cases, judges and juries have found day care providers and parents not guilty of crimes after Harper has testified that abuse occurred, though a verdict cannot necessarily be interpreted as a repudiation of Harper or any other expert witness’ determinations or credibility.

Additionally, two federal lawsuits filed recently accuse Harper of ignoring or even concealing alternative explanations for children’s injuries. And, more broadly, medical and legal experts are increasingly questioning a leading child abuse diagnosis, shaken baby syndrome, which is also known as abusive head trauma.

Harper did not respond to requests for comment. She has yet to respond to either lawsuit. In past court testimony, Harper has said that both shaken baby syndrome and abusive head trauma are considered scientifically valid diagnoses by the mainstream medical community. Any controversy, she has said, exists primarily in the legal world rather than the medical one.

Kathleen Pakes, a former prosecutor who now specializes in the forensics of child abuse cases for the Office of the Wisconsin State Public Defender, said Harper’s claim of never making an incorrect diagnosis strains credulity.

“There is no other specialty in medicine that has zero error rate. None,” she said.

Below are four cases in which Harper concluded there was abuse but courts or juries determined otherwise.

On July 12, 2017, an 11-month-old boy named Gabriel Cooper collapsed in his high chair at the day care that Sylwia Pawlak-Reynolds operated in South Minneapolis. Paramedics took him to Hennepin County Medical Center, where he was declared brain dead a day later.

Harper reviewed Cooper’s medical records and wrote that “in the absence of a well-documented consistent severe accidental injury, non-accidental trauma or abusive head trauma remains the primary diagnostic consideration.” The child, she wrote, was essentially shaken to death. Before any criminal charges were filed, Pawlak-Reynolds boarded a plane for her native Poland to care for her ailing father, according to her attorney. In February 2018, prosecutors charged Pawlak-Reynolds with two counts of second-degree murder, citing Harper’s diagnosis.

According to her husband, Will Reynolds, they did not realize Pawlak-Reynolds was pregnant when she boarded her flight to Poland. She remained there to give birth to their third child, who is now 6, while Reynolds remained in Minnesota with their two older children, who are now 13 and 16. Reynolds said he and his wife have no confidence that she will get a fair trial, and that she fears she will lose custody of their youngest child if she reenters the country. The family has now been separated for eight years.

Sylwia Pawlak-Reynolds’ husband, Will Reynolds, remains in Minnesota with their two older children.

Early in the case, Pawlak-Reynolds’ attorneys obtained the same copy of Cooper’s hospital records that had been provided to Minneapolis police, which included the paramedics’ report. The document had been printed out at a significantly reduced scale, shrinking the text to the point that some fields were illegible. Two years later, they obtained a second copy, printed at normal size, which revealed a possible alternate explanation for the injuries: “Mom recalls [patient] did fall 2 days ago, striking the back of his head.”

“That was the sort of proverbial silver-bullet evidence that we’re always looking for in every case and usually never find,” said Brock Hunter, Pawlak-Reynolds’ lawyer.

Polish courts, including an appeals court, have denied extradition requests from the U.S. three times, and the country’s minister of justice has affirmed the rulings. The denials are particularly critical of Harper’s assessment. Polish forensic experts evaluated the case records and took note of a finding by a neurology expert hired by Pawlak-Reynolds, who wrote that Cooper carried a gene tied to a blood clotting disorder.

The ambulance report, the Polish judges wrote, “was concealed from the defense.”

“Then, after the fact was made public, it did not affect the actions of the American authorities in any way,” a Polish district court judge wrote in 2022.

Hennepin Country Medical Center

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office certified Cooper’s manner of death as “undetermined” and the date and place of injury “unknown,” a tacit disagreement with Harper’s opinion that Cooper would have collapsed “shortly after infliction of the trauma.”

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office declined to comment.

Then in 2023, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty wrote to Pawlak-Reynolds’ attorneys after meeting with them: “We agree that to resolve the current impasse regarding Ms. Pawlak-Reynolds, the best course for all involved is to dismiss the pending charges without prejudice, and for her to return to the United States.”

But months later, Moriarty changed her mind.

In a statement to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office wrote that the office is completing a “final, thorough review” of the case that will include an evaluation of “concerns regarding the medical conclusions and the overall strength of the case.”

Gabriel’s parents, Joseph and Samantha Cooper, did not respond to requests for comment. In a television interview in June, they denied that Cooper struck the back of his head two days before his collapse. They said that they want justice for their son.

Pawlak-Reynolds declined to comment through her attorney. In late February, her husband filed a federal lawsuit against Harper that claims she “knowingly and intentionally falsified, modified and erased exculpatory information” from her evaluation of Cooper, and she diagnosed abusive head trauma to “promote her own personal, academic, reputational and financial needs.”

Harper has yet to respond to the lawsuit. A spokesperson for Hennepin Healthcare, which operates Hennepin County Medical Center, declined to comment on the case or the lawsuit.

“There is no oversight,” Reynolds said. “It’s the thing they’re most resistant against and the thing that is most necessary to stop this legacy of brutality, that results in kids being taken away from innocent caregivers and innocent caregivers going to prison.”

An old photograph shows Pawlak-Reynolds and one of her children

In August 2017, Kathryn Campbell called 911 after a 4-month-old girl at her day care seemed lethargic and was “breathing wrong.” First responders did not take the baby to the hospital, but her mother eventually did. At the hospital, MRI scans showed fluid in the baby’s brain and doctors noted small bruises.

Dr. Barbara Knox, a child abuse pediatrician then with the University of Wisconsin, told police it was “obvious child abuse.” The Dane County district attorney charged Campbell with physical abuse of a child. Campbell pleaded not guilty.

But before the 2021 trial, Knox left the University of Wisconsin after she was placed on leave for “unprofessional acts that may constitute retaliation” and intimidation of her own staff. A Wisconsin Watch investigation cast doubt on Knox’s judgment in several cases of alleged abuse.

Knox did not respond to the Wisconsin Watch series or to ProPublica’s requests for comment. After two families in Alaska sued her in 2022, alleging she had wrongly concluded their children had been abused, Knox wrote in an affidavit that she has no control over whether police and child protection services workers take children away from parents, that she did not “conspire” with police or anyone else on custody issues, and that she did not personally evaluate one of the children. The lawsuit was dismissed in 2024 after the families agreed to drop the matter.

Knox moved on to a job at the University of Florida. According to a spokesperson for the university, Knox resigned as a pediatrician with the Child Protective Team in late June, effective Aug. 15. He declined to comment on the circumstances.

At Campbell’s trial, Knox’s name was never mentioned. Instead, Harper stepped in as an expert witness. When Campbell heard Knox had been replaced, she was initially hopeful.

“I’m like, oh, great, new eyes,” Campbell said. “They’re going to look at it and go, ‘This is nuts, I don’t agree with this.’ And I definitely was wrong.”

Harper’s assessment affirmed Knox’s diagnosis of abuse. She told the jury that the bruises were likely caused by squeezing by an adult’s hand. A medical expert hired by Campbell’s defense argued that the child’s bleeding could not be precisely dated and that a preexisting medical condition could have caused it.

After just two hours of deliberation, the jury returned a not guilty verdict. Campbell said she is grateful to have the case concluded, though she said she is still haunted by the accusations against her.

“That was the hardest thing too, going home after this case was done, and being like, ‘Am I allowed to be alone with my children now?’” she said. “It’s all because of the quote-unquote experts not doing their due diligence and looking further into underlying issues that these kids could have.”

In a statement to ProPublica, Dane County District Attorney Ismael Ozanne expressed confidence in both Harper and Knox, saying “their testimony had been consistent with many different medical professionals and experts in their own areas of practice.”

“It is important to note that a not guilty verdict by lay jurors hardly invalidates the widespread acceptance of abusive head trauma as a diagnosis in the medical community nor would it cause us to have concerns about Dr. Harper’s qualifications or knowledge in the field,” he added. “Jurors are not bound to accept any expert testimony as accurate.”

In the winter of 2022, a 4-month-old boy began breathing abnormally at his day care in Mineral Point, Wisconsin. His parents took him to a hospital, where he died days later. A police investigation determined that his day care provider, Joanna Ford, left him and several other children alone in her home for over an hour while she went to a tattoo and piercing parlor.

Prosecutors used Harper as an expert witness in the case. After evaluating the child’s medical records, she concluded that his injuries were “clinically diagnostic of abusive head trauma,” or, put another way, Ford shook the baby violently. She was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. Ford pleaded not guilty.

Ford’s defense lawyers successfully petitioned the judge in the case for a hearing to determine whether Harper’s expert witness testimony would be scientifically valid and admissible at trial. In response to questions, Harper explained why the child’s symptoms — brain swelling, blood under his skull, damage to his eyes — pointed to abuse, and why, despite the controversy surrounding it, the diagnosis of abusive head trauma was scientifically sound. She also explained that, because the baby was not walking or crawling, the fact that none of his caregivers could explain his injuries indicated abuse.

“People should know what happened,” she testified.

On cross examination by Ford’s lawyers, Harper said she couldn’t say for certain what time the abuse would have occurred, exactly how Ford had injured the baby and that there are no “great biomechanical models” for shaken baby syndrome.

A little over a month later, Judge Lisa McDougal delivered a highly critical ruling that barred Harper from telling the jury that the child died as the result of “abusive head trauma, non-accidental injury, child abuse or murder.” She also took issue with the idea that a lack of explanation for injuries is indicative of abuse, calling it a “leap in logic.”

“Offering a conclusive opinion as to how an injury may have occurred crosses a line and does not fit within the dictionary definition of what diagnosis is,” McDougal said. The judge also said that Harper views herself as an advocate, and that that casts doubt on her “fidelity to the scientific validation of abusive head trauma diagnoses, especially when it is a close call.”

The murder charge was dismissed. For leaving the children alone, Ford pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of neglect of a child where the consequence is death. She is serving a 10-year prison sentence. Ford, through her attorney, declined a request for an interview. The Iowa County district attorney also declined to comment.

On Feb. 4, 2022, Paul and Sarah Marshall hosted a dinner for her parents and a family friend at their home in Hudson, Wisconsin. Afterward, their 7-week-old son, Fox, became fussy. Paul Marshall carried him into the mother-in-law unit on the lower level of the house, which was cool and dark, to try to calm him. He emerged minutes later in a panic, yelling that the baby spit up and stopped breathing.

Paramedics rushed Fox to Children’s Minnesota, a hospital about 25 minutes across the state border in St. Paul. Doctors ran tests, and a scan showed Fox had a skull fracture with fluid pooling on both sides of his brain. He died days later.

Harper examined Fox, as well as his twin sister, Liana, and found “skull fractures, likely rib fractures, metaphyseal fractures.”

“This constellation of findings in a nonambulatory infant is clinically diagnostic of inflicted injury or child physical abuse likely occurring on more than one occasion,” she wrote.

But the Marshalls said that wasn’t true. They told Harper that Sarah Marshall had experienced a difficult pregnancy with gestational diabetes and severe anemia, and that Liana had a vacuum-assisted delivery. Both twins had been to their regular pediatrician over health concerns. While Liana’s health improved, Fox’s had not.

A spokesperson for Children’s Minnesota declined to comment on the case.

Because he was the last person alone with Fox before he stopped breathing, Paul Marshall was charged with first-degree reckless homicide. He was also charged with physical abuse of a child for hurting Liana. Sarah Marshall said there was no evidence that her soft-spoken husband had hurt their children.

“The state wanted to cast me as a naive idiot,” she said. “I chose not to believe it because of the logic and facts in my face. I had no reason to believe the accusation.”

At Paul Marshall’s 2023 trial, his defense lawyer, Aaron Nelson, cross-examined the other doctors who treated or evaluated Fox and Liana, and was able to highlight points of medical disagreement. A doctor who tested Liana for genetic disorders said she could not rule out rickets as a possible cause of her bone fractures. A neuropathologist did not agree with Harper that Fox had a trauma-induced blood clotting disorder. By Harper’s own admission on cross-examination, determining the age of the skull fractures in children Fox and Liana’s age was difficult. Nelson called six of his own medical experts to suggest that the difficult birth or a vitamin deficiency could explain the twins’ injuries.

“How many people have to be wrong for Dr. Harper to be right?” Nelson said in closing arguments.

After an 11-day trial, the jury found Marshall not guilty.

In a statement to ProPublica, St. Croix County District Attorney Karl Anderson pointed out that Harper was not the only treating physician who was concerned that Fox and Liana had been abused.

“A not guilty verdict does not mean that the jury concluded that the children were not abused,” Anderson said. “Rather, it means that they did not conclude that the State proved that Paul Marshall caused the death, beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Paul and Sarah Marshall with their children at home, which is decorated with memories of their son, Fox

Six weeks after the trial, the family moved three hours away into a century-old farmhouse that is far from the community that they felt wrongfully villainized by.

One of the cruelest impacts of the abuse diagnosis, they said, came after it was clear that Fox would die and the hospital staff began making preparations for his organs to be donated. Sarah Marshall said she had hoped to someday hear her son’s heart beating in another child’s chest. Instead, a court order put a halt to the procedure.

“They were already treating him as evidence,” she said.

The experience of going from a grieving parent to an accused murderer, her husband said, has given the couple post-traumatic stress. Paul Marshall said he is grateful to be with his wife and children, but what he calls a “broken system” has left them unsure whether or not to have another baby or even be left alone with one of their daughters.

“You get pregnant. You go to all of your appointments. You voice all of your concerns. You do everything you’re supposed to do as a parent and your child still dies. And the state tells you it’s your fault,” Sarah Marshall said. “I don’t understand why I live in a world like that.”

Mariam Elba contributed research.