“We are all very proud to work for the space program,” wrote Dr. James Polk, NASA’s chief health and medical officer. “But in the current environment, with a lot of negative rhetoric coming in our direction, I want you all to please use caution.”

Since taking office in January, President Donald Trump and his administration and allies have used strong language to disparage federal workers, whom they have been firing en masse. “We’re bloated. We’re sloppy. We have a lot of people that aren’t doing their job,” the president said on Feb. 26 during his first Cabinet meeting.

Polk’s warning to employees came two days later, after receiving a report about an employee who was “assaulted” at a Starbucks. “This is probably one of the saddest emails I have had to write of late,” he said in the email, which was obtained by ProPublica.

Polk wrote that Nicola Fox, an associate administrator at NASA, said at a meeting that an employee was confronted at a Starbucks by someone “because she was a federal employee.” The worker was working on her computer and was identified by her badge and a logo, he wrote.

Reached Saturday, Polk said the email was not intended for anyone outside NASA. He said he did not have additional details about the incident and declined to comment on it or on his email to staff, which did not name the employee. Fox declined to comment.

NASA spokesperson Cheryl Warner said the agency was “hearing stories of possible harassment toward employees, but not assault,” the term used in the email.

“Our managers are hearing information thirdhand and using this as an opportunity to remind our teams to be mindful of their surroundings and to report any incidences to the Office of Protective Services,” she said.

The White House did not immediately return a request for comment.

It was not clear where the incident took place.

The email was circulating among NASA employees, some of whom said they are concerned by the Trump administration’s rhetoric regarding government workers. The president, his advisers and his congressional allies have all sharpened their attacks on federal employees over the past week as the administration undertakes expansive efforts to reduce the size of the federal government

Elon Musk, the tech billionaire who Trump named the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, has been leading the way.

A week ago, he demanded federal employees respond to an email asking them to list five things they’d accomplished in the previous week — or be fired. “What he’s doing is saying ‘Are you actually working’?” Trump said.

On Tuesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., said during a committee meeting that “federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.”

And senior Trump officials on Wednesday sent out a memo on reducing the federal workforce that said, “The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024, by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

NASA sidestepped expected layoffs in February, but it is still losing personnel due to a buyout plan.

Polk urged his staff to stay vigilant.

“Be aware of your surroundings and keep good situational awareness and operational security,” he wrote. “Use caution when on the phone in public places, and ensure you are aware of those around you.”

“Safety drives everything we do at the FAA,” the agency’s chief counsel said in September, after proposing $633,000 in fines for alleged violations related to two previous launches. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s response was swift and caustic. He accused the agency of engaging in “lawfare” and threatened to sue it for “regulatory overreach.” “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Musk wrote on X.

Today, Musk is in a unique position to deliver that change. As one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers and head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, he’s presiding over the administration’s effort to cut costs and slash regulation.

While it’s unclear what changes his panel has in store for the FAA, current and former employees are bracing for Musk to focus on the little-known part of the agency that regulates his rocket company: the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST. “People are nervous,” said a former employee who did not want to be quoted by name talking about Musk.

The tech titan and his company have been critical of the office, which is responsible for licensing commercial rocket launches and ensuring public safety around them. After the fines in September, SpaceX sent a letter to Congress blasting AST for being too slow to keep up with the booming space industry. That same month, Musk called on FAA chief Mike Whitaker to resign and told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.”

FAA leadership seems to have heard him. The day of Trump’s inauguration, Whitaker stepped down — a full four years before the end of his term. And experts said the pressure is almost certain to grow this year as Musk pursues an aggressive launch schedule for Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built.

Whitaker did not respond to requests for comment.

Part of the problem for AST, experts say, is bandwidth.

The office has seen a sixfold increase in launches in the past six years, from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year — with SpaceX leading the pack. At the same time, AST’s staffing and budget have not kept pace. The agency has roughly 160 people to oversee regular flights by private rocket companies — sometimes more than one a day — bringing satellites to orbit, giving rides to astronauts, assisting with national security surveillance efforts and carrying tourists to the edge of space.

Launch traffic “has increased exponentially,” said George Nield, who led the office from 2008 to 2018. “No signs that that’s turning around or even leveling off.”

For each launch, AST’s staff calculate the risk that “uninvolved” members of the public, or their property, will be harmed. They also consider whether the launch will cause environmental damage or interfere with other airspace activities like commercial flight, as well as make sure a rocket’s payload received the proper approvals. The office licenses space vehicle reentries, too, though, as yet, there are far fewer of them.

The process, on average, takes five months. “It takes a certain amount of time to do the work to protect the public, and you do want to do that right,” Nield said. The consequences of shrinking the office or eliminating it altogether could be devastating, he said. “If a rocket goes off course, and nobody’s double-checked it, and so you have a major catastrophic event, that’s going to result in a huge backlash.”

But Musk has criticized AST for focusing on “nonsense that doesn’t affect safety.” He’s also emphasized that his company moves quickly and must have failures to learn and improve. Within SpaceX, this approach is known as “rapid iterative development.” And it is not without risk. Last month, when Starship blew up shortly after liftoff, dozens of airplanes scrambled to avoid falling debris. Residents of the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the craft on beaches and roads, and the FAA said a car sustained minor damage.

SpaceX has said it was reviewing data to determine the cause, pledging to “conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”

Musk, however, downplayed the explosion as “barely a bump in the road.” Moreover, he seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” He also said nothing suggested the accident would push plans to launch the next Starship this month — even though the FAA investigation was still pending.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, said that Musk’s response was “recklessness … at a minimum,” given that people were alarmed by the falling rocket debris, which streaked fire and smoke across the sky before landing in and around the islands.

“That he now gets to provide government oversight over the things that he is trying to get permission to do is one of the most significant conflicts of interest I’ve seen in my career, and it’s inexplicable to me,” said Jah, who served on a federal advisory committee for AST.

The White House did not answer questions from ProPublica about DOGE’s plans for AST. Officials referred to comments by Trump, who said last week that if a conflict arises for Musk between one of his businesses and his government work, “we won’t let him go near it.” Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, also said Musk “will excuse himself from those contracts” if needed.

Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions.

Jah said Musk and others advocating for less regulation have what he called a “launch, baby, launch mentality” that could push the FAA office in the wrong direction.

Industry representatives and members of Congress have accused the FAA of being more risk averse than necessary, stifling innovation.

“With nations like China seeking to leapfrog our accomplishments in space, it is even more imperative that we streamline our processes, issue timely approvals, minimize regulatory burdens and advance innovative space concepts,” said Rep. Brian Babin, a Republican from Texas and the incoming chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, at a hearing in September. He said he was concerned the FAA’s regulations could result in the mission to return astronauts to the moon being “unnecessarily delayed.”

Babin did not respond to a request for an interview about AST.

Sean Duffy, Trump’s new transportation secretary, has already indicated his department will take a more business-friendly approach.

Last month during his confirmation hearing, when Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the FAA’s enforcement action against SpaceX and asked Duffy whether he would “commit to reviewing these penalties and more broadly to curtailing bureaucratic overreach and accelerating launch approvals,” Duffy said he would. “I commit to doing a review and working with you, and following up on the space launches and what’s been happening at the FAA with regard to the launches.”

Duffy has since said he’s spoken to Musk about airspace reform and is looking to DOGE to “help upgrade our aviation system” — a move that drew a quick rebuke from Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington last week. She called Musk’s involvement in FAA matters a conflict of interest.

The Department of Transportation did not make Duffy available for an interview, and the FAA did not answer written questions provided by ProPublica, despite multiple requests for comment.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat of the Science committee, said streamlining the regulation of commercial space launches has bipartisan support.

Still, she said, the safety of crews and launchpads’ neighbors, as well as noise and pollution, need to be managed. “There needs to be a traffic cop here,” she said, especially given increased launches and issues such as space debris. “This can’t just be the Wild West, right?”

The $42 million allocated annually to AST is less than 1% of the FAA’s budget.

Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks space launches at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said the office needs the resources and authority to hold companies accountable as the industry grows and has more impact. “Government will need to play a role,” he said, “and they’re going to have to sort it out.”

Last year, a government advisory committee recommended the AST move out of the FAA and become a standalone agency within the Department of Transportation.

Proponents argue the move would help AST get more attention, and potentially resources. Industry supporters also say the FAA’s culture of allowing no failures — a bedrock of its oversight of the commercial airline industry — is culturally a bad fit for what AST does, given how young the space industry is.

AST does not require that each mission succeed in the conventional sense, said Caryn Schenewerk, an industry consultant who sat on the advisory committee. “They can’t,” she said. Launching rockets is still so new, the office’s goal is to make sure failures don’t hurt anyone — not to prevent them altogether, she said.

As launches have become more common, though, so too have problems like the Starship explosion. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that in the three years before its 2023 review, commercial space launches experienced roughly two dozen mishaps, the industry’s term for “catastrophic explosions and other failures.”

While the report noted that none of those incidents resulted in fatalities, serious injuries or significant property damage to the public, there have been other impacts. Starship’s first launch in April 2023, for example, blew a cloud of dust and grime that stretched miles across Texas. Debris like concrete and shrapnel rained down on an environmentally sensitive migratory bird habitat near the company’s Boca Chica launchpad. Residents have complained, Jah said, but “citizens of that community aren’t feeling that they’re being heard.” A report in The New York Times noted egg yolk staining the ground near a bird’s nest.

In response, Musk wrote on X: “To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from having omelette for a week.”

SpaceX’s plans to launch the next Starship this month are part of the accelerated schedule the company has been pushing AST to approve. The company launched four of the vehicles in 2024, and officials said it wants to launch 25 this year.

With pink manicured nails that matched her trim pink blazer, she tapped out a message on her phone to a top election lawyer for the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee. “Got it passed,” she wrote to Gineen Bresso, photographs reviewed by ProPublica show.

What had passed that September afternoon in Atlanta was a state rule, championed by Adams, that would allow poll watchers like those she’d trained to gain greater access to sensitive areas in counting centers where votes were being tallied. The rule was a priority for supporters of former President Donald Trump who are looking to pave the way to challenge election results if their candidate loses this week’s vote.

The win was one in a string of them for Adams, who quickly ascended from a little-known, financially troubled conservative activist to a surprise appointee to the Fulton County board of elections. Her note to Bresso signaled not just this particular victory but the extent to which the 61-year-old has used her new perch to carry out the efforts of national players seeking to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.

Fulton itself is significant in state and national politics for a host of reasons: its sheer concentration of Democratic voters (380,000 in 2020, more than any other Georgia county), the scrutiny it received from national election skeptics after Trump lost the state by fewer than 12,000 votes — and, now, its newest election board member’s outsize role in trying to influence Georgia’s election processes.

Her actions in her nine months on the Fulton County board have been prodigious. She secretly helped push another, arguably higher-stakes rule through the state election board that vastly expanded the authority of county board members to refuse to certify votes they deem suspicious. She herself refused to certify the results of the presidential primary in March (though the board’s Democratic majority overruled her), and then she sued her board and election director, asserting local officials should be allowed to refuse to certify vote totals if there are discrepancies, which experts say are almost always innocuous. Some of her lawyers in that case work for the America First Policy Institute, an advocacy group staffed with former Trump officials.

So far, Adams’ efforts have mostly failed. Two judges have invalidated rules that Adams backed, with one calling them “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” But other efforts are still underway. The month after joining the Fulton County election board, Adams became regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the group founded by lawyer Cleta Mitchell, who joined Trump on a call when he asked Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” him enough votes to overturn the 2020 election results there.

In that role, Adams runs weekly calls for Republican activists who have described Georgia’s voting as rigged, and she has pulled conservative members of local election boards into a loose coalition, many of whom have challenged results in their counties, too. And prominent conservative election lawyers, writers and national groups have used Adams’ push against certification in Georgia as the basis for a national argument.

Adams did not respond to numerous requests for comment or a detailed list of questions. Nor did representatives for the Election Integrity Network.

The Georgia-based group that hired Adams in 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, has received millions of dollars from organizations closely tied to conservative legal activist and fundraiser Leonard Leo and billionaire Richard Uihlein, tax records show. Uihlein-backed groups launched unsubstantiated attacks on the legitimacy of voter rolls in at least a dozen states after the 2020 election.

A representative for Uihlein did not respond to questions. A representative for Leo would not elaborate on his contributions to organizations that supported Tea Party Patriots.

The true test of Adams’ effectiveness will come on Election Day — and, if the results in Georgia are anywhere near as close and consequential as they were in 2020, in the days and weeks beyond.

“She’s trying to help Trump win or trying to create chaos in the administration of the election in order to cast aspersions on it if he doesn’t win,” said Patrise Perkins-Hooker, who served as chair of the county election board when Adams joined. Perkins-Hooker described Adams’ work as centered on carrying out the agenda of right-wing activists and not making “the elections run smoothly or transparently.”

In response to ProPublica’s questions, the Republican National Committee provided a statement that said: “The Georgia state election board passed commonsense safeguards to secure Georgia's elections. The Trump-Vance Campaign and RNC supported these rules to bring transparency and accountability to the election process.” It also said, “The RNC defended these rules in court against attacks from Kamala and the DNC and will continue to fight against Democrat election interference.”

Back in 2020, Mitchell and others challenging the results across the country had to rely on disorganized groups of Trump supporters who came together at the last minute and were mostly unfamiliar with election systems. Experts now warn about the more pronounced impact that election deniers like Adams will have, given that they have come to occupy positions of power in local election administration. As Trump said at an October rally in North Carolina: “The vote counter is far more important than the candidate.”

When Adams placed her hand on a Bible in February and took an oath to fairly administer Fulton County’s elections, voting rights advocates and Democrats thought they had scored a victory. Eight months earlier, they had twice swatted back efforts by the county GOP to install an activist who’d made his name challenging residents’ voter registrations. The Republicans had sued to force the election board to accept him, then relented and put Adams forward instead.

“It was universal support for Julie,” said Earl Ferguson, a vice chair of the Fulton County Republicans, who has also filed challenges to voters’ eligibility and repeated debunked conspiracy theories about the reliability of voting machines at election board meetings. (Ferguson does not agree that the points he made about the machines were not valid.) “She is honest and very capable, and very pleasant.”

After Trump lost the 2020 election, Adams and a small group of conservative activists became regular attendees at election board meetings. On a few occasions, she addressed the board during the public comment period, questioning the integrity of the county’s elections and its certification process. But she was much less outspoken than other activists in the group.

“When Adams was appointed, little was known about her connections to election deniers to justify opposition,” said Max Flugrath, spokesperson for Fair Fight, the Georgia-based voting advocacy organization. “Voting rights groups instead focused on opposing candidates with documented anti-voter records.”

Adams had worked in human resources and executive recruiting. Records show she also had experienced major financial setbacks. She’d filed for bankruptcy in 2005, and her mortgage company had auctioned her Cobb County home on the courthouse steps in 2010. A landlord later sued her, and she agreed to pay more than $13,000 in back rent, according to a 2021 consent agreement.

That same year, she trained 32 poll watchers to monitor the 2021 municipal elections. And she told county commissioners that she believed some tally sheets from an audit of the 2020 election had been “falsified.”

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action, the politically active arm of one of the largest national Tea Party groups, hired Adams as a field director, paying her about $124,000 a year according to tax filings.

Her hire came at a time when the group was pulling in cash and intensifying its focus on election issues. Groups funded by Leo, who is seen as the architect behind the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, provided the Tea Party group and a related foundation at least $1.1 million between 2020 and 2022, records show, including a 2021 grant related to election integrity. The group also hired Leo’s firm as consultants.

In 2022, Tea Party Patriots Action more than doubled its annual revenue, thanks in part to a $2.5 million grant from Restoration of America — which is backed by Uihlein, the billionaire owner of the packing supplies company Uline. That year, former Trump campaign official Gina Swoboda was a Restoration for America executive director. Restoration has spent the years since Trump lost in 2020 pushing the unfounded idea that discrepancies in voter roll data between the number of votes and the number of ballots cast are evidence of fraud, despite insistence by elected officials from both parties that the claims are baseless.

That year, the Tea Party group added a program to bring in poll watchers and workers in Georgia, records show. And it had Adams in place.

Representatives for the Tea Party group and Restoration of America did not respond to requests for comment. Swoboda did not respond to questions.

Adams has run scores of poll watcher and worker online trainings, with some drawing dozens of people, records reviewed by ProPublica show. In a May training, Adams listed over 10 things that she wants trainees to report, from the serial numbers on voting machines to the names of poll managers. “There’s no such thing as too much documentation,” she said in a recording of a May training. “If something doesn’t feel right to you, you need to write it out.”

At an October training, she told the roughly three dozen attendees, including those joining from out of state, to first report discrepancies to their state GOP and RNC hotlines and then to VoterGA, an organization whose leader has cast doubt on the outcome of the 2020 election. The Republican Party and right-wing organizations plan to use the poll watchers’ reports in post-election litigation, ProPublica has reported.

“VoterGA has an 18-year proven track record of nonpartisan activity,” said co-founder Garland Favorito. “Republicans and Democrats are told to call their own party hotlines for election issues. We have no plans or resources to file any type of speculative litigation in any matter.”

While working for the Tea Party, Adams also led weekly meetings frequented by prominent state activists, RNC officials, GOP county heads, conservative election board members and voter registration challengers, according to records including emails obtained by the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and shared with ProPublica.

Agendas included subjects such as “Voter Integrity concerns for 2024 Elections” and warnings like “New York Times Reporter traveling to several counties in Georgia.”

In 2022, Adams had appeared at the Election Integrity Network’s Georgia chapter launch and was described the following year as its state liaison in social media posts by other activists.

But much of her work was done behind the scenes. So when the county GOP nominated her to join the election board in the heavily Democratic Fulton County, commissioners approved the choice 6-0.

After Adams joined the board in February, it did not take long for fellow members to begin worrying about her intentions. The board is made up of four political appointees, two by each party, led by a chair chosen by the Democratic-majority county commission. Traditionally, the board’s primary goal has been to make Fulton elections run smoothly, past and present board members said.

However, Perkins-Hooker, the chair when Adams joined, said that during meetings, she could see Adams receiving text messages from a Republican activist “telling her what to say, and what to do.” After Perkins-Hooker stepped down in April, the new chair banned board members from using phones during meetings.

“She came with a mission to try and paint our elections as being fraught with fraud and incompetency,” said Perkins-Hooker, an opinion echoed by other board members.

Adams had been on the board for just a few weeks when, in March, she was elevated to regional coordinator for the Election Integrity Network, the organization that Mitchell, Trump’s lawyer, had launched. The new position put her near the top of the leadership’s organizational chart.

Adams quickly began pushing conservative priorities at election board meetings. She wanted poll watchers to have more access to vote tallies from election machines. And she was very concerned about the mechanics of certifying elections. Though a century of case law says that certification is a mandatory duty for officials like her — whom experts compare to scorekeepers, not referees — Adams began questioning if she had to do it. She demanded reams of information she said that she needed to be certain of the results before certifying.

At Adams’ third meeting, in March, she and the other Republican board member shocked Democratic board members by voting against the certification of the presidential primary election — though the Democratic majority overruled them.

Adams’ push to have power over certification of election results couldn’t succeed under the state’s current rules, so she set out to change them.

To do so, she lobbied to remake the body that determined them, the State Election Board, which at the time was composed of two moderate Republican members, two MAGA-aligned members and a Democrat. She activated the coalition she had been building with the support of national Republicans, inviting them to a March meeting where the goal was to ensure that the moderate Republican on the State Election Board was replaced. “The Georgia House of Representatives needs to take action immediately!!!!” the meeting invitation read, providing the phone number of the speaker of the house.

Not long afterward, the speaker replaced that board member with a conservative media personality whom Trump would soon praise by name at a rally.

The new Trump-backed majority quickly began passing rules that the prior board had criticized as illegal, including one, originally pushed by Adams, expanding the power of county board members to refuse to certify votes they found suspicious. It was passed by the new board along with another rule potentially allowing county board members to delay certification.

A national outcry ensued, with The New York Times calling it “The Republican Plan to Challenge a Harris Victory.”

Three of the nation’s leading conservative election lawyers backed the new rules. A conservative group ran ads targeting swing state election officials that echoed the lawyers’ arguments. And the certification rule Adams pushed became a talking point for conservative media outlets. One article in The Federalist argued that it “could stop leftists from bullying election officials into certifying results without completing their duties.” Lawyers for the Republican National Committee and a Trump-aligned conservative think tank also defended the certification rules in Georgia superior court, testing arguments that certifying election results was optional.

Adams’ arguments that certification is not mandatory inspired David Hancock, a GOP member of Gwinnett County’s election board, to vote against certifying the same presidential primary as Adams. (He described several minor inconsistencies as sufficient reason for him not to certify.) “It was, like, a big deal,” Hancock said of Adams’ decision to vote against certifying.

Because two judges in October invalidated the new rules passed by the State Election Board, the mechanics of the election this week will be the same as before Adams’ pushes to empower poll watchers and county election board members.

But at a combative Fulton County board meeting the week before the election, Adams made clear that she wasn’t going to let the judge’s rulings stop her from continuing her campaign. Despite the county’s lawyer telling her that the certification rule she had pushed had been stayed, she argued that it had actually not been, citing her lawyers. “I’ve learned how the system works — or at least how it was supposed to work,” Adams said. “I’ve learned how sometimes it doesn’t work as the law requires, right here in Fulton County.”

After the news broke in May of last year that government-sponsored lending agency Freddie Mac had agreed to back $786 million in loans to the Kushner Companies, political opponents asked whether the family real estate firm formerly led by the president's son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, had received special treatment.

“We are especially concerned about this transaction because of Kushner Companies' history of seeking to engage in deals that raise conflicts of interest issues with Mr. Kushner," Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Tom Carper, D-Del., wrote to Freddie Mac's CEO in June 2019.

The loans helped Kushner Companies scoop up thousands of apartments in Maryland and Virginia, the business's biggest purchase in a decade. The deal, first reported by Bloomberg, also ranked among Freddie Mac's largest ever. At the time, the details of its terms weren't disclosed. Freddie Mac officials didn't comment publicly then. Kushner's lawyer said Jared was no longer involved in decision-making at the company. (He does continue to receive millions from the family business, according to his financial disclosures, including from some properties with Freddie Mac-backed loans.)

Freddie Mac packaged the 16 loans into bonds in August 2019 and sold them to investors. But Kushner Companies hadn't finished its buying spree. Within the next two months, records show, Freddie Mac backed another two loans to the Kushners for an additional $63.5 million, allowing the company to add two more apartment complexes to its portfolio.

A new analysis by ProPublica shows Kushner Companies received unusually favorable loan terms for the 18 mortgages it obtained with Freddie Mac's backing. The loans allowed the Kushner family company to make lower monthly payments and borrow more money than was typical for similar loans, 2019 Freddie Mac data shows. The terms increase the risk to the agency and to investors who buy bonds with the Kushner mortgages in them.

Moreover, Freddie Mac's estimates of the Kushner properties' profitability — a core element of any decision to back a loan — have already proven to be overly optimistic. All 16 properties in the firm's biggest loan package delivered smaller profits in 2019 than Freddie Mac expected, despite the then-booming economy. The loan for the largest property lagged Freddie Mac's profit prediction by 31% last year.

U.S. taxpayers could be responsible for paying back much of the nearly $850 million in Freddie Mac financing if Kushner Companies defaults and its properties drop significantly in value. Freddie Mac said that's unlikely. But during the last real estate crash, taxpayers had to bail out the agency and its larger sibling, Fannie Mae, to the tune of $190 billion as the agencies plunged into the government equivalent of bankruptcy. (The agencies ultimately repaid the money and more.)

The involvement of Jared's sister Nicole Kushner Meyer adds to questions about whether the family sought to exploit its political influence. Meyer, who shares her brother's slight build, porcelain features and dark chestnut hair, lobbied Freddie Mac in person on behalf of Kushner Companies in February last year, a timeline of the deal obtained by ProPublica shows. She has previously drawn criticism for invoking her brother's name while doing Kushner Companies' business.

In a statement, Freddie Mac said it does “not consider the political affiliations of borrowers or their family members." It called ProPublica's analysis “random, arbitrary and incomplete" and asserted that the Kushner loans “fit squarely within our publicly-available credit and underwriting standards. The terms and performance of every one of these loans is transparent and available on our website, and all the loans are current and have been consistently paid."

A spokesperson for Kushner Companies did not respond to calls and emails seeking comment. Emails to the White House seeking Jared Kushner's comment were not returned.

There's no evidence the Trump administration played a role in any of the decisions, and Freddie Mac operates independently. But Freddie Mac embarked on approving the loans at the moment that its government overseer, the Federal Housing Finance Agency, or FHFA, was changing from leadership by an Obama administration appointee to one from the Trump administration, Mark Calabria, Vice President Mike Pence's former chief economist. Calabria, who was confirmed in April 2019, has called for an end to the “conservatorship," the close financial control that his agency has exerted over Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae since the 2008 crisis.

The potential for improper influence exists even if the Trump administration didn't advocate for the Kushners, said Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University specializing in government and legal ethics. She compared the situation to press reports that businesses and associates connected to Jared Kushner and his family were approved to receive millions from the Paycheck Protection Program. Officials could have acted because they were seeking to curry favor with the Kushners or feared retribution if they didn't, according to Clark. And if Kushner Companies had wanted to avoid any appearance of undue influence, she added, it should have sent only nonfamily executives to meet with Freddie Mac. “I'd leave it to the professionals," Clark said. “I'd keep family members away from it."

The Freddie Mac data shows that Kushner Companies secured advantageous terms on multiple points. All 18 loans, for example, allow Kushner Companies to pay only interest for the full 10-year term, thus deferring all principal payments to a balloon payment at the end. That lowers the monthly payments but increases the possibility that the balance won't be paid back in full.

“That's as risky as you get," said Ryan Ledwith, a professor at New York University's Schack Institute of Real Estate, of 10-year interest-only loans. “It's a long period of time, and you're not getting any amortization to reduce your risk over time. You're betting the market is going to get better all by itself 10 years from now."

Interest-only mortgages, which notoriously helped fuel the 2008 economic crisis, represent a small percentage of Freddie Mac loans. Only 6% of the 3,600 loans funded by the agency last year were interest-only for a decade or more, according to a database of its core mortgage transactions.

Kushner Companies also loaded more debt on the properties than is usual for similar loans, with the loan value for the 16-loan deal climbing to 69% of the properties' worth. That compares with an average 59%, according to data for loans with similar terms and property types that Freddie Mac sold to investors in 2019, and is just below the 70% debt-to-value ceiling Freddie Mac sets for loans in its category. “What we generally have seen from Freddie and Fannie," said Andrew Little, a principal with real estate investment bank John B. Levy & Company, “is they will do 10 years of interest-only on lower-leveraged deals."

Loans right at the ceiling are “not very common," Little said, adding that “you don't see deals this size that commonly."

Meanwhile Freddie Mac and its lending partner overestimated the profits for the buildings in the Kushners' 16-loan package by 12% during the underwriting process, according to the agency's data. Such analysis is supposed to provide a conservative, accurate picture of revenue and expenses, which should be relatively predictable in the case of an apartment building.

But the level of income anticipated failed to materialize in 2019, financial reports show. The most dramatic overstatement came with the largest loan in the deal, $120 million for Bonnie Ridge Apartments, a 960-apartment complex in a suburban part of Baltimore. In that case, realized profits last year were 31% below what Freddie Mac had expected.

“That's definitely a significant amount," said John Griffin, a University of Texas professor who specializes in forensic finance and has studied mortgage underwriting. He co-authored a recent paper highlighting as worrisome loans in which projected profits exceeded actual profits by 5%. “It's a problem when underwritten income is inflated or overstated," he said. “That is a key metric that determines the safety of the loan."

Griffin's paper found that 28% of all loans examined had projected profits that were 5% or more greater than what the properties actually earned in their first year. Some instances of underperformance could be caused by bad luck, the paper acknowledged, but “such situations should be relatively rare." Yet in the case of Freddie Mac's estimates in the Kushner deal, 13 of the original 16 loans met or exceeded the 5% threshold — many by a considerable amount.

Freddie Mac said it followed normal underwriting guidelines in assessing the Kushner buildings, including securing an independent appraisal and looking at historical property performance. It said investors who examined the riskiest portion of the debt also expressed no concerns.

If the underwriting had been on target, and reflected lower expectations, the loans would still have been within Freddie Mac's credit parameters, data shows. But the resulting analysis would have suggested the Kushner Companies has a smaller cushion to sustain its loan payments. It could also have affected the interest rate the company pays. Thinner margins accompanied by relatively high rates of debt provide less wiggle room if the properties, or the economy, run into trouble. As Kushner Companies has seen before, that wiggle room can disappear quickly.

Freddie Mac's main business has historically been buying bundles of home loans from the lenders that originated them, then selling them to investors as securities. The arrangement takes the debt off banks' balance sheets, freeing them to make more loans. Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are privately owned, but they have been financially backstopped by the federal government and are required to meet goals for lending on affordable housing.

Single-home loans are still Freddie Mac's primary business, but since the 2008 economic crisis, the agency has greatly expanded its financing of apartment complexes.

Apartment complexes have been the specialty of the Kushner family, whose real estate holdings have spanned the mid-Atlantic and Midwest in recent years, with thousands of units scattered across suburbia. The company sold off 17,500 apartments in 2007, after the family's patriarch, Jared's father, Charles Kushner, returned from prison for convictions on illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion and witness tampering.

After Jared became CEO in 2008, the company turned its ambitions to high-profile commercial properties in New York City, a foray that turned sour. In 2018, the company gave up control of its marquee $1.8 billion building and headquarters, 666 Fifth Avenue, after being unable to keep up with its loans. Another piece of prime Kushner Companies Manhattan real estate, retail space in the old New York Times building near Times Square, was headed for a potential default in 2019, and foreclosure. (The New York Times reported in August that the foreclosure action was put off at the last minute, so negotiations with a lender could continue.)

Kushner Companies eventually resumed its residential focus and began bulking up its apartment portfolio. In the eight years before Trump entered the White House, the company and its partners secured a total of $581 million in Freddie Mac financing, according to data from the firm Real Capital Analytics first published by Bloomberg. By the end of 2018, Kushner Companies had amassed 21,000 apartment units.

Some of those loans didn't fare well. They included a series of supplemental loans, or second mortgages, taken out on properties in Maryland that Kushner Companies owned in partnership with others (the size of the Kushner share was not clear). Landlords often use such second loans as a way to extract large amounts of cash from their holdings.

A lender had originated 10 such loans to Kushner Companies and its partners in 2015, and Freddie Mac planned to sell them to investors, or securitize them, once the properties demonstrated income consistently high enough to cover the debt payments. For four of the properties, however, profits dipped in 2016, and two more were in little better shape. Freddie Mac still hadn't securitized the six loans, for $40 million, by inauguration day in 2017.

Mortgage industry experts say poor profits at underlying properties can lead Freddie Mac to delay selling off the loans as bonds, fearing they will be rejected by investors. By the time Freddie Mac offloaded the last of Kushner's second mortgages in April 2017, they had racked up above-average lag times between their origination and securitization, compared with other loans in their debt packages, data shows. (Freddie Mac said the wait time was normal.)

Within 10 months of the sale of the loans to investors, one of the complexes landed on the servicer's watchlist for mortgages at a heightened risk for default. Another soon followed, and another the year after that. All 10 complexes, which were built in the early 1970s or earlier, exhibited upkeep issues alarming enough to earn a flag in Freddie Mac data for “deferred maintenance" problems. (A Freddie Mac spokesman said the issues identified were almost all related to exterior asphalt and concrete, with one instance of an exterior drainage system in need of repair.)

At one property, a representative of Kushner Companies and its partners blamed residents of the nearby neighborhoods, who are primarily Black and low-income, for its declining profits and a rash of evictions: “The main driver is the client base in the area," the servicer reported the borrower as saying, Freddie Mac records show.

Kushner Companies had other problems, too. In 2017, ProPublica reporter Alec MacGillis documented the company's practice of charging aggressive, and what some tenants' lawyers called illegal, fees to occupants of some of those complexes. Tenants also claimed Kushner Companies' property management arm, Westminster Properties, at times neglected basic repairs and allowed the property condition to deteriorate, including raw sewage flowing out of one kitchen sink.

The complaints spurred a lawsuit filed in October 2019 by the attorney general of Maryland, Brian Frosh. Frosh accused the management company and its partners of charging “illegitimate fees" and having “rented apartments and townhomes to consumers that are distressed, shoddily maintained, and have conditions that can adversely impact consumers' health and well being." (Westminster has defended its conduct in legal filings for the suit, which remains active.)

Kushner Companies first approached Freddie Mac in August 2018 through Berkadia Commercial Mortgage, then abandoned its application without explanation in mid-October of that year. Berkadia did not return messages seeking comment.

In February 2019, Berkadia approached Freddie Mac again and informed the agency that Kushner Companies wanted to move forward. It's not clear what explains the renewed interest. But two things had changed in the interim. The rates on 10-year Treasury bonds had dropped, a circumstance that typically fuels borrowing and the securitized lending that Freddie provides. And the Obama appointee in charge of the FHFA was gone, leaving an interim Trump appointee in place.

Six days after rekindling its interest, Nicole Kushner Meyer and two Kushner Companies executives, President Laurent Morali and Chief Operating Officer Peter Febo, met with Freddie Mac officials, along with representatives of Berkadia and an advisory firm, documents show. The records don't say which Freddie Mac officials attended. The meeting covered the “business plan for assets, track record and general overview of the Kushner Companies." Meyer followed up, documents say, sending multiple emails to a senior Freddie Mac official, who was not identified.

Meyer has been serving as a principal at Kushner Companies since 2015, according to her LinkedIn profile. She caused a stir in 2017, when she invoked her brother on a trip to China to pitch potential investors for a Kushner Companies development in Jersey City, New Jersey. The company was seeking investors to participate in a government program known as EB-5, which grants visas to foreigners who make high-dollar investments intended to create jobs in struggling areas.

Freddie Mac said Meyer did not mention Kushner by name during the meeting. The agency also said no one connected to the White House asked that the deal be done.

But the political sensitivity was obvious to Freddie Mac, whose officials emailed each other in the weeks after the meeting, expressing a desire to minimize press coverage of the deal, according to a person with knowledge of the situation. They also took the unusual step of notifying FHFA, their regulator, of the transaction, the timeline shows. Freddie Mac and FHFA both declined to say why Freddie made the notification except to say that it was necessary as part of the agency's conservatorship. (One source suggested deals above a certain dollar amount require such notification.)

In March, Kushner Companies was able to move fast to lock in a favorable interest rate, documents show. It submitted a financing application, which is needed to request a lock on a component of its interest rate. Freddie Mac's website says that single loans are eligible for such a procedure, but that groups of loans must obtain additional approval. The day after Kushner Companies submitted its application, documents show, Freddie locked the rate for all 16 mortgages.

Through a spokesman, Freddie Mac said that such locks are an important part of its business model, and that timing is at the borrower's discretion.

Kushner Companies' full-term interest-only loan proved exceptional in another way: Freddie Mac had granted Lone Star Funds, a private equity firm managing $85 billion in global investments, interest-only terms for only the first three years of its seven-year mortgages when it had acquired the same apartment complexes in 2015. As a result, Lone Star had been able to borrow more money. But it soon faced a sharp hike in its monthly payments, when it added principal to interest.

(Freddie Mac said full-term, interest-only loans are more common when the pool of mortgages examined is restricted to larger, conventional loans. Nonpublic data shows they made up roughly 20% of such loans over the last three years, the agency said.)

Freddie Mac completed its due diligence for the Kushner Companies deal and on May 22 of last year, Kushner Companies and its partner, Torchlight Investors, took ownership of the 16 properties, with $785,803,000 in loans pledged. Torchlight did not respond to questions.

The properties were largely in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore suburbs. Their average construction date was 1980, almost a decade older than the other properties Freddie approved for similar loans in 2019.

From a profit standpoint, the 16 properties were a mixed bag. Appraisers pegged their value as having increased 2% overall in the previous four years. Four of the properties lost value, according to the analysis.

The Kushners also benefited from another provision that increased the deal's risk. Groups of loans are often cross-collateralized, meaning that if one defaults, the lender can seek to seize others to recoup their losses. The strategy provides an extra hedge against risk for the lender. The Lone Star properties were cross-collateralized under their previous loan. But not those for Kushner Companies. (A Freddie Mac spokesman said cross-collateralization is not required and each of the company's loans met credit parameters without it.)

Another curious phenomenon emerged in the disclosures for the new loans: The reported profits for seven of the Kushner buildings in 2017 were higher than those listed for the same buildings and same year in prior loan documents. For some properties, the difference was slight. But for others, it was more substantial. At one Kushner complex, for example, the Apartments at Cambridge Court in suburban Baltimore, the 2017 net operating income was nearly 6% higher in the new loan filing than it had been for the same year in an old disclosure.

In May, ProPublica reported a pattern of similar discrepancies in bonds that hold mortgages across the commercial real estate industry. And the paper by Griffin, the University of Texas finance professor, and his colleague Alex Priest also found a pattern of such profit alterations, suggesting multiple institutions are manipulating historical financials to downplay risk and bolster more aggressive lending.

Financial data on how the 18 Kushner properties are faring in this year's economic slump is not yet available.

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