The recent testimony, coming from a SpaceX insider during a court case, marks the first time direct Chinese investment in the privately held company has been disclosed. While there is no prohibition on Chinese ownership in U.S. military contractors, such investment is heavily regulated and the issue is treated by the U.S. government as a significant national security concern.

“They obviously have Chinese investors to be honest,” Iqbaljit Kahlon, a major SpaceX investor, said in a deposition last year, adding that some are “directly on the cap table.” “Cap table” refers to the company’s capitalization table, which lists its shareholders.

Kahlon’s testimony does not reveal the scope of Chinese investment in SpaceX or the identities of the investors. Kahlon has long been close with the company’s leadership and runs his own firm that acts as a middleman for wealthy investors looking to buy shares of SpaceX.

SpaceX keeps its full ownership structure secret. It was previously reported that some Chinese investors had bought indirect stakes in SpaceX, investing in middleman funds that in turn owned shares in the rocket company. The new testimony describes direct investments that suggest a closer relationship with SpaceX.

SpaceX has thrived as it snaps up sensitive U.S. government contracts, from building spy satellites for the Pentagon to launching spacecraft for NASA. U.S. embassies and the White House have connected to the company’s Starlink internet service too. Musk’s roughly 42% stake in the company is worth an estimated $168 billion. If he owned nothing else, he’d be one of the 10 richest people in the world.

National security law experts said federal officials would likely be deeply interested in understanding the direct Chinese investment in SpaceX. Whether there was cause for concern would depend on the details, they said, but the U.S. government has asserted that China has a systematic strategy of using investments in sensitive industries to conduct espionage.

If the investors got access to nonpublic information about the company — say, details on its contracts or supply chain — it could be useful to Chinese intelligence, said Sarah Bauerle Danzman, an Indiana University professor who has worked for the State Department scrutinizing foreign investments. That “would create huge risks that, if realized, would have huge consequences for national security,” she said.

SpaceX did not respond to questions for this story. Kahlon declined to comment.

The new court records come from litigation in Delaware between Kahlon and another investor. The testimony was sealed until ProPublica, with the assistance of lawyers at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and the law firm Shaw Keller, moved in the spring to make it public. SpaceX fought the effort, but a judge ruled that some of the records must be released. Kahlon’s testimony was publicly filed this week.

Buying shares in SpaceX is much more difficult than buying a piece of a publicly traded company like Tesla or Microsoft. SpaceX has control over who can buy stakes in it, and the company’s investors fall into different categories. The most rarefied group is the direct investors, who actually own SpaceX shares. This group includes funds led by Kahlon, Peter Thiel and a handful of other venture capitalists with personal ties to Musk. Then there are the indirect investors, who effectively buy stakes in SpaceX through a middleman like Kahlon. (The indirect investors are actually buying into a fund run by the middleman, typically paying a hefty fee.) All previously known Chinese investors in SpaceX fell into the latter category.

This year, ProPublica reported on an unusual feature of SpaceX’s approach to investment from China. According to testimony from the Delaware case, the company allows Chinese investors to buy stakes in SpaceX so long as the money is routed through the Cayman Islands or other offshore secrecy hubs. Companies only have to proactively report Chinese investments to the government in limited circumstances, and there aren’t hard and fast rules for how much is too much.

After ProPublica’s report, House Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth raising alarms about the company’s “potential obfuscation.” “In light of the extreme sensitivity of SpaceX’s work for DoD and NASA, this lack of transparency raises serious questions,” they wrote. It’s unclear if any action was taken in response.

Kahlon has turned his access to SpaceX stock into a lucrative business. His investor list reads like an atlas of the world. The investors’ names are redacted in the recently unsealed document, but their addresses span from Chile to Malaysia. One is in Russia. At least two are in mainland China. One is in Qatar. (In one email to SpaceX’s chief financial officer, Kahlon said a Los Angeles-based fund had money from the Qatari royal family and was already invested in SpaceX.)

“You made a big fortune,” a China-based financier wrote to Kahlon four years ago. “Lol something like that. SpaceX has been the gift that keeps on giving,” Kahlon responded. “All thanks to you.”

Kahlon first met with SpaceX when it was a fledgling startup, according to court records. SpaceX’s CFO, Bret Johnsen, who’s been there for 14 years, testified that Kahlon “has been with the company in one form or fashion longer than I have.” Johnsen also testified that SpaceX has no formal policy about accepting investments from countries deemed adversaries by the U.S. government. But he said he asks fund managers to “stay away from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, North Korean ownership interest” because that could make it “more challenging to win government contracts.”

There are indications that by 2021, Kahlon was wary of raising funds from China. The U.S. government had grown increasingly concerned about Chinese investments in tech companies, and that June, Kahlon told an associate he was “being picky” with who he’d let buy into a new SpaceX opportunity. “Only people I want to have a relationship with long term. No one from mainland China,” Kahlon said.

But as he raced to assemble a pool of investors, those concerns appeared to fade away. By November 2021, Kahlon was personally raising money from China to buy SpaceX stakes. He told a Shanghai-based company that if it invested with him, it would get quarterly updates on SpaceX’s business development, “visits to SpaceX, and the opportunities to interview with Space X’s CFO,” court records show.

The Shanghai company ultimately sent Kahlon $50 million to invest in Musk’s business, according to court records. SpaceX had the deal canceled after the plan became public.

In the weeks leading up to July 9, Ayman Soliman told friends he was terrified of losing the sanctuary he’d found after fleeing Egypt in 2014 and building a new life as a Muslim chaplain at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital.

Soliman, 51, was to show up at 9 a.m. on that date for his first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement since losing his asylum status. He’d been granted the protections in 2018 under the first Trump administration. Then, in the last month of the Biden presidency, immigration authorities moved to revoke them based on sharply disputed claims of fraud and aid to a terrorist group. Once President Donald Trump returned to office weeks later, court records show, immigration officials bumped up the terrorism claims and formalized the asylum termination June 3.

By the time of Soliman’s ICE appointment, friends said, he was distraught over the prospect of being returned to the regime that had jailed him for documenting protests as a journalist. He arrived at the agency’s field office in Blue Ash, Ohio, accompanied by fellow clergy and a couple of Democratic state lawmakers.

“I didn’t come to America seeking a better life. I was escaping death,” he said in a video filmed just before he entered.

Inside, Soliman’s attorneys said, he was shocked to find FBI agents waiting for him. They interrogated him for three hours about his charity work more than a decade ago in Egypt, the basis for the Department of Homeland Security accusations of illegal aid, or “material support,” to Islamist militants.

His lawyer eventually emerged from the ICE office holding a belt and a wallet. Soliman had been swept into custody, joining a record 61,000 people now in ICE detention. As he awaits an immigration court trial Sept. 25, he is being held in a county jail run by a sheriff who posted a sign outside reading, “Illegal Aliens Here.”

Legal observers are watching the chaplain’s case as a bellwether of the Trump administration’s ability to merge the vast federal powers of immigration and counterterrorism. The case is also a reminder, they say, of sweeping post-9/11 statutes that both Republican and Democratic administrations have been accused of abusing, especially in cases involving Muslims.

Material support laws ban almost any type of aid to U.S.-designated foreign terrorist groups, extending far beyond the basics of weapons, personnel and money. Prosecutors describe the laws as an invaluable tool against would-be attackers, but civil liberties groups have long complained of overreach.

Over the years, successive administrations have faced legal challenges over how they wield the power; a milestone Supreme Court decision during the Obama administration upheld the laws as constitutional. Now, however, there are particular fears about the material support “sledgehammer,” as one legal scholar put it, in the hands of Trump, who has been openly hostile toward Muslims and determined to deport a million people who are in the United States without permission.

“These statutes are written extraordinarily broadly with the unstated premise that discretion will be exercised responsibly. And one thing this administration has shown is that it doesn’t understand what it means to exercise discretion responsibly,” said David Cole, a Georgetown Law professor who argued high-profile material support cases and served as national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

At issue are DHS allegations that Soliman’s involvement with an Islamic charity provided material support to the Muslim Brotherhood. But neither the charity nor the Brotherhood is a U.S.-designated terrorist organization, and an Egyptian court found no official ties between the groups.

The Biden-era DHS, which first flagged the issue, said it would revoke Soliman’s asylum if “a preponderance of the evidence supports termination” after a hearing, according to the December notice. At the time, court records show, the material support allegation was listed as a secondary concern after more common asylum questions about the veracity of official documents and his claims of persecution in Egypt.

Once Trump came to power weeks later, Soliman’s attorneys said, the material support claims metastasized, with U.S. authorities declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a Tier III, or undesignated, terrorist group and adding new arguments about ties to Hamas. The Brotherhood, a nearly century-old Islamist political movement, renounced violence in the 1970s, though Hamas and other spinoffs are on the U.S. blacklist. In addition to the Egypt-related concerns, DHS filings about Soliman had noted warrants for “murder and terrorism” in Iraq — a country Soliman says he’s never visited.

By elevating the national security argument, Soliman’s lawyers said, DHS was able to bypass an immigration judge and order the chaplain held without bond as “potentially dangerous.” An established terrorism nexus means less transparency for immigrants — and more power for the authorities.

“DHS is judge, jury and executioner,” said Robert Ratliff, one of Soliman’s attorneys.

The idea of Soliman as a secret militant has outraged residents who know him locally as “the interfaith imam” and the first Muslim on the pastoral care team at Cincinnati Children’s, a top-ranked pediatric hospital. Colleagues described a popular chaplain with nicknames for the tiny patients and soothing words for their bleary-eyed parents.

Judy Ragsdale, the former pastoral care director who hired Soliman in 2021 shortly before retiring, said she wrote a letter to hospital leaders imploring them to speak out against the allegations that could return him to certain persecution in Egypt. He lost authorization to work in June, when his asylum was terminated.

“This is a ‘Schindler’s List’ moment,” Ragsdale said she told hospital leaders. “And if you don’t stand up for Ayman, you’re complicit in what’s happening to him.”

Some fear DHS is parlaying the scope and secrecy of counterterrorism laws into a weapon to boost the president’s mass-deportation mission.

Immigrant rights groups say a sped-up campaign with fewer guardrails for due process is already leading to removals based on evidence that hasn’t been fully vetted. If DHS is successful in test cases like Soliman’s, they say, material support claims could be more easily applied to immigration cases with even tenuous links to militant factions, including newly designated cartels.

The White House referred questions to Homeland Security, which routed a request for comment to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services; a spokesperson there said in a statement that the agency generally “does not discuss the details of individual immigration cases and adjudication decisions.”

“An alien — even with a pending application or lawful status — is not shielded from immigration enforcement action,” the statement said. The FBI declined to comment.

Jeffrey Breinholt, an architect of the material support statutes who spent three decades as a federal terrorism prosecutor, defends the laws as crucial to closing loopholes that were exploited by foreign militant groups and their domestic sympathizers.

Breinholt, who retired in 2024, said he has no concerns about the widening scope as it converges with Trump’s deportation push. The designation of cartels, he said, “is a natural outgrowth of the success we have had with ‘material support’ crime.”

To Cole and other critics, however, the Soliman case could be “the canary in the coal mine.”

More Than a Chaplain

Within a few hours of Soliman’s detention, dozens showed up for an impromptu rally and news conference in the ICE center parking lot. That backup has since grown into a hundreds-strong campaign to refute the DHS allegations, which supporters call a resurgence of anti-Muslim fearmongering that has persisted across party lines since the 9/11 attacks 24 years ago this month.

“Any time you have a brown man or a Muslim man and you use the words ‘FBI’ and ‘red flag,’ you don’t have to say any more,” said Tala Ali, a friend of Soliman’s who heads the board of a Cincinnati mosque where he sometimes led prayers.

Voices calling for Soliman’s release include parents who met him in the hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit. The families are in disbelief that the chaplain they’d grown close to is now jailed in a high-stakes international case. They knew he’d fled Egypt but said they were learning details of his ordeal through the campaign to free him.

“It would be very easy to be resentful and be angry with the world when you have to live through that kind of trauma, and he’s not like that at all. He’s taking on other peoples’ trauma,” said Heather Barrow, whose infant daughter, Mya, died in the NICU last year.

She said Soliman stepped in to spare her grieving family the heartache of making funeral arrangements for a 5-month-old. He attended Mya’s celebration of life and, later, a butterfly release on June 7, which would’ve been her first birthday. A month later, he was in an ICE cell.

“I was like, how is this happening? He was just at our house,” Barrow said.

Another couple, Taylor and Bryan McClain, also came to rely on Soliman when their newborn, Violette, arrived at Cincinnati Children’s last year with life-threatening complications. The chaplain steadied them during their 271 days in the NICU, which Taylor said felt like “a roller coaster in a tornado and it’s on fire.” The McClains call him “family.”

“I say with full confidence: Violette is alive because of the advocacy that Ayman gave us,” Taylor said one recent afternoon as she held her daughter, now just over a year old.

Clergy members make up another bloc of support — so many that they built a spreadsheet to divide visiting hours among imams, rabbis and pastors. Immigration advocates and Ohio civil rights leaders have added their names to petitions. So have University of Cincinnati student groups including the Ornithology Club and the Harry Potter Appreciation Club.

More than a dozen people faced criminal charges stemming from a melee after a rally in Soliman’s support; demonstrators and police blame each other for the violence July 17.

Two of Soliman’s fellow chaplains at Cincinnati Children’s, Adam Allen and Elizabeth Diop, said they lost their jobs for refusing to keep quiet about their jailed colleague. Meanwhile, the hospital, a cherished local institution, is taking heat for its silence. Soliman’s supporters launched a letter-writing campaign demanding a response from the hospital, which has said it does not discuss personnel issues.

Signs appeared outside the hospital. “Missing Chaplain,” they said. “Abducted By ICE.”

Cincinnati Children’s Hospital did not return messages seeking comment. In an internal memo published by The Cincinnati Enquirer, hospital CEO Dr. Steve Davis told employees that the lack of response “should not be mistaken for a lack of caring or action.” As a nonprofit, Davis stressed, the hospital has strict rules about “activities that could be characterized as political.”

Soliman’s supporters press on. One recent Sunday evening, about 200 filled a Cincinnati church where preachers from several faith backgrounds urged them to demand his freedom.

“The trial that Imam Ayman is going through is our trial,” Abdulhakim Mohamed, head of the North American Imams Fellowship, told the crowd. “His justice is ours to own. The injustice is also ours to bear.”

Escape From Egypt

Soliman’s entanglement with the Egyptian security apparatus began in 2000 when he joined fellow college students to protest repressive laws, he said in asylum papers.

He was periodically locked up and intimidated after that, he said. The persecution worsened more than a decade ago during uprisings that remade the Middle East by toppling dictators — including Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak — but in some places spiraled into civil war.

Soliman worked as a freelance journalist covering pro-democracy revolts in Egypt and neighboring Libya. Friends say he was also studying to become an imam and served on the board of a local chapter of the Islamic charity Al-Gameya al-Shareya, which is known for its network of hospitals and orphan programs throughout Egypt.

The charity, whose name has multiple English spellings, launched in 1912 and is often described as “one of the most established national Islamic organizations.” Scholars have written that early leaders came from the Muslim Brotherhood, archenemy of Egypt’s current military leadership, but that ties ended around 1990 under government pressure.

In the years since, researchers found, the group maintained smooth relations with the government as its more than 1,000 chapters nationwide encompass Egyptians of all political leanings. That delicate balance faltered briefly in 2013 when a military-led counterrevolution quashed the nascent democratic movement and deposed elected leaders who were part of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Egypt’s military rulers declared the Brotherhood a terrorist organization and shuttered any organization it suspected of ties. Al-Gameya Al-Shareya was among more than 1,000 civil society groups blacklisted in the crackdown, court filings say, and chapters suspected of helping the Brotherhood during elections were dissolved. The group resumed operations the next year, when an Egyptian court lifted the ban, ruling that the charity “has no ties to the Muslim Brotherhood,” according to news reports.

Egypt’s return to zero tolerance for dissidents made Soliman’s activism dangerous, he said in court papers. As a journalist and Islamic scholar, he represented two fields the Egyptian government views as existential threats: a free press and religious organizing.

Soliman fled to the United States in 2014 on a visitor visa and later filed a petition for asylum, describing how security forces over the years had locked him up on false charges and tortured him with electrical shocks. In one incident, his attorney said, Egyptian forces with machine guns stormed into an apartment where Soliman was asleep with his wife and young child. (Through attorneys, Soliman asked to withhold details about his family because they remain in Egypt.)

“For me, it’s life or death,” Soliman later told a U.S. immigration officer of his need to escape.

Officials in Cairo referred questions to the Egyptian Embassy in Washington, which did not respond to requests for comment.

The asylum application asked whether Soliman had belonged to political parties or other associations in his home country. Ratliff, the attorney, said Soliman marked “yes” and attached a statement that mentioned Al-Gameya Al-Shareya and his role in fundraising for the local chapter.

Friends said Soliman rejoiced when he was granted asylum in 2018, under the first Trump administration, and sought permanent residency as the next step toward reuniting with his family. But the process stalled. “Bureaucratic hurdle after bureaucratic hurdle,” Ratliff said.

Then came a more serious snag. In 2021, Soliman learned he was on a federal watchlist when a background check for a chaplain job at an Oregon prison showed that the FBI had flagged him, court papers show.

His attorneys said they have no idea why. It could’ve been about a specific piece of intelligence. It could’ve been a misspelling or mistaken identity, simple errors that have landed ordinary Muslims on opaque “war on terror” watchlists that are nearly impossible to get off.

Soliman, friends say, insisted on trying to clear his name. With the help of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, he sued government agencies including the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration. That route led to open-ended legal battles that yielded no clear answers and no green card.

Instead, his place in the country became more vulnerable. In December, the final stretch of the Biden administration, Soliman received notice that the government intended to terminate his asylum based on “inconsistencies” in his claims of persecution and concern that his charity work made him inadmissible based on “possible membership in a terrorist organization.”

Some of his friends are convinced it was payback for the lawsuits, but attorneys say there’s no telling what triggered a review.

“What Ayman has experienced is something that, post-9/11, has been the reality of Muslims in this country,” said Ali, his friend and advocate. “All he did was try to get answers and accountability for what he’d been put through.”

Big Claims, Little Transparency

Contested asylum cases like Soliman’s were prime targets when Trump took office the next month and supercharged deportations, a top campaign pledge. Since his return to office, ICE arrests have doubled.

Soliman was called to an asylum hearing in February, a month into the new administration, for a last shot at defending his eligibility. A DHS officer asked about claims in the Biden-era notice alleging “discrepancies in date and number of times he suffered harm” and raising doubts about a handwritten Egyptian police report and letters authenticating his journalistic work.

A transcript shows Soliman explaining that he sometimes got confused when describing traumatic incidents from years ago in English, his second language. He said the police report was a rough translation included by mistake and submitted statements verifying his journalism.

Then the DHS officer’s questioning took a turn: “When did you start supporting Al-Jameya Al-Shareya?”

For the rest of the meeting, the transcript shows, the officer drilled down on Soliman’s knowledge of the charity: fundraising, chapter size, support for violence and whether he had been aware of a Brotherhood link.

Another of Soliman’s attorneys interrupted when the immigration officer said the Brotherhood had been a Tier III group since 2012. That’s not how it works, the attorney countered — only top-tier terrorist organizations like al-Qaida or the Islamic State are given dates of designation. Tier III, she said, is for undesignated groups and is determined on a case-by-case basis, with the burden of proof on the government.

“Counsel, I’ll give you an opportunity at the end to make a closing,” the DHS officer said.

“I understand,” the attorney replied, “but we’re talking about something factual.”

The next time Soliman heard from DHS was the official termination of his asylum, effective June 3. This time, there was no hedging in language that declared he was ineligible based on “evidence that indicated you provided material support to a Tier III terrorist organization.” A few weeks later, he was taken into custody and notified of his pending removal.

Soliman’s legal team sued, arguing that he was stripped of asylum on illegal grounds because the designations had been made “without proper findings” and based on no new evidence.

Court filings show DHS attorneys introducing, then withdrawing or amending, materials to build a case linking Soliman to the Brotherhood through the charity.

“It looked like, ‘What can we put here to get to there?’” said Ratliff, a former immigration judge.

Among the supporting evidence filed by the government are three academic reports by scholars with deep knowledge of Islamic charities in Egypt. Soliman’s legal team filed statements from all three balking at how DHS had cherry-picked their research.

Steven Brooke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison detailed “important mistakes of fact and interpretation.” Neil Russell, an academic in Scotland, called the U.S. conclusions “a mischaracterization of my findings.” Marie Vannetzel, a French scholar who has conducted field research with Al-Gameya Al-Shareya, rebutted what she called “a dishonest manipulation of my text and my work.”

Vannetzel wrote that she rejects the idea that Soliman, “simply by virtue of his activity in the association, could be accused of providing material support to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

Observers of Cairo’s unsparing campaign to uproot Islamist opposition say the matter is clear-cut: If the charity survived the scrutiny of Egyptian intelligence, then it’s not Muslim Brotherhood. “It’s really striking that this group is not proscribed,” said Michael Hanna, an Egypt specialist and U.S. program director of the nonprofit International Crisis Group.

Soliman’s attorneys also criticized the government’s assertion in court filings that he, as a board member of one local branch, would’ve been aware of any Brotherhood affiliation of chapters nationwide. “If a Rotarian in Seattle commits murder, we don’t go charging Rotarians in Des Moines with conspiracy,” Ratliff said.

Separate from U.S. attempts to tie Soliman to the Brotherhood was a puzzling footnote about Iraq that appeared in a later filing. Without detail, DHS attorneys alluded to warrants for “murder and terrorism activities.” Ratliff said a DHS attorney later confirmed to him in a phone call that it wasn’t about Soliman, but didn’t explain why it was there.

The error remained uncorrected in filings until Sept. 3, when DHS attorney Cheryl Gutridge acknowledged in court that it was an “inadvertent” reference to another case, Ohio news outlets reported. The original wording suggesting that Soliman faced murder charges in Iraq had been included in the government’s successful argument for keeping him in custody.

DHS did not address questions about the Iraq reference.

A close friend, Ahmed Elkady, said Soliman told him on a jail visit he was stunned to be linked to Iraq, a place he’s never been: “He said, ‘How can I become a virtual terrorist?”

A Sheriff’s ICE Fiefdom

As he awaits trial in immigration court, Soliman is in custody at the Butler County Jail, about 30 miles outside of Cincinnati, past cornfields and a German social club and the Town and Country Mobile Home Park.

For more than 20 years, this outpost has been the domain of Sheriff Richard Jones, a cowboy hat-wearing firebrand who keeps a framed photo of Trump in his office. In the run-up to the 2024 election, Jones mused that a Trump victory might put him “back in the deportation business.”

From 2003 to 2021, the jail had been contracted to house immigration detainees until the arrangement dissolved in the Biden era. As predicted, the county entered into a new agreement with ICE in February, after Trump returned to power, to hold around 400 detainees: $68 a day per person, plus $36 an hour for the sheriff’s office toward transportation.

Jones celebrated the restored partnership by posting a fake image showing inflatable gators outside the jail, a nod to ICE’s “Alligator Alcatraz” detention center in Florida. A Black Lives Matter group in Dayton issued a statement calling the sheriff’s post an “egregious act of cruelty and historical mockery.”

As it returns to deportation work, the jail still faces a federal civil rights lawsuit filed in 2020 by two ICE prisoners who said they endured beatings and discrimination. One plaintiff, a Muslim, said a jailer called him a “fucking terrorist” and threatened to throw his prayer rug in the toilet. Jones has disputed the claims.

The sheriff is in the news again because of Soliman. In court filings, the Muslim chaplain says he was denied access to a space where he could lead communal prayers and then placed in “isolation” for nearly a week with only an hour of phone access between midnight and 1 a.m.

Soliman’s attorneys say in court papers that the episode was related to “targeted harassment” over his religion. The sheriff’s office told local outlets that it respects religious freedom and said Soliman was placed in isolation because he was “argumentative” and “threatening.”

After agreeing to an interview with ProPublica, Jones later decided he was “no longer interested,” the sheriff’s spokesperson, Deputy Kim Peters, wrote in a text message.

As he languishes in jail, Soliman’s empty apartment in Cincinnati has become a way station for an inner circle of supporters, who said they felt like “intruders” when they first gathered there. Soliman is known as an elegant dresser, but his apartment was in bachelor-pad disarray, a reflection of his long hours at the hospital and the abruptness of his detention, said his friends, also clerics. The imams laughed when one confessed that he first thought the FBI had ransacked the place.

Over water bottles and energy drinks scavenged from Soliman’s fridge, they talked about the deportation threat. In Egypt, pro-government news outlets already have trumpeted the case as proof that Soliman was leading a secret Brotherhood cell in America.

Despite Soliman’s predicament, they said, being in limbo here is preferable to the alternative.

“You think I’m afraid of being here in jail?” Soliman told fellow imam Ihab Alsaghier during a recent visit. “Every moment I’m alone, I imagine I’m on a flight back to Egypt.”

On Feb. 10, on the third floor of the Social Security Administration’s Baltimore-area headquarters, Leland Dudek unfurled a 4-foot-wide roll of paper that extended to 20 feet in length. It was a visual guide that the agency had kept for years to explain Social Security’s many technological systems and processes. The paper was covered in flow charts, arrows and text so minuscule you almost needed a magnifying glass to read it. Dudek called it Social Security’s “Dead Sea Scroll.”

Dudek and a fellow Social Security Administration bureaucrat taped the scroll across a wall of a windowless executive office. This was where a team from the new Department of Government Efficiency was going to set up shop.

DOGE was already terrifying the federal bureaucracy with the prospect of mass job loss and intrusions into previously sacrosanct databases. Still, Dudek and a handful of his tech-oriented colleagues were hopeful: If any agency needed a dose of efficiency, it was theirs. “There was kind of an excitement, actually,” a longtime top agency official said. “I’d spent 29 years trying to use technology and data in ways that the agency would never get around to.”

The Social Security Administration is 90 years old. Even today, thousands of its physical records are stored in former limestone mines in Missouri and Pennsylvania. Its core software dates back to the early 1980s, and only a few programmers remain who understand the intricacies of its more than 60 million lines of code. The agency has been talking about switching from paper Social Security cards to electronic ones for two decades, without making it happen.

DOGE, billed as a squad of crack technologists, seemed perfectly designed to overcome such obstacles. And its young members were initially inquisitive about how Social Security worked and what most needed fixing. Several times over those first few days, Akash Bobba, a 21-year-old coder who’d been the first of them to arrive, held his face close to Dudek’s scroll, tracing connections between the agency’s venerable IT systems with his index finger. Bobba asked: “Who would know about this part of the architecture?”

Before long, though, he and the other DOGErs buried their heads in their laptops and plugged in their headphones. Their senior leaders had already written out goals on a whiteboard. At the top: Find fraud. Quickly.

Dudek’s scroll was forgotten. The heavy paper started to unpeel from the wall, and it eventually sagged to the floor.

It only got worse from there, said Dudek, who would — improbably — be named acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, a position he held through May. In 15 hours of interviews with ProPublica, Dudek described the chaos of working with DOGE and how he tried first to collaborate, and then to protect the agency, resulting in turns that were at various times alarming, confounding and tragicomic.

DOGE, he said, began acting like “a bunch of people who didn’t know what they were doing, with ideas of how government should run — thinking it should work like a McDonald’s or a bank — screaming all the time.”

The shock troops of DOGE, at the Social Security Administration and myriad other federal agencies, were the advance guard in perhaps the most dramatic transformation of the U.S. government since the New Deal. And despite the highly public departure of DOGE’s leader, Elon Musk, that campaign continues today. Key DOGE team members have transitioned to permanent jobs at the SSA, including as the agency’s top technology officials. The 19-year-old whose self-anointed moniker — “Big Balls” — has made him one of the most memorable DOGErs joined the agency this summer.

The DOGE philosophy has been embraced by the SSA’s commissioner, Frank Bisignano, who was confirmed by the Senate in May. “Your bias has to be — because mine is — that DOGE is helping make things better,” Bisignano told senior officials weeks after replacing Dudek, according to a recording obtained by ProPublica. “It may not feel that way, but don’t believe everything you read.”

In a statement, a Social Security Administration spokesperson said that Bisignano has made “notable” initial progress and that “the initiatives underway will continue to strengthen service delivery and enhance the integrity and efficiency of our systems.” The statement asserted that “under President Trump’s leadership and his commitment to protect and preserve Social Security, Commissioner Bisignano is strengthening Social Security and the programs it provides for Americans now and in the future.”

For all the controversy DOGE has generated, its time at the Social Security Administration has not amounted to looming armageddon, as some Democrats warn. What it’s been, as much as anything, is a missed opportunity, according to interviews with more than 35 current or recently departed Social Security officials and staff, who spoke on the condition of anonymity mostly out of fear of retaliation by the Trump administration, and a review of hundreds of pages of internal documents, emails and court records.

The DOGE team, and Bisignano, have prioritized scoring quick wins that allow them to post triumphant tweets and press releases — especially, in the early months, about an essentially nonexistent form of fraud — while squandering the chance for systemic change at an agency that genuinely needs it.

They could have worked to modernize Social Security’s legacy software, the current and former staffers say. They could have tried to streamline the stupefying volume of documentation that many Social Security beneficiaries have to provide. They could have built search tools to help staff navigate the agency’s 60,000 pages of policies. (New hires often need at least three years to master the nuances of even one type of case.) They could have done something about wait times for disability claims and appeals, which often take over a year.

They did none of these things.

Ultimately, no one had a more complete view of the missed opportunity than Lee Dudek. A 48-year-old with a shaved pate and a broad build that suggests an aging former linebacker, Dudek is a figure seemingly native to the universe of President Donald Trump — an unlikely holder of a key post, elevated after little or no vetting, who briefly attains notoriety in Washington circles before vanishing into obscurity — not unlike Anthony Scaramucci in the first Trump administration.

Dudek, a midlevel bureaucrat with blunt confidence and a preference for his own ideas, had failed in his one past attempt to manage a small team within the SSA, leading him and his supervisors to conclude he shouldn’t oversee others. Despite that, Trump made him the boss of 57,500 people as acting commissioner of the agency this spring.

Dudek got the job, wittingly or not, through an end-run around his bosses. After Trump won the 2024 election and rumors of a cost-cutting-and-efficiency SWAT team began to swirl, Dudek asked people he knew at big tech companies for introductions to potential DOGE members. In December, a contact set him up with Musk’s right-hand man, Steve Davis, which led to conversations with other DOGE figures about how they could “hack” Social Security’s bureaucracy to “get to yes,” Dudek said.

By February, Dudek had become the conduit between DOGE and the SSA, alerting top agency officials that DOGE wanted to work at headquarters. And unlike Michelle King, the acting agency chief at the time, Dudek was willing to speed up the new-hire training process to give DOGE access to virtually all of the SSA’s databases. This precipitated a sequence of events that began with him being placed on administrative leave, where he wrote a LinkedIn post that propelled him into the public eye for the first time: “I confess,” he posted. “I helped DOGE understand SSA. … I confess. I … circumvented the chain of command to connect DOGE with the people who get stuff done.” The same weekend, King resigned and Dudek, who was at home in his underwear watching MSNBC, got an email stating that the president of the United States had appointed him commissioner.

Between February and May, when Dudek’s tenure ended, his erratic rhetoric and decisions routinely madefront-page news. He was often portrayed as a DOGE patsy, perhaps even a fool. But in his interviews with ProPublica this summer, he revealed himself to be a much more complex figure, a disappointed believer in DOGE’s potential, who maintains he did what he could to protect Social Security’s mission under duress.

Dudek is the first agency head to speak in detail on the record about what it is like to be thrust into such an important position under Trump. He told ProPublica that he decided to speak because he wishes that “those who govern” would have more frank and honest conversations with the public.

To the 73 million Americans whose financial lives depend on the viability of Social Security, those first months were a seesaw of apprehension and rumor. Inside the agency, Dudek, ill-prepared for leadership or for DOGE’s murky agenda, was stumbling through the chaos in part by creating some of his own.

Dudek knows what it’s like to depend on Social Security. When he was a kid in Saginaw, Michigan, his mother turned to Social Security disability benefits to support him and his siblings after she got injured at a Ford-affiliated parts factory; she also had a mental-health breakdown. (Dudek’s now-deceased father, who worked for General Motors, was alternately abusive and absent, according to the family.)

At school, Dudek was isolated and bullied for being poor, his sister told ProPublica, and he’s had an underdog’s quick temper ever since. But he was always an advanced student, and he developed an early interest in computer science and politics. As a teenager, he often watched C-Span. He was fascinated, he said, by “how government worked and how it could change people’s lives.”

Dudek arrived in Washington in 1995 to attend Catholic University of America. He was the type of earnest young man who was enthralled by President Bill Clinton’s campaign at the time to “reinvent government” by injecting it with private sector-style efficiency, much as Trump and DOGE later said they would.

In college, he also displayed the tendency to buck authority that would mark his professional career. He had a night job running the university’s computer labs; if there were problems, he was supposed to call his boss. He wasn’t supposed to install new software on all the computers, but that’s what he did. It worked, although he got a talking-to about knowing his role.

After graduating, Dudek spent nearly a decade working for tech companies that contracted with the federal government on modernization projects, before migrating to several jobs within federal agencies themselves.

In 2009, he arrived at the Social Security Administration as an IT security official. The agency was just like the Saginaw he’d run from, Dudek said: an insular, hidebound place where everyone knew everyone and they all thought innovation would cost them their jobs.

But the SSA wasn’t the only institution at fault. Congress had enacted byzantine eligibility requirements for disability and Supplemental Security Income benefits, forcing the agency to expend huge amounts of time and money running those programs. At the same time, lawmakers had capped the agency’s administrative funding just as tens of millions of Baby Boomers were aging into retirement, exploding Social Security’s rolls. (The SSA is now at its lowest staffing level in a half-century, even as it has taken on 40 million more beneficiaries.)

Because of the SSA’s stultifying culture, Dudek said, he leaned into his insubordinate streak. He had the sense that he could do it better, and when he felt like his proposals weren’t receiving money or attention, he went around his superiors. In one instance, he approached potential partners at credit card companies, hoping they would like his ideas for combating fraud and would relay those ideas to the Social Security commissioner at the time. “Certainly from an internal perspective within SSA, certainly from a congressional perspective, I was violating rules,” Dudek said.

In part because of moves like this, Dudek got reassigned within the agency several times. Over the years, he was given multiple roles as a “senior adviser,” a title he said is for federal employees who are either incompetent but too established to fire or highly competent in a technical way but lacking in management or people skills.

Dudek was stubborn. He could come off as a know-it-all, and he tended to ramble when speaking. But he is also thoughtful and well read. In our interviews, he brought up everything from the origins of the concept of Social Security among sociologists and psychologists in the Depression era to the bureaucrats who were left behind in faraway places after the decline of the British Empire. He repeatedly cited James Q. Wilson’s seminal 1989 book, “Bureaucracy,” which spills considerable ink on the inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration — and on a businessman named Donald J. Trump who supposedly knew how to cut through red tape to get building projects done. (“No such law constrained Trump,” Wilson wrote.)

Dudek had been a lifelong Democrat and voted for Kamala Harris. But, like some other liberals, he was becoming exasperated with the “administrative state” and special-interest groups, including corporations, unions and social-justice organizations, that “capture” government and stifle reform. If it took Trump to cut through that, Dudek was open-minded. “The world has changed,” he scribbled in a note to himself. “We must change with it.”

Immediately after Dudek became commissioner in February, he got a call from Scott Coulter, a hedge fund manager with a $12 million Manhattan apartment who’d been picked to lead DOGE’s team at Social Security. “We’re coming,” Coulter said. “Be prepared.”

DOGE arrived ready to embark on a specific mission: Its operatives at the Treasury Department had seen data suggesting that the Social Security Administration wasn’t keeping its death records up to date. They thought they saw signs of fraudulent payments. Musk was very, very interested.

Dudek wasn’t initially concerned about this focus, which he and his colleagues viewed as misguided. To him, the young coders were nerdy outsiders just like he’d once been, albeit ones from privileged Ivy League and Silicon Valley backgrounds. They “reminded me of myself when I first got into computers,” he said. He thought he could mold them.

In particular, Dudek liked Bobba, who had a gentle air and a thick pile of dark hair that covered his forehead. Dudek had spent hours with Bobba, trying to get him to focus on concrete problems like how beneficiaries’ records were stored, often as cumbersome PDF and image files. Instead, Bobba, who did not respond to a request for comment, prioritized Musk’s quest to prove that dead people were receiving Social Security benefits.

Bobba had completed high school in New Jersey just three and a half years earlier. As a class speaker at his graduation, he’d encouraged his classmates not to ignore “nuance” and “complexity.” He’d lamented the “increasing willingness to simplify even the most complex narratives into sensational tidbits” like “280-character tweets,” which “perpetuates misinformation.”

Yet Dudek had barely settled in as commissioner when Bobba unintentionally sparked a national misinformation firestorm: A table he created appeared as a screenshot in a grossly misleading Musk tweet about “vampires” over the age of 100 allegedly collecting Social Security checks. Bobba had sorted people with a Social Security number by age and found more than 12 million over 120 years old still listed in the agency’s data.

Bobba said he knew these people weren’t actually receiving benefits and tried to tell Musk so, to no avail, according to SSA officials. Dudek watched in horror as Trump then shared the same statistics with both houses of Congress and a national television audience, claiming the numbers proved “shocking levels of incompetence and probable fraud in the Social Security program for our seniors.” (The White House declined to comment on this episode. Bisignano, the new SSA commissioner, has repeatedlysaid that “the work that DOGE did was 100% accurate.”)

Inside the SSA, the DOGE team tried to find proof of the fraud that Musk and Trump had proclaimed, but it didn’t seem to know how to go about it, jumping from tactic to tactic. “It was a maelstrom of topic A to topic G to topic C to topic Q,” said a senior SSA official who was in the room. “Were we still helping anything by explaining stuff?” the official said. “It really wasn’t clear by that point.”

Dudek began to realize that the problem wasn’t primarily the people he called the “DOGE kids.” It was the senior leaders who were issuing orders without heeding what the young DOGErs were learning.

Dudek was perhaps the most favorably disposed to the outsiders. Plenty of agency officials were already put off by the DOGErs, who often issued peremptory orders to meet with them and answer questions.

Michelle Kowalski, an analyst who has since departed the agency, was instructed to take one of the DOGE people, Cole Killian, through earnings data and historical records to analyze the cases of extremely old people whose deaths had not been recorded in Social Security data. She found herself having to explain to him, again and again, that many of these people were born before states reported births and deaths to the federal government and decades before the advent of electronic record keeping. In the early days of the agency, some people didn’t even know their birthdays.

Kowalski had assumed that Killian was middle-aged, since he was issuing instructions to her team. But he usually kept his camera turned off during video meetings. When he finally turned it on for one call, the face she saw seemed like that of a teenager.

Killian was actually 24, just six years removed from performing “Hotel California” at his high school talent show at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School outside of Boston. (Killian, whose DOGE responsibilities also involved work at the Environmental Protection Agency, did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica.)

Kowalski was exasperated by having to answer to such inexperience, even as so many of her colleagues were being pushed out the door by the Trump administration. She was not alone.

“Many of us had actually believed in the marketed idea of genius technologists coming in to make things work better,” one senior SSA official said. But DOGE ended up being more interested, the official said, in “trying to prove that the Social Security Administration was entirely incompetent” than in suggesting improvements.

Employees at headquarters took their time walking past the glass-walled conference room where DOGE staffers had set up, glaring in at them as they worked among stacks of laptops that they used for assignments at different agencies. On a blog popular among SSA staffers, the mood in the comments section turned dark, with some anonymous posters identifying where in the building the “incel DOGE boys” were located and saying that “they are just warming up … just think what will come next.”

Dudek sensed the growing tension. He felt it, too. He’d been getting anonymous death threats mailed to his house. He decided to move the DOGE operatives to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned an armed security detail to protect them.

During his first month as commissioner, Dudek ran his executive meetings in bombastic fashion, as if he were Trump on “The Apprentice.” And he sent out insulting full-staff emails pressuring career employees to retire. (Some 5,500 have left, with 1,500 more expected to follow.)

Dudek says this behavior stemmed partly from being in over his head, amazed by who he was suddenly answering to. “When the president of the United States asks you to do stuff,” he said, “you get caught up.”

But he also claims he was just performing a role. “Early on, I put on a persona of a yeller,” Dudek said. (Multiple longtime colleagues and friends noticed the change, they told ProPublica. As one put it, “There’s Lee, and then there’s Leland-performingly-Dudek.”)

This, he hoped, would convince the White House and DOGE of his commitment, which could in turn give him credibility as he kept trying to push them toward the real issues at Social Security.

But the Trump administration kept having other plans. Its demands usually came through Coulter, the DOGE lead with the Harvard and hedge fund background, who early on dropped by Dudek’s office unannounced multiple times a week, Dudek said.

“I really think it would be helpful if you were to do this tomorrow,” Coulter would say to Dudek about eliminating an entire division of the SSA or cutting more staff, according to Dudek. To him, these suggestions felt like orders. If he responded, “I don’t know, let me think about it,” Coulter would call a few hours later on the encrypted-messaging app Signal to ask, “You really aren’t catching on, are you?” and “Do you know how many times I’ve defended you?”

“I was supposed to get the message — and it would be ‘my own decision,’ so I’d be stuck with it,” Dudek said. “He can say he never told me to do anything.” (Coulter, who has been working for DOGE at NASA in recent months, did not respond to a request for comment.)

One of Coulter’s suggestions involved the SSA’s Office of Transformation, which had been doing the seemingly DOGE-like work of developing an online application to replace many of the agency’s paper-based forms and in-person interviews. The office had been working with elderly, low-income and disabled people to see what most confused them about SSA processes and what would most help them if these were redesigned.

But instead of facilitating this effort at greater efficiency, Coulter told Dudek to close the office, according to Dudek, claiming it was wasteful. Agency staff joked that DOGE shut it down because its name included a word that began with “trans.”

Dudek and his colleagues sometimes attempted to co-opt DOGE’s obsessions in the hope that they could address a genuine problem at the agency. This strategy was not successful.

Such was the case with the issue of phone fraud. Knowing that the DOGErs would perk up at the mention of anything fraud-related, Dudek and other officials made a point of explaining that they’d been working on an initiative to block bots that had been calling the agency. The bots would impersonate beneficiaries, using dates of birth and other information that can be found on the internet, to try to change the beneficiaries’ bank-routing information and steal their benefits.

In 2024, Dudek had been on a team that spearheaded an effort to combat this type of fraud. The plans included running all phone-based requests for bank account changes against a Treasury Department database of suspicious accounts and analyzing such calls to verify whether they were being made from the vicinity of the address on file of the person purportedly calling.

DOGE ignored the proposed solutions. Instead, the White House instructed Dudek to end all claims and direct-deposit transactions by phone. Beneficiaries would have to verify their own identities by using an often-confusing web portal or by traveling to a field office to do it in person. For millions of elderly or disabled people, these were daunting or impossible options.

When this policy was rolled out at the end of March, beneficiaries panicked. Many flocked to field offices to preemptively provide proof of their identities even when they didn’t need to.

Back at headquarters, in a weekly staff meeting, Dudek asked who could jump on the increasingly urgent task of making it easier to schedule field office appointments via the SSA website. “Well, Lee, you just fired that team,” one official answered, referring to the Office of Transformation. (Dudek said he asked this question on purpose to make sure DOGE heard the answer.)

Over the course of six weeks under Dudek, the phone policy zigged and zagged a half dozen times — for example, the SSA adopted, then abandoned, a three-day waiting period to conduct an algorithmic fraud check on all calls — before finally ending up nearly where it began. Transactions could be carried out by phone again.

Throughout this saga, Dudek was still getting calls from White House officials — most often from Katie Miller, DOGE’s spokesperson and the wife of Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s closest advisers. (Katie Miller went on to work for Musk before announcing plans to launch her own podcast. She did not respond to a request for comment.) Miller often called well into the evening, Dudek said, to chastise him about anything the press had reported that day that had caught the administration off guard.

As Dudek restored the phone policy to its pre-Trump version, Miller got angrier. “You changed the president’s policy,” she said, according to Dudek.

“I’m like, ‘No, I’m still with the president’s policy,’” Dudek told Miller. But, if Social Security officials could implement the anti-fraud measures that he and his team had previously been planning, he said, they could “achieve the same end.” In that case, Dudek said, “we will do so and ease the friction point on the public.”

“How dare you,” Miller said.

Increasingly dismayed, Dudek hatched a plan that seemed to embody his mix of good intentions, hubris and melodrama. He decided he would continue to play along with DOGE on the surface, in part so that Coulter and the other bigwigs would think he was still handling their business and thus spend less time at the agency. The younger DOGE team members, he said, were “easier to work with when their masters weren’t around.”

But behind the scenes, he began to undermine DOGE however he could. Sometimes he did this by making intemperate statements that he knew would find their way into the press and draw attention to what DOGE was asking him to do. “Have you ever worked with someone who’s manic-depressive?” he said of the Trump administration’s leadership in one meeting.

Other times Dudek himself was the leaker. As commissioner, he was often an anonymous source for articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times. “If it was stupid stuff from the DOGE team, a lot of times I would go out to the press and immediately tattletale on myself so that it would blow up the next day,” Dudek said, adding that he did this in part to help Social Security advocates understand and bring attention to the growing crisis at the agency.

Rebecca Vallas, CEO of the nonprofit National Academy of Social Insurance, said she was in a one-on-one meeting with Dudek in March when he started getting calls from DOGE officials and the media. The calls were about his recent public comments claiming he might have to shut down the entire Social Security Administration if a federal judge continued to deny DOGE access to sensitive Social Security data. “He just let me sit there with the volume up high,” Vallas said.

On one of the calls, she said, someone told Dudek, “Elon loved that, but now it’s time to walk it back.” Afterward, Dudek told her, “I don’t know how we get out of this without hurting huge numbers of people. … I’m just trying to give advocates some ammunition.”

Dudek’s strategy was easier to pull off without DOGE catching on if it came off as the blundering of an amateur, he told ProPublica. In the most striking example, DOGE instructed Dudek to cancel two contracts that the SSA had with the state of Maine, according to Dudek and other SSA officials. The contracts, which all 50 states have long had versions of, allowed Maine to automatically report births and deaths to Social Security. Canceling them would impede government efficiency: Births and deaths in the state would take weeks or months longer to enter the federal system. That would likely cause benefits to continue to be sent to thousands of Mainers after they’ve died, exactly the kind of thing that Trump and Musk had been railing against.

It seemed clear to Dudek that he was being told to do this only because Trump was publicly feuding with Maine’s governor about transgender athletes. (The White House declined to comment on this episode.) So he decided to “write the hell out of” an email directing that the contracts be canceled. He did so in a way he thought would still earn him points with Trump and DOGE but that would, simultaneously, be so inflammatory that it would create a major storyline for reporters, advocates and Congress.

“Please cancel the contracts,” Dudek’s email read. “While our improper payments will go up, and fraudsters may compromise identities, no money will go from the public trust to a petulant child.” That last phrase referred to Maine’s governor, Janet Mills, the one Trump had been fighting with. (“Do I care about Janet Mills? No,” Dudek told ProPublica.)

As Dudek had hoped, the press attention he generated compelled him to do what he already wanted to do: reinstate the contracts. In a written apology, he explained that he was only belatedly realizing the potential harm of what he (alone) had done. “I screwed up,” he told reporters. “I’m new at this job.”

Once again, Miller called Dudek and excoriated him. “What the hell is going on?” she said.

“This place leaks like a sieve,” he answered. “What can I tell you?”

Looking back on his tenure, Dudek maintains that his three months working alongside DOGE were not as harmful as they could have been, especially compared with what happened this spring at other federal agencies, some of which were essentially vaporized. Social Security checks, he points out, are still going out the door.

Still, the SSA is reduced in his wake, with thousands fewer staff members to process claims and improve systems. These departed employees were disproportionately experienced and knowledgeable; they were the ones able to get other jobs or to retire with a pension. They took a lot of know-how with them.

And the emotional harm that DOGE caused to older people and to people with disabilities — worsened by Dudek’s confusing actions — lingers. Many of these people have had money taken out of their paychecks their entire careers to pay for something more than just retirement benefits: security. It’s a feeling that may now be lost to them forever.

Indeed, DOGE and Dudek caused so much consternation about the stability of the system that hundreds of thousands of people have filed early for retirement in recent months, even though doing so is not financially wise in the long term. The SSA must now pay out more in benefits than expected, contrary to DOGE’s cost-saving mission.

Dudek’s sister back in Saginaw, Ana Dudek, relies on Social Security disability benefits. “I would talk to my brother when he was commissioner and be like, dude, the decisions you’re making are causing people to feel terror,” she said. “Terror is an apt descriptor.”

Dudek acknowledges much of this. “I’m not a cold, callous son of a bitch, I really do get it,” he said. “I’ll forever be associated with the pain of DOGE. … But so much went on in such a short amount of time. I tried to make the best decisions I could given the circumstances.”

Since being dismissed from the agency in June, Dudek has been struggling to find another job. “My name is mud,” he said. “It is as if I no longer exist.”

As a former SSA colleague put it, Dudek’s story is “the story of a disposable pawn, and there’s lots of those under Trump. They just used him, and then they disposed of him.”

The White House, presented with extensive questions for this article, sent a one-paragraph statement disparaging ProPublica and Dudek. ProPublica’s story, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said, “is largely based around the comments of a disgruntled former employee who openly admitted to leaking to the media, manipulating his colleagues, and repeatedly telling lies from his official position. On his last day as Acting Commissioner, Leland Dudek showered praise upon President Trump in an op-ed and touted the ‘real results’ of the Social Security Administration, but now that he’s bitter about being out of the top job — he’s singing a different tune.”

Dudek said the administration asked him to write the op-ed and then vetted it. Referring to the litany of extravagant praise that cabinet secretaries lavished on Trump recently, he said, “you saw the cabinet meeting.”

Bisignano, the Social Security commissioner, comes to the role with a very different professional background than Dudek (though, like Dudek, he has working-class roots, in his case in Brooklyn). Until this job, Bisignano, 66, spent his career in the private sector. He was a top executive in operations and technology at massive banks like Citigroup and JPMorganChase and went on to become CEO of the payment processor Fiserv.

Yet, like DOGE, he appears to have embraced the appearance of efficiency rather than efficiency itself. He has repeatedly told staff that Social Security should be run more like Amazon, with AI handling more customer interactions. But disability claims are more complicated than ordering toothpaste, according to SSA officials and experts, and Social Security’s customer base is older and more likely to have an intellectual disability than the average Amazon Prime member.

Bisignano has also fixated on how much time it takes to reach an agent on the SSA’s 800 number. In a July press release, he claimed that the average was down to six minutes, an 80% reduction from 2024. He achieved this in part by reassigning 1,000 field office employees to phone duty. That means initial calls are getting answered faster, but there are significantly fewer staff members available to handle complex, in-person cases. And “reaching an agent” turns out to mean speaking to a human being — or an AI bot. Internal SSA statistics obtained by ProPublica reveal that Bisignano’s estimate treats cases in which beneficiaries interact with a chatbot and opt for a callback as “zero-minute” waits, skewing the average. If you actually stay on the line, USA Today has found, it often takes over an hour to reach a live representative.

In its statement, the SSA reiterated that call wait times have dramatically improved and that “using technology on our national 800 number has enabled 90 percent of calls handled to be served via automated self-service options or convenient callbacks.”

Even the latest phone fraud policy feels like a rerun from DOGE’s earlier season. In late July, Bisignano’s team quietly posted a document to the Office of Management and Budget website stating that 3.4 million more people would have to go into field offices to verify their identities instead of being able to do so by phone, starting Aug. 18. Days later, the SSA announced that this was actually optional.

The DOGE era may officially be over at the agency, but the approach, it seems, is the same. As one SSA official put it, Bisignano is “doing all the same fundamentally inefficient things, more efficiently.”

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

There is nothing remarkable about a politician raising money for nonprofits and other groups that promote their campaigns or agendas. What’s unusual, experts said, is for a politician to keep some of the money for themselves.

“If donors to these nonprofits are not just holding the keys to an elected official’s political future but also literally providing them with their income, that’s new and disturbing,” said Daniel Weiner, a former Federal Election Commission attorney who now leads the Brennan Center’s work on campaign finance.

ProPublica discovered details of the payment in the annual tax form of American Resolve Policy Fund, which is part of a network of political groups that promote Noem and her agenda. The nonprofit describes its mission as “fighting to preserve America for the next generation.” There’s little evidence in the public domain that the group has done much. In its first year, its main expenditures were paying Noem and covering the cost of some unspecified travel. It also maintains social media accounts devoted to promoting Noem. It has 100 followers on X.

In a statement, Noem’s lawyer, Trevor Stanley, said, “Then-Governor Noem fully complied with the letter and the spirit of the law” and that the Office of Government Ethics, which processes disclosure forms for federal officials, “analyzed and cleared her financial information in regards to this entity.” Stanley did not respond to follow-up questions about whether the ethics office was aware of the $80,000 payment.

Stanley also said that “Secretary Noem fully disclosed all of her income on public documents that are readily available.” Asked for evidence of that, given that Noem didn’t report the $80,000 payment on her federal financial disclosure form, Stanley did not respond.

Before being named Homeland Security secretary, overseeing immigration enforcement, Noem spent two decades in South Dakota’s government and the U.S. House of Representatives, drawing a public servant’s salary. Her husband, Bryon Noem, runs a small insurance brokerage with two offices in the state. Between his company and his real estate holdings, he has at least $2 million in assets, according to Noem’s filing.

While she is among the least wealthy members of Trump’s Cabinet, her personal spending habits have attracted notice. Noem was photographed wearing a gold Rolex Cosmograph Daytona watch that costs nearly $50,000 as she toured the Salvadoran prison where her agency is sending immigrants. In April, after her purse was stolen at a Washington, D.C., restaurant, it emerged she was carrying $3,000 in cash, which an official said was for “dinner, activities, and Easter gifts.” She was criticized for using taxpayer money as governor to pay for expenses related to trips to Paris, to Canada for bear hunting and to Houston to have dental work done. At the time, Noem denied misusing public funds.

Noem’s personal company, an LLC called Ashwood Strategies, shares a name with one of her horses. It was registered in Delaware early in her second term as South Dakota governor, around 1 p.m. on June 22, 2023. Four minutes later, the nonprofit American Resolve Policy Fund was incorporated in Delaware too.

American Resolve raised $1.1 million in 2023, according to its tax filing. The group reported that it had zero employees, and what it did with that money is largely unclear.

In 2023, the nonprofit spent only about $220,000 of its war chest — with more than a third of that going to Noem’s LLC. The rest mostly went toward administrative expenses and a roughly $84,000 travel budget. It’s not clear whose travel the group paid for.

The nonprofit reported that it sent the $80,000 fundraising fee to Noem’s LLC as payment for bringing in $800,000, a 10% cut. A professional fundraiser who also raised money for the group was paid a lower rate of 7%.

In the intervening years, American Resolve has maintained a low public profile. In March, it purchased Facebook ads attacking a local news outlet in South Dakota, which had been reporting on Noem’s use of government credit cards. Noem’s lawyer did not answer questions about whether the group paid her more money after 2023, the most recent year for which its tax filing is available.

The nonprofit has an affiliated political committee, American Resolve PAC, that’s been more active, at least in public. Touting Noem’s conservative leadership under a picture of her staring off into the sky, its website said the PAC was created to put “Kristi and her team on the ground in key races across America.” Noem traveled the country last year attending events the PAC sponsored in support of Republican candidates.

American Resolve’s treasurer referred questions to Noem’s lawyer. In his statement, Noem’s lawyer said she “did not establish, finance, maintain, or control American Resolve Fund. She was simply a vender for a non-profit entity.”

While Noem failed to report the fundraising income Ashwood Strategies received on her federal financial disclosure, she did provide some other details. She described the LLC as involving “personal activities outside my official gubernatorial capacity” and noted that it received the $140,000 advance for her book “No Going Back.” The LLC also had a bank account with between $100,001 and $250,000 in it and at least $50,000 of “livestock and equipment,” she reported.

The fact that Ashwood Strategies is Noem’s company only emerged through the confirmation process for her Trump Cabinet post. South Dakota has minimal disclosure rules for elected officials, and Noem had not previously divulged that she created a side business while she was governor.

Noem’s outside income may have run afoul of South Dakota law, according to Lee Schoenbeck, a veteran Republican politician and attorney who was until recently the head of the state Senate. Thelaw requires top officials, including the governor, to devote their full time to their official roles.

“There’s no way the governor is supposed to have a private side business that the public doesn’t know about,” Schoenbeck told ProPublica. “It would clearly not be appropriate.”

Noem’s lawyer said South Dakota law allowed her to receive income from the nonprofit.

The administration’s plans, described in internal documents and by government officials, would reduce federal prosecutors’ control over investigations, shifting key decisions to a network of task forces jointly led by the FBI and Homeland Security Investigations, the primary investigative arm of DHS.

Officials said the plan to bring law enforcement agencies together in the new Homeland Security Task Forces has been driven primarily by President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller, who is closely overseeing the project’s implementation.

Current and former officials said the proposed reorganization would make it easier for senior officials like Miller to disregard norms that have long walled off the White House from active criminal investigations.

“To the administration’s credit, they are trying to break down barriers that are hard to break down,” said Adam W. Cohen, a career Justice Department attorney who was fired in March as head of the office that coordinates organized crime investigations involving often-competing federal agencies. “But you won’t have neutral prosecutors weighing the facts and making decisions about who to investigate,” he added of the task force plan. “The White House will be able to decide.”

The proposed reorganization would elevate the stature and influence of Homeland Security Investigations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement among law enforcement agencies, while continuing to push other agencies to pursue immigration-related crimes.

The task forces would at least formally subordinate the Drug Enforcement Administration to HSI and the FBI after half a century in which the DEA has been the government’s lead agency for narcotics enforcement.

Trump’s directive to establish the new task forces was included in an Inauguration Day executive order, “Protecting the American People Against Invasion,” which focused on immigration.

The new task forces will seek “to end the presence of criminal cartels, foreign gangs and transnational criminal organizations throughout the United States,” the order states. They will also aim to “end the scourge of human smuggling and trafficking, with a particular focus on such offenses involving children.”

Since that order was issued, the administration has proceeded with considerable secrecy. Some Justice Department officials who work on organized crime have been excluded from planning meetings, as have leaders of the DEA, people familiar with the process said.

A White House spokesperson, Abigail Jackson, did not comment on Miller’s role in directing the task force project or the secrecy of the process. “While the Biden Administration opened the border and looked the other way while Americans were put at risk,” she said, “the Trump Administration is taking action to dismantle cross-border human smuggling and trafficking and ensure the use of all available law enforcement tools to faithfully execute immigration laws and to Make America Safe Again.”

The task force project was described in interviews with current and former officials who have been briefed on it. ProPublica also reviewed documents about the implementation of the task forces, including a briefing paper prepared for Cabinet-level officials on the president’s Homeland Security Council.

The Homeland Security Task Forces will take a “coordinated, whole-of-government approach” to combatting transnational criminal groups, the paper states. They will also draw support from state and local police forces and U.S. intelligence agencies.

Until now, the government has coordinated that same work through a Justice Department program established by President Ronald Reagan, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces — which the Trump administration is shutting down.

Known by the ungainly acronym OCDETF (pronounced “oh-suh-def”), the $550-million program is above all an incentive system: To receive funding, different agencies (including the DEA, the FBI and HSI) must come together to propose investigations, which are then vetted and approved by prosecutor-led OCDETF teams.

The agents are required to include a financial investigation of the criminal activity, typically with help from the Treasury Department, and they often recruit support from state and local police. The OCDETF intelligence center, located in the northern Virginia suburbs, manages the only federal database in which different law-enforcement agencies share their raw investigative files.

While officials describe OCDETF as an imperfect structure, they also say it has become a crucial means of law enforcement cooperation. Its mandate was expanded under the Biden and first Trump administrations to encompass all types of organized crime, not just drug trafficking.

As recently as a few months ago, the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, declared that OCDETF would play a central role in stopping illegal immigration, drug trafficking and street gangs. He even suggested that it investigate the governments of so-called sanctuary cities for obstructing immigration enforcement.

But just weeks after Blanche’s announcement, the administration informed OCDETF officials their operations would be shut down by the end of the fiscal year in September. In a letter to Democratic senators on June 23, the Justice Department confirmed that the Homeland Security Task Forces would absorb OCDETF’s “mission and resources” but did not explain how the new structure would take charge of the roughly 5,000 investigations OCDETF now oversees.

“These were not broken programs,” said a former Homeland Security official who, like others, would only discuss the administration’s plans on condition of anonymity. “If you wanted to build them out and make sure that the immigration side of things got more importance, you could have done that. You did not have to build a new wheel.”

Officials also cited other concerns about the administration’s plan, including whether the new task force system will incorporate some version of the elaborate safeguards OCDETF has used to persuade law enforcement agencies to share their case files in its intelligence database. Under those rules, OCDETF analysts must obtain permission from the agency that provided the records before sharing them with others.

Many officials said they worried that the new task forces seem to be abandoning OCDETF’s incentive structure. OCDETF funds are conditioned on multiple agencies working together on important cases; officials said the monies will now be distributed to law enforcement agencies directly and without the requirement that they collaborate.

“They are taking away a lot of the organization that the government uses to attack organized crime,” a Justice Department official said. “If you want to improve something, great, but they don’t even seem to have a vision for how this is going to work. There are no specifics.”

The Homeland Security Task Forces will try to enforce interagency cooperation by a “supremacy clause,” that gives task force leaders the right to pursue the cases they want and shut down others that might overlap.

The clause will require “that any new or existing investigative and/or intelligence initiatives” targeting transnational criminal organizations “must be presented to the HSTF with a right of first refusal,” according to the briefing paper reviewed by ProPublica.

“Further,” it adds, “the supremacy clause prohibits parallel or competitive activities by member agencies, effectively eliminating duplicative structures such as stand-alone task forces or specialized units, to include narcotics, financial, or others.”

Several senior law enforcement officials said that approach would curtail the independence that investigators need to follow good leads when they see them; newer and less-visible criminal organizations would be more likely to escape scrutiny.

In recent years, those officials noted, both Democratic and Republican administrations have tried at times to short-circuit competition for big cases among law enforcement agencies and judicial districts. But that has often led to as many problems as it has solved, they said.

One notable example, several officials said, was a move by the Biden administration’s DEA administrator, Anne Milgram, to limit her agency’s cooperation with FBI and HSI investigations into fentanyl smuggling by Los Chapitos, the mafia led by sons of the Mexican drug boss Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as “El Chapo.”

Although the DEA eventually indicted the Chapitos’ leaders in New York, officials from other agencies complained that Milgram’s approach wasted months of work and delayed the indictments of some traffickers. Later, when the FBI secretly arranged the surrender of one of the sons, Joaquín Guzmán López, DEA officials were not told about the operation until it was underway, officials said. (Guzmán López initially pleaded not guilty but is believed to be negotiating with the government. Milgram did not respond to messages asking for comment.)

As to the benefits of competition, prosecutors and agents cite the case of El Chapo himself. Before he was extradited to the United States in January 2017, Guzmán Loera had been indicted by seven U.S. attorneys’ offices, reflecting yearslong investigations by the DEA, the FBI and HSI, among others. In the agreement that the Obama Justice Department brokered, three offices led the prosecution, which used the best evidence gathered by the others.

Under the new structure of the Homeland Security Task Forces, several officials said, federal prosecutors will still generally decide whether to bring charges against criminal groups, but they will have less of a role in determining which criminals to investigate.

Regional and national task forces will be overseen by “executive committees” that are expected to include political appointees, officials said. The committees will guide broader decisions about which criminal groups to target, they said.

“The HSTF model unleashes the full might of our federal law enforcement agencies and federal prosecutors to deliver justice for the American people, whose plight Biden and Garland ignored for four years,” a Justice Department spokesperson said, referring to former Attorney General Merrick Garland. “Any suggestion that the Department is abandoning its mission of cracking down on violent organized crime is unequivocally false.”

During Trump’s first term, veteran officials of the FBI, DEA and HSI all complained that the administration’s overarching focus on immigration diverted agents from more urgent national security threats, including the fentanyl epidemic. Now, as hundreds more agents have been dispatched to immigration enforcement, those officials worry that the new task forces will focus on rounding up undocumented immigrants who have any sort of criminal record at the cost of more significant organized crime investigations.

The first task forces to begin operating under the new model have not assuaged such concerns. In late May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin announced that the Virginia Homeland Security Task Force had arrested more than 1,000 “criminal illegal aliens” in just two months, but the authorities have provided almost no details connecting those suspects to transnational criminal organizations.

On June 16, the Gulf of America Homeland Security Task Force, a new unit based in Alabama and Georgia, announced the arrests of 60 people, nearly all of them undocumented immigrants, at a cockfighting event in northern Alabama. Although cockfighting is typically subject to a maximum fine of $50 in the state, a senior HSI official claimed the suspects were “tied to a broader network of serious crimes, including illegal gambling, drug trafficking and violent offenses.” Once again, however, no details were provided.

It is unclear how widely the new task force rules might be applied. While OCDETF funds the salaries of more than a thousand federal agents and hundreds of prosecutors, thousands more DEA, FBI and HSI agents work on other narcotics and organized crime cases.

In early June, five Democratic senators wrote to Bondi questioning the decision to dismantle OCDETF. That decision was first reported by Bloomberg News.

“As the Department’s website notes, OCDETF ‘is the centerpiece of the Attorney General’s strategy to combat transnational-organized crime and to reduce the availability of illicit narcotics in the nation,’” the senators wrote.

In a June 23 response, a Justice Department official, Daniel Boatright, wrote that OCDETF’s operations would be taken over by the new task forces and managed by the office of the Deputy Attorney General. But Boatright did not clarify what role federal prosecutors would play in the new system.

“A lot of good, smart people are trying to make this work,” said one former senior official. “But without having prosecutors drive the process, it is going to completely fracture how we do things.”

Veteran officials at the DEA — who appear to have had almost no say in the creation of the new task forces— are said to be even more concerned. Already the DEA has been fighting pressure to provide access to investigative files without assurances that the safeguards of the OCDETF intelligence center will remain in place, officials said.

“DEA has not even been invited to any of the task force meetings,” one former senior official said. “It is mind-boggling. They’re just getting orders saying, ‘This is what Stephen Miller wants and you’ve got to give it to us.’”

Brian Maloney Jr. was flummoxed when he was served with a lawsuit against his family’s business, Middlesex Truck and Coach, in January. Maloney and his father, also named Brian, run the operation, located in Boston, which boasts that it can repair anything “from two axles to ten.” A burly man in his mid-50s who wears short-sleeved polo shirts emblazoned with the company name, Maloney Jr. has been around his dad’s shop since he was 8. The garage briefly surfaced in the media in 2012 when then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney made a campaign stop there and the Boston Herald featured Maloney Sr. talking about how he had built the business from nothing in a neighborhood he described as having been a “war zone.”

Now Middlesex was being sued by a New Jersey man who claimed he had been defrauded of $133,565 in a cryptocurrency scheme. The suit claimed Middlesex “controlled and maintained” a bank account at Chase that had been used to collect the fraudulent payment. The purported victim wanted his money back.

None of this made any sense to Maloney Jr. His company did not have an account at Chase, and he barely knew what crypto was. “For God’s sake, we fix trucks and still have AOL,” he would later say.

It was only after Maloney went to Chase to investigate that he was able to piece together at least part of the explanation. It turned out that Chase had allowed an unknown individual, who applied online with no identification, to open an account under Middlesex’s name, according to information Chase provided to Maloney. The account was then used to solicit hundreds of thousands of dollars from fraud victims, including the $133,565 from the man who was now trying to reclaim his funds.

Middlesex’s experience, as bizarre as it seems, is part of a global problem that plagues the banking industry. The account falsely opened in Middlesex’s name, and many others like it, are way stations in a sophisticated multistep money laundering process that transports cash from U.S. scam victims to crime syndicate bosses in Asia.

There’s been an explosion in international online fraud in recent years. Particularly widespread are “pig-butchering” schemes, as ProPublica reported in 2022. The macabre name derives from the process of methodically “fattening” victims by getting them to contribute more and more money to an investment scheme that seems to be succeeding, before eventually “butchering” them by taking all their deposits. Often operated by Chinese gangs out of prison-like compounds in Cambodia, Laos and Myanmar, pig-butchering in that region has reached a staggering $44 billion per year, according to a report by the United States Institute of Peace, and it likely involves millions of victims worldwide. The report called the Southeast Asian scam syndicates the “most powerful criminal network of the modern era.”

A huge portion of such fraud is transacted in cryptocurrency. But given that the typical consumer doesn’t own crypto, many scams unfold with a victim tapping a traditional bank account to wire dollars to swindlers, who receive the funds in their own accounts, then convert them into crypto to move across borders. Later in the process, the scammers will typically transfer their crypto back into standard currency.

Bank accounts are so crucial to this process that a thriving international black market has developed to rent accounts for fraud. That, it seems, is how a Chase account in the name of Middlesex ended up as a repository for the proceeds of pig-butchering.

The huge demand for accounts used for misbehavior gives banks a crucial, and not always welcome, role as gatekeepers — a responsibility required by U.S. law — to prevent criminals from opening accounts or engaging in money laundering. Yet from the U.S. to Singapore, Australia and Hong Kong, banks have consistently failed at that responsibility, according to experts who have investigated money laundering, as well as reviews of fraudulent account details shared by victims and court cases reviewed by ProPublica. The list of financial institutions whose accounts pig-butchering scammers have made use of includes global behemoths like Bank of America, Chase, Citibank, HSBC and Wells Fargo and many other U.S. and foreign lenders.

The banks said in statements to ProPublica that they make extensive efforts to fight fraud by investing in systems to detect suspicious activity and to report it to authorities (read the banks’ statements here). The American Bankers Association, which represents the industry, acknowledged that “with more than 140 million bank accounts opened every year bad actors can sometimes get through despite determined and ongoing efforts to stop them.” But the group said other industries like telecommunications providers and social media platforms need to do more to fight fraud because there’s only so much that financial institutions can do.

Pig-butchering scams present some unique challenges for banks. Among other things, a customer in thrall to a fraudster will sometimes foil their own bank’s attempts to prevent them from sending money to a criminal. And foreign-based scammers have become adept at finding middlemen in the U.S. to exploit the banking system. “Cyber-enabled fraud operations in Southeast Asia have taken on industrial proportions,” according to an October report by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. John Wojcik, one of the authors of the report, told ProPublica, “Banks have never been targeted at this scale, in these ways.”

It doesn’t help that there are “no real standards as to what a bank has to do for detecting fraud or money laundering,” said Lester Joseph, a financial compliance consultant who used to oversee money laundering cases at the Department of Justice and later worked at Wells Fargo. The main law governing U.S. compliance regimes, the Bank Secrecy Act, requires financial institutions to maintain programs to know their customers and to detect and report suspicious activity to the government. That might mean noticing, say, that a newly opened account is suddenly receiving and sending hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire payments each month.

But it is up to banks to design those programs. The regulations don’t even require that the programs be effective. That gives banks wide flexibility on how much due diligence and monitoring to do — or not do. More scrutiny upfront means slowing down business and adding costs. Many banks don’t ask questions until it’s too late.

If you’re a criminal looking to obtain a bank account with no pesky formalities, it’ll take you only minutes to find one on the messaging app Telegram. Chinese forums there feature ads for “cars” or “fleets” — bank accounts or other online payment platforms that can be used to collect stolen funds. (The vehicle metaphor stems from the fact that in Chinese slang, money laundering operations are known as “motorcades.”) One Telegram ad offered accounts at PNC, Chase, Citi and Bank of America and boasted of “firsthand” control of the accounts: “People can go to the bank to transfer money,” the ad said.

Another Telegram channel listed various flavors of pig-butchering scams for which it provided bank accounts. The group, named KG Pay, boasted of accepting wire transfers, making withdrawals from U.S. banks and converting deposits into crypto to transfer them to scammers. KG offered to handle deposits of up to $1 million in accounts that imitate “normal business transactions.” To avoid suspicion, KG said, it sliced big amounts into smaller batches. If banks grew suspicious and froze one of its accounts, KG said, it had agents ready to call customer service to persuade them to lift the freeze. For smaller transfers, a video tutorial inside the channel showed how easy it was to send cash using the Chase app. (Telegram deleted the KG Pay channel after ProPublica asked about it. In a statement, Telegram said it “expressly forbids money laundering, scams and fraud and such content is immediately removed whenever discovered. Every month, over 10 million accounts, groups and channels are removed for breaching Telegram’s terms of service — including rules that prohibit money laundering and fraud.”)

Demand for money laundering is huge in Sihanoukville, a seedy gambling hub in Cambodia notorious for hosting massive scam operations. In some hotels above casinos there, blocks of guest rooms have been converted into offices where workers help fraudsters find motorcades to move illicit funds, according to a 2024 report by a doctoral anthropology student.

Inside those offices, the tap of keyboards and buzz of Telegram notifications suggested a trading floor at a stock exchange. But the work of the people interviewed by Yanyu Chen, the doctoral student, was very different. The workers, all Chinese and speaking on the condition of anonymity, were candid. They said they were tasked with matching cyberscam gangs with providers who could supply them with bank accounts to collect and move proceeds from fraud victims. In Telegram chat groups, the workers could see bank account suppliers and swindlers in need of accounts and would match the two and keep track of trades and commissions.

The business has become so mainstream that even one of Cambodia’s most prominent financial services firms, Huione Group, runs an online marketplace that allegedly facilitates such transactions. Its Telegram channels, including the one that included the aforementioned ad offering “firsthand” control of U.S. bank accounts, have helped launder funds for pig-butchering scams as well as heists linked to North Korea, according to the U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. (Huione said in a statement that it is working to prevent abuse of its services and is “fully committed to collaborating with the U.S. Treasury Department to address expeditiously any and all concerns.”)

The workers interviewed by Chen were unperturbed about enabling fraud. One described the work as boring, little more than copying and pasting bank account info between scammers and motorcades. Another worker told her that he viewed himself as “solving a very old problem of getting into the banking system people who have long been shut out of it.”

The fraud that ensnared Middlesex Truck and Coach as a tangential victim covered thousands of miles via electronic byways. By all appearances, it emanated from Cambodia, then reached New Jersey, where a mark was persuaded to wire a total of $716,000 to accounts tied to purported businesses in Boston, New York, California, Hong Kong and elsewhere. All but a few appeared to have been incorporated by Chinese individuals, sometimes just days before their accounts started accepting large sums.

The fleecing of Kevin, who ProPublica agreed to identify by first name only, was a textbook example of pig butchering. Kevin had reached the stage in life when he wanted to ease his workload after a varied career as a financial planner, small-business owner and fitness instructor. Just before Christmas 2022, someone purporting to be a San Diego woman named Viktoria Zara friended Kevin on Facebook. She soon introduced him to a sleek crypto trading website called 3A on which she claimed to have made $700,000 on bitcoin futures. (Facebook deactivated Zara’s profile after ProPublica inquired about it, and a spokesperson said the social media company has “detected and disrupted over seven million accounts associated with scam centers” in Asia and the Middle East since the start of 2024.)

Kevin acknowledges he was seduced by the thrall of easy money. “Something came over me,” he said. Kevin accepted Zara’s offer to teach him how to trade and, within a few weeks, he was routinely wiring tens of thousands of dollars to various bank accounts to fund his trading.

The accounts were not registered to 3A. They were listed under a variety of companies he’d never heard of, such as Guangda Logistics and Danco Global.

Kevin found this odd. But Zara, his supposed friend, told him that was just how 3A operated, and Kevin felt safe wiring funds to accounts at Chase because of its size and reputation. Every time he did so, the sum showed up in his online 3A portal, making him think the transactions were real. Better yet, his investments had apparently soared; his account balance now read $1.4 million.

Like many a pig-butchering victim, Kevin realized something was off only when he went to withdraw his profits and 3A demanded that he first pay a “tax” of almost $134,000. Kevin knew from his financial planning days that wasn’t how things worked. But he set aside his doubts and went to his bank late one afternoon in April 2023 to wire the tax payment. He’d been given a fresh Chase account to send funds to and pressured to wire money within two hours.

This time, his money was addressed to Middlesex Truck and Coach. Kevin was so under the sway of his scammers at that point that he did not question the money’s destination. Nor did the teller at the TD Bank branch he went to. (TD declined to comment on Kevin’s case but said it trains employees to challenge customers when transactions seem suspicious and to warn them never to wire funds to people they do not know.)

As soon as Kevin got home, panic set in: 3A told him the Chase account to which he’d just wired $134,000 was frozen and that his tax payment would not go through. He would need to send another $134,000 to a different account. Confused, Kevin went back to TD first thing the next day and asked the teller to reverse the wire. Over the next two weeks, Kevin said, his bankers at TD called Chase three times but never got a response. (Chase did not answer ProPublica’s questions about Kevin’s efforts to recall his wire but said the wire recall process is challenging and rarely succeeds.)

It is possible to reverse a wire transfer if customers inform their banks quickly, before the transaction has been completed, according to lawyers and experts. But banks have no obligation to reverse a transfer even when a customer reports potential fraud. “It’s really up to the receiving institution if they release the funds and how they go after the customer on their end,” said Saskia Parnell, a banking industry veteran who now volunteers for an anti-scam group called Operation Shamrock.

As Kevin agonized, the 3A customer service reps dangled a solution: Just wire the funds again and unlock your $1.4 million. He feared TD wouldn’t let him send the wire again, so he switched to PNC Bank and sent a fresh $134,000 wire to another recipient at Cathay Bank in California. That yielded yet another tale about a purported government roadblock and the demand for yet another payment.

Kevin wasn’t thinking clearly. His son, who had struggled with substance abuse, had suddenly died of a fentanyl overdose. Kevin was overwhelmed with grief. He agreed to make another payment.

By June 2023, even a call from PNC’s fraud department declining his outgoing wire could not dissuade him. It was the only instance, out of the 11 times he attempted to wire money to scammers, that a bank stopped the transaction, according to Kevin, who did not have a history of making wire payments before. (PNC said in a statement that “we believe we took appropriate action.”)

It made no difference. Kevin’s mind was so clouded that he instead opened a new account at Wells Fargo. The switch illustrated another challenge: Even if one bank succeeds in preventing fraud, criminals can still win if another bank isn’t as diligent. (Wells Fargo said it invests hundreds of millions of dollars a year to fight scams).

After wiring $150,000 from Wells Fargo to two Chinese entities listed at a Singaporean bank, Kevin waited to receive his trading proceeds. But when all that resulted was another request that he wire money — $40,000 this time — Kevin finally grasped reality. He was now without a son, and his finances lay in ruins. “The whole world was coming to an end,” he recalled.

Kevin had preserved enough savings to hire a private investigator, John Powers of Hudson Intelligence, to follow the financial trail. Powers found a litany of red flags among the entities that had gotten bank accounts and received Kevin’s funds. Some of the businesses gave phony addresses, such as a vacant home. Another was registered to a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles that was also listed as the headquarters of a dozen other businesses set up since 2022 by different Chinese individuals. Contact info was scarce; official emails for two companies included the temporary email domain “netsmail.us,” which doesn’t connect to a functioning website. All of these ersatz businesses had accounts at Chase, Cathay or Singapore’s DBS Bank.

Chase said that it has policies to identify and verify the identities of its customers, and that it continually evaluates and enhances them. Cathay said it also reviews its systems and policies to detect and prevent fraudulent activity. DBS did not respond to requests for comment.

Another clue indicated that the banks had been doing business with a larger criminal enterprise. Two of the companies Kevin sent funds to, Guangda Logistics (which lists no contact information) and Danco Global (which did not respond to ProPublica’s request for comment), showed up on a list of more than six dozen shell entities that had been used to defraud Americans of nearly $60 million. The information was uncovered in an investigation by the U.S. Secret Service into KG Pay, one of the money laundering groups that was on Telegram.

The case of the man behind KG Pay sheds further light on how motorcades use U.S. banks. Daren Li, a Chinese national in his early 40s, went by the alias KG Perfect. Based in Cambodia, he directed the movement of large sums of pig-butchering proceeds from the U.S. to overseas. Li, who was arrested in April 2024 at the airport in Atlanta, pleaded guilty in November to conspiracy to commit money laundering. He admitted that at least $73.6 million of victim funds were deposited into bank accounts he and his co-conspirators controlled. Li, who is in federal detention awaiting sentencing, could not be reached for comment through his lawyer. Seven other people have pleaded guilty to conspiring with Li.

KG exploited a weakness in the U.S. banking system: Banks are reluctant to share account information, even after they’ve identified suspicious activity. A law enacted in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks gave banks a reprieve from secrecy rules if they alert one another to potential terrorism or money laundering activities. But the information sharing is voluntary and “banks are not communicating with each other,” according to Matt O’Neill, who led many money laundering investigations for the U.S. Secret Service during his 25 years there. “Fraudsters know it and fraudsters are clearly making hundreds of millions or billions of dollars off of this glaring gap in the system,” said O’Neill, who now runs 5OH Consulting.

One of the most prolific cogs in Li’s motorcade, according to civilandcriminalcases, was a Chinese national named Hailong Zhu. He entered the U.S. on a tourist visa around 2019 and then stayed, working odd jobs in construction and at a restaurant. In 2022, Zhu was recruited to help Li’s other operatives set up businesses and bank accounts near Los Angeles in exchange for $70,000.

Zhu turned the assignment into a full-time job, eventually juggling seven accounts at Bank of America, Chase, East West Bank and Wells Fargo tied to two entities set up in his name: Sea Dragon Trading and Sea Dragon Remodel. When Bank of America restricted Zhu’s Sea Dragon Trading account due to suspected fraud on Oct. 19, 2022, Zhu got another account at Bank of America the next day using Sea Dragon Remodel. By Nov. 1, 2022, he had secured four more accounts at Chase, Wells Fargo and East West Bank. Except for varying his address and email, investigators found that Zhu provided largely the same info when opening accounts for the two shell entities.

Zhu’s account opening spree happened just a few months after federal prosecutors blamed “the corruption of BofA bankers” for a scheme in which a handful of employees opened 754 accounts at Bank of America registered to 13 false addresses in the Los Angeles suburbs. In that case, shadowy middlemen dispensed bribes of $200 to $250 per account to Bank of America employees who overrode internal compliance systems to open accounts for overseas Chinese citizens who weren’t physically present at the branch to open the accounts, in violation of the bank’s rules. Even when the bankers registered 176 customers to one small home, the accounts were still opened. (Two of the bankers later pleaded guilty to making false entries in bank records; Bank of America said in a statement that it “uncovered illegal activity using its monitoring systems, terminated the employees, and cooperated with law enforcement, who successfully prosecuted those involved. This is how our anti-money laundering program is designed to work.”)

With banks always one step behind, Zhu’s accounts kept receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from victims across the U.S. Zhu would bundle the proceeds and transfer them abroad. During one week in November 2022, for example, he received six wires totaling almost $52,000 into one of his accounts and wired out one lump sum of $53,000. The destination was a bank account in the Bahamas controlled by Li and others, who converted the funds into cryptocurrency for their journey to scam centers located overseas, including in Sihanoukville. Investigators discovered a crypto wallet address they believed Li controlled. Data from cryptocurrency analytics firm Crystal Intelligence shows the wallet address sent and received about $341 million of crypto across 16,800 transactions between April 2021 and April 2024.

Zhu was arrested in March 2023 and charged with bank fraud. His lawyers acknowledged at trial that their client opened bank accounts and moved funds but said that Zhu did not know his bosses were using them for criminal purposes. Zhu was acquitted after the attorneys persuaded the trial judge that using false information to obtain a bank account does not constitute a scheme to defraud a bank. Only months after the acquittal, Zhu was charged again, this time with money laundering offenses, in an indictment filed in December 2023. Zhu, who couldn’t be reached for comment, did not enter a plea and was listed as a fugitive as of March 2025.

In January 2024, Kevin, desperate to get his money back, sued the 10 companies to which he had wired money at the scammers’ behest, including Middlesex Truck and Coach. None replied to his lawsuit — most were shell entities, after all — until January 2025, when Kevin’s lawyer got an email from Brian Maloney Jr.

Maloney confessed that his staff had ignored the lawsuit when it was initially served because it looked like a scam. He said he’d never banked with Chase and had no idea about any account that had been used to defraud Kevin. Maloney agreed to go to the local Chase branch to investigate and try to help Kevin get his money back.

“I went to the bank and said, ‘What the hell is going on?’” Maloney told ProPublica. After spending nearly two hours with the local Chase branch manager, Maloney realized that he, too, was a victim of the bank’s lax procedures: He said the branch manager told him that Chase had allowed someone to obtain an account online in his company’s name in March 2023 with nothing more than a digital signature and an employer identification number, but no personal identification. That account had then accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of wire transfers. And now Maloney’s family business — not Chase — was the defendant in a lawsuit. “How is this legal?” he wondered. (Colin Schmitt, a retired FBI agent, said Chase could have mitigated the fraud by at least pausing incoming wire transfers to the fake Middlesex account and asking its owner to justify the transactions. “If you’re just using an account just for wires, that’s a big red flag,” Schmitt said.)

Still, there was a silver lining: The funds remained in the account. Not only Kevin’s $134,000, but almost $100,000 more from several other victims sat frozen inside since spring 2023.

Kevin was glad the money was still there, but he wondered why it took a lawsuit to unearth the info. “It does not seem like the system is tailored to give any deference to the victim,” he said. “That’s what frustrates me.” His lawyers advised him to seek an order from a federal judge to get his funds back and filed such a petition in March. After ProPublica asked Chase about Kevin’s funds in April, the bank agreed to return the money to him without a court order.

The $134,000 landed back in Kevin’s bank account in mid-May. Finally, he felt a sense of relief. (He has now dropped the suit against Middlesex.) But Kevin also wondered what would happen to the other people whose money got siphoned up by the fake Middlesex account. Would Chase wait for them to file lawsuits too?

Banks are starting to face lawsuits by pig-butchering victims who allege laxness in opening accounts. In December, a California man who was defrauded of nearly $1 millionsued DBS and two other banks for alleged failures to comply with know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering laws. A college professor from Iowa who lost $700,000filed a lawsuit in January against Hang Seng Bank in Hong Kong for failing to do proper due diligence on the people who opened accounts used to defraud him. Hang Seng reached an agreement with the Iowa professor to dismiss the suit and declined to comment further. DBS did not reply to requests for comment on the California case, but the bank asserted that the lawsuit contains “fatal flaws,” according to a filing in the suit.

Such cases are long shots, according to Carla Sanchez-Adams, senior attorney at the National Consumer Law Center. The suits typically fail because it’s hard to show that financial institutions knew or should have known about potential fraud.

Still, banks are well aware that fraud is on the rise. Nearly 1 in 3 Americans say they have been the victim of online fraud or cybercrime, according to a 2023 poll commissioned by Wells Fargo. “The scale of fraud taking place every day is a massive burden for our country and for the millions of hard-working women and men whose lives are affected by it,” Rob Nichols, president of the American Bankers Association, said in an October speech.

Nichols contends that “consumers credit the banking industry with doing more than other industries to protect them from fraud and keep their information safe.” He cited an initiative by the ABA to create a database of fraud contacts to help banks figure out who to call when there’s a problem. And he urged the Trump administration to develop a national fraud prevention strategy.

Other countries are taking more aggressive steps. In October, the U.K. began requiring banks to reimburse scam victims up to £85,000, or about $116,000, per claim when they make a fraudulent payment on behalf of their customers, even if the customers authorized the transfer. Australia recently enacted a law that will require banks to share suspect account info with one another. Thailand has gone even further, creating a Central Fraud Register intended to compel banks to identify and close accounts used for money laundering.

The U.S. lacks such rules. O’Neill, the former Secret Service agent, thinks that updating the Patriot Act, the post-9/11 law meant to encourage banks to share intel, would be a good place to start. But Congress has not moved in that direction and the Trump administration has shown no sign that it plans to prioritize this issue. (Asked what steps the administration is taking, a spokesperson told ProPublica to Google the administration’s sanctions related to pig-butchering scams.)

For now, bank accounts remain easy for fraudsters to obtain. A sleek-looking brokerage akin to 3A has been online for months, soliciting deposits for what a researcher at the Global Anti-Scam Organization identified as a pig-butchering scheme. Anyone wishing to “invest,” the brokerage said, can wire money to a shifting array of banks, including Chase.

In mid-April, President Donald Trump sat down in the Oval Office with President Nayib Bukele of El Salvador to celebrate a new partnership. They had recently negotiated an extraordinary deal in which El Salvador agreed to incarcerate in a maximum security prison hundreds of Venezuelan immigrants that the Trump administration had labeled as violent criminals, though few had been convicted of such crimes. The U.S. also sent back accused members of the notorious Salvadoran gang MS-13 — which both the U.S. and El Salvador have designated as a terrorist organization.

Bukele’s presidency has been defined by his successful crackdown against MS-13. He has jailed tens of thousands of alleged gang members, transforming one of the hemisphere’s most dangerous nations into one of its safest. Although human rights groups have criticized his tactics, Bukele remains extremely popular in El Salvador.

During their meeting at the White House, Trump praised his guest as “one hell of a president.” He shook Bukele’s hand, saying, “We appreciate working with you because you want to stop crime and so do we.”

A long-running U.S. investigation of MS-13 has uncovered evidence at odds with Bukele’s reputation as a crime fighter. The inquiry, which began as an effort to dismantle the gang’s leadership, expanded to focus on whether the Bukele government cut a secret deal with MS-13 in the early years of his presidency.

New reporting on that investigation by ProPublica shows that senior officials in Bukele’s government repeatedly impeded the work of a U.S. task force as it pursued evidence of possible wrongdoing by the Salvadoran president and his inner circle.

Bukele’s allies secretly blocked extraditions of gang leaders whom U.S. agents viewed as potential witnesses to the negotiations and persecuted Salvadoran law enforcement officials who helped the task force, according to exclusive interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials, newly obtained internal documents and court records from both countries.

In a previously unreported development, federal agents came to suspect that Bukele and members of his inner circle had diverted U.S. aid funds to the gang as part of the alleged deal to provide it with money and power in exchange for votes and reduced homicide rates. In 2021, agents drew up a request to review U.S. bank accounts held by Salvadoran political figures to look for evidence of money laundering related to the suspected diversion of U.S. funds. The list of names assembled by the agents included Bukele, senior officials and their relatives, according to documents viewed by ProPublica.

“Information obtained through investigation has revealed that the individuals contained within this submission are heavily engaged with MS-13 and are laundering funds from illicit business where MS-13 are involved,” the agents wrote. The people on the list “are also believed to have been funding MS-13 to support political campaigns and MS-13 have received political funds.”

The outcome of the request is not known, but its existence shows that the U.S. investigation had widened to examine suspected corruption at high levels of the Bukele government.

The investigation was led by Joint Task Force Vulcan, a multiagency law enforcement team created at Trump’s request in 2019. Agents found evidence that the Bukele government tried to cover up the pact by preventing the extraditions of gang leaders who faced U.S. charges that include ordering the murders of U.S. citizens and plotting to assassinate an FBI agent.

In addition, U.S. officials helped at least eight of their counterparts in Salvadoran law enforcement flee the country and resettle in the United States or elsewhere because they feared retaliation by their own government, current and former U.S. officials said.

It has been clear from the beginning what Trump wants from El Salvador: an ally who would accept, and even imprison, deportees. Less clear has been what Bukele might want from the United States. In striking the deal with the Salvadoran president, Trump has effectively undercut the Vulcan investigation and shielded Bukele from further scrutiny, current and former U.S. officials said.

Veterans of the Vulcan team are “concerned that all their work, the millions of dollars that were spent, going all over the United States, El Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico, that it will be weakened for political reasons,” said a U.S. official familiar with the investigation.

The task force worked closely with the Salvadoran attorney general’s office, whose prosecutors shared evidence from their own investigation of the gang negotiations and suspected graft in the Bukele government, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials.

“There was good information on corruption between the gang and the Bukele administration,” Christopher Musto, a former senior official at Homeland Security Investigations, or HSI, who worked on Vulcan, said about the Salvadoran investigation. “It was a great case.”

In May 2021, Bukele’s legislative majority in Congress ousted the attorney general and justices of the Supreme Court, which oversees extradition requests. Within seven months, newly installed justices reversed or halted six requests for senior gang leaders wanted in the U.S., according to interviews and documents.

“Bukele’s people were coming to the Supreme Court and saying under no circumstances are we extraditing the MS-13 leaders,” said the U.S. official familiar with the investigation. “‘Delay, interfere, undermine, do what you have to do.’”

Senior Bukele officials helped an MS-13 leader with a pending extradition order escape from prison, according to court records, U.S. officials and Salvadoran news reports. At least three other top gang leaders were released from Salvadoran custody after the U.S. filed extradition requests for them, according to Justice Department documents.

Published accounts in the United States and El Salvador have reported allegations that Bukele also pushed for the return of MS-13 leaders to prevent them from testifying in U.S. courts about the pact. Despite his government’s refusal to extradite gang bosses to the United States, the Trump administration in March deported one MS-13 leader accused of terrorism. The Justice Department is now seeking to dismiss charges against a second leader, which would allow him to be sent back to El Salvador, according to recent court filings.

The Justice Department declined to comment in response to questions sent by ProPublica. The State Department referred questions to the Justice Department.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to detailed questions.

“President Trump is committed to keeping his promises to the American people and removing dangerous criminals and terrorist illegals who pose a threat to the American public,” said Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson. “We are grateful for President Bukele’s partnership.”

Bukele, the Salvadoran Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Salvadoran Supreme Court did not respond to lists of questions. Bukele has repeatedly denied making any agreement with MS-13. The Trump administration’s deportation of MS-13 members to El Salvador, he said in a post on X, will enable security forces to dismantle the gang.

“This will help us finalize intelligence gathering and go after the last remnants of MS-13, including its former and new members, money, weapons, drugs, hideouts, collaborators, and sponsors,” the post said.

“Just Fear”

Bukele was elected president of El Salvador in February 2019, promising to fight the country’s ingrained political corruption and pervasive gang violence, which he called “one of the greatest challenges” facing the nation.

During his first term, Trump also made MS-13 a high-profile foe, calling it “probably the meanest, worst gang in the world.” In August 2019, Attorney General William P. Barr created the Vulcan task force, teaming federal prosecutors with agents of the FBI, Homeland Security Investigations, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies. The goal: Eradicate MS-13.

For decades, MS-13 has bedeviled law enforcement in the Americas with its vast reach, extreme violence and complex culture. The initials stand for “Mara Salvatrucha.” “Mara” means a swarm, while “salvatrucha” has been said to refer to a clever Salvadoran, according to interviews and an academic study. The number represents the 13th letter of the alphabet, M, in homage to the Mexican Mafia, the powerful Southern California prison gang.

MS-13 emerged in the 1980s in Los Angeles among Salvadoran youths whose families had fled a bloody civil war. The gang expanded throughout the diaspora and, as the U.S. deported planeloads of ex-convicts starting in the 1990s, took root in El Salvador. Although most of the leaders were serving sentences in El Salvador, a jailhouse council of 14 bosses, known as the “Ranfla,” used cellphones to micromanage criminal activities in U.S. cities thousands of miles away.

The gang developed a reputation for torturing, brutalizing and dismembering its victims. Barr has called it “a death cult” in which violence is more important than riches.

“It was like a very violent mom-and-pop operation where the cousins and second cousins all want to be a part of it,” said Carlos Ortiz, who served as the HSI attaché in El Salvador from 2018 to 2024. “Minimal money, compared to others. Even though it’s an organization, a lot of it is just fear. Fear of the high-ranking bosses among the rest of the gang, that’s what drives it.”

Trained with military weapons, MS-13 warred with security forces in El Salvador, took over neighborhoods and generated one of the world’s worst homicide rates, driving an exodus of immigrants reminiscent of the 1980s. The Salvadoran Supreme Court designated the gang as a terrorist organization in 2015.

The Vulcan task force had about 30 members, including prosecutors, agents and analysts. Its director, John J. Durham, was a federal prosecutor in the Eastern District of New York who had spent a decade pursuing MS-13 cliques on Long Island. Members of the task force worked from bases around the country and traveled to Mexico and Central America.

One of the founding investigators, Newark FBI agent Daniel Brunner, spoke fluent Spanish and had worked gangs for seven years. He became a roving specialist providing expertise, communications intelligence and court transcripts, sometimes in person and sometimes from a distance.

“Our idea was that Vulcan was like a SEAL Team 6, going in to help the different districts build cases,” Brunner, who is now retired, said in an interview.

Vulcan built on the longtime U.S. presence and extensive influence in El Salvador, where the embassy has long funded and trained law enforcement agencies. FBI agents and others were embedded as advisers in police anti-gang and homicide units and worked with prosecution teams led by Attorney General Raúl Melara.

The U.S. task force modeled its strategy on the ones used against Mexican cartels and Colombian narcoguerrillas: Break the power of the MS-13 bosses by extraditing them to face trial and prison in the United States.

On Jan. 14, 2021, six days before the end of the Trump administration, Durham and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray joined acting Attorney General Jeffrey A. Rosen when he announced “the highest-reaching and most sweeping indictment targeting MS-13 and its command and control structure in U.S. history.”

Prosecutors charged the 14 members of the leadership council with major crimes including conspiracy to support and finance narcoterrorism. For more than two decades, the Ranfla ran a criminal network in the United States, Mexico and Central America that sanctioned the murders of Americans and trafficked drugs and arms, the indictment alleged.

The indictment contained a stunning charge: MS-13 bosses had taken the extraordinary step of giving an order, or “green light,” to assassinate an FBI agent working with local investigators in El Salvador. Embassy officials learned of the threat and evacuated the agent, according to interviews.

It is highly unusual for Latin American criminal groups to target a U.S. agent — they have learned that it invites an overwhelming law enforcement response. The assassination plot was a sign that the U.S. crackdown had rattled the gang chiefs, current and former officials said.

Vulcan on the Hunt

In conversations with American officials as president-elect, Bukele promised cooperation and welcomed their support against gangs and graft, even in his own Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former U.S. officials.

At a press event about the Vulcan task force in 2020, Trump asserted that in the past El Salvador “did not cooperate with the United States at all,” but now it had become a strong law enforcement partner.

Already, though, there had been news accounts alleging that Bukele had cut deals with gangs when he was mayor of San Salvador. Vulcan investigators quickly found evidence that top aides to the new president were negotiating a new pact with gang chiefs, according to interviews.

For more than a decade, MS-13’s control of the streets had made it a political force. It could deliver votes, ignite mayhem or impose order. A series of politicians had held talks with gang leaders to seek electoral support and reductions in violence in return for improved prison conditions and perks such as prostitutes and big-screen televisions.

The Bukele government adopted a more sophisticated bargaining strategy, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials. During secret meetings in prisons and other sites, the president’s emissaries offered MS-13 leaders political power and financial incentives if they lowered the homicide rate and marshaled support for the Nuevas Ideas party, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials and court documents.

The chief negotiator was Carlos Marroquín, a former rap artist and confidant of the president. Bukele had appointed him the director of a new Justice Ministry program known as “Reconstruction of the Social Fabric” that operated in impoverished communities.

Marroquín promised the Ranfla a central role in developing the program, control of neighborhood youth centers, power over urban turf and other financial and political benefits, according to current and former U.S. officials, court documents and Treasury Department sanctions. Informants and communications intercepts indicated that some of the resources going to MS-13 came from U.S. government aid, a violation of U.S. law, according to interviews and documents.

“Money was going from us, from USAID, through to this social fabric group,” a former federal law enforcement official said. “They’re supposed to be building things and getting skills and learning. It was funding the gangs.”

Vulcan also gained information from two highly placed Salvadoran officials involved in the talks with MS-13. The officials provided inside information to U.S. agents about the negotiations, which they said Bukele directed, according to interviews.

The accumulating evidence about the gang pact and the suspected misuse of U.S. funds spurred the task force to broaden its initial focus and target alleged corruption in the Bukele government, current and former U.S. officials said.

In April 2021, federal agents prepared a list of powerful Salvadorans for a financial review by the U.S. Treasury Department. Bukele was one of the 15 names. So were Marroquín; Osiris Luna, the director of the national prison system and another alleged organizer of the gang talks; Martha Carolina Recinos, the president’s chief of staff; and other political figures and their relatives. The request asked the Treasury Department to search for possible illicit transactions in any bank accounts held in the United States by those on the list, according to documents seen by ProPublica.

The Vulcan task force was seeking evidence in U.S. banks of money laundering tied to the diversion of USAID funding through the gang pact, the documents showed. Agents explained that the task force had “uncovered information that MS-13 members are in close contact with politically exposed persons in El Salvador,” referring to prominent government figures.

“The USAID funding is believed to have been laundered by the individuals submitted in this request,” who were suspected of “facilitating, supporting and promoting MS-13 through their official positions,” said the request, which was viewed by ProPublica.

Made under section 314A of the USA Patriot Act, the request for a canvass of U.S. banks requires that investigators show reasonable suspicion rather than probable cause, which is a higher standard. The outcome of the request is unknown. The Treasury Department declined to comment. U.S. prosecutors have not publicly accused Bukele and the others of crimes related to USAID funds.

As U.S. investigators advanced in this political direction, they gained valuable information from the Salvadoran prosecutors who were pressing their own investigation of the gangs and the Bukele administration.

Known in English as Operation Cathedral, their probe was as ambitious and sensitive as the U.S. one. Investigators had documented the secret jailhouse deals with MS-13 and the official attempts to cover them up. They also pursued leads that revealed alleged widespread corruption involving the country’s COVID-19 relief programs, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials and documents. Political tensions increased as the Salvadoran prosecutors targeted the president’s inner circle and raided government offices, clashing with police who tried to stop them from searching the Health Ministry in one incident.

April 2021 was also when a delegation led by Attorney General Melara came to Washington to meet with leaders of Vulcan and other senior U.S. officials. The prosecutors laid out their case against prominent figures in the Bukele government. The “impressive” presentation, a former U.S. federal law enforcement official said, cited videos, phone intercepts and other evidence showing that Marroquín, prisons director Luna and others had clandestinely arranged for government negotiators and gang leaders to enter and leave prisons, smuggled in phones and destroyed logs of prison visits.

“Melara was very nervous because of the very high level of the people he was investigating,” a former U.S. federal law enforcement official said.

Melara declined to comment, saying he does not discuss his work as attorney general.

Interference

On May 1, 2021 — soon after Melara and his team met with U.S. investigators — the Salvadoran Legislature, controlled by Bukele, voted to expel the attorney general and five justices on the Supreme Court.

The purge was a decisive step by Bukele to centralize power. It drew international condemnation. In El Salvador, critics denounced the president’s actions as a “self-coup.” On his Twitter page, Bukele began calling himself “the world’s coolest dictator.”

For Vulcan, the expulsions marked a dramatic shift in its investigation. The Supreme Court justices had signaled their willingness to sign off on some extraditions. Melara had been a helpful ally who reportedly pledged to do “everything necessary” to extradite the Ranfla members, many of whom were in custody in El Salvador. But it soon became clear that the government was no longer interested in handing over senior gang leaders.

“The next prosecutors were not willing to work with us,” said Musto, the former HSI official. “We were not closed out, but all these things that we had in place that we were moving to getting people back here slowed down to a snail’s pace.”

The first clash came over Armando Melgar Diaz, an alleged MS-13 leader who acted as a middleman between gangs in the United States and senior leaders in El Salvador. Melgar, known as “Blue,” had ordered the kidnapping of a family in Oklahoma that owed the gangs $145,000, collected money from a drug ring operating out of restaurants in Maryland and Virginia and was involved with killings in the U.S., according to an indictment and interviews with U.S. officials. He was the first MS-13 member to be accused under terrorism laws.

The newly constituted Supreme Court voted to approve Melgar’s extradition but then reversed its decision, announcing that the matter needed further study. Later, Bukele’s new attorney general asked for a halt to the extradition. The reason: The United States had failed to guarantee that it would not seek the death penalty or life in prison, sentences not allowed under Salvadoran law.

The rationale made no sense to Vulcan prosecutors. The Justice Department had already promised that it would not pursue such punishments against Melgar, according to records and interviews. U.S. and Salvadoran officials attributed the sudden reversal to fear that Melgar could link Bukele and his government to the pact with MS-13.

“Melgar Diaz was going to be the test case,” Musto said. “It was going to be an easy win for Vulcan.”

Information obtained by U.S. agents included allegations that Bukele’s judicial adviser, Conan Castro-Ramírez, had called one of the new Supreme Court justices and told him to find ways to stop the extradition of Melgar, according to interviews. When the justice objected, saying that the extradition had already been approved, Castro allegedly ordered him to reverse it. “That’s why we put you there,” he said, according to the interviews.

The State Department sanctioned Castro for his role in assisting in the “inappropriate removal” of the Supreme Court justices and the attorney general. Castro did not respond to attempts to contact him.

A Salvadoran court sentenced Melgar to 39 years in prison for conspiracy to commit homicide, among other crimes. He was the first MS-13 leader whose extradition was blocked. Soon after, the U.S. extradition requests for other gang chiefs ran into opposition.

“Bukele and his government are using the entire state apparatus to prevent these people from being extradited,” a person with knowledge of the Salvadoran judicial system said in a recent interview.

Miguel Ángel Flores Durel, a newly appointed Supreme Court justice who reportedly had served as a lawyer for a top MS-13 leader, made sure that the requests were never granted, according to the person with knowledge of El Salvador’s judicial system. Flores instructed colleagues “do not work on extraditions at all,” the person said.

In July 2022, El Salvador agreed to extradite two lower-ranking MS-13 members charged with the murders of Salvadoran immigrants in Long Island in 2016 and 2017 in which victims were butchered with axes and machetes. The Supreme Court also approved the return of Salvadorans not affiliated with the gang who were accused in the U.S. of crimes such as murder.

This was a deliberate strategy, the person said. Flores said that El Salvador needed to continue some extraditions in order to “calm” U.S. officials, who were complaining about the lack of cooperation with Vulcan, the person said. (Flores died in 2023.)

It didn’t work. The extradition of other criminals by the Bukele-aligned Supreme Court only emphasized the lack of cooperation on requests for the senior MS-13 leaders.

“We were never told officially that it wouldn’t happen, but it became impossible,” said Brunner, the former FBI agent.

In October 2022, Bukele’s new attorney general announced that criminals would first have to serve their sentence in El Salvador before being sent to the U.S. — an interpretation of the country’s extradition treaty that differed from the previous Supreme Court.

“We aren’t going to be sending Salvadorans without them first paying for the crimes they have committed” in El Salvador, Rodolfo Delgado said.

Threats and Roadblocks

The Bukele government’s interference with the U.S. investigation went beyond blocking extraditions, U.S. officials said.

Senior Bukele allies also waged a campaign of harassment and intimidation against the Salvadoran officials who had investigated corruption and assisted the Vulcan task force, according to interviews with current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials.

The government threatened officials with arrest and sent police patrols to their homes, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials. At least eight senior Salvadoran law enforcement and judicial officials fled El Salvador for the United States and elsewhere. Vulcan provided them with travel money, language classes, housing and help gaining legal immigration status and finding jobs. In one instance, a U.S. Embassy official escorted a Salvadoran prosecutor out of the country because American officials believed his life was in danger, according to an official familiar with the incident.

The Salvadoran government also weakened special “vetted units” of the police that had worked with the FBI and other U.S. agencies, according to current and former U.S. officials.

Bukele’s allies didn’t stop there. They allegedly helped the escape or release from prison of at least four members of the MS-13 leadership council sought by Vulcan for alleged crimes in the U.S., according to interviews, court documents and press reports.

Elmer Canales-Rivera, alias “Crook de Hollywood,” was one of the most wanted of the Ranfla members. He had been imprisoned for several murders in El Salvador, including a case in which he reportedly helped suffocate and drown in insecticide a gang member who violated orders. In the United States, prosecutors had accused him of orchestrating murders and kidnapping across the nation for more than 20 years.

In November 2021, Canales escaped from prison. El Faro, a prominent investigative news outlet, and other Salvadoran media published stories that detailed how Marroquín had escorted Canales from the prison. The articles featured taped calls between gang members and a person identified as Marroquín discussing his role in the escape, along with photos of officials apparently attempting to remove jail logs to conceal their presence at the prison.

Canales was caught in Mexico and turned over to U.S. authorities. Currently in prison awaiting trial, he has pleaded not guilty.

Over the next several months, three other MS-13 leaders disappeared from Salvadoran prisons, causing Durham, the head of the task force, to express his concern in a letter to the judge in New York overseeing the cases. At the time the Bukele administration had received extradition requests and Interpol notices, he wrote, the leaders had been in custody. Salvadoran media later reported that the country’s Supreme Court had formally denied the extradition requests for the three men.

The purge of the Supreme Court and prosecutors, the blocked extraditions and the disappearance of the MS-13 gang members marked a significant deterioration in relations between Bukele and the administration of President Joe Biden. Agencies across the government began looking for ways to push El Salvador to cooperate.

Acting U.S. Ambassador Jean Manes announced a “pause” in relations with El Salvador and left the country. A veteran diplomat who had previously served in El Salvador, Manes had pressured Bukele in public and private, criticizing the extradition delays and his increasingly authoritarian rule, according to State Department officials.

“What are we seeing now? It is a decline in democracy,” Manes said shortly before her departure.

In December 2021, the Treasury Department issued sanctions against Bukele aides Luna, Marroquín and Recinos, blocking them from conducting financial transactions in the United States because of alleged corruption. None of them responded to questions sent to a Bukele spokesperson.

Nonetheless, former members of the task force said they felt that the Biden administration treated Vulcan as a lower priority and cut its resources. They said Biden officials saw the task force as a Trump initiative and wanted to focus on other law enforcement targets, such as human trafficking.

“As soon as the Biden administration came in, we were slowed down,” Brunner said. “There was a lot more red tape we had to go through.” Former Biden officials denied this was the case.

Whatever truce had existed between the Salvadoran government and MS-13 collapsed in March 2022. The country descended into chaos. Over one three-day period, some 80 people were killed in gang-related violence.

Bukele reacted forcefully. He declared a nationwide “state of exception” that suspended constitutional protections. Police began rounding up thousands of accused gang members and others. He announced the construction of the megaprison known as CECOT.

The policies proved tremendously popular. Murder rates dropped dramatically, though human rights advocates criticized the loss of civil liberties. Bukele dismissed their complaints.

“Some say we have put thousands in prison, but the reality is that we have set millions free,” he has said, an assertion he repeated to Trump in the Oval Office.

The Turnaround

Despite the harsh treatment of gang members — an estimated 14,500 people are now held in CECOT — one thing did not change: The Bukele government continued to refuse to extradite senior MS-13 leaders to the United States.

The reasons for Bukele’s alleged protection of the gang leadership versus his relentless pursuit of the rank and file are the subject of speculation in both the United States and El Salvador. One possible explanation, according to current and former U.S. and Salvadoran officials: Bukele is aware that Vulcan was gathering evidence that could lead to criminal charges and political damage. The imprisoned leaders are potential witnesses to his alleged deal with MS-13, while El Salvador’s street-level gangsters are not.

In February 2023, the Justice Department unsealed an indictment for another group of leaders, most of whom operated a tier below the Ranfla, relaying its directives to gangsters on the streets. The 13 defendants were accused of terrorism and drug smuggling, among other charges.

The U.S. announced it would “explore options for their extradition with the government of El Salvador.” The Justice Department declined to say whether any such requests had been made.

In filing the charges, prosecutors made their strongest public accusations yet about deals between the Bukele government and the gangs. Without naming the president or his allies, prosecutors alleged that MS-13 leaders agreed to use their vast political influence to turn out votes for candidates belonging to Bukele’s Nuevas Ideas party in legislative elections in 2021.

The gang bosses also “agreed to reduce the number of public murders in El Salvador, which politically benefited the government of El Salvador, by creating the perception that the government was reducing the murder rate,” the indictment said.

As part of the arrangement, the senior MS-13 leaders demanded that the Bukele government refuse to extradite them, the indictment said. The alleged condition appears to be in effect. To date, none of the extradition requests for more than a dozen high-ranking gang members has been approved.

In the face of obstacles, Vulcan relied increasingly on the Mexican government for help. During the past four years, Mexican authorities have captured nine of the 27 MS-13 leaders named in the indictments and deported them to the United States, where they were arrested. This year, prosecutors obtained guilty pleas to terrorism charges from two lower-ranking bosses, including one who prosecutors said had helped implement the deal between the Bukele administration and the gang. Sentencing for the men is pending.

Since Trump took office this year, his administration has redirected Vulcan’s mission to also target Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang that the president has put in the spotlight.

There has been a remarkable recent development related to MS-13, however. After more than five years leading the Vulcan task force, Durham wrote letters asking the judge overseeing the cases to dismiss charges against two gang leaders in U.S. custody, allowing them to be deported to El Salvador. The letters were dated March 11 and April 1, weeks after the Trump administration began negotiating the mass deportation deal with Bukele’s government.

César Humberto López Larios, a member of the Ranfla known as “Greñas,” had his charges dismissed and was returned to El Salvador with more than 250 Venezuelans and Salvadorans sent to CECOT as part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation of migrants on March 15. López, identified in media reports, is featured in a slickly produced video posted by Bukele on X, kneeling in the prison, his head shaved. He had pleaded not guilty to the charges against him.

Then, in April, Durham asked for the dismissal of terrorism charges against a lower-ranking MS-13 prisoner, Vladimir Antonio Arevalo-Chavez, alias “Vampiro,” according to recently unsealed court records. His defense lawyers are seeking to stall the request to give them time to fight his deportation to El Salvador. He has pleaded not guilty.

Durham acknowledged in his letters to the judge that the evidence against the two men is “strong.” After millions spent on an operation involving investigators and prosecutors from the U.S., El Salvador and other countries, Vulcan had amassed a trove of evidence aimed at incarcerating the MS-13 leaders who had overseen the killings, rapes and beatings of Americans. Prosecutors told defense attorneys they had more than 92,903 pages of discovery, including 600 pages of transcribed phone intercepts, 21 boxes of documents from prosecutors in El Salvador and 11 gigabytes of audio files.

Durham said prosecutors were dropping their pursuit of the cases “due to geopolitical and national security concerns.”

It was like a reverse extradition. Trump was giving Bukele the kind of high-level criminals that the United States had never received from El Salvador.

During the negotiations over the use of El Salvador’s prison, Trump officials agreed to pay some $6 million to house the deported men and acceded to an additional demand.

Bukele had one specific request, according to Milena Mayorga, his ambassador to the United States.

“I want you to send me the gang leaders who are in the United States,” she quoted Bukele as telling U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

For Bukele, she said in a broadcast interview, it was “a matter of honor.”

Sahil Lavingia, who wrote the code, told it to cancel, or in his words “munch,” anything that wasn’t “directly supporting patient care.” Unfortunately, neither Lavingia nor the model had the knowledge required to make such determinations.

“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months, in an interview with ProPublica. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made.”

It turns out, a lot of mistakes were made as DOGE and the VA rushed to implement President Donald Trump’s February executive order mandating all of the VA’s contracts be reviewed within 30 days.

ProPublica obtained the code and prompts — the instructions given to the AI model — used to review the contracts and interviewed Lavingia and experts in both AI and government procurement. We are publishing an analysis of those prompts to help the public understand how this technology is being deployed in the federal government.

The experts found numerous and troubling flaws: the code relied on older, general-purpose models not suited for the task; the model hallucinated contract amounts, deciding around 1,100 of the agreements were each worth $34 million when they were sometimes worth thousands; and the AI did not analyze the entire text of contracts. Most experts said that, in addition to the technical issues, using off-the-shelf AI models for the task — with little context on how the VA works — should have been a nonstarter.

Lavingia, a software engineer enlisted by DOGE, acknowledged there were flaws in what he created and blamed, in part, a lack of time and proper tools. He also stressed that he knew his list of what he called “MUNCHABLE” contracts would be vetted by others before a final decision was made.

Portions of the prompt are pasted below along with commentary from experts we interviewed. Lavingia published a complete version of it on his personal GitHub account.

Problems with how the model was constructed can be detected from the very opening lines of code, where the DOGE employee instructs the model how to behave:

This part of the prompt, known as a system prompt, is intended to shape the overall behavior of the large language model, or LLM, the technology behind AI bots like ChatGPT. In this case, it was used before both steps of the process: first, before Lavingia used it to obtain information like contract amounts; then, before determining if a contract should be canceled.

Including information not related to the task at hand can confuse AI. At this point, it’s only being asked to gather information from the text of the contract. Everything related to “munchable status,” “soft-services” or “DEI” is irrelevant. Experts told ProPublica that trying to fix issues by adding more instructions can actually have the opposite effect — especially if they’re irrelevant.

The models were only shown the first 10,000 characters from each document, or approximately 2,500 words. Experts were confused by this, noting that OpenAI models support inputs over 50 times that size. Lavingia said that he had to use an older AI model that the VA had already signed a contract for.

This portion of the prompt instructs the AI to extract the contract number and other key details of a contract, such as the “total contract value.”

This was error-prone and not necessary, as accurate contract information can already be found in publicly available databases like USASpending. In some cases, this led to the AI system being given an outdated version of a contract, which led to it reporting a misleadingly large contract amount. In other cases, the model mistakenly pulled an irrelevant number from the page instead of the contract value.

“They are looking for information where it’s easy to get, rather than where it’s correct,” said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. “This is the lazy approach to gathering the information that they want. It’s faster, but it’s less accurate.”

Lavingia acknowledged that this approach led to errors but said that those errors were later corrected by VA staff.

Once the program extracted this information, it ran a second pass to determine if the contract was “munchable.”

Again, only the first 10,000 characters were shown to the model. As a result, the munchable determination was based purely on the first few pages of the contract document.

The above prompt section is the first set of instructions telling the AI how to flag contracts. The prompt provides little explanation of what it’s looking for, failing to define what qualifies as “core medical/benefits” and lacking information about what a “necessary consultant” is.

For the types of models the DOGE analysis used, including all the necessary information to make an accurate determination is critical.

Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the governmental use of artificial intelligence, said that knowing which jobs could be done in-house “calls for a very sophisticated understanding of medical care, of institutional management, of availability of human resources” that the model does not have.

The prompt above tries to implement a fundamental policy of the Trump administration: killing all DEI programs. But the prompt fails to include a definition of what DEI is, leaving the model to decide.

Despite the instruction to cancel DEI-related contracts, very few were flagged for this reason. Procurement experts noted that it’s very unlikely for information like this to be found in the first few pages of a contract.

These two lines — which experts say were poorly defined — carried the most weight in the DOGE analysis. The response from the AI frequently cited these reasons as the justification for munchability. Nearly every justification included a form of the phrase “direct patient care,” and in a third of cases the model flagged contracts because it stated the services could be handled in-house.

The poorly defined requirements led to several contracts for VA office internet services being flagged for cancellation. In one justification, the model had this to say:

The contract provides data services for internet connectivity, which is an IT infrastructure service that is multiple layers removed from direct clinical patient care and could likely be performed in-house, making it classified as munchable.

Despite these instructions, AI flagged many audit- and compliance-related contracts as “munchable,” labeling them as “soft services.”

In one case, the model even acknowledged the importance of compliance while flagging a contract for cancellation, stating: “Although essential to ensuring accurate medical records and billing, these services are an administrative support function (a ‘soft service’) rather than direct patient care.”

Shobita Parthasarathy, professor of public policy and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at University of Michigan, told ProPublica that this piece of the prompt was notable in that it instructs the model to “distinguish” between the two types of services without instructing the model what to save and what to kill.

The emphasis on “direct patient care” is reflected in how often the AI cited it in its recommendations, even when the model did not have any information about a contract. In one instance where it labeled every field “not found,” it still decided the contract was munchable. It gave this reason:

Without evidence that it involves essential medical procedures or direct clinical support, and assuming the contract is for administrative or related support services, it meets the criteria for being classified as munchable.

In reality, this contract was for the preventative maintenance of important safety devices known as ceiling lifts at VA medical centers, including three sites in Maryland. The contract itself stated:

Ceiling Lifts are used by employees to reposition patients during their care. They are critical safety devices for employees and patients, and must be maintained and inspected appropriately.

This portion of the prompt attempts to define “soft services.” It uses many highly specific examples but also throws in vague categories without definitions like “non-performing/non-essential contracts.”

Experts said that in order for a model to properly determine this, it would need to be given information about the essential activities and what’s required to support them.

This section of the prompt was the result of analysis by Lavingia and other DOGE staff, Lavingia explained. “This is probably from a session where I ran a prior version of the script that most likely a DOGE person was like, ‘It’s not being aggressive enough.’ I don’t know why it starts with a 2. I guess I disagreed with one of them, and so we only put 2, 3 and 4 here.”

Notably, our review found that the only clarifications related to past errors were related to scenarios where the model wasn’t flagging enough contracts for cancellation.

This section of the prompt provides the most detail about what constitutes “direct patient care.” While it does cover many aspects of care, it still leaves a lot of ambiguity and forces the model to make its own judgements about what constitutes “proven efficacy” and “critical” medical equipment.

In addition to the limited information given on what constitutes direct patient care, there is no information about how to determine if a price is “reasonable,” especially since the LLM only sees the first few pages of the document. The models lack knowledge about what’s normal for government contracts.

“I just do not understand how it would be possible. This is hard for a human to figure out,” Jaquith said about whether AI could accurately determine if a contract was reasonably priced. “I don’t see any way that an LLM could know this without a lot of really specialized training.”

This section explicitly lists which tasks could be “easily insourced” by VA staff, and more than 500 different contracts were flagged as “munchable” for this reason.

“A larger issue with all of this is there seems to be an assumption here that contracts are almost inherently wasteful,” Coglianese said when shown this section of the prompt. “Other services, like the kinds that are here, are cheaper to contract for. In fact, these are exactly the sorts of things that we would not want to treat as ‘munchable.’” He went on to explain that insourcing some of these tasks could also “siphon human sources away from direct primary patient care.”

In an interview, Lavingia acknowledged some of these jobs might be better handled externally. “We don’t want to cut the ones that would make the VA less efficient or cause us to hire a bunch of people in-house,” Lavingia explained. “Which currently they can’t do because there’s a hiring freeze.”

The VA is standing behind its use of AI to examine contracts, calling it “a commonsense precedent.” And documents obtained by ProPublica suggest the VA is looking at additional ways AI can be deployed. A March email from a top VA official to DOGE stated:

Today, VA receives over 2 million disability claims per year, and the average time for a decision is 130 days. We believe that key technical improvements (including AI and other automation), combined with Veteran-first process/culture changes pushed from our Secretary’s office could dramatically improve this. A small existing pilot in this space has resulted in 3% of recent claims being processed in less than 30 days. Our mission is to figure out how to grow from 3% to 30% and then upwards such that only the most complex claims take more than a few days.

The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”

The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

The DOGE AI tool flagged more than 2,000 contracts for “munching.” It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled — the Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box. The VA uses contractors for many reasons, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.

We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.

ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it “deeply problematic.”

Cary Coglianese, professor of law and of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the governmental use and regulation of artificial intelligence, said he was troubled by the use of these general-purpose large language models, or LLMs. “I don’t think off-the-shelf LLMs have a great deal of reliability for something as complex and involved as this,” he said.

Sahil Lavingia, the programmer enlisted by DOGE, which was then run by Elon Musk, acknowledged flaws in the code.

“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

Though Lavingia has talked about his time at DOGE previously, this is the first time his work has been examined in detail and the first time he’s publicly explained his process, down to specific lines of code.

Lavingia has nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer and entrepreneur but no formal training in AI. He briefly worked at Pinterest before starting Gumroad, a small e-commerce company that nearly collapsed in 2015. “I laid off 75% of my company — including many of my best friends. It really sucked,” he said. Lavingia kept the company afloat by “replacing every manual process with an automated one,” according to a post on his personal blog.

Lavingia did not have much time to immerse himself in how the VA handles veterans’ care between starting on March 17 and writing the tool on the following day. Yet his experience with his own company aligned with the direction of the Trump administration, which has embraced the use of AI across government to streamline operations and save money.

Lavingia said the quick timeline of Trump’s February executive order, which gave agencies 30 days to complete a review of contracts and grants, was too short to do the job manually. “That’s not possible — you have 90,000 contracts,” he said. “Unless you write some code. But even then it’s not really possible.”

Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job — using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz lauded DOGE’s work on vetting contracts in a statement to ProPublica. “As far as we know, this sort of review has never been done before, but we are happy to set this commonsense precedent,” he said.

The VA is reviewing all of its 76,000 contracts to ensure each of them benefits veterans and is a good use of taxpayer money, he said. Decisions to cancel or reduce the size of contracts are made after multiple reviews by VA employees, including agency contracting experts and senior staff, he wrote.

Kasperowicz said that the VA will not cancel contracts for work that provides services to veterans or that the agency cannot do itself without a contingency plan in place. He added that contracts that are “wasteful, duplicative or involve services VA has the ability to perform itself” will typically be terminated.

Trump officials have said they are working toward a “goal” of cutting around 80,000 people from the VA’s workforce of nearly 500,000. Most employees work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.

The VA has said it would avoid cutting contracts that directly impact care out of fear that it would cause harm to veterans. ProPublica recently reported that relatively small cuts at the agency have already been jeopardizing veterans’ care.

The VA has not explained how it plans to simultaneously move services in-house, as Lavingia’s code suggested was the plan, while also slashing staff.

Many inside the VA told ProPublica the process for reviewing contracts was so opaque they couldn’t even see who made the ultimate decisions to kill specific contracts. Once the “munching” script had selected a list of contracts, Lavingia said he would pass it off to others who would decide what to cancel and what to keep. No contracts, he said, were terminated “without human review.”

“I just delivered the [list of contracts] to the VA employees,” he said. “I basically put munchable at the top and then the others below.”

VA staffers told ProPublica that when DOGE identified contracts to be canceled early this year — before Lavingia was brought on — employees sometimes were given little time to justify retaining the service. One recalled being given just a few hours. The staffers asked not to be named because they feared losing their jobs for talking to reporters.

According to one internal email that predated Lavingia’s AI analysis, staff members had to respond in 255 characters or fewer — just shy of the 280 character limit on Musk’s X social media platform.

Once he started on DOGE’s contract analysis, Lavingia said he was confronted with technological limitations. At least some of the errors produced by his code can be traced to using older versions of OpenAI models available through the VA — models not capable of solving complex tasks, according to the experts consulted by ProPublica.

Moreover, the tool’s underlying instructions were deeply flawed. Records show Lavingia programmed the AI system to make intricate judgments based on the first few pages of each contract — about the first 2,500 words — which contain only sparse summary information.

“AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,” said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. “AI gives convincing looking answers that are frequently wrong. There needs to be humans whose job it is to do this work.”

Lavingia’s prompts did not include context about how the VA operates, what contracts are essential or which ones are required by federal law. This led AI to determine a core piece of the agency’s own contract procurement system was “munchable.”

At the core of Lavingia’s prompt is the direction to spare contracts involved in “direct patient care.”

Such an approach, experts said, doesn’t grapple with the reality that the work done by doctors and nurses to care for veterans in hospitals is only possible with significant support around them.

Lavingia’s system also used AI to extract details like the contract number and “total contract value.” This led to avoidable errors, where AI returned the wrong dollar value when multiple were found in a contract. Experts said the correct information was readily available from public databases.

Lavingia acknowledged that errors resulted from this approach but said those errors were later corrected by VA staff.

In late March, Lavingia published a version of the “munchable” script on his GitHub account to invite others to use and improve it, he told ProPublica. “It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script and anyone in the public could see that this is how the VA is thinking about cutting contracts.”

According to a post on his blog, this was done with the approval of Musk before he left DOGE. “When he asked the room about improving DOGE’s public perception, I asked if I could open-source the code I’d been writing,” Lavingia said. “He said yes — it aligned with DOGE’s goal of maximum transparency.”

That openness may have eventually led to Lavingia’s dismissal. Lavingia confirmed he was terminated from DOGE after giving an interview to Fast Company magazine about his work with the department. A VA spokesperson declined to comment on Lavingia’s dismissal.

VA officials have declined to say whether they will continue to use the “munchable” tool moving forward. But the administration may deploy AI to help the agency replace employees. Documents previously obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials proposed in March consolidating the benefits claims department by relying more on AI.

And the government’s contractors are paying attention. After Lavingia posted his code, he said he heard from people trying to understand how to keep the money flowing.

“I got a couple DMs from VA contractors who had questions when they saw this code,” he said. “They were trying to make sure that their contracts don’t get cut. Or learn why they got cut.

“At the end of the day, humans are the ones terminating the contracts, but it is helpful for them to see how DOGE or Trump or the agency heads are thinking about what contracts they are going to munch. Transparency is a good thing.”

His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.

The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.

Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.

News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.

Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldn’t have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugate’s leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.

“Maybe he’s a wunderkind. Maybe he’s Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But that’s not likely the case,” said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. “It sounds like putting the intern in charge.”

In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administration’s decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is “reckless.”

“We’re entering very dangerous territory,” one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said.

The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.

The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.

The office’s mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The “terrorism” category that framed the agency’s work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.

ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugate’s position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the department’s prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugate’s CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.

“Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office,” the official wrote in an email. “This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.”

ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.

The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. “The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, it’s ignorant,” spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.

Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.

Accounts of Fugate’s arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.

In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugate’s unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.

The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as “a minder” and “a babysitter.”

DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization.

Rising MAGA Star

The CP3 homepage boasts about the office’s experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.

Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.

On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old “in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.”

Fugate is a self-described “Trumplican” who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.

Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.

The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trump’s 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. “I truly wish I could say more about what I’m doing, but more to come soon!” he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.

Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called “surreal and invigorating.” In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegation’s signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.).

By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trump’s advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him “from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.”

“Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome,” Fugate wrote on Instagram.

In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a “special assistant” assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.

In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the office’s achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the office’s 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.

“CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS — to prevent terrorism,” Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.

In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to “career counseling.” DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.

One grant recipient called Fugate’s appointment “an insult” to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.

“They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem,” the grantee said. “Now that’s all gone.”

Critics of Fugate’s appointment stress that their anger isn’t directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administration’s seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.

“The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions,” a former Homeland Security official said. “Who’s going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik?”

Season of Attacks

Spring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.

In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on “security failures.” Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.

Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.

June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspect’s charges include a federal hate crime.

If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nation’s pared-down counterterrorism sector.

“If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you can’t scale up staff once they’re fired,” said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administration’s shift away from prevention.

Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant “solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities” against terrorism and targeted violence.

But Homeland Security’s budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it “does not align with DHS priorities.”

The former Homeland Security official said the decision “means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States.”

“Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of high organizational performance,” Betsy DeVos continued, adding that all people were welcome in the Department of Education. The memo ended with a call for employees to “actively embrace” principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.

As part of that push, Quay Crowner was among the top education officials who enrolled in the “diversity change agent program.” Crowner thought little of it at the time. She had over two decades filled director-level human resources roles at several federal agencies, including the IRS and Government Accountability Office, and she’d participated in seminars on leadership and workplace discrimination. But five years later, as Trump entered office a second time, his administration’s tune on DEI had changed. Crowner was abruptly placed on leave under Trump’s executive order to dismantle DEI programs across the federal government.

As a longtime manager familiar with federal hiring and firing policies, Crowner, 55, believed she knew what it looked like to be unfairly targeted. Her current job as the director of outreach, impact and engagement at the Education Department was not connected to diversity initiatives. She said the only part of her responsibilities that could have been considered DEI was that her team guided students who’d had trouble navigating financial assistance applications; while most people who seek federal student aid are from disadvantaged backgrounds, her office was a resource for any and all and had no diversity mandate. She was not involved with hiring and retention efforts.

More troubling, she said, was that she was the only person on her team who had been let go, and her bosses refused to answer her questions about her dismissal. When she and colleagues from different departments began comparing notes, they found they had one thing in common. They had all attended the training encouraged under DeVos. They also noticed something else: Most of them were Black women.

“We are still just in utter shock that the public service we took an oath to complete … has fallen apart,” said Crowner, whose bills related to an injury and health issues are likely to mount as she loses her federal health care coverage.

“We never imagined that this would be something that would happen to us.”

Her experience is part of a largely untold story unfolding as Trump dismantles civil rights and inclusion programs across government: Many of those being forced out, like Crowner, are Black women who spent decades building a career of government service, only to see those careers shattered in a sudden purge.

ProPublica interviewed Crowner and two other career civil servants, all Black women, who are among the hundreds of fired federal employees represented in a legal action brought against the Trump administration. Filed in March with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board by legal teams including the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the case contends the administration violated the First Amendment rights of employees by targeting them for holding views perceived as contrary to the Trump 2.0 doctrine.

What has received less attention is the suit’s claim that the administration also violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They claim the DEI purge disproportionately affected those who aren’t white men.

Hard numbers documenting the demographics of those forced out by Trump are hard to attain. The Trump administration has provided little information on those being fired, and a revolving door of firings and reinstatements in some departments makes capturing formal figures even more challenging.

But a broad assessment of Trump’s firings by ProPublica and other media shows the agencies with the most diverse staffs are often the hardest hit. Before the firings, the Education Department’s staff was majority nonwhite, with Black women making up about 28% of workers, the most recent federal data shows. According to a New York Times tracker of the firings, that department has seen a reduction of about 46% of its staff. The staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development was majority women and nearly 40% racial and ethnic minorities before Trump all but eliminated it.

Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, where white personnel make up two-thirds of the workforce, most of it men, staff has been cut just 1%, according to the most recently available federal data and the Times tracker. The Department of Energy, more than 70% white, saw a reduction of about 13%.

Lawyers representing federal employees whose careers and families have been uprooted cite anecdotal evidence of disparate impact, a key ingredient in many successful civil rights claims.

“We have observed approximately 90% of the workers targeted for terminations due to a perceived association with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are women or nonbinary,” said Kelly Dermody, one of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, who have asked an administrative law judge to approve class-action status for the fired employees.

Nearly 80% of potential case plaintiffs are nonwhite, she said; most of that cohort are Black women.

A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.

Since reentering office, Trump has made clear his feelings about diversity programs, referring to them in an executive order as “Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.”

Disparate Impact?

Ronicsa Chambers graduated from Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in 1990. Afterward, she got an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and landed a finance job with U.S. Airways, where she fell in love with aviation.

In 2005, she left the private sector to work in finance for the Federal Aviation Administration. She worked her way up the chain and, by 2019, helped create a program to address a lack of diversity in the agency by gaining the interest of graduates from historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.

In 2022, Chambers was named Air Traffic Manager of the Year. “I didn’t even know that non-air traffic controllers could get that award, and I was so proud,” she said. As titles in government do, hers changed in December 2024 as her team’s mission expanded to help FAA employees with issues such as providing accommodations so people with disabilities could do their jobs.

Then this January, she felt as though she’d been hit “in the face with a brick.” She was told on a video conference call that her FAA career was over. Though her work had involved DEI in the past, it was no longer in her title or her job description, and she said no one had asked her what her job entailed before she was removed.

She said she began moving through stages of grief but keeps coming back to anger because her team members — five Black women and one white man with a disability — were told they would be reassigned. She says they never were.

“As far as we know, we’re the only ones still on administrative leave,” she said, referring to those removed as part of Trump’s DEI executive order.

It’s unclear if the FAA, whose workforce was largely spared due to recent airline safety concerns, has fired or even fired and rehired people in departments outside of Chambers’ team. A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

The FAA has long been criticized for its lack of diversity. According to the most recent federal data, the agency was composed of 57% white men compared with 4.4% Black women.

Scott Michelman, an ACLU of DC attorney working on the complaint against the Trump administration, said Chambers’ case underscores how mass firings aimed at people who had even a peripheral connection to a DEI program, past or present, “harms the American people.”

“It takes dedicated, experienced, award-winning civil servants out of their job, their expertise, the place where we as the public want them and need them so that our government works for us,” he said. “This is a lose-lose.”

Key to their case is the argument that minority workers were disparately impacted, a long-held civil rights theory at which Trump has taken direct aim. In April, Trump issued an executive order to broadly eliminate that doctrine from civil rights enforcement, one of many steps he’s taken to reverse the traditional role of the federal government in protecting individuals from issues such as housing and employment discrimination.

For instance, the Trump administration gutted the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which was tasked with ensuring equal treatment for students regardless of gender and race, and instead focused that office at targeting transgender athletes and their schools.

Lawyers and former employees say focusing on people who may have had some DEI training or job duties would cause greater harm to nonwhite employees. And historically, the federal government has been a prominent force in upward mobility.

“For a segment of Black America, the federal government has been crucial to stepping up,” said Marcus Casey, an economist and associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. The opening of federal work following the Civil Rights Movement provided an alternative to manual labor, teaching or ministerial work in the form of white-collar jobs and skills training that many took into private sector jobs.

Today, Black people make up about 18.6% of the federal workforce, larger than their percentage in the overall U.S. workforce, 12.8%, according to the Pew Research Center.

“So, you think about HBCU graduates, like Howard University, a lot of these people tell us the same story: ‘This is where I started. This is where I got my first internship,’” Casey said.

Upward Mobility

Sherrell Pyatt’s family story is quintessentially American.

Her great-grandfather served in the Vietnam War and, on his return, took a job in the U.S. Postal Service, a key employer in the story of upward mobility for middle-class Black families. His granddaughter, Pyatt’s mother, also found a career at the Postal Service. So, even though she would attain more education than the previous three generations, it seemed fitting that eventually Pyatt would find herself at the Postal Service.

Pyatt grew up in the Bronx, New York City’s poorest borough, but tested well enough to attend a private school. She became the first of her family to get a degree, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked to pay tuition. She got a master’s degree and worked at a nonprofit before landing a job in 2014 with the Postal Service, shaping policy as a government relations specialist.

While at USPS, she coordinated with Customs and Border Protection to stop drug shipments through the mail. That experience, as well as her fluency in Spanish, led her to a similar role at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While there, she was involved in immigrant removal operations as part of Trump’s first-term “zero tolerance” clampdown on border crossings. She next transferred to CBP, where she helped investigate deaths of migrants in federal custody and rampant racism in a Facebook group of Border Patrol agents.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, both of her parents fell ill, and she moved to an Atlanta suburb to care for them. To make the move work, she transitioned to a job at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where she worked as a supply chain analyst, ensuring that equipment such as medical masks made their way to U.S. hospitals. In early 2024, she moved yet again, to the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates allegations of rights abuses lodged by both immigrants and U.S. citizens.

“My team was almost exclusively African Americans, and I think it’s just because of the experience of Black people in this country,” Pyatt said. “We seem to be more likely to go into those types of roles — one, because we have experience, and two, because of the passion to make a difference.”

In March, the Trump administration fired nearly all 150 employees in that office, including Pyatt. A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about her firing.

“I think it was an easy target to get rid of people of color and people who fight for people of color,” Pyatt said. “It’s absolutely a way to attack people of color, people who are differently abled, people who don’t agree with what this administration is.”

Pyatt’s sudden loss of a career wrought instant consequences for her family. She was the primary breadwinner, but now her husband, who works for the Postal Service, provides the only income. They worry they won’t be able to make the mortgage payments on their home for the long run. Their three daughters, all middle school age, may no longer be able to attend their private Christian school or play softball.

Career federal employees like Pyatt are supposed to be able to petition for a transfer or receive preference in hiring at other agencies. Despite having worked for the federal government for more than a decade, at five agencies, including four Homeland Security posts, Pyatt says she’s faced nothing but silence.

“So it’s little things like that that this administration is doing that makes it really feel like they’re targeting people like me, people who love the country, come from a family that has served the country for generations, did what we were supposed to do,” Pyatt said through tears. “And it just doesn’t matter.”

It’s a tough time for the rank-and-file tech worker or computer science graduate looking for a job. The Silicon Valley giants have laid off tens of thousands in the past couple years. The longstanding threat of offshoring persists, while the new threat of AI looms.

There is seemingly one reason for hope, which you won’t find in popular hiring websites like Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter. It’s exclusively in the help-wanted classifieds in printed newspapers. Every Sunday, metropolitan newspapers across the country are full of listings for tech jobs, with posted salaries sometimes exceeding $150,000. If you’ve got tech skills, it seems, employers are crying out for you, week after week.

One day this spring, I decided to test this premise. I set out with the classified pages from the most recent Sunday edition of The Washington Post, which were laden with tech job offerings in the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland.

First, I drove to the address given for one of the employers, Sapphire Software Solutions, whose ad said it was looking for someone to “gather and analyze data and business requirements to facilitate various scrum ceremonies for multiple business systems and processes.” I arrived at an office building in Ashburn, Virginia, near Dulles International Airport. But the receptionist in the appointed suite looked confused when I asked for Sapphire.

“This is virtual office,” she said, in a heavy Eastern European accent. “We have many kinds of virtual offices.” She gestured at a long filing-cabinet drawer that was open behind her, full of folders. “You must mail to them.”

From there, I drove 2 miles to another company advertising for help, Optimum Systems, whose address turned out to be an office park full of dental practices. But the office door said nothing about Optimum, instead carrying a sign for an accountant and a different tech firm. It was dark and empty.

And from there, I drove 6 miles to a company called Softrams, which was advertising for a “Full Stack Developer.” I walked into an office in a building that also housed a driving school. The reception area was empty. I called hello, and a woman appeared. I told her I was a reporter wanting to learn more about the listing. She was surprised and asked if she could read the ad in my hand. “I’ll check with the team and get back to you,” she said.

A few days later, after similarly mysterious visits to other offices, I reached the woman, Praveena Divi, on the phone. “This ad is for a PERM filing,” she said. “A filing for a green card.”

To anybody familiar with the PERM system, those words meant the ad was not really intended to find applicants. I had entered one of the most overlooked yet consequential corners of the United States immigration system: the process by which employers sponsor tech workers with temporary H-1B visas as a first step to getting them the green card that entitles them to permanent residency in the U.S. It is a process that nearly everyone involved admits is nonsensical, highly vulnerable to abuse, as well as a contributor to inequities among domestic and foreign tech workers.

Yet the system has endured for decades, largely out of public view. There is occasional debate over the roughly 120,000 workers from overseas who are awarded H-1B visas every year for temporary high-skilled employment. Last December, a tiff erupted between billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, on the one side, and MAGA champions including Steve Bannon, over the formers’ claims that H-1B workers are needed because the homegrown tech workforce is inadequate. But almost as quickly as it started, the spat vanished from the news.

There is even less attention given to what happens with these foreign workers — three quarters of whom are now from India — when many decide they want to stay beyond the six-year maximum allowed for an H-1B recipient (a three-year term can be renewed once). To qualify for a green card, workers must get their employers to sponsor them via the Permanent Labor Certification process, aka PERM. And to do that, employers must demonstrate that they made a sincere effort to find someone else — a U.S. citizen or permanent resident — to do the job instead.

What’s striking about this requirement is that, as a result of choices made by legislators 35 years ago, the effort to find a citizen is not expected at the front end, when employers are considering hiring workers from abroad. At that point, employers simply enter the lottery for H-1Bs, and if they get one, they can use it.

Only once a company has employed someone for five or six years and become committed to helping that person stay in the country permanently must the company show that it is trying to find someone else. It’s no surprise that the efforts at this point can be less than sincere.

This is where the newspaper ads come in. Under U.S. Department of Labor rules dating back to the era before the worldwide web, employers must post the job for which PERM certification is being sought for 30 days with a state workforce agency and in two successive Sunday newspapers in the job’s location.

This makes for a highly ironic juxtaposition: pages of print ads paid for by tech employers, many of them the same Silicon Valley giants that have helped eviscerate newspaper classifieds and drive down print newspaper circulation to the point that it can be hard even to find a place to buy a paper in many communities.

These columns of ads that are not really looking for applicants underscore the challenges facing American tech workers and the striking disparities in the current immigration landscape. While restaurants, meatpackers and countless other businesses now risk having workers targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tech employers have largely escaped Trump administration scrutiny for their use of foreign labor. Among the companies sponsoring many H-1B employees for green cards every year are ones aligned with President Donald Trump, such as Oracle, Palantir and Musk’s Tesla.

But the PERM system also takes a toll on its supposed beneficiaries, the temporary employees seeking permanent residency. Even after their PERM applications are approved, they must typically wait more than 10 years before getting a green card, a long wait even by the standards of the U.S. immigration system. In the interim, it can be hard for them to leave their sponsoring employers, which exposes them to overwork at jobs that often pay less than what their American counterparts receive.

Whichever way you look at it, said Ronil Hira, a Howard University political science professor and research associate at the Economic Policy institute, the PERM process is crying out for reform. As he put it, “Everyone in the industry knows it’s a joke.”

Divi, the manager at Softrams, was quite forthcoming about how PERM works at the 450-person company, whose largest client is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and which was bought last year by another company, Tria. She told me that Softrams had 69 employees on H-1B visas, had never hired another applicant during the PERM process and had received zero applicants from the latest ads.

I had a much harder time getting through to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn, whose website states that it’s “a leading provider of IT staffing solutions and services since 2011” and that it also has offices in the Northern California town of Dublin, plus Hyderabad, India. The company’s phone directory offers options for, among others, “recruiting” and “immigration.” When I chose the latter, I reached a man who sounded surprised by the call and said, “Give me some time.” I never heard back from him, so I called back days later and pushed the option for “recruiting.” This time, the person who answered hung up on me. Finally, I picked the option for human resources and reached a woman who told me to send an email. I did, and never heard back.

Fortunately, one can learn a lot about the PERM process from Department of Labor records, which list all of the roughly 90,000 PERM applications submitted every year. The 2024 list shows Sapphire with 51 applications — a striking number for a company that gives its size as 252 employees. The jobs include computer systems analysts offered $96,158, software developers offered $100,240 and web developers offered $128,731. All of the applications were approved by the government, as is true of virtually all applications under the PERM process.

The federal listings don’t list the names of the employees whom the companies are sponsoring for PERM certification, but they do show their nationalities and where they received their degrees. All but one of Sapphire’s 51 were from India; their degrees came from a mix of American institutions (among them the University of South Florida and University of Michigan-Flint) and Indian ones (among them Visvesvaraya Technological University and Periyar University.)

All of the Sapphire applications were advertised in The Washington Post. And all list the same immigration attorney, Soo Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I called and asked her about the company’s applications. Sapphire, she said, is “just one of the companies I do.” I inquired about the PERM process, and she demurred, telling me to ask AI instead.

I encountered similar resistance and intrigue when I made the rounds in a different metro area with a burgeoning tech sector: Columbus, Ohio. Here also, several of the job listings in The Columbus Dispatch led to empty or abandoned offices or to buildings that were mail-drops for dozens of companies.

When I sought out Vizion Technologies, which had listed three jobs, I found a single-story office park in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus. Vizion’s office, adjacent to that of a cleaning company, was empty, save for a Keurig machine and some magazines. I called the company’s number and asked the man who answered about the listings. “This is a PERM ad,” he said freely. But, he said, he would consider other applicants. Had any come across the transom? I asked. No, he said. “But you never know.”

After an unilluminating visit to another company, I headed to EDI-Matrix, which had advertised for software programmers. At the company’s small office, I met John Sheppard, a manager. He said the owner, Shafiullah Syed, was for the time being in India, where a quarter of the company’s 40 employees were based, and where 20 of the Ohio-based staff was from. The company, founded in 2008, provides tech support for state government and private-sector clients.

Were the ads in the Dispatch for PERM applicants? I asked. “Probably,” Sheppard said. “Our owner is a big believer in trying to find ways to help people.”

The story of how the PERM system — the full name is Program Electronic Review Management — came to be is a decadeslong tale of, depending on your perspective, misguided assumptions or self-interested machinations. Since the middle of the 20th century, temporary guest-worker programs had been on a separate track from employment-based permanent residency programs. It was difficult for guest workers to apply for permanent residency, a process that had long required employers to prove that they couldn’t find an American worker for the role.

But those separate tracks converged with the 1990 Immigration Act. Bruce Morrison, who helped draft the law as a Connecticut Democrat serving as chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, told me that the law’s goal was to constrict the use of temporary labor from abroad.

Previously, employers had been able to hire unlimited numbers of temporary skilled workers under vague language about “distinguished merit and ability.” The 1990 law created a new H-1B category that required a bachelor’s degree, established a cap of 65,000 visas per year and set a minimum wage level. Still, it spared employers from having to prove they couldn’t find U.S. workers for the job in question, on the logic that these were just temps filling a short-term role.

The hope, Morrison said, was to encourage employers to bring in skilled workers via the permanent residency pathway, on the theory that immigrants with green cards would, by being on stronger footing, be less likely to undercut wages for Americans than guest workers did.

Things worked out much differently. The law passed on the cusp of the Internet era as the job market was pushing toward shorter-term employment, especially in the tech world. A rapidly growing middle class in Asia was producing millions of tech workers eager to work in the U.S., especially English-speaking Indians.

And, crucially, the law allowed H-1B holders to apply for permanent residency.

Within just a few years, three-quarters of those applying for employer-based permanent residency were people who were already working for the employer in question, mostly on H-1Bs. Thus was created the backward situation of employers having to prove that they were looking for qualified applicants for a role that they had already filled with the person they were sponsoring. Their recruitment efforts were “perfunctory at best and a sham at worst,” wrote the Department of Labor’s office of inspector general in a scathing 1996 report.

The report found that there had been more than 136,000 applicants for 18,011 PERM openings that it examined, but that only 104 people were hired via advertisements — less than 1% — and those hirings were almost accidental. (The companies kept the foreign workers they were sponsoring, but came across a tiny smattering of qualified Americans, whom they also hired.) “The system is seriously flawed,” the report stated. “The programs are being manipulated and abused.”

In the years that followed, the demand for H-1B visas surged, due partly to the demand for Indian tech workers to assist with the Y2K threat and to the tech-bubble burst prompting companies to seek lower-wage workers. Under pressure from the tech industry, the government raised the cap for several years, as high as 195,000 visas annually, between 2001 and 2003.

This exacerbated a bottleneck already in the making: Tens of thousands of H-1B holders, many from India, were now seeking permanent residency as their visas neared expiration, but under the law, no single nationality could receive more than 7% of the 140,000 employment-based green cards awarded in a given year. Workers who had been approved for permanent residency could remain on extended H-1Bs while they waited for their green card, but this was an unstable limbo that further swelled the ranks of H-1Bs.

In 2005, the Department of Labor tried to address at least one part of the pipeline, the delays in approving employees for permanent residency. It introduced the new PERM process, which allowed employers simply to attest that the position in question was open to U.S. workers, that any who applied were rejected for job-related reasons and that the offered pay was at least the prevailing wage for that role. Employers also had to submit a report describing the recruitment steps taken and the number of U.S. applicants rejected. It was at this point that the print advertising requirement was clarified as two successive Sunday newspapers.

It became quickly apparent how easy it was for employers to game the system. Many advertised completely different positions in the newspaper ads compared to their own websites. Some directed applicants to send resumes to the company’s immigration lawyers rather than to human resources.

A viral video captured the absurdity. At a 2007 panel discussion, an immigration lawyer, Lawrence Lebowitz, laid out the mission in startlingly candid terms: “Our goal here of course is to meet the requirements, No. 1, but also do so as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our goal. And our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. In a sense, that sounds funny, but it’s what we’re trying to do here.”

The video caused a flurry of outrage, yet the system has survived to this day, largely unchanged, protected by congressional dysfunction and the interests that are served by the status quo, the tech industry and the immigration law bar.

Advocacy groups representing American tech workers have attacked the system repeatedly, challenging the notion that H-1Bs are bringing in the world’s “best and brightest” by pointing out that the program makes no attempt to identify exceptional talent beyond requiring a bachelor’s degree, relying instead on a lottery to award the visas. The real appeal of H-1Bs for employers, worker advocates say, is that they can pay their holders an average of 10% to 20% less, as several studies have found to be the case, which has helped suppress tech wages more broadly.

Yet the advocacy groups have struggled to mobilize sustained opposition. There was talk during the Obama administration of reforming PERM, but it fizzled amid the failure of broader immigration reform during his second term.

In 2020, the Department of Labor’s inspector general issued another critical report, calling attention to PERM’s vulnerability to abuse. It noted that when the department did full audit reviews of applications, which it did for 16% of them, it wound up rejecting a fifth of them, far more than the mere 3% that were rejected during the standard review. That suggested that many faulty applications were slipping through. “The PERM program relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria,” it concluded.

As for the newspaper ad requirement, the report noted with understatement, “Available data indicates newspapers are becoming a less effective means of notifying potential applicants in the U.S. about job opportunities. … U.S. workers are likely to be unaware of these employment opportunities due to the obsolete methods required.”

Since that report, there have been two notable bids for accountability. In December 2020, the Department of Justice filed suit against Facebook, alleging that the company was discriminating against U.S. citizens by routinely reserving jobs for PERM applicants. In a settlement nearly a year later, Facebook, which had denied any discrimination, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $4.75 million, pay up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of the alleged discrimination and conduct more expansive recruitment for slots in PERM applications.

In 2023, the DOJ announced a similar settlement with Apple, which also denied any discriminatory behavior but agreed to pay up to $25 million in back pay and civil penalties, conduct more expansive recruitment, train employees in anti-discrimination requirements and submit to DOJ monitoring for three years.

And yet, the PERM process carries on, with its own ecosystem. One firm, Atlas Advertising, offers the specific service of advertising jobs intended for PERM applicants. “Expertly place your immigration ads in leading newspapers, ensuring compliance and targeted reach for PERM certification,” Atlas urges potential customers.

I searched in vain for defenders of the process — major tech lobby groups either declined to comment or didn’t return my calls. Theresa Cardinal Brown has lobbied on immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Immigration Lawyers Association, but she, too, was critical of PERM. “Even if you are trying to sponsor someone who is already on the job, you have to act as if you aren’t,” she said. “Increasingly, this jury-rigged system isn’t working for anyone.”

Among those now decrying the system the most sharply is Morrison, the former Democratic congressman who helped write the 1990 law. In 2017, he told “60 Minutes” that H-1B “has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans.”

Morrison, who is now a lobbyist, was even more outspoken when I talked with him. He noted the H-1B caps have grown in recent years. The 65,000 cap laid out in 1990 no longer includes the thousands renewed every year, and there are an additional 20,000 visas for people with graduate degrees and 35,000-odd exemptions for universities, nonprofits and research organizations. This adds up to about 120,000 new H-1Bs per year. Meanwhile, the per-country cap for employer-based green cards last year was 11,200. The backlog of workers and family members awaiting green cards, mostly Indians, has swelled to more than 1 million, creating a vast army of what Morrison and others call “indentured” workers who are at the mercy of their employers.

“It’s fair to say that no American has ever gotten a job due to the certification system,” Morrison said. “It doesn’t do what it should do.”

One day, after many more hang-ups on calls to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn and 51 PERM applications on last year’s Department of Labor list, I finally reached one of their managers, Phani Reddy Gottimukkala.

I asked him whether the company had gotten any responses to its recent ads in The Washington Post. “That will be taken care of by the immigration department,” he said. More broadly, he said the PERM process was working well for the company. “Everything is fine because we have very strong attorneys working for us.”

Federal prosecutors in Texas identified 80 victims defrauded of nearly $40 million by Charles Carrier since 2018. Though Carrier agreed to plead guilty to only one count of felony wire fraud involving one $200,000 transfer, he admitted to the broader scheme as part of the deal and agreed to pay restitution — the amount of which has yet to be determined.

The charge also carries a maximum 20-year prison sentence and the possibility of millions of dollars in fines. A federal judge will decide the sentence.

Carrier owned Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, one of the most successful franchises in the HomeVestors chain, which is known for its “We Buy Ugly Houses” slogan. HomeVestors terminated Carrier’s franchise in October 2024, after receiving a tip that he had been defrauding investors. It has since sued him for infringing on the company’s assiduously protected trademark. Carrier has not yet responded to the lawsuit.

In a story published this month, ProPublica detailed how Carrier bilked millions of dollars from scores of investors across Texas, including both wealthy businesspeople and older adults of more modest means who depended on the investment income for daily expenses. According to new court documents, losses to individual investors range from $35,000 to $11.6 million. The plea agreement was filed in court two weeks after the article was published.

Carrier took loans from investors to finance his house-flipping business, initially using the money to buy and renovate older houses to sell for a profit. Carrier promised each loan would be secured by an ownership interest in a house and that he would pay 8%-10% interest in monthly installments over the course of the loan.

For many years, investors received reliable monthly payments. In 2018, however, Carrier started taking out multiple loans on individual properties, sometimes providing investors with deeds he never recorded and racking up debt far beyond the value of the houses, according to court documents. Carrier also admitted to forging signatures and notary stamps so he could sell properties without notifying the investors or paying off their notes, according to court documents. Carrier admitted to using investor money to “pay personal credit card balances, business operating expenses and interest obligations to earlier investors,” according to court documents.

The fact that Carrier’s plea deal contains only a single charge left some victims even more angry.

“That’s ridiculous,” said Ron Carver, who lost $300,000 and whose father lost $200,000 before he died. “They will let him plead out and he might get a slap on the wrist.”

A spokesperson for the U.S. attorney’s office said they can’t comment on a pending case.

Carrier’s lawyer, Tom Pappas, said it wasn’t Carrier’s “intention to defraud anybody of their money.”

“Pretty much all of his money was put into his business to try and make it successful so investors would be successful,” Pappas said, adding that Carrier didn’t fund a lavish lifestyle. Without providing details, Pappas said changes in the real estate market “overtook” Carrier and “the thing just got away from him.”

Although Carrier agreed to plead to only one count, the entirety of the fraud identified by prosecutors will be considered by the judge during sentencing.

Pappas said Carrier is “committed to repaying every investor every dollar he can to make them whole.” Pappas said he expects the restitution will likely be “much lower” than the $40 million in losses identified by prosecutors, as the lawyers are wrangling over the value of the investors’ losses. In February, Carrier signed an asset liquidation agreement allowing prosecutors to oversee the sale of his remaining properties, with the proceeds going toward restitution.

Pappas said he expects Carrier will serve time in prison.

“Depending on the amount of the loss, there’s a strong possibility he may go to jail,” he said. “But again, we are doing everything we can to make everybody as whole as we can.”

In Missouri, the 2025 legislative session was dominated by Republican lawmakers trying to reverse two major measures that voters had put on the ballot and approved just months before; one made abortion in the state legal again, while the other created an employee sick leave requirement.

GOP lawmakers in Alaska and Nebraska also have moved to roll back sick leave benefits that voters approved last year, while legislators in Arizona are pushing new restrictions on abortion access, despite voters six months ago approving protections.

At the same time, Republican leaders in Florida, Utah, Montana, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, Ohio, North Dakota and South Dakota have approved efforts to restrict citizen-led ballot initiatives or are considering measures to do so, essentially trying to make it harder for voters to change laws outside legislatures.

In some cases, legislators aren’t just responding to measures that voters approved; they’re acting shortly after citizen-led efforts failed but came too close for comfort, such as an abortion-rights initiative in Florida, which in November fell just short of the 60% of votes needed to pass and loosen the state’s ban on the procedure.

Republican elected officials across these states make strikingly similar arguments: They say the initiative process is susceptible to fraud and unduly influenced by out-of-state money. What’s more, they say that they, as elected officials, represent the true will of the people more than ballot initiatives do.

In his opening speech on the first day of Utah’s legislative session in January, Senate President Stuart Adams urged lawmakers to push back against citizen-led ballot initiatives, warning that “unelected special interest groups outside of Utah” were using the process to “override our republic” and “cast aside those who are duly elected.”

Utah lawmakers then passed a law tightening the process. They required initiative sponsors to detail how their proposal would be funded and, if it makes the ballot, pay for costly publication of the ballot language in newspapers across the state — potentially adding $1.4 million in expenses. They also voted to put a 2026 measure before voters that would require a 60% supermajority for any tax-related initiatives.

The battle between direct democracy and representative government isn’t new, and it hasn’t always been the domain of just Republicans. Democrats have done the same thing, although perhaps not with the same frequency, when voters have taken steps they had campaigned against.

What’s different now, political observers say, is that the tension has reached a new level. State lawmakers, primarily Republicans the past few years, are routinely trying to undermine voter majorities.

“This is very much connected to the rise of authoritarianism that we’ve seen across the country,” said Chris Melody Fields Figueredo, executive director of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, a nonprofit that tracks and supports ballot measures across the 26 states and the District of Columbia that allow some form of direct democracy. “They can’t win fairly, so they’re trying to rewrite the rules to get their way no matter what a majority of folks in their state wants.”

In Missouri, overturning the will of voters has almost become the legislature’s main business. Lawmakers wasted no time moving to undo a constitutional amendment that legalized abortion up to fetal viability, advancing a new measure to place another amendment on the ballot that would ban it again.

They also moved to repeal a sick leave requirement and portions of a minimum wage increase, which had also passed through the initiative process but which Republicans have said are harmful to businesses.

The bill has gone to Gov. Mike Kehoe, who has indicated that he will sign it.

In addition, Missouri lawmakers passed, and the governor signed, a new law that limits the ability of courts to intervene when the legislature writes ballot language for proposed constitutional amendments.

Critics say the law opens the door to misleading ballot language, giving politicians and partisan officials more power to frame initiatives in a way that could mislead voters. Kehoe said in a statement that the law “streamlines complex procedures while protecting the rights of every Missourian.”

State Rep. Brian Seitz, a Republican from Branson, has supported multiple failed efforts to change the state’s initiative process — he’d prefer a 60% threshold rather than a simple majority, as it is now — and backed the sick leave repeal and the amendment to restore Missouri’s abortion ban.

“We’ve been elected in a representative republic to see to the needs of the people,” he said, “and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

State Rep. Ashley Aune, a Democrat from Kansas City and the House minority leader, recalled that one of her first fights as a lawmaker was over the expansion of Medicaid, which voters approved in 2020 but Republican lawmakers refused to fund the following year.

“They thought they were being clever — and of course, the courts told them they are not clever. They had to fund it,” Aune said. “But I’ve seen this nearly every year I’ve been here, and this year has been the absolute worst.”

In response to lawmakers’ efforts, a new campaign called Respect Missouri Voters is recruiting volunteers to collect signatures for a statewide ballot measure in November 2026. The measure would bar lawmakers from overturning voter-approved initiatives or undermining the citizens’ ability to use the initiative process.

In several states, Republican legislators are trying to change the initiative petition process by imposing stricter rules on who can collect signatures and how petitions are submitted and raising the threshold for passing amendments. They are also trying to limit out-of-state funding, shorten signature-gathering windows and give themselves more power to rewrite or block voter-approved measures.

Arkansas is one example of where this is playing out. Last year, abortion rights supporters turned in more than 100,000 signatures for a ballot measure that would have loosened the state’s near-total abortion ban. But the state Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s ruling blocking the proposal from making the ballot, deciding that organizers had made a technical error in how they submitted paperwork for a portion of the signatures that had been collected by paid canvassers.

This year, state Sen. Kim Hammer, a Republican from Benton, led a push to pass a series of laws aimed at the ballot initiative process. They place requirements on petition circulators and signers, including mandates that the signer read the ballot title in the presence of a canvasser or have it read to them, that canvassers ask signers to show photo ID and that they inform signers that petition fraud is a crime. They also expand state oversight, giving officials more power to disqualify petitions.

The League of Women Voters of Arkansas has filed a lawsuit challenging some of the new laws, along with existing restrictions, arguing that they violate the U.S. Constitution. Arkansas Secretary of State Cole Jester said in a statement that they were “basic, commonsense protections, and we look forward to fighting for them.”

Hammer said he’s concerned that outside groups are using Arkansas as a testing ground for policy changes, and he wants to prevent that by keeping the ballot process “as pure as possible.”

“They drop the rock in the state, and it just ripples out from there,” he said in an interview. “So it’s to the benefit of abortionists and to the benefit of the marijuana industry and others to be able to do whatever they have to do to get a foothold.”

Dan Smith, a political scientist at the University of Florida who studies direct democracy, said it wasn’t long ago that voters might punish a candidate for opposing a popular policy — like raising the minimum wage or expanding health care.

But that connection has largely been severed in the minds of voters, he said. Today, many voters experience a kind of cognitive dissonance: They support abortion rights or paid sick leave at the ballot box but continue voting for politicians who oppose those policies.

They don’t see the contradiction, he said, because partisanship has become more about team loyalty than policy.

Smith said the disconnect is reinforced by gerrymandered legislative and congressional districts, which are drawn to favor Republican candidates and help maintain their supermajority control. They can override or ignore voter-backed initiatives with little political risk.

Direct democracy in the United States took root during the Progressive Era of the late 1800s and early 1900s, especially in the West and Midwest, where newer states had less entrenched political structures and were more open to reform. These regions were often skeptical of centralized power, and reformers pushed for tools like the initiative and referendum to give citizens a way to bypass political machines and corporate influence.

The first state to adopt the initiative process into its constitution was South Dakota in 1898. Now it’s one of the states where legislators are trying to undermine it.

Most East Coast and Southern states never adopted initiative processes at all. Their constitutions didn’t allow for it, and lawmakers have shown little interest in surrendering power to voters through direct legislation. Some academics have argued the process is barred by Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution, which requires states to produce governments by electoral processes.

While efforts to override or undermine voter-approved initiatives are now almost exclusively driven by Republicans, Democratic-controlled legislatures have also tried to rein in direct democracy when it clashed with their priorities.

After California voters passed Proposition 13 in 1978 to limit property taxes — and later Proposition 209 in 1996 banning affirmative action — Democrats sought ways to blunt or undo their impact through legislation and legal challenges.

In the mid-2000s, Colorado Democrats began pushing to restrict the initiative process after a wave of conservative-backed measures passed at the ballot box. A key example was Amendment 43, a 2006 initiative placed on the ballot by citizen petition, which amended the state constitution to define marriage as between “one man and one woman.” It passed with 55% of the vote and effectively banned same-sex marriage in the state until the U.S. Supreme Court overturned such bans in 2015.

In 2008, Colorado’s Democratic-controlled legislature placed a referendum on the ballot that would have made it harder for people to petition to change the state constitution. The measure, also backed by some Republicans, failed at the polls. But in 2016, voters approved a citizen-initiated measure that raised the bar for constitutional amendments by requiring signatures from every state senate district and a 55% supermajority to pass. More recently, Democrats have sought to overturn Colorado’s “taxpayer bill of rights,” which voters enacted through initiative petition in 1992. The measure prohibits tax increases without voter approval. Democrats have argued the law may be unconstitutional because it strips the legislature of its budgetary authority.

But most of the states that allow citizen-led ballot initiatives are Republican-controlled, which means the fight over direct democracy is often playing out in red states. At the center of the GOP argument is the claim that voter initiatives are driven by outside influence and funding. Smith called it “hypocrisy.”

“If you ask lawmakers to not take any outside contributions when they are running for office, they would find every reason under the sun to oppose it,” he said.

Efforts to change the initiative process have themselves drawn heavy outside funding. In August 2023, Ohio voters decisively rejected Issue 1, a Republican-backed proposal to raise the threshold for passing constitutional amendments from a simple majority to 60%. The measure also would have made it harder to place initiatives on the ballot by requiring signatures from at least 5% of voters in all 88 counties.

Backers claimed the changes were needed to protect the constitution from out-of-state special interests — but the campaign itself was funded mostly by $4 million from conservative Illinois billionaire Dick Uihlein.

Just three months later, Ohio voters returned to the polls and approved a new Issue 1 — this time a constitutional amendment guaranteeing abortion rights up to fetal viability. It passed with nearly 57% of the vote.

In 2006, Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment to raise the threshold for future amendments to 60% — but the measure itself passed with just 57.8% of the vote, a margin that wouldn’t meet the standard it created.

That irony came into sharp focus in 2024, when a ballot measure to protect abortion rights received 57% of the vote — more support than a similar measure in Missouri, which passed with just under 52% — yet failed in Florida due to the supermajority rule.

After the election, Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican lawmakers began pushing for even tougher restrictions on the process, pointing to a report issued by the governor’s administration alleging “widespread petition fraud” in the push for the abortion rights measure. The governor signed a law prohibiting felons, non-U.S. citizens and non-Florida residents from serving as petition circulators; limiting the number of signed petitions a volunteer can collect before being required to register as an official canvasser and requiring signers to write either the last four numbers of their Social Security or driver’s license number on petitions.

In response, several groups have filed a federal lawsuit challenging the new restrictions. Florida Decides Healthcare, which is working to place a Medicaid expansion initiative on the 2026 ballot, has argued that the law imposes vague and punitive restrictions that chill political speech and civic engagement. The state has not yet responded to the lawsuit; the lead defendant, Secretary of State Cord Byrd, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

“I think that what happens here is being watched and copied,” Mitch Emerson, executive director of Florida Decides Healthcare, said in an interview. “And if these attacks on democracy work in Florida, they’ll spread.”

Under the watchful gaze of security guards, dozens of people streamed through metal detectors to enter Temple Israel one evening this month for a town hall meeting on hate crimes and domestic terrorism.

The cavernous synagogue outside of Detroit, one of several houses of worship along a suburban strip nicknamed “God Row,” was on high alert. Police cars formed a zigzag in the driveway. Only registered guests were admitted; no purses or backpacks were allowed. Attendees had been informed of the location just 48 hours in advance.

The intense security brought to life the threat picture described onstage by Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, the recipient of vicious backlash as a gay Jewish Democrat who has led high-profile prosecutions of far-right militants, including the kidnapping plot targeting the governor. Nessel spoke as a slideshow detailed her office’s hate crimes unit, the first of its kind in the nation. She paused at a bullet point about working “with federal and local law enforcement partners.”

“The federal part, not so much anymore, sadly,” she said, adding that the wording should now mention only state and county partners, with help from Washington “TBD.”

“The federal government used to prioritize domestic terrorism, and now it’s like domestic terrorism just went away overnight,” Nessel told the audience. “I don’t think that we’re going to get much in the way of cooperation anymore.”

Across the country, other state-level security officials and violence prevention advocates have reached the same conclusion. In interviews with ProPublica, they described the federal government as retreating from the fight against extremist violence, which for years the FBI has deemed the most lethal and active domestic concern. States say they are now largely on their own to confront the kind of hate-fueled threats that had turned Temple Israel into a fortress.

The White House is redirecting counterterrorism personnel and funds toward President Donald Trump’s sweeping deportation campaign, saying the southern border is the greatest domestic security threat facing the country. Millions in budget cuts have gutted terrorism-related law enforcement training and shut down studies tracking the frequency of attacks. Trump and his deputies have signaled that the Justice Department’s focus on violent extremism is over, starting with the president’s clemency order for militants charged in the storming of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

On the ground, security officials and extremism researchers say, federal coordination for preventing terrorism and targeted violence is gone, leading to a state-level scramble to preserve efforts no longer supported by Washington, including hate-crime reporting hotlines and help with identifying threatening behavior to thwart violence.

This year, ProPublica has detailed how federal anti-extremism funding has helped local communities avert tragedy. In Texas, a rabbi credited training for his actions ending a hostage-taking standoff. In Massachusetts, specialists work with hospitals to identify young patients exhibiting disturbing behavior. In California, training helped thwart a potential school shooting.

Absent federal direction, the fight against violent extremism falls to a hodgepodge of state efforts, some of them robust and others fledgling. The result is a patchwork approach that counterterrorism experts say leaves many areas uncovered. Even in blue states where more political will exists, funding and programs are increasingly scarce.

“We are now going to ask every local community to try to stand up its own effort without any type of guidance,” said Sharon Gilmartin, executive director of Safe States Alliance, an anti-violence advocacy group that works with state health departments.

Federal agencies have pushed back on the idea of a retreat from violent extremism, noting swift responses in recent domestic terrorism investigations such as an arson attack on Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro in April and a car bombing this month outside a fertility clinic in California. FBI officials say they’re also investigating an attack that killed two Israeli Embassy staff members outside a Jewish museum in Washington in a likely “act of targeted violence.”

Federal officials say training and intelligence-sharing systems are in place to help state and local law enforcement “to identify and respond to hate-motivated threats, such as those targeting minority communities.”

The Justice Department “is focused on prosecuting criminals, getting illegal drugs off the streets, and protecting all Americans from violent crime,” said a spokesperson. “Discretionary funds that are not aligned with the administration’s priorities are subject to review and reallocation.” The DOJ is open to appeals, the spokesperson said, and to restoring funding “as appropriate.”

In an email response to questions about specific cuts to counterterrorism work, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump is keeping promises to safeguard the nation, “whether it be maximizing the use of Federal resources to improve training or establishing task forces to advance Federal and local coordination.”

Michigan, long a hotbed of anti-government militia activity, was an early adopter of strategies to fight domestic extremism, making it a target of conservative pundits who accuse the state of criminalizing right-wing organizing. An anti-Muslim group is challenging the constitutionality of Nessel’s hate crimes unit in a federal suit that has dragged on for years.

In late December, after a protracted political battle, Michigan adopted a new hate crime statute that expands an old law with additions such as protections for LGBTQ+ communities and people with disabilities. Right-wing figures lobbed threatening slurs at the author, state Rep. Noah Arbit, a gay Jewish Democrat who spoke alongside Nessel at Temple Israel, which is in his district and where he celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Arbit acknowledged that his story of a hard-fought legislative triumph is dampened by the Trump administration’s backsliding. In this political climate, Arbit told the audience, “it is hard not to feel like we’re getting further and further away” from progress against hate-fueled violence.

The politicians were joined onstage by Cynthia Miller-Idriss, who leads the Polarization & Extremism Research & Innovation Lab at American University and is working with several states to update their strategies. She called Michigan a model.

“The federal government is gone on this issue,” Miller-Idriss told the crowd. “The future right now is in the states.”

“The Only Diner in Town”

Some 2,000 miles away in Washington state, this month’s meeting of the Domestic Extremism and Mass Violence Task Force featured a special guest: Bill Braniff, a recent casualty of the Trump administration’s about-face on counterterrorism.

Braniff spent the last two years leading the federal government’s main office dedicated to preventing “terrorism and targeted violence,” a term encompassing hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and political violence. Housed in the Department of Homeland Security, the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships treated these acts as a pressing public health concern.

Part of Braniff’s job was overseeing a network of regional coordinators who helped state and local advocates connect with federal resources. Advocates credit federal efforts with averting attacks through funds that supported, for example, training that led a student to report a gun in a classmate’s backpack or programs that help families intervene before radicalization turns to violence.

Another project helped states develop their own prevention strategies tailored to local sensibilities; some focus on education and training, others on beefing up enforcement and intelligence sharing. By early this year, eight states had adopted strategies, eight others were in the drafting stage and 26 more had expressed interest.

Speaking via teleconference to the Seattle-based task force, Braniff said the office is now “being dismantled.” He resigned in March, when the Trump administration slashed 20% of his staff, froze much of the work and signaled deeper cuts were coming.

“The approach that we adopted and evangelized over the last two years has proven to be really effective at decreasing harm and violence,” Braniff told the task force. “I’m personally committed to keeping it going in Washington state and in the rest of the nation.”

A Homeland Security spokesperson did not address questions about the cuts but said in an email that “any suggestion that DHS is stepping away from addressing hate crimes or domestic terrorism is simply false.”

Since leaving government, Braniff has joined Miller-Idriss at the extremism research lab, where they and others aspire to build a national network that preserves an effort once led by federal coordinators. The freezing of prevention efforts, economic uncertainty and polarizing rhetoric in the run-up to the midterm elections create “a pressure cooker,” Braniff said.

Similar discussions are occurring in more than a dozen states, including Maryland, Illinois, California, New York, Minnesota and Colorado, according to interviews with organizers and recordings of the meetings. Overnight, grassroots efforts that once complemented federal work have taken on outsized urgency.

“When you’re the only diner in town, the food is much more needed,” said Brian Levin, a veteran extremism scholar who leads California’s Commission on the State of Hate.

Levin, speaking in a personal capacity and not for the state panel, said commissioners are “pedaling as fast as we can” to fill the gaps. Levin has tracked hate crimes since 1986 and this month released updated research showing incidents nationally hovering near record highs, with sharp increases last year in anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim targeting.

The commission also unveiled results of a study conducted jointly with the state Civil Rights Department and UCLA researchers showing that more than half a million Californians — about 1.6% of the population — said they had experienced hate that was potentially criminal in nature, such as assault or property damage, in the last year.

Prevention workers say that’s the kind of data they can no longer rely on the federal government to track.

“For a commission like ours, it makes our particular mission no longer a luxury,” Levin said.

Hurdles Loom

Some state-level advocates wonder how effectively they can push back on hate when Trump and his allies have normalized dehumanizing language about marginalized groups. Trump and senior figures have invoked a conspiracy theory imagining the engineered “replacement” of white Americans, as the president refers to immigrants as “poisoning the blood” of the country.

Trump uses the “terrorist” label primarily for his political targets, lumping together leftist activists, drug cartels and student protesters. In March, he suggested that recent attacks on Tesla vehicles by “terrorists” have been more harmful than the storming of the Capitol.

“The actions of this administration foment hate,” Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown, a Democrat, told a meeting last month of the state’s Commission on Hate Crime Response and Prevention. “I can’t say that it is solely responsible for hate activity, but it certainly seems to lift the lid and almost encourages this activity.”

A White House spokesperson rejected claims that the Trump administration fuels hate, saying the allegations come from “hoaxes perpetrated by left-wing organizations.”

Another hurdle is getting buy-in from red states, where many politicians have espoused the view that hate crimes and domestic terrorism concerns are exaggerated by liberals to police conservative thought. The starkest example is the embrace of a revisionist telling of the Capitol riots that plays down the violence that Biden-era Justice Department officials labeled as domestic terrorism.

The next year, citing First Amendment concerns, Republicans opposed a domestic terrorism-focused bill introduced after a mass shooting targeting Black people in Buffalo, N.Y.

The leader of one large prevention-focused nonprofit that has worked with Democratic and Republican administrations, speaking on condition of anonymity because of political sensitivities, said it’s important not to write off red states. Some Republican governors have adopted strategies after devastating attacks in their states.

A white supremacist’s rampage through a Walmart in El Paso in 2019 — the deadliest attack targeting Latinos in modern U.S. history — prompted Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to create a domestic terrorism task force. And in 2020, responding to a string of high-profile attacks including the Parkland high school mass shooting, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis released a targeted violence prevention strategy.

The pitch is key, the nonprofit director said. Republican officials are more likely to be swayed by efforts focused on “violence prevention” than on combating extremist ideologies. “Use the language and the framing that works in the context you’re working in,” the advocate said.

Still, gaps will remain in areas such as hate crime reporting, services for victims of violence and training to help the FBI keep up with the latest threats, said Miller-Idriss, the American University scholar.

“What feels awful about it is that there’s just entire states and communities who are completely left out and where people are going to end up being more vulnerable,” she said.

Cautionary Tale From Michigan

On a summer night in 1982, Vincent Chin was enjoying his bachelor party when two white auto workers at a nightclub outside of Detroit targeted him for what was then called “Japan bashing,” hate speech stemming from anger over Japanese car companies edging out American competitors.

The men, apparently assuming the Chinese-born Chin was Japanese, taunted him with racist slurs in a confrontation that spiraled into a vicious attack outside the club. The men beat 27-year-old Chin with a baseball bat, cracking his skull. He died of his injuries four days later and was buried the day after his scheduled wedding date.

Asian Americans’ outrage over a judge’s leniency in the case — the assailants received $3,000 fines and no jail time — sparked a surge of activism seeking tougher hate crime laws nationwide.

In Michigan, Chin’s killing inspired the 1988 Ethnic Intimidation Act, which was sponsored by a Jewish state lawmaker, David Honigman from West Bloomfield Township. More than three decades later, Arbit — the Jewish lawmaker representing the same district — led the campaign to update the statute with legislation he introduced in 2023 and finally saw adopted in December.

“It felt like kismet,” Arbit told ProPublica in an interview a few days after the event at Temple Israel. “This is the legacy of my community.”

But there’s a notable difference. Honigman was a Republican. Arbit is a Democrat.

“It’s sort of telling,” Arbit said, “that in 1988 this was a Republican-sponsored bill and then in 2023 it only passed with three Republican votes.”

Some Republicans argued that the bill infringes on the First Amendment with “content-based speech regulation.” One conservative state lawmaker told a right-wing cable show that the goal is “to advance the radical transgender agenda.”

Arbit said it took “sheer brute force” to enact new hate crimes laws in this hyperpartisan era. He said state officials entering the fray should be prepared for social media attacks, doxing and death threats.

In the summer of 2023, Arbit was waylaid by a right-wing campaign that reduced his detailed proposal to “the pronoun bill” by spreading the debunked idea it would criminalize misgendering someone. Local outlets fact-checked the false claims and Arbit made some 50 press appearances correcting the portrayal — but they were drowned out, he said, by a “disinformation storm” that spread quickly via right-wing outlets such as Breitbart and Fox News. The bill languished for more than a year before he could revive it.

In December 2024, the legislation passed the Michigan House 57-52, with a single Republican vote. By contrast, Arbit said, the bill was endorsed by an association representing all 83 county prosecutors, the majority of them Republicans. Those who see the effects up close, he said, are less likely to view violent extremism through a partisan lens.

“These are real security threats,” Arbit said. “Shouldn’t we want a society in which you’re not allowed to target a group of people for violence?”

“The Constitution is clear — and that of course is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion,” Miller said earlier this month in response to a question about Trump’s threat to suspend habeas corpus, the legal right of a prisoner to challenge their detention. Days after Miller’s remarks, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem issued the same warning when a member of a House panel asked her if the number of illegal border crossings meets the threshold for suspending the right. “I’m not a constitutional lawyer,” Noem said. “But I believe it does.”

Hard-liners have referred to immigrants as “invaders” as long as the U.S. has had immigration. By 2022, invasion rhetoric, which had previously been relegated to white nationalist circles, had become such a staple of Republican campaign ads that most of the public agreed an invasion of the U.S. via the southern border was underway.

Now, however, the claim that the U.S. is under invasion has become the legal linchpin of President Donald Trump’s sweeping anti-immigrant campaign.

The claim is Trump’s central justification for invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport roughly 140 Venezuelans to CECOT, the Salvadoran megaprison, without due process. (The administration cited different legal authority for the remaining deportees.) The Trump administration contends they are members of a gang, Tren de Aragua, that Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is directing to infiltrate and operate in the United States. Lawyers and families of many of the deportees have presented evidence the prisoners are not even members of Tren de Aragua.

The contention is also the throughline of Trump’s day one executive order “Protecting the American People Against Invasion.” That document calls for the expansion of immigration removal proceedings without court hearings and for legal attacks against sanctuary jurisdictions, places that refuse to commit local resources to immigration enforcement.

So far, no court has bought the idea that the U.S. is truly under invasion, as defined by the Constitution or the Alien Enemies Act, on the handful of occasions the government has used the argument to justify supercharged immigration enforcement. Four federal judges, including one Trump appointee, have said the situation Trump describes fails to meet the definition of an invasion. Tren de Aragua “may well be engaged in narcotics trafficking, but that is a criminal matter, not an invasion or predatory incursion,” U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein wrote. Indeed, Trump’s own intelligence agencies found that Maduro is not directing the gang. The Supreme Court has not ruled on the question but froze any more deportations without due process on May 16.

The Trump legal push has been in the works for years. After Trump left the White House, two of his loyalists, former Homeland Security official Ken Cuccinelli and his now-two-time budget chief Russell Vought, quietly built a consensus for the invasion legal theory among state Republican officials and ultimately helped persuade Texas to give it a test run in court.

Most legal scholars reject the idea that the wave of undocumented immigration fits the original definition of what an invasion is, but they worry nonetheless. When U.S. District Judge Stephanie L. Haines, a Trump appointee, issued a preliminary ruling earlier this month that allowed Trump to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, she did not label immigrants “invaders.” Instead, she proposed that Tren de Aragua was “the modern equivalent of a pirate or a robber.”

If the Supreme Court ultimately takes up the invasion question, a ruling like Haines’ offers a blueprint for sidestepping the issue while giving Trump what he wants, or for embracing the invasion theory wholesale, legal scholars said.

“All this really comes down to the issue of whether the United States Supreme Court is going to allow a president to behave essentially as an autocratic dictator if he’s prepared to make entirely fictitious factual declarations that trigger monarchical power,” said Frank Bowman, a legal historian and professor emeritus at the University of Missouri School of Law.

Under the Constitution, if the United States is invaded, Congress has the power to call up the militia and can allow the suspension of habeas corpus, the constitutional right that is the core of due process. The states, which are normally forbidden from unilaterally engaging in war, can do so according to the Constitution if they are “actually invaded.”

The Alien Enemies Act, an 18th century wartime law enacted during a naval conflict with France, also rests on the definition of an invasion. It allows the president to expel “aliens” during “any invasion or predatory incursion … by any foreign nation or government.” It has only ever been invoked three times, during the War of 1812 and World Wars I and II.

Habeas corpus has likewise been suspended only a handful of times in the Constitution’s nearly 240-year history, including during Reconstruction, to put down violent rebellions in the South by the Ku Klux Klan; in 1905, to suppress the Moro uprising against U.S. control of the Philippines; and in Hawaii after Pearl Harbor in order to place Japanese Americans under martial law. In each of these cases, the executive branch acted after receiving permission from Congress.

An exception was in 1861, when President Abraham Lincoln unilaterally suspended habeas corpus at the outbreak of the Civil War. This provoked a direct confrontation with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who ruled that only Congress was empowered to take such an extraordinary step. Congress later papered over the conflict by voting to give Lincoln the authority for the war’s duration.

Today, nearly every historian and constitutional scholar is in agreement that, when it comes to suspending habeas, Congress has the power to decide if the conditions are met.

“The Constitution does not vest this power in the President,” future Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote in 2014. “Scholars and courts have overwhelmingly endorsed the position that, Lincoln’s unilateral suspensions of the writ notwithstanding, the Constitution gives Congress the exclusive authority to decide when the predicates specified by the Suspension Clause are satisfied.” Even then, the Constitution only allows Congress to act in extreme circumstances — “when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.”

Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University who has closely followed these arguments, argues there is virtually no evidence that the drafters of the Constitution thought of an “invasion” as anything other than the kind of organized incursion that would traditionally spark a war.

“The original meaning of ‘invasion’ in the Constitution is actually what sort of the average normal person would think it means,” Somin said. “As James Madison put it, invasion is an operation of war. What Vladimir Putin did to Ukraine, that’s an invasion. What Hamas did to Israel, that’s an invasion. On the other hand, illegal migration, or drug smuggling, or ordinary crime — that’s not an invasion.”

In 1994, Florida Democratic Gov. Lawton Chiles Jr. filed the first modern-day lawsuit arguing otherwise. The Haitian and Cuban refugee crises had spawned a new wave of anti-immigration sentiment, and hard-liners accused the federal government of owing states billions for handling immigrants’ supposed crimes and welfare claims. Chiles, who died in 1998, took the concept one step further. He filed a $1.5 billion suit claiming the U.S. had violated the section of the Constitution stating the federal government “shall protect each [state] against Invasion.”

Federal courts slapped down his lawsuit — and a spate of copycatsuits from Arizona, California, New York and New Jersey — and the legal case for calling immigration an invasion died out.

In the late 2000s, a group of far-right voices began to revive this approach. Ken Cuccinelli was among the first and most strident. He was an early member of State Legislators for Legal Immigration, part of a powerful network of anti-immigration groups that pioneered efforts like ending birthright citizenship. The organization contended that immigrants were “foreign invaders” as described in the Constitution.

Cuccinelli evangelized for the theory as he rose from a state legislator to an official in Trump’s first Department of Homeland Security.

“Under war powers, there’s no due process,” Cuccinelli told Breitbart radio shortly before his appointment in the first Trump administration. “They can literally just line their National Guard up with, presumably with riot gear like they would if they had a civil disturbance, and turn people back at the border. … You just point them back across the river and let them swim for it.”

Cuccinelli got traction after Trump’s reelection loss. He joined a think tank Vought had founded as its immigration point man. During his time in the first Trump administration, Vought became frustrated that the president’s goals were frequently thwarted. He founded the Center for Renewing America, dedicated to a sweeping vision of remaking the government and society — what ultimately became Project 2025.

In remarks to a private audience at his think tank in 2023, Vought, who is now Trump’s budget chief and the intellectual force behind Trump’s unprecedented executive power grab, said he specifically championed the term “invasion” because it “unlocked” extraordinary presidential powers.

“One of the reasons why we were very, so insistent about coming up with the whole notion of the border being an ‘invasion’ because there were Constitutional authorities that were a part of being able to call it an invasion,” Vought said. Documented and ProPublica obtained videos of Vought’s speech last year. Vought and Cuccinelli did not respond to requests for comment.

In 2021 and 2022, Cucinelli, with Vought’s help, mounted press conferences and privately urged Gov. Doug Ducey of Arizona and Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas to proclaim that their states were being invaded.

After Arizona’s then-attorney general, Mark Brnovich, released a legal opinion in February 2022 proclaiming violent cartels had “actually invaded” and opened the door for Ducey to deploy the state’s National Guard, Vought bragged to his audience that he and Cuccinelli had personally provided draft language for the opinion. In a previous email to ProPublica, Brnovich acknowledged speaking to Cuccinelli but said his opinion was “drafted and written by hard working attorneys (including myself) in our office.”

Ducey never acted on the invasion theory. But Abbott was more receptive. He invoked the state’s war powers, citing the “actually invaded” clause, in a 2022 open letter to President Joe Biden. “Two years of inaction on your part now leave Texas with no choice,” he wrote. Andrew Mahaleris, a spokesperson for Abbott, said the governor “declared an invasion due to the Biden Administration’s repeated failures in upholding its constitutional duty to secure the border and defend states.”

Abbott ordered the banks of the Rio Grande river to be strung with razor wire and a shallow section to be obstructed by a 1,000-foot string of man-sized buoys and blades and signed a law, S.B. 4, giving state authorities the power to deport undocumented immigrants.

When the Justice Department sued, Abbott’s administration argued in legal briefs that its actions were justified in part because his state was under “invasion.” Twenty-three Republican attorneys general filed a brief in agreement.

“In both scope and effect, the wave of illegal migrants pouring across the border is like an invasion,” their brief read. “The Constitution’s text, the principle of sovereignty in the federal design, and the broader constitutional structure all support the conclusion that the States have a robust right to engage in self-defense. Contained within that right is presumptively acts to repel invasion.”

Texas’ invasion argument did not prevail. The 5th Circuit has blocked S.B. 4., and a lower court and a three-judge panel skewered Abbott’s constitutional argument in the buoy case. In 2024, the full 5th Circuit ruled under another law that Abbott was entitled to leave the floating barriers in place. It avoided ruling on Texas’ invasion claim altogether — but not without one judge dissenting. Trump appointee James Ho argued courts have no ability to second-guess executives about which threats rise to the level of an invasion and justify military action.

In his speech, Vought credited “the massive take-up rate” of the invasion legal theory to his and Cuccinelli’s behind-the-scenes efforts. Now the concept is being taken seriously by the president’s top advisers as they threaten to upend a core civil liberty.

“The definition of ‘invasion’ has broad implications for civil liberties — that’s pretty obvious,” Somin said. “They’re trying to use this as a tool to get around constitutional and other legal constraints on deportation and exclusion that would otherwise exist. But they also want to use it to undermine civil liberties” for U.S. citizens.

The Feb. 11 sales occurred near the stock market’s historic peak, just before it began to slide amid concerns about Trump’s tariff plans and ultimately plummeted after the president unveiled the details of the new tariffs on April 2.

Disclosure records filed by Duffy with the U.S. Office of Government Ethics show he sold between $75,000 and $600,000 of stock two days before Trump’s Feb. 13 announcement, and up to $50,000 more that day.

Transportation secretaries normally have little to do with tariff policy, but Duffy has presented himself as one of the intellectual forefathers of Trump’s current trade agenda. As a congressman in 2019, his last government position before Trump elevated him to his cabinet post, Duffy introduced a bill he named the “United States Reciprocal Trade Act.” The proposed legislation, which did not pass, in many ways mirrors Trump’s reciprocal tariff plan. Duffy worked on that bill with Trump’s trade adviser Peter Navarro. Trump’s tariffs were “the culmination of that work,” Duffy posted online, referring to his own bill in the House.

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned in the course of their official duties could violate the law. However, it’s unclear whether Duffy had any information about the timing or scale of Trump’s reciprocal tariff plans before the public did.

Trump had repeatedly promised to institute significant tariffs throughout the campaign. But during the first weeks of his term, investors were not panic selling, seeming to assume Trump wouldn’t adopt the far-reaching levies that led to the market crash following his “Liberation Day” announcement.

In response to questions from ProPublica, a Transportation Department spokesperson said an outside manager made the trades and Duffy “had no input on the timing of the sales” — a defense that ethics experts generally consider one of the strongest against questions of trading on nonpublic information.

His stock transactions “are part of a retirement account and not managed directly by the Secretary. The account managers must follow the guidance of the ethics agreement and they have done so.”

“The Secretary strongly supports the President’s tariff policy, but he isn’t part of the administration’s decisions on tariff levels,” the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson dismissed the notion that knowledge of Trump’s coming tariffs could constitute insider knowledge because “President Trump has been discussing tariffs since the 1980s.”

Duffy is the second cabinet secretary to have sold stock at an opportune time.

Last week, ProPublica reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares of Trump Media, the president’s social media company, on April 2. A government ethics agreement required Bondi to sell the shares within 90 days of her confirmation, a deadline that would have given her until early May, but why she sold on that date is unclear. After the market closed that day, Trump presented his tariffs, sending the market reeling.

Following ProPublica’s story, at least two Democratic members of Congress called for investigations. Bondi has yet to answer questions about whether she knew anything about Trump’s tariff plans before the public did. The Justice Department has not responded to questions about the trades.

Disclosure forms for securities trading by government officials do not require them to state the exact amount bought or sold but instead to provide a broad range for the totals of each transaction.

Duffy's disclosure records show he sold 34 stocks worth between $90,000 and $650,000 on Feb. 11 and Feb. 13. Per the ethics agreement he signed to avoid conflicts of interest as head of the Transportation Department, he was required to sell off stock in seven of those companies during his first three months in office. Cabinet members are typically required to divest themselves of financial interests that intersect with their department’s oversight role, which in Duffy’s case involve U.S. roadways, aviation and the rest of the nation’s transportation network. The ethics agreement was dated Jan. 13, and Duffy was confirmed by the senate on Jan. 28, meaning he had until late April to sell. His spokesperson said he provided his account manager with the ethics agreement on Feb. 7.

The stocks he sold in the other 27 companies were not subject to the ethics agreement. Those shares were valued somewhere between $27,000 and $405,000, according to the records. Among them were Shopify, whose merchants are impacted by the tariffs, and John Deere, the agricultural machinery manufacturer that has projected hundreds of millions of dollars in new costs because of Trump’s tariffs.

Other companies Duffy sold, like gambling firm DraftKings and food delivery service DoorDash, are less directly vulnerable to tariff disruptions. But even those companies will be impacted if Americans have less disposable cash to spend. Few stocks were not hit hard by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcements. The S&P 500, a broadbased index, fell almost 19% in the weeks that followed Duffy’s sales and 13% specifically after Trump unveiled the details of his reciprocal tariff plan. Since Trump unexpectedly walked back much of those initial tariffs, the market has rebounded.

There’s no indication that the cash from Duffy’s sales was immediately reinvested. He appears to have held on to parts of his portfolio, including a Bitcoin fund, treasuries, S&P 500 funds and stock in Madrigal Pharmaceuticals, an American biopharma company. (Duffy also purchased some Microsoft shares, one of the stocks he’s prohibited from holding, days earlier on Feb. 7, only to sell them on Feb. 11 with the rest of his sales.)

Trades by government officials informed by nonpublic information learned through their jobs could violate the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge, or STOCK, Act. The 2012 law clarified that executive and legislative branch employees cannot use nonpublic government information to trade stock and requires them to promptly disclose their trades.

But no cases have ever been brought under the law, and some legal experts have doubts it would hold up to scrutiny from the courts, which in recent years have generally narrowed what constitutes illegal insider trading. Current and former officials have also raised concerns that Trump’s Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission would not aggressively investigate activities by Trump or his allies.

The president’s selection of Duffy to lead the Department of Transportation was somewhat unexpected. Duffy, who came to fame when he starred in the reality show “The Real World” in the late 1990s, had last held public office in 2019 during Trump’s first term when he served as a Wisconsin congressman.

As a lawmaker, Duffy introduced the bill that would have made it easier for Trump, or any president, to levy new tariffs, a role that had long been largely reserved for Congress. The bill would have allowed the president to impose additional tariffs on imported goods if he determined that another country was applying a higher duty rate on the same goods when they were coming from America.

The bill did not pass, but Trump has essentially assumed that power by justifying new tariffs as essential to national security or in response to a national emergency. His Feb. 13 announcement called on his advisers to come up with new tariff rates on goods coming from countries around the world based on a number of restrictions he said those countries were placing on American products — not just through tariffs, but also with their exchange rates and industry subsidies.

Even the public rollout of Duffy’s bill and Trump’s tariffs were similar. Duffy released a spreadsheet showing how other countries tariffed particular goods at a higher rate than the U.S. Trump also used a spreadsheet during his rollout to show that his new tariffs were the same or lower than the trade restrictions other countries had placed on American goods.

More recently, Duffy has been a booster of Trump’s trade policies.

“LIBERATION DAY!!🇺🇸🇺🇸We’re not gonna take it anymore!💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻,” he tweeted two days after Trump unveiled his reciprocal tariffs on April 2. “This week, @POTUS took a historic step towards stopping other countries from ripping off the American worker and restoring Fair Trade. In Congress, I helped lead the US Reciprocal Trade Act with @RealPNavarro and the @WhiteHouse to expand the President’s tariff powers in his first term. I am so proud to have been able to share the culmination of that work, Liberation Day, with my family this week. Thank you at POTUS!”

Ronald Carver was skeptical when his investment adviser first tried to sell him on an “ugly houses” investment opportunity eight years ago. But once the Texas retiree heard the details, it seemed like a no-lose situation.

Carver would lend money to Charles Carrier, owner of Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, a high-producing franchise in the HomeVestors of America house-flipping chain known for its ubiquitous “We Buy Ugly Houses” advertisements. The business would then use the dollars to purchase properties in which Carver would receive an ownership stake securing his investment and an annual return of 9%, paid in monthly installments.

“Worst case, I would end up with a property worth more than what the loan was,” Carver said of the pitch.

Carver started with a $115,000 loan in 2017. And sure enough, the interest payments arrived each month.

He had worked three decades at a nuclear power plant, and retired without a pension and before he could collect Social Security. He and his wife lived off the investment income.

The deal seemed so good, Carver talked his elderly father into investing, starting with $50,000. As the monthly checks arrived as promised, both men increased their investments. By 2024, Carver estimates they had about $700,000 invested with Carrier.

Then, last fall, the checks stopped. The money Carver and his father had invested was gone.

Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from scores of investors, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews with people who said they lost money. The financial wreckage is strewn across Texas, having swept up both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes who dug into retirement savings on the advice of the same investment advisor used by Carver.

As early as 2020, Carrier had begun taking out multiple loans on individual properties — some of which he never owned. In cases reviewed by ProPublica, as many as five notes were recorded against a single property, far exceeding the property’s value. Carrier also failed to properly record many deeds that were supposed to secure the loans, accumulating more debt than he could ever repay while investors remained unaware they had no collateral for their investments.

“It’s incalculable the amount of damage this guy did,” said one investor who lost about $1 million and asked not to be named to avoid embarrassment and not to interfere with a criminal investigation into Carrier’s scheme. “He’s ruined some lives.”

Carrier, who declined an interview request, said in a brief phone conversation that he’s not trying to avoid responsibility for the harm he caused. “When this thing finally stopped, it was completely driven by me saying ‘enough’ and going to the people and saying, ‘Here’s the mess I’ve created,’” he said. “This is a mess created by me.”

Investors also blame HomeVestors. For nearly two decades, Carrier used the company’s carefully cultivated brand as the “largest homebuyer in the United States” to gain investors’ trust. They accuse HomeVestors of failing to provide oversight that could have prevented the fraud, despite claiming to hold its franchises accountable for best business practices. In itsanswers to their lawsuits, HomeVestors has denied responsibility for Carrier’s actions, claiming its franchises are independently operated, despite earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from Carrier’s business.

HomeVestors revoked Carrier’s franchise on Oct. 24, about the time interest payments stopped arriving in investors’ accounts. The company said it had received a tip on its ethics hotline — created in 2023, after ProPublica detailed predatory buying practices by multiple franchises. When confronted by HomeVestors, Carrier admitted that “he and his business had entered into debts that they could not pay,” a HomeVestors spokesperson said. The company reported him to the FBI. In May, HomeVestors filed suit against Carrier for trademark infringement and for not indemnifying it against these lawsuits.

“We take all allegations of misconduct incredibly seriously as demonstrated by our decisive action,” the spokesperson said. “It is truly disheartening for us that anyone who lent Mr. Carrier money was misled or harmed by his alleged fraudulent activity.”

Now, Carrier is under investigation by the Department of Justice, according to a recording of an April call between the lead prosecutor and potential victims. (The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.) A judge in one of the many lawsuits against Carrier has deemed allegations of fraudulent loans to be true because Carrier never answered the complaint. And the investors are in a race with one another to recoup even a small amount of what they lost, by either waiting for the DOJ to pay restitution, suing Carrier or trying to foreclose on properties still left in his portfolio.

Just months after learning they had lost all of their investments, and before any restitution could be paid, Carver’s father died.

A Top-Performing Franchise

In 2005, Carrier opened a HomeVestors franchise in Dallas, where HomeVestors is headquartered. In the early days, records show, he relied on a handful of institutional lenders to finance his house purchases. Soon, the Wharton School of Business MBA who had come to house-flipping following a career at Pepsi and a food service equipment company, started cultivating his wealthy friends for loans.

Carrier didn’t fit any stereotype of a glad-handing huckster with a bad loan to sell. Those who knew him describe him as a serious person, “cordial but very direct.” He always had files in front of him, constantly focusing on his business. It made him seem trustworthy, one investor said.

At HomeVestors, he was held up as a model franchise operator. C&C Residential Properties routinely made the top volume and top closer lists and was even named franchise of the year. Carrier led training sessions at company conferences and described his business as “the largest and most successful HomeVestors franchise in the United States” — a claim that remained on the website for Carrier’s business through early May.

“Chas Carrier, for maybe 15 years, was one of the golden boys at HomeVestors,” said Ben Ahern, who over two decades worked for a HomeVestors franchise and later owned one before leaving the company in 2021. “Internally, it was like, ‘Do whatever Chas Carrier’s doing.’”

It isn’t unusual for HomeVestors franchises to rely on private investors to finance their house-flipping. Banks aren’t typically interested in house-flipping loans, which are often short-term and riskier than a standard mortgage. Because of that risk, investors who lend to house-flippers earn a substantially higher return.

To further minimize their risk and ensure they had a legitimate ownership stake in the house, savvy investors would verify the transaction with an independent title company to research whether there were other liens against the property and then record the deed with the county recorder. But many of Carrier’s investors, after years of consistent payments led them to trust him, let Carrier handle recording the deeds and did not confirm that he’d done so.

As Carrier grew his business, he began relying more on individual investors. ProPublica identified through public records at least 124 people who have lent money to Carrier since 2009. Not all of them have lost money.

Carrier’s search for new investors was aided by Robert Welborn, an investment adviser in Granbury, Texas, southwest of Dallas. Welborn had built a network of clients in Granbury, a city of about 12,000 people on the Brazos River, through church, friendships and referrals. Many of his clients were older and had modest nest eggs, which Welborn said were “well diversified.” He said he built a relationship with Carrier in 2012, after researching his background for about two months. That Carrier was a successful franchisee lent him credibility, Welborn said.

“I never imagined the No. 1 franchisee with a fast-growing franchise company, HomeVestors,” would defraud investors, he said.

At the time, Welborn also solicited new investors with invitations to steak dinners where they would hear his pitch. An investment in Carrier’s business, according to Welborn’s sales material, which also featured the HomeVestors caveman mascot, Ug, was both lucrative and secure. “Your investment is protected,” the sales material assured potential clients.

For loans he sent Carrier’s way, Welborn earned a 2% commission, he said. Welborn had at least two dozen clients who invested with Carrier, most of whom had multiple loans to him, according to a public records search. He would not comment on how many of his clients invested with Carrier.

Many investors were happy for years — in some cases, more than a decade. The interest payments came in like clockwork. A lot of Welborns’ clients relied on the payments for retirement income.

“I was real tickled with it,” said Tom Walls, 85, who said he lost $50,000 of his retirement savings by investing with Carrier.

Some investors noticed small problems — a payment that arrived a few days late or an error on the paperwork to secure the loan. But Carrier always fixed the problems promptly, investors said.

“When you have this 10-year continuous, pleasant and mutually beneficial relationship, you build up a great deal of trust,” said John Moses, who estimates he lost more than $1 million to Carrier.

Looking back, the investors who spoke with ProPublica said they wished they had taken those warning signs more seriously.

“He Just Pencil Whipped Those Deeds”

By fall 2024, Carrier’s payments to his lenders stopped. That’s when the house of cards fell.

Carrier had spent that summer scrambling for money. Not only did Carrier have to make loan payments to scores of investors, but he also needed to keep up with the HomeVestors franchise fees and advertising payments. The company requires its franchises to make regular reports on sales and to open their books for audits, to provide financial statements when requested, and to report all assets and liabilities. Any of those reports could have called into question Carrier’s ability to stay solvent. But, according to former franchise owners and employees, HomeVestors’ audits of its franchises are mostly geared toward ensuring they’re paying all their franchise fees, which are based on sales.

Before Carrier’s tangle of fraudulent loans collapsed and was exposed in court, there were signs of trouble.

In 2016, Carrier was fined by the Texas Real Estate Commission for managing properties without a license. The HomeVestors franchise agreement requires owners to follow all laws and regulations, particularly real estate regulations. In 2020, two title insurance companies issued specialalerts on Carrier’s business, advising their title officers not to enter into transactions with him without further legal and underwriting review. Carrier hasn’t paid taxes on some of his properties since early 2023, according to court and public records, another violation of his franchise agreement. Despite the apparent violations, HomeVestors didn’t terminate Carrier’s franchise agreement.

“I don’t really think they do have much in place to prevent something like this,” Ahern, the former HomeVestors franchise owner, said of the company. “HomeVestors at the time didn’t seem to have an internal system policing how franchises finance buying properties.”

A HomeVestors spokesperson said the company focuses on its franchise customers’ experiences selling their homes and does not “dictate” how franchises raise capital. “The more than 950 franchises of HomeVestors are independent businesses with a wide variety of finance options available to them,” the spokesperson said.

Last spring, Carrier began borrowing against his future receipts in exchange for cash advances with exorbitant fees and annualized interest rates that he later claimed ranged as high as 600%. Between May and October, he did this at least seven times, racking up more than $1.2 million in debt beyond what he owed his investors, exhibits included with court filings show. By fall, he owed more than $75,000 in payments a week, according to the original terms. Seven companies filed suit over the cash-advance agreements, accusing him of default. Carrier has denied the allegations of default and has countersued four of the companies, claiming he was charged unreasonably high interest rates.

The lending scheme appears to have fallen in a gray area for state and federal securities regulations. It’s unclear whether the promissory notes Carrier issued to investors meet the definition of a security, two experts told ProPublica.

In October, Carrier’s investors began to confront him about the missing payments, including Jeff Daly and Steve Needham, two of Carrier’s largest investors who had been lending him money for years. Carrier came clean to Daly, admitting he had been running a lending scheme for “several” years, according to a lawsuit Daly and Needham filed. He told Needham he had taken out multiple loans on individual properties without disclosing them to the investors, according to the lawsuit. The two men claimed in their lawsuit, which resulted in default judgments against Carrier, that combined they had lost $13.5 million to Carrier.

The investor who spoke to ProPublica and asked not to be named said in an interview that Carrier broke down in tears when confronted about losing more than $1 million of the investor’s money. Carrier admitted the loans paid for his operating expenses, not for buying and refurbishing houses, the investor said.

“He just pencil whipped those deeds at the end,” the investor said, explaining that Carrier drew up documents but didn’t record them. Because the deeds were never recorded, the investor had no lien on the properties and therefore no collateral. Some deeds were for houses that Carrier didn’t own or never bought, the investor said. “It was a complete fabrication.”

Welborn’s clients, who typically invested much smaller amounts with Carrier, also learned of the house-flipper’s collapse in the fall, when their payments stopped. Carver said that Welborn called him a couple of days after the October payment was due and said, “Hey, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Chas has called me and admitted to fraud.”

Carver said he got in the car and drove to Welborn’s office, where he learned the nightmarish truth that all the money Carrier had taken was gone.

“A Life-Changing Hit”

Investors are deploying a variety of strategies to get their money back — some of which pit bigger investors against smaller ones and early investors against more recent ones. Those who acted quickly are recovering some money through foreclosures and lawsuit settlements. Although Carrier is denying allegations in lawsuits brought by the cash-advance companies, he’s not fighting individual investors who are suing him. Three of their lawsuits have resulted in judgments against Carrier, and he has so far not defended himself against the others.

Welborn said he’s doing his best to help his clients recover their money by providing the necessary paperwork, connecting them with buyers for the houses used as collateral and researching lien histories on the homes. When he first learned of the scheme, Welborn tried to convince his clients to sign on with his lawyer to sue Carrier. The lawyer, Anthony Cuesta, hoped a court would seize Carrier’s assets to help recover the investors’ lost funds. But he quickly learned there were too many investors and not enough equity in the properties to fund the litigation. Now, many of Welborn’s clients are waiting for the FBI and DOJ to act, while wealthier investors are foreclosing on properties and making them ineligible to be used for restitution. Welborn said some of his clients have been paid restitution through a DOJ-appointed real estate agent’s sale of Carrier’s properties, but he declined to provide details.

Carver isn’t optimistic: “We are not going to get a dime.”

At least one investor went after Welborn individually. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure, the claim was settled for $130,000. In his response to the SEC disclosure, Welborn denied breaching fiduciary duty to the client and said he “resolved the claim to avoid controversy.” Welborn told ProPublica that $120,000 of the settlement came from the sale of the house used as collateral for the family’s loan and he paid $10,000 for their attorney fees.

Welborn said he’s “devastated” by the loss of his clients’ money. “But every day I drag myself to work with God’s help and spend most of my day helping lenders with their own personal restitution battles,” he said.

Some investors said they will have to go back to work after having retired or are scrambling to find some way to replace their lost income.

Carver wishes he had paid more attention to red flags, like paperwork errors. But the monthly checks were so reliable, he didn’t listen to his gut. Or his wife.

“Every time I added money, my wife would say, ‘Don’t do it,’” Carver said. “My mother, too. She would push on my dad not to add any more. But he liked getting the monthly check.”

Carver’s dad, Larry, believed it was the best performing investment he had ever made. When the money disappeared, Carver went to work trying to recoup some of it. Maybe he could write it off on his taxes, he thought. He wanted to get at least something back for his dad. But Larry was in ill health, and in February, he died.

“My dad passed thinking he lost all of his money to this guy,” Carver said, adding he hopes Carrier “goes to jail for a very long time.”

The investor who asked not to be named said the loss was “a life-changing hit.” He had retired at 53, after sticking it out in a job he hated until his stock options vested. When he finally quit, he put the money into Carrier’s business and lived off of the monthly payments. He may have to go back to work.

“He was an arrogant son of a bitch,” the investor said. “It was gone before he told anyone there was a problem. That’s the unforgivable piece. He squandered it all away. And he had to get backed into a corner before he admitted it was all gone.”

“There are real-life dangerous impacts for veterans,” said Rep. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, citing the news organization’s work.

This week, ProPublica reported on dozens of emails sent from staff at VA hospitals and clinics across the country to headquarters warning how cuts could, and in some cases are, degrading the agency’s ability to provide for the roughly 9 million veterans who rely on it.

Hiring freezes and other edicts from the White House have left medical providers scrambling and short-staffed amid an ever-shifting series of policy moves, including the cancellation of contracts with companies that maintain cancer registries, the emails said. Staffers at VA centers in Pennsylvania warned the cuts were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”

“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” one wrote, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.” Staffers at the hospital warned more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.

On Thursday, the House members, several of whom are veterans, demanded VA leadership provide more details on how cuts are affecting such work, in which service members often receive treatment they would not otherwise have access to.

“We all want to cut waste, fraud and abuse, but what we see today is when you cancel a contract, it means the end of a clinical trial that’s going to save someone’s life,” Rep. Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire said.

Notably, Deluzio, an Iraq War veteran whose Pittsburgh-area district includes a VA facility, and other lawmakers said they had learned about the impact for the first time from ProPublica’s reporting. On Thursday, they accused agency Secretary Doug Collins of stonewalling their efforts to find out what positions have been laid off, what contracts have been canceled and what future cuts will look like.

“We want the country to understand that this administration is hiding what they are doing, not just from us and the Congress, but from veterans and the American people,” Deluzio said.

“And the worst part is, we don’t know if anyone has died,” he added.

President Donald Trump has long said his administration will prioritize veterans and not compromise their care.

The disruptions at the VA have come even as the department has laid off just a few thousand staffers — a small fraction of the employees it said it ultimately plans to remove. Collins has said the agency is developing plans with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to cut at least 70,000 employees — a number that he has underscored is a “goal.” “Could be more, could be less,” he told lawmakers this week.

On Thursday, in a post on X, Collins pushed back on criticism, calling ProPublica’s reporting “misleading” and saying it was based on “some outdated reports from the internal system VA uses to quickly identify and fix issues across the department.”

In a statement, VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz said that Collins was working to fix a “broken bureaucracy” that has long had problems with patient safety and access to care, among other issues. “Unfortunately, many in the media, government union bosses and some in Congress are fighting to keep in place the broken status quo,” he said. “Our message to Veterans is simple: Despite major opposition from those who don’t want to change a thing at VA, we will reform the department to make it work better for Veterans, families, caregivers and survivors.”

Kasperowicz previously told the news organization that the issues in Pennsylvania have been resolved, though locals there with knowledge of the issues said that’s not the case and that the impact is ongoing. Kasperowicz also said in regard to the contracts to maintain the cancer registries that there had been “no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer them.

According to some providers, even the temporary disruptions have hurt the care of veterans. One clinical trial to treat veterans for opioid addiction was hobbled by temporary layoffs. “We couldn’t give veterans a tool that could save their lives,” said Ellie Gordon, the CEO of the startup Behavior, which is testing biosensors to alert veterans to the risk of relapse.

Collins touted the cuts in a sometimes-contentious hearing on Tuesday before the U.S Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

“We’re going to maintain VA’s mission-essential jobs like doctors, nurses and claims processors, while phasing out non-mission essential roles like interior designers and DEI officers,” he said in an opening statement. The funds saved will be rerouted into direct health care and benefits for veterans, he added.

Some Republicans at the hearing defended the administration’s proposed cuts. “The VA has become a bloated bureaucracy,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville, who represents Alabama. “I think most of us will agree with that.”

But Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., pushed back on Collins’ statements, saying that laying off such a large portion of the staff will inevitably involve letting go of health care workers, like nurses and doctors. “You cannot slash and trash the VA without eliminating those essential positions which provide access and availability of health care,” he said. “It simply cannot be done.”

Others at the hearing took Collins to task for a lack of transparency. Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, admonished the secretary for refusing to provide a list of the 538 canceled contracts since his appointment. Collins said he would provide the information, but only after it’s finalized.

“We’re looking at every step we can, but also, I’m not going to play it out in a public arena,” he said.

The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.

“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”

The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.

President Donald Trump has long promised to prioritize veterans.

“We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take good care of them.”

After the Department of Veterans Affairs began shedding employees and contracts, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, pledged, “Veterans are going to notice a change for the better.”

But dozens of internal emails obtained by ProPublica reveal a far different reality. Doctors and others at VA hospitals and clinics across the country have been sending often desperate messages to headquarters detailing how cuts will harm veterans’ care. The VA provides health care to roughly 9 million veterans.

In March, VA officials across the country warned that a critical resource — databases for tracking cancer — would no longer be kept up to date. As officials in the Pacific Northwest explained, the Department of Government Efficiency was moving to kill its contract with the outside company that maintained and ran its cancer registry, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. DOGE had marked it for “immediate termination.”

The VA in Detroit raised a similar alarm in an email, warning of the “inability to track oncology treatment and recurrences.” The emails obtained by ProPublica detail a wide variety of disruptions. In Colorado, for instance, layoffs to social workers were causing homeless veterans waiting for temporary housing to go without help.

The warnings, sent as part of a longstanding system at the VA to alert higher-ups of problems, paint a portrait of chaotic retrenchment at an agency that just three years ago was mandated by Congress through the PACT Act to expand care and benefits for veterans facing cancer and other issues after exposure to Agent Orange, burn pits or other toxins.

Doctors and other health care providers across the VA have been left scrambling and short-staffed amid an ever-shifting series of cuts, hiring freezes and other edicts from the White House.

The upheaval laid bare in the emails is particularly striking because the cuts so far would be dwarfed by the dramatic downsizing in staff and shift in priorities the administration has said is coming.

The VA has cut just a few thousand staffers this year. But the administration has said it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through layoffs and voluntary buyouts within the coming months. The agency, which is the largest integrated health care system in the U.S., currentlyhas nearly 500,000 employees, most of whom work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.

Despite an expanded role mandated by Congress through the PACT Act, administration officials have said their goal is to trim the agency to the size it was before the legislation passed.

“The Biden Administration understood what it meant to pay for the cost of war; it seems the Trump Administration does not,” said Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat and chief author of the PACT Act.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials working at the VA in March prepared an outline to “transform” the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to handle benefits claims. One DOGE document proposed closing 17 hospitals — and perhaps a dozen more.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz told ProPublica that there would be no hospital closures. “Just because a VA employee wrote something down, doesn’t make it VA policy,” he said in a written statement. But he did say that use of AI will be a big part of what he called VA’s “reform” efforts.

Kasperowicz dismissed the idea that the emails obtained by ProPublica show chaos.

“The only thing these reports show is that VA has a robust and well-functioning system to flag potential issues and quickly fix them so we can provide the best possible care to Veterans,” he wrote.

DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

The White House released a budget proposal last week that calls for a 4% increase in the VA’s budget. That total includes more money for medical care, though a portion of that would be used to pay for veterans to seek care outside the VA medical system.

More answers to the VA’s larger plans may come today, when Collins is scheduled to testify before the Senate Veterans Committee, his first hearing on Capitol Hill since coming into office.

David Shulkin, who headed the VA in Trump’s first term, said the administration is too focused on cuts rather than communicating a strategy for improving care for vets.

“I think it’s very, very hard to be successful with the approach that they’re taking,” Shulkin told ProPublica.

One way local VA officials have tried to limit the damage has been by sending warnings — formally known as an issue brief — to higher-ups. And sometimes it works.

After officials in Los Angeles warned that “all chemotherapy” would stop unless Washington backed off killing a service contract, the VA reversed its decision.

And, amid growing scrutiny, the administration also made some researchers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere exempt from cuts. The laid-off social workers who helped homeless vets in Colorado were also brought back after about a month away from their jobs. Kasperowicz said that four social workers were affected but “their caseload was temporarily redistributed to other members of the homeless team.”

The warnings from officials across the country underscore how the comparatively modest cuts so far are already affecting the work of the VA’s medical system, with the study and treatment of cancer cited in multiple warnings to agency leadership.

“We have absolutely felt the impact of the chaos all around us. We’re already losing people,“ said one senior researcher, who spoke to ProPublica anonymously for fear of retaliation.

Referring to studies, he added: “We’re going to be losing things that can’t restart.”

And while Kasperowicz told ProPublica that the issues in Pennsylvania have been resolved, locals there said that’s not the case and that the impact is ongoing.

In Pittsburgh, two trials to treat veterans with advanced head and neck cancer, which officials in March had warned were at risk because of hiring freezes, have still not started, according to Alanna Caffas, who heads a Pittsburgh nonprofit, the Veterans Health Foundation, that partners with the VA on research.

“It’s insane,” Caffas said. “These veterans should be able to get access to research treatments, but they can’t.”

A third trial there, to help veterans with opioid addiction, wasn’t halted. Instead, it was hobbled by layoffs of key team members, according to Caffas and another person involved in the research.

Regarding the issues with cancer registries, Kasperowicz said there had been “no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer those registries.

Rosie Torres, founder of Burn Pits 360, the veterans advocacy group that also pushed hard for the legislation, called the emails showing impeded cancer treatment a “crisis in the making” and “gutwrenching.”

That the decisions are being made without input from the communities of vets they affect is worse, she added.

“If they are killing contracts that may affect the delivery of care, then we have a right to know,” she said.

Last week, as the second Trump administration marked its first 100 days in office, Collins celebrated what he described as its achievements.

In a recorded address, he said that under his stewardship the VA processed record numbers of benefit claims, ended “divisive” spending on diversity initiatives and redirected millions of agency dollars from “non-mission-critical” programs back toward services to benefit veterans.

“We will not stop working to put veterans first,” he wrote in an accompanying op-ed.

Others say Collins has done no such thing. Instead of focusing on veterans, said one VA oncologist, “we’re spending an enormous amount of time preparing for a staffing catastrophe.”

“Veterans’ lives are on the line,” the doctor said. “Let us go back to work and take care of them.”

Since taking charge of the office in January, Martin has launched controversial investigations, rushed to defend Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and vowed to change how his office prosecutes crime in the District of Columbia.

His actions have been met with fierce pushback from Democratic lawmakers, watchdog groups and legal experts. There have been at least four disciplinary complaints filed against him with the D.C. and Missouri bars. One of the D.C. complaints has been dismissed; the other three appear to be pending. If Martin has responded to the complaints, his statements have not been made public.

Martin did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Here are some of Martin’s most contentious moves so far.

Jan. 6 Retribution

At Trump’s direction, Martin has presided over the dismissal of outstanding cases that were part of the Justice Department’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, riots at the Capitol.

But Martin got tripped up by what should have been a legal formality: In one of the cases he dismissed, he was still listed as counsel of record for the defendant, a possible conflict of interest. The incident prompted bar complaints against Martin in D.C. and Missouri. (The D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel dismissed the complaint, saying Martin had been acting at the behest of the president. The Missouri complaint appears to be pending.)

Martin fired more than a dozen federal prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases. He demoted seven senior lawyers in his office, including the two prosecutors who led the Jan. 6 team, to low-level roles in D.C. Superior Court, which handles local prosecutions. (Most of the affected attorneys have not commented publicly, but those who have are critical of Martin’s tenure.)

Martin has opened an investigation into supposed leaks related to Jan. 6 cases, saying the information was used “by the media and partisans as misinformation.” He also ordered an investigation into past charging decisions made as part of the Jan. 6 cases. In 2024, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the DOJ’s use of an obstruction statute in those prosecutions. In an office-wide email obtained by ProPublica, Martin quoted an unnamed contact who compared the DOJ’s use of the obstruction statute to President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to imprison more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

DOGE Enforcer

Martin has published several open letters to Musk on the Musk-owned social media platform X.

In the first letter, dated Feb. 3, Martin asked Musk to “utilize me and my staff” to protect the people and the work of DOGE. He vowed to take “any and all legal action against anyone” who impeded DOGE’s work.

“We will not act like the previous administration,” Martin added, “who looked the other way as the Antifa and BLM rioters as well as thugs with guns trashed our capital city.”

In his second letter, dated Feb. 7, Martin expanded on his pledge to his office’s legal powers in support of Musk and DOGE’s work. “Please let me reiterate again: If people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable,” Martin wrote.

He urged his employees to respond to Musk’s demand that all federal employees list five things they accomplished that week, adding: “DOGE and Elon are doing great work! Historic.”

And when DOGE employees attempted to seize control of the U.S. Institute of Peace, a private nonprofit that receives government funding, Martin and his office assisted so that DOGE could take over and wind down the nonprofit.

“We Will Defend You”

The U.S. attorney’s office for D.C. is unique in that it prosecutes both federal and local crimes. In his tweets and public statements, Martin has vowed to “Make D.C. Safe Again,” even though violent crime has broadly declined in the District in recent years.

While his public safety agenda is light on details so far, he has pledged to be a stalwart defender of the D.C. police. In yet another open letter posted on X, Martin wrote that the “radical ‘Defund the Police’ movement by Black Lives Matter is over” and that it was “time to get back to protecting and supporting our law enforcement officers.”

“At every turn, we will defend you,” he said.

Yet current and former federal prosecutors in D.C. say Martin’s actions so far have undercut morale in the office while his proposed reforms could make it harder, not easier, for prosecutors to do their jobs.

In February, Martin removed the chief and deputy chief of the Federal Major Crimes section, which oversees cases involving drugs, firearms possession, child exploitation, human trafficking and immigration violations. The two lawyers, who had decades of experience between them and were widely respected, were demoted to low-level roles; the more senior of the two, Melissa Jackson, resigned soon afterward. (Jackson declined to comment; her deputy did not respond to requests for comment.)

Martin also said he was “rewriting” the office’s policy for the so-called Lewis list, a repository of police officer disciplinary records. Prosecutors consult the Lewis database when they decide whether to put a police officer on the witness stand. They also use the Lewis list to identify officers about whom they need to disclose information to defense attorneys that bears on a witness’s credibility or potential bias to fulfill their constitutional obligations.

Martin framed his decision to reform the Lewis list as part of a broader shift to be more pro-police. “USAO will no longer allow judges or others to gratuitously damage your careers because of the outsized impact of inexact characterizations,” he wrote.

Michael Romano, a former federal prosecutor in the D.C. office, said that any effort to weaken or eliminate the Lewis list will only make it harder for prosecutors to argue and win cases because it would deprive them of information that they must disclose in court. “Gutting the Lewis list,” Romano told ProPublica, “makes it less likely that prosecutors will obtain convictions at trial, makes it more likely that convictions will be reversed on appeal and puts prosecutors’ licenses to practice law at risk.”

Investigating Democrats

Martin has initiated multiple inquiries into critics and opponents of Trump.

Martin asked Rep. Eugene Vindman, D-Va., for information about a business that Vindman and his brother, Alexander, started to support Ukraine in its war against Russia, The Washington Post reported. Vindman and his twin brother, Alex, both blew the whistle on Trump’s attempt to withhold military aid to Ukraine while pressuring the country’s leader to investigate the family of President Joe Biden. Eugene Vindman said that Martin’s letter was part of Trump’s “retribution campaign” and that those who wrote the letter and “encouraged this weird attempt at intimidation are lying.”

Biden’s family members and former officials from his administration received letters from Martin’s office related to the ex-president’s decision to grant pardons to people close to him, The New York Times reported. Trump has pushed an unproven theory that Biden’s actions weren’t valid because he wasn’t mentally competent.

He also sent letters to Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York and Rep. Robert Garcia of California, both Democrats, asking them to answer questions about incendiary public comments they had made. The inquiries appeared to have fizzled out and did not result in any charges.

Targeting Medical Journals

On Apr. 14, Martin sent a list of questions to the editor of Chest magazine, a medical journal published by the American College of Chest Physicians. The letter accused the journal and others like it of “being partisans in various scientific debates” and asked a series of contentious questions, such as “How do you clearly articulate when you have certain viewpoints that are influenced by your ongoing relations with supporters, funders, advertisers, and others?” and “How do you handle allegations that authors of works in your journals may have misled readers?”

Two other medical journal publishers received similar letters, The New York Times reported. The letters have raised grave concerns about curbing free speech and government intimidation of scientific publications.

The attacks on Judge John Barberis in the fall of 2016 appeared on his personal Facebook page. They impugned his ethics, criticized a recent ruling and branded him as a “politician” with the “LOWEST rating for a judge in Illinois.”

Barberis, a state court judge in an Illinois county across the Mississippi River from St. Louis, was presiding over a nasty legal battle for control over the Eagle Forum, the vaunted grassroots group founded by Phyllis Schlafly, matriarch of the anti-feminist movement. The case pitted Schlafly’s youngest daughter against three of her sons, almost like a Midwest version of the HBO program “Succession” (without the obscenities).

At the heart of the dispute — and the lead defendant in the case — was Ed Martin, a lawyer by training and a political operative by trade. In Missouri, where he was based, Martin was widely known as an irrepressible gadfly who trafficked in incendiary claims and trailed controversy wherever he went. Today, he’s the interim U.S. attorney in Washington, D.C., and one of the most prominent members of the Trump Justice Department.

In early 2015, Schlafly had selected Martin to succeed her as head of the Eagle Forum, a crowning moment in Martin’s career. Yet after just a year in charge, the group’s board fired Martin. Schlafly’s youngest daughter, Anne Schlafly Cori, and a majority of the Eagle Forum board filed a lawsuit to bar Martin from any association with the organization.

After Barberis dealt Martin a major setback in the case in October 2016, the attacks began. The Facebook user who posted them, Priscilla Gray, had worked in several roles for Schlafly but was not a party to the case, and her comments read like those of an aggrieved outsider.

Almost two years later, the truth emerged as Cori’s lawyers gathered evidence for her lawsuit: Behind the posts about the judge was none other than Martin.

ProPublica obtained previously unreported documents filed in the case that show Martin had bought a laptop for Gray and that she subsequently offered to “happily write something to attack this judge.” And when she did, Martin ghostwrote more posts for her to use and coached her on how to make her comments look more “organic.”

“That is not justice but a rigged system,” he urged her to write. “Shame on you and this broken legal system.”

“Call what he did unfair and rigged over and over,” Martin continued.

Martin even urged Gray to message the judge privately. “Go slow and steady,” he advised. “Make it organic.”

Gray appeared to take Martin’s advice. “Private messaging him that sweet line,” she wrote. It was not clear from the court record what, if anything, she wrote at that juncture.

Legal experts told ProPublica that Martin’s conduct in the Eagle Forum case was a clear violation of ethical norms and professional rules. Martin’s behavior, they said, was especially egregious because he was both a defendant in the case and a licensed attorney.

Martin appeared to be “deliberately interfering with a judicial proceeding with the intent to undermine the integrity of the outcome,” said Scott Cummings, a professor of legal ethics at UCLA School of Law. “That’s not OK.”

Martin did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Martin’s legal and political career is dotted with questions about his professional and ethical conduct. But for all his years in the spotlight, some of the most serious concerns about his conduct have remained in the shadows — buried in court filings, overlooked by the press or never reported at all.

His actions have led to more than $600,000 in legal settlements or judgments against Martin or his employers in a handful of cases. In the Eagle Forum lawsuit, another judge found him in civil contempt, citing his “willful disregard” of a court order, and a jury found him liable for defamation and false light against Cori.

Cori also tried to have Martin charged with criminal contempt for his role in orchestrating the posts about Barberis, but a judge declined to take up the request and said she could take the case to the county prosecutor. Cori said her attorney met with a detective; Martin was never charged.

Nonetheless, the emails unearthed by ProPublica were evidence that he had violated Missouri rules for lawyers, according to Kathleen Clark, a legal ethics expert and law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She said lawyers are prohibited from trying to contact a judge outside of court in a case they are involved in, and they are barred from using a proxy to do something they are barred from doing themselves.

Such a track record might have derailed another lawyer’s career. Not so for Martin.

As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump vowed to use the Justice Department to reward his allies and seek retribution against his perceived enemies. Since taking office, Trump and his appointees have made good on those pledges, pardoning Jan. 6 rioters while targeting Democratic politicians, media critics and private law firms.

As one of its first personnel picks, the Trump administration chose Martin to be interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, one of the premier jobs for a federal prosecutor.

A wide array of former prosecutors, legal observers and others have raised questions about his qualifications for an office known for handling high-profile cases. Martin has no experience as a prosecutor. He has never taken a case to trial, according to his public disclosures. As the acting leader of the largest U.S. attorney’s office in the country, he directs the work of hundreds of lawyers who appear in court on a vast array of subjects, including legal disputes arising out of Congress, national security matters, public corruption and civil rights, as well as homicides, drug trafficking and many other local crimes.

Over the last four years, the office prosecuted more than 1,500 people as part of the massive investigation into the violence at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. While Trump has pardoned the Jan. 6 defendants, Martin has taken action against the prosecutors who brought those cases. In just three months, he has overseen the dismissal of outstanding Jan. 6-related cases, fired more than a dozen prosecutors and opened an investigation into the charging decisions made in those riot cases.

Martin has also investigated Democratic lawmakers and members of the Biden family; forced out the chief of the criminal division after she refused to initiate an investigation desired by Trump appointees citing a lack of evidence, according to her resignation letter; threatened Georgetown University’s law school over its diversity, equity and inclusion policies; and vowed to investigate threats against Department of Government Efficiency employees or “chase” people in the federal government "discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically.”

Martin “has butchered the position, effectively destroying it as a vehicle by which to pursue justice and turning it into a political arm of the current administration,” says an open letter signed by more than 100 former prosecutors who worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia under Democratic and Republican presidents.

Already, Martin has been the subject of at least fourdisciplinarycomplaints with the D.C. and Missouri bars, of which one was dismissed and the other three appear to be pending. Two of the complaints came after he moved to dismiss charges against a Jan. 6 rioter whom he had previously represented and for whom he was still listed as counsel of record. (The first complaint was dismissed after the D.C. bar’s disciplinary panel concluded that Martin had dismissed the case as a result of Trump’s pardons and so did not violate any rules.) The third was filed in March by a group of Democratic lawmakers in the U.S. Senate. The fourth was submitted last week by a group of former Jan. 6 prosecutors and members of the conservative-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It argues that Martin’s actions so far “threaten to undermine the integrity of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the legal profession in the District of Columbia.” If Martin has responded to any of the complaints, those responses have not been made public.

Trump has nominated Martin to run the office permanently. Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have vowed to drag out Martin’s confirmation, demanding a hearing and setting up a fight over one of Trump’s most controversial nominees.

Martin stepped off the elevator into the newsroom of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch newspaper. He was angry at a reporter named Jo Mannies, one of the city’s top political journalists. At a conference table with Mannies and her senior editors, he accused Mannies of being unethical and pressed the paper’s leadership to spike her stories about him, according to interviews.

Mannies said later she believed he was trying to get her fired.

“He was attacking her,” said Pam Maples, who was managing editor at the time. “He was implying she had an ax to grind, that she wanted to get some big story and that she was not being ethical. And when that didn’t get traction, it was more like ‘this isn’t a story.’ It wasn’t that he said anything about a fact being inaccurate, or he wanted to retract a story; he wanted the reporting to stop.”

Mannies had been covering a scandal dubbed “Memogate” that started to unfold in 2007 while Martin was chief of staff to Missouri Gov. Matt Blunt. In that role, Martin was using his government email to undermine Democratic rivals and rally anti-abortion groups. But when reporters requested emails from Blunt’s staff, the governor’s office denied they existed. Media organizations joined a lawsuit to preserve the messages and recover them from backup tapes.

An attorney for the governor, Scott Eckersley, later said in a deposition that Martin tried to block the release of government emails and told employees to delete their messages. After Eckersley warned that doing so might violate state law, he was fired. He sued the state for wrongful termination and defamation and settled for $500,000. Martin resigned as chief of staff in 2007 after just over a year on the job, and Blunt’s office would eventually hand over 22 boxes of internal emails.

In a 2008 email to the Associated Press, Martin dismissed Eckersley’s lawsuit as a “desperate attempt” to revise his story after he was fired, citing Eckersley’s own testimony that not all emails are public records.

The Memogate incident was telling — and Martin’s efforts to have Mannies fired were never reported. “His claim was we were misrepresenting what the law was and what he was doing,” she told ProPublica. “I mean, he can get very hyper. He can get very emotional.”

When Martin launched a bid for Congress in 2010, he acted as if Memogate was ancient history. He made himself available to Mannies, she recalled, always taking her calls. Years later, he even appeared, lighthearted and bantering, on a St. Louis Public Radio podcast Mannies co-hosted. She said Martin could be outlandish and aggressive, but he could also be disarmingly passionate about whatever cause he was pursuing at the moment, often speaking in a frenetic rush. “He just wore people down with his enthusiasm,” she said.

Martin allowed a different St. Louis reporter to shadow him during his 2010 run for Congress. The reporter asked about the St. Louis election board, a dysfunctional organization that, by all accounts, Martin had helped turn around in the mid-2000s. Martin had fired an employee there named Jeanne Bergfeld, and she later sued for wrongful termination. The board settled the lawsuit.

As part of the settlement, Martin agreed not to talk about the case and the board paid Bergfeld $55,000. Martin and two others issued a letter saying she had been a “conscientious and dedicated professional.”

But talking to the reporter covering his campaign, Martin said Bergfeld enjoyed “not having to do anything” and “wasn’t interested in changing.” The day after the story was published, Bergfeld sued Martin again, this time for violating the settlement agreement. Martin denied making the comments, but the Riverfront Times released audio that proved he had.

Martin agreed to pay Bergfeld another $15,000 but delayed signing the settlement for a few months. The judge then ordered Martin to pay some of her legal costs, citing his “obstinacy.”

Martin lost his 2010 congressional bid. He ran for Missouri attorney general two years later and lost again. After his stint as chair of the Missouri Republican Party, he went to work as Schlafly’s right-hand man. Martin grew so attached to Schlafly that a lawyer for the Eagle Forum jokingly called him “Ed Martin Schlafly.”

As the 2016 presidential campaign ramped up, Martin supported Trump even though Eagle Forum board members, including Cori, supported Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas. At the time, Cori described Trump at the time as an “egomaniacal dictator.” (Today, she said she supports him.) Cori and other board members were stunned when Schlafly endorsed Trump, with Martin standing by her side.

A few weeks later, a majority of the Eagle Forum’s board voted to oust Martin as president; a lawsuit filed by the board cited mismanagement and poor leadership and described his tenure as “deplorable.” Martin has maintained that he was Schlafly’s “hand-picked successor” and has characterized his removal as a hostile takeover.

“Every day, they are diminishing the reputation and value of Phyllis,” he said in a 2017 statement. She died in September 2016.

Cori and the board’s lawsuit sought to enforce Martin’s removal and demand an accounting of the forum’s assets. That’s the case that wound up before Barberis.

On top of his efforts to direct Gray’s posts on Barberis’ Facebook page, Martin prepared a separate statement, according to previously unreported records from the case. The statement called Barberis’ ruling to remove him as Eagle Forum president “judicial activism at its worst” that “shows what happens when the law is undermined by judges who think they can do whatever they want.”

Martin emailed the statement, which said it was from “Bruce Schlafly, M.D.” — the name of one of Schlafly’s sons — to himself, then sent it to two of her other sons, John and Andy, court filings show. Martin said the statement was a “declaration of war” and urged the Schlaflys to “put something like this out to our biggest list.” (It’s unclear if the message was ever sent.) Bruce Schlafly did not respond to requests for comment.

In a 2019 sworn deposition, Cori’s lawyer asked Martin questions about the posts on Barberis’ Facebook page and the letter he drafted for Bruce Schlafly. Because of the possibility that he could be charged with criminal contempt of court, Martin declined to comment, on the advice of his own lawyer, though he acknowledged that lawyers are barred from communicating with judges outside of court or engaging in conduct meant to disrupt proceedings.

Andy Schlafly, a lawyer and former Eagle Forum board member who supported Martin in the leadership fight, said “no court has ever sanctioned Ed for his engagement of First Amendment advocacy” and likened the controversy to liberal attacks on conservative judges. He dismissed concerns about Martin directing Gray to contact the judge, saying she “speaks for herself” and had every right to voice her outrage. He compared Martin’s style — then and now — to Trump’s. He said he did not believe the email Martin drafted for his brother Bruce had ever been sent, but if it had been, it would have been no different from Trump posting on Truth Social, which he considered normal behavior in political battles.

“What would Trump do in that position?” Andy Schlafly said of Martin’s current role in Washington. “I would say Trump would be doing just what Ed’s doing. Elections do have consequences.”

Gray declined to comment. She was not part of the lawsuit.

When Cori’s lawyers uncovered the emails, they asked a new judge, David Dugan — who had taken over the case after Barberis was elected to a higher court — why Martin should not be held in criminal contempt for “an underhanded scheme” to “attack the integrity and authority” of the court with the Facebook comments about Barberis, according to court records.

Dugan declined to take up the criminal contempt motion. But he later found Martin and John Schlafly in civil contempt of court for having interfered with Eagle Forum after Barberis had removed them from the group. John Schlafly appealed the contempt finding and mostly lost. He did not respond to requests for comment. It’s unclear if Martin appealed.

Cori told ProPublica she also filed an ethics complaint against Martin with the Missouri Office of Chief Disciplinary Counsel, which investigates ethics complaints against lawyers. She said she was told her complaint would have to wait until her lawsuit concluded. The office said it could neither confirm nor deny it had received a complaint.

In 2022, when part of Cori’s lawsuit went to trial, a jury found Martin liable for defaming her and casting her in a false light — including by sharing a Facebook post suggesting that she should be charged with manslaughter for her mother’s death. It awarded her $57,000 in damages and also found Martin liable for $25,500 against another Eagle Forum board member.

Martin argued that the statute of limitations had expired on the defamation claims and that many of his statements were either true or vague hyperbole not subject to proof. He also claimed he could not be held liable because he didn’t write the offending post — he had merely shared something written by someone else.

In a post-trial motion, he also leaned into protections that make it harder for public figures to win defamation cases. Under that higher legal standard, it’s not enough for a plaintiff to show that a statement was false. Cori also had to prove that Martin knew it was false or acted with reckless disregard for the truth, and he said she didn’t prove it.

But while he’s wrapped himself in First Amendment protections when defending his own speech, he’s taken the opposite stance since being named interim U.S. attorney by Trump, threatening legal action against people when they criticize the administration.

For instance, after Rep. Robert Garcia called DOGE leader Elon Musk a “dick” and urged Democrats to “bring weapons” to a political fight, Martin sent Garcia a letter warning his comments could be seen as threats and demanding an explanation.

With the start of Trump’s first presidency, Martin and his family moved to the Northern Virginia suburbs near Washington, D.C. Martin had no formal role in the new administration, but he turned himself into one of the president’s most prolific and unfiltered surrogates.

CNN hired him in September 2017 to be a pro-Trump on-air commentator, only to fire him five months later after a string of controversial on-air remarks. He attacked a woman who had accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of molesting her as a child, praised Trump for denigrating Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas,” and described some of his CNN co-panelists as “rabid feminists” and “Black racists.”

Unbowed, Martin went on to make more than 150 appearances on the Russia Today TV channel and Sputnik radio, both Russian state-owned media outlets, first reported by The Washington Post. On RT and Sputnik, Martin railed against the “Russia hoax,” criticized the DOJ investigation led by special counsel Robert Mueller and questioned American support for Ukraine after Russia’s invasion by saying the U.S. was “wasting money in Kiev for Zelensky and his corrupt guys.” The State Department would later say RT and Sputnik were “critical elements in Russia’s disinformation and propaganda ecosystem.” The Treasury Department sanctioned RT employees in 2024. The DOJ indicted two RT employees for conspiracy to commit money laundering and conspiracy to fail to register as foreign agents.

Martin’s flair for fealty set him apart even from fellow Trump supporters. He cheered the Maine Republican Party for considering whether to censure Sen. Susan Collins for her vote to convict Trump during the second impeachment trial. He singled out Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska in a radio segment titled “America Needs to Go on a RINO Hunt.” He accused Sen. John Cornyn of going “soft” on gun rights after Cornyn endorsed a bipartisan gun-safety law after the Uvalde, Texas, mass shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

On Jan. 6, 2021, Martin joined the throngs of Trump supporters who marched in protest of the 2020 election outcome. He compared the scene that day to a Mardi Gras celebration and later said the prosecution of Jan. 6 defendants was “an op” orchestrated by former Rep. Liz Cheney and law enforcement agencies to “damage Trump and Trumpism.”

During an appearance on Russia Today, Martin said then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “weaponized” Congress’ response to the Jan. 6 riots by ramping up security on Capitol Hill, comparing her to the Nazis. “Not since the Reichstag fire that was engineered by the Nazis have we seen behavior like what Nancy Pelosi did,” he said.

As an attorney, he represented Jan. 6 defendants, helped raise money for their families and championed their cause. Last summer, Martin gave an award to a convicted Jan. 6 rioter named Timothy Hale-Cusanelli. According to court records, Hale-Cusanelli held “long-standing white supremacist and Nazi beliefs,” wore a “Hitler mustache” and allegedly told his co-workers that “Hitler should have finished the job.” (In court, Hale’s attorney said his client “makes no excuses for his derogatory language,” but the government’s description of him was “simply misleading.”)

After hugging and thanking Hale-Cusanelli at the ceremony, Martin told the audience that one of his goals was “to make sure that the world — and especially America — hears more from Tim Hale, because he’s extraordinary.”

In his three months as interim U.S. attorney for D.C., Martin has used his position to issue a series of threats. He’s vowed not to hire anyone affiliated with Georgetown Law unless the school drops any DEI policies. He vowed to Musk that he would “pursue any and all legal action against anyone who impedes your work or threatens your people.” He publicly told former special counsel Jack Smith and Smith’s lawyers to “[s]ave your receipts.” And in another open letter addressed to Musk and Musk’s deputy, Martin wrote that “if people are discovered to have broken the law or even acted simply unethically, we will investigate them and we will chase them to the end of the Earth to hold them accountable.”

More often than not, Martin’s threats have gone nowhere.

A month into the job, he announced “Operation Whirlwind,” an initiative to “hold accountable those who threaten” public officials, whether they’re DOGE workers or judges. One of the “most abhorrent examples” of such threats, he said, were Sen. Chuck Schumer’s 2020 remarks that conservative Supreme Court justices had “released the whirlwind” and would “pay the price” if they weakened abortion rights.

Even though Schumer walked back his incendiary comments the next day, Martin said he was investigating Schumer’s nearly 5-year-old remarks as part of Operation Whirlwind. Despite Martin’s bravado, the investigation went nowhere. No grand jury investigation was opened. No charges were filed. That the probe fizzled out came as little surprise. Legal experts said Schumer’s remarks, while ill advised, fell well short of criminal conduct.

In another instance, when one of Martin’s top deputies refused to open a criminal investigation into clean-energy grants issued by the Biden administration, Martin demanded the deputy’s resignation and advanced the investigation himself. When a subpoena arrived at one of the targeted environmental groups, Martin’s was the only name on it, according to documents obtained by ProPublica.

Kevin Flynn, a former federal prosecutor who served in the D.C. U.S. attorney’s office for 35 years, told ProPublica that he did not know of a single case in which the U.S. attorney was the sole authorizing official on a grand jury subpoena. Flynn said he could think of only two reasons why this could happen: The matter was of “such extraordinary sensitivity” that the office’s leader took exclusive control over it, or no other supervisor or line prosecutor was willing to sign off on the subpoena “out of concern that it wasn’t legally or ethically appropriate.”

And when the dispute between the environmental groups and the Justice Department reached a courtroom, federal Judge Tanya Chutkan asked a DOJ lawyer defending the administration’s actions for any evidence of possible crimes or violations — evidence, in other words, that could have justified the probe initiated by Martin. The DOJ lawyer said he had none. “You can’t even tell me what the evidence of malfeasance is,” Chutkan said. “There are still rules that even the government has to follow, last I checked.”

Martin’s tenure has caused so much consternation that in early April, Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., put a hold on Martin’s nomination. Typically, the Senate Judiciary Committee approves U.S. attorney picks by voice vote without a hearing. But in Martin’s case, all 10 Democrats on the committee have asked for a public hearing to debate the nomination, calling Martin “a nominee whose objectionable record merits heightened scrutiny by this Committee.”

Even the process of submitting the requisite paperwork for Senate confirmation has tripped him up. According to documents obtained by ProPublica, he has sent the Judiciary Committee three supplemental letters that correct omissions about his background. In an earlier submission, Martin did not disclose any of his appearances on Russian state-owned media. But just before The Washington Post reported that Martin had, in fact, made more than 150 such appearances, he sent yet another letter correcting his previous statements.

“I regret the errors and apologize for any inconvenience,” he wrote.

Consider: The staff of a program that helps millions of poor families keep the electricity on, in part so that babies don’t die from extreme heat or cold, have all been fired. The federal office that oversees the enforcement of child support payments has been hollowed out. Head Start preschools, which teach toddlers their ABCs and feed them healthy meals, will likely be forced to shut down en masse, some as soon as May 1. And funding for investigating child sexual abuse and internet crimes against children; responding to reports of missing children; and preventing youth violence has been withdrawn indefinitely.

The administration has laid off thousands of workers from coast to coast who had supervised education, child care, child support and child protective services systems, and it has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in funding for things like school meals and school safety.

These stark reductions have been centered in little-known children’s services offices housed within behemoth agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Justice, offices with names like the Children’s Bureau, the Office of Family Assistance and the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention. In part because of their obscurity, the slashing has gone relatively overlooked.

“Everyone’s been talking about what the Trump administration and DOGE have been doing, but no one seems to be talking about how, in a lot of ways, it’s been an assault on kids,” said Bruce Lesley, president of advocacy group First Focus on Children. He added that “the one cabinet agency that they’re fully decimating is the kid one,” referring to Trump’s goal of shuttering the Department of Education. Already, some 2,000 staffers there have lost or left their jobs.

The impact of these cuts will be felt far beyond Washington, rippling out to thousands of state and local agencies serving children nationwide.

The Department of Education, for instance, has rescinded as much as $3 billionin pandemic-recovery funding for schools, which would have been used for everything from tutoring services for Maryland students who’ve fallen behind to making the air safer to breathe and the water safer to drink for students in Flint, Michigan. The Department of Agriculture, meanwhile, has canceled $660 million in promised grants to farm-to-school programs, which had been providing fresh meat and produce to school cafeterias while supporting small farmers.

At the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the agency’s secretary, has dismissed all of the staff that had distributed $1.7 billion annually in Social Services Block Grant money, which many states have long depended on to be able to run their child welfare, foster care and adoption systems, including birth family visitation, caseworker training and more. The grants also fund day care, counseling and disability services for kids. (It is unclear whether anyone remains at HHS who would know how to get all of that funding out the door or whether it will now be administered by White House appointees.)

Head Start will be especially affected in the wake of Kennedy’s mass firings of Office of Head Start regional staff and news that the president’s draft budget proposes eliminating funding for the program altogether. That would leave one million working-class parents who rely on Head Start not only for pre-K education but also for child care, particularly in rural areas, with nowhere to send their kids during the day.

Some local Head Start programs are already having to close their doors, and many program directors are encountering impediments to spending their current budgets. When they seek reimbursement after paying their teachers or purchasing school supplies, they’re being directed to a new “Defend the Spend” DOGE website asking them to “justify” each item, even though the spending has already been appropriated by Congress and audited by nonpartisan civil servants.

Next on the chopping block, it appears, is Medicaid, which serves children in greater numbers than any other age group. If Republicans in Congress go through with the cuts they’ve been discussing, and Trump signs those cuts into law, kids from lower- and middle-class families across the U.S. will lose access to health care at their schools, in foster care, for their disabilities or for cancer treatment.

The Trump administration has touted the president’s record of “protecting America’s children,” asserting in a recent post that Trump will “never stop fighting for their right to a healthy, productive upbringing.” The statement listed five examples of that commitment. Four were related to transgender issues (including making it U.S. government policy that there are only two sexes and keeping trans athletes out of women’s sports); the other was a ban on COVID-19 vaccine mandates at schools that receive federal funding.

The White House, and multiple agencies, declined to respond to most of ProPublica’s questions. Madi Biedermann, a Department of Education spokesperson, addressed the elimination of pandemic recovery funding, saying that “COVID is over”; that the Biden administration established an “irresponsible precedent” by extending the deadline to spend these funds (and exceeding their original purpose); and that the department will consider extensions if individual projects show a clear connection between COVID and student learning.

An HHS spokesperson, in response to ProPublica’s questions about cuts to children’s programs across that agency, sent a short statement saying that the department, guided by Trump, is restructuring with a focus on cutting wasteful bureaucracy. The offices serving children, the statement said, will be merged into a newly established “Administration for Healthy America.”

Programs that serve kids have historically fared the worst when those in power are looking for ways to cut the budget. That’s in part because kids can’t vote, and they typically don’t belong to political organizations. International aid groups, another constituency devastated by Trump’s policy agenda, also can’t say that they represent many U.S. voters.

This dynamic may be part of why cuts on the health side of the Department of Health and Human Services — layoffs of doctors, medical researchers and the like — have received more political and press attention than those on the human services side, where the Administration for Children and Families is located. That’s where you can find the Office of Child Support Services, the Office of Head Start, the Office of Child Care (which promotes minimum health and safety standards for child care programs nationally and helps states reduce the cost of child care for families), the Office of Family Assistance (which helps states administer direct aid to lower-income parents and kids), the Children’s Bureau (which oversees child protective services, foster care and adoption) and the Family and Youth Services Bureau (which aids runaway and homeless teens, among others).

All told, these programs have seen their staffs cut from roughly 2,400 employees as of January to 1,500 now, according to a shared Google document that is being regularly updated by former HHS officials. (Neither the White House nor agency leadership have released the exact numbers of cuts.)

Those losses have been most acutely felt in the agency’s regional offices, five out of 10 of which — covering over 20 states — have been closed by the Trump administration. They were dissolved this month without notice to their own employees or to the local providers they worked with. It was these outposts that had monitored Head Start programs to make sure that they had fences around their playgrounds, gates at the top of their stairs and enough staffing to keep an eye on even the most energetic little ones. It was also the regional staff who had helped state child support programs modernize their computer systems and navigate federal law. That allowed them, among other things, to be able to “pass through” more money to families instead of depositing it in state coffers to reimburse themselves for costs.

And it was the regional staff who’d had the relationships with tribal officials that allowed them to routinely work together to address child support, child care and child welfare challenges faced by Native families. Together, they had worked to overcome sometimes deep distrust of the federal government among tribal leaders, who may now have no one to ask for help with their children’s programs other than political appointees in D.C.

In the wake of the regional office cuts, local child services program directors have no idea who in the federal government to call when they have urgent concerns, many told ProPublica. “No one knows anything,” said one state child support director, asking not to be named in order to speak candidly about the administration’s actions. “We have no idea who will be auditing us.”

“We’re trying to be reassuring to our families,” the official said, “but if the national system goes down, so does ours.”

That national system includes the complex web of databases and technical support maintained and provided by the Office of Child Support Services at HHS, which helps states locate parents who owe child support in order to withhold part of their paychecks or otherwise obtain the money they owe, which is then sent to the parent who has custody of the child. Without this federal data and assistance, child support orders would have little way of being enforced across state lines.

For that reason, the Trump administration is making a risky gamble by slashing staffing at the federal child support office, said Vicki Turetsky, who headed that office under the Obama administration. She worries that the layoffs create a danger of system outages that would cause child support payments to be missed or delayed. (“That’s a family’s rent,” she said.) The instability is compounded, she said, by DOGE’s recent unexplained move to access a highly confidential national child support database.

But even if the worst doesn’t come to pass, there will still be concrete consequences for the delivery of child support to families, Turetsky said. The staff members who’ve been pushed out include those who’d helped manage complicated, outdated IT systems; without updates, these programs might over- or undershoot the amount of child support that a parent owes, misdirect the money or fail to give notice to the dad or mom about a change in the case.

When Liz Ryan departed as administrator of the Department of Justice’s juvenile division in January, its website was flush with opportunities for state and local law enforcement as well as nonprofits to apply for federal funding for a myriad of initiatives that help children. There were funds for local police task forces that investigate child exploitation on the internet; for programs where abused children are interviewed by police and mental health professionals; and for court-appointed advocates for victimized kids. Grants were also available for mentoring programs like Big Brothers Big Sisters and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

But the Trump administration removed those grant applications, which total over $400 million in a typical year. And Ryan said there still hasn’t been any communication, including in what used to be regular emails with grant recipients, many of whom she remains in touch with, about whether this congressionally approved money even still exists or whether some of it might eventually be made available again.

A spokesperson for the Office of Justice Programs within the DOJ said the agency is reviewing programs, policies and materials and “taking action as appropriate” in accordance with Trump’s executive orders and guidance. When that review has been completed, local agencies and programs seeking grants will be notified.

Multiple nonprofits serving exploited children declined to speak on the record to ProPublica, fearing that doing so might undermine what chance they still had of getting potential grants.

“Look at what happened to the law firms,” one official said, adding that time is running out to fund his program’s services for victims of child abuse for the upcoming fiscal year.

“I never anticipated that programs and services and opportunities for young people wouldn’t be funded at all by the federal government,” Ryan said, adding that local children’s organizations likely can’t go to states, whose budgets are already underwater, to make up the funding gap. “When you look at this alongside what they’re doing at HHS and the Department of Education and to Medicaid, it’s undercutting every single effort that we have to serve kids.”

One item that made the list is polyethylene terephthalate, more commonly known as PET resin, the thermoplastic used to make plastic bottles.

Why it was spared is unclear, and even people in the industry are confused about the reason for the reprieve.

But its inclusion is a win for Reyes Holdings, a Coca-Cola bottler that ranks among the largest privately held companies in the U.S. and is owned by a pair of brothers who have donated millions of dollars to Republican causes. Records show the company recently hired a lobbying firm with close ties to the Trump White House to make its case on tariffs.

Whether the company’s lobbying played any role in the exemption is unclear. Reyes Holdings and its lobbyists did not respond to questions from ProPublica. The White House also did not comment, but some industry advocates say the administration has rebuffed requests for exemptions.

The resin’s unexplained inclusion on the list exemplifies how opaque the administration’s process for crafting its tariff policy has been. Major stakeholders are in the dark about why certain products face levies and others don’t. Tariff rates have been altered without any clear explanation for the changes. Administration officials have given conflicting messages about the tariffs or declined to answer questions at all.

The lack of transparency about the process has created concerns among trade experts that politically connected firms might be winning carve-outs behind closed doors.

“It could be corruption, but it could just as easily be incompetence,” a lobbyist who works on tariff policy said of PET resin’s inclusion. “To be honest, this was such a hurried mess, I am not sure who got into the White House to talk to folks about the list.”

During the first Trump administration, there was a formal process for seeking an exemption from tariffs. Companies submitted hundreds of thousands of applications making the case for why their products should be spared. The applications were public, so the machinery of the tariff crafting process could be more closely examined. Such transparency allowed academics to subsequently analyze thousands of the applications and determine that political donors to Republicans were more likely to be granted exemptions.

In Trump’s second term, at least thus far, there has not been a formal application process for tariff carve-outs. Industry executives and lobbyists are making their case behind closed doors. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board last week called “the opacity of the process” for getting an exemption “the Beltway Swamp’s dream.”

In the executive order formalizing Trump’s new tariffs, including baseline 10% tariffs for almost all countries, exemptions were broadly defined as products in the pharmaceutical, semiconductor, lumber, copper, critical minerals and energy sectors. An accompanying list detailed the specific products that would be spared.

But a ProPublica review of that list found many items that don’t fit neatly, or at all, in those broad categories, and some items that fall squarely within the categories were not spared.

The White House exclusions list, for example, included most types of asbestos, which is not generally considered a critical mineral and doesn’t seem to fit in any of the exempted categories. The cancer-causing mineral, which is not generally considered critical to national security or the U.S. economy, is still used to make chlorine, but the Biden administration’s Environmental Protection Agency banned imports of the material last year. The Trump administration has signaled it may roll back some of those Biden-era restrictions.

A spokesperson for the American Chemistry Council, which had pushed back on the ban because it could hurt the chlorine industry, said the trade group played no role in lobbying for asbestos to get a tariff exemption and didn’t know why it was included. (Two major chlorine companies also showed no indication of lobbying on the tariffs in their disclosure forms.)

Other items that landed on the list, despite not falling into exempted categories, are far more innocuous. Among them: coral, shells and cuttlebone, a part of the cuttlefish that is used as a dietary supplement for pets.

PET resin also doesn’t fit neatly in any of the exempted categories. It’s possible the administration counted it as an energy product, experts said, because its ingredients are derived from petroleum. But other products that would have met that same low bar were not included.

“We are as surprised as anybody,” said Ralph Vasami, executive director of the PET Resin Association, a trade group for the industry. The resin, he said, has no application for the exempted categories, unless you count the packaging those products come in.

During the fourth quarter of last year, the same period when Trump won the election, records show Reyes Holdings, the Coca-Cola bottler, enlisted Ballard Partners to lobby on tariffs. During the first quarter of this year, when Trump was inaugurated, records show that Ballard began lobbying the Commerce Department, which shapes trade policy, on tariffs.

The firm has become a destination for companies looking for an in with the Trump administration. It once lobbied for Trump’s own company, the Trump Organization, and its staff has included top officials in the administration, such as Attorney General Pam Bondi and the president’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles. Brian Ballard, its founder and a prolific fundraiser for Trump, was named by Politico “the most powerful lobbyist in Trump’s Washington.” He was one of two lobbyists from the firm who lobbied on tariffs for Reyes Holdings, federal disclosure records show.

The billionaire brothers behind Reyes Holdings, Chris and Jude Reyes, also have their own political ties. While they have given to some Democratic candidates, the bulk of their political donations have gone to Republican causes, campaign finance disclosures show. And after Trump’s first election win, Chris Reyes was invited to Mar-a-Lago to meet privately with Trump.

The PET resin carve-out isn’t just a break for Reyes Holdings. It’s a boon to other firms that buy the resin to manufacture bottles and the beverage companies that use them. Earlier this year, the CEO of Coca-Cola said the company would transition to using more plastic bottles in the face of new tariffs on aluminum, a plan that might have been dashed if the thermoplastics were also hit with new tariffs. Disclosure records show the company also lobbied this year about tariffs on the Hill, but the documents don’t provide detail about which policies in particular, and the company did not respond to questions from ProPublica. (Coca-Cola has looked to make inroads with Trump, donating about $250,000 for his inauguration, and the CEO presented Trump with a personalized bottle of his favorite soda, Diet Coke.)

Another industry that appears to have done relatively well lobbying for carve-outs from the recent tariffs is agriculture. The exemption list includes various pesticide and fertilizer ingredients.

The American Farm Bureau Federation, an agricultural lobby, took credit for some of those exemptions in an analysis posted on its website recently, calling exemptions for peat and potash “hard fought for by agricultural organizations such as the American Farm Bureau Federation” and “a testament to the effectiveness of farmers’ and ranchers raising their collective voice.”

There are a number of other imports that don’t neatly fall into any of the exempted categories but might if the categories were defined loosely.

One example is sucralose, the artificial sweetener. Its inclusion will largely help companies that use the product in food and beverages. But sucralose is also sometimes used in drugs to make them more palatable. It’s not clear if the White House gave it a pass under the pharmaceutical exemption or for some other reason.

Even for the items that were spared, the reprieve may just be temporary.

The broad categories exempted are largely industries that are being investigated by the administration for potential future tariffs under its authority to administer levies to protect national security.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse-gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

The Terrorgram community, which has been linked to around three dozen criminal cases around the globe, including at least three mass shootings, was profiled last month in stories and a documentary produced by ProPublica and FRONTLINE.

The court documents allege that Nikita Casap, a 17-year-old from Waukesha, Wisconsin, wrote a three-page manifesto calling for the assassination of Trump in order to “foment a political revolution in the United States and ‘save the white race’ from ‘Jewish controlled politicians.’”

In his manifesto, Casap allegedly encouraged people to read the writings of Juraj Krajčík, a longtime Terrogram figure who murdered two people in an attack on an LGBTQ+ bar in Bratislava, Slovakia, in 2022, according to the court records. Casap also allegedly recommended two publications produced by the Terrorgram Collective, a secretive group that produced alleged hit lists, videos and written publications — including instructions for building bombs and sabotaging critical infrastructure — and distributed them throughout the Terrorgram ecosystem.

Launched in 2019, Terrorgram was a constellation of scores of Telegram channels and chat groups focused on inciting acts of white supremacist terrorism and anti-government sabotage. At the network’s peak, some Terrorgram channels drew thousands of followers. Over the past six months, however, the network has been disrupted as authorities in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have arrested key Terrorgram influencers and community members.

But the violence hasn’t stopped.

Casap in February allegedly shot and killed his mother, Tatiana Casap, and stepfather, Donald Mayer; stole their property; and fled in their Volkswagen Atlas, Waukesha County prosecutors say. He was arrested in Kansas. Prosecutors have charged the teen with two counts of first-degree homicide, as well as identity theft and other theft charges. He is expected to be arraigned on May 7, according to court records.

A witness told local investigators that Casap “was in touch with a male in Russia through the Telegram app and they were planning to overthrow the U.S. government and assassinate President Trump,” according to charging documents in the Wisconsin case.

The newly unsealed federal court filings indicate that the FBI is investigating Casap in connection to the alleged assassination plot.

The bureau declined to comment on the matter.

Last fall, federal prosecutors accused two Americans of acting as leaders of the Terrorgram Collective and charged them with soliciting the murder of federal officials and a host of other terrorism-related offenses. The U.S. State Department has officially designated the Terrorgram Collective as a terrorist organization, as have officials in the United Kingdom and Australia. The two Americans have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

“Do absolutely anything you can that will lead to the collapse of America or any country you live in,” Casap allegedly wrote in his manifesto, according to an FBI affidavit. “This is the only way we can save the White race.”

The teen’s writings and online postings that are cited in the affidavit indicate that he is a believer in militant accelerationism, a concept that has become increasingly popular with neo-Nazis and other right-wing extremists over the past decade. Militant accelerationists aim to speed the collapse of modern society through acts of spectacular violence; from the ruins of today’s democracies, they aim to build all-white ethno-states organized on fascist principles.

Matthew Kriner, executive director of the Institute for Countering Digital Extremism, a nonprofit think tank, called the alleged Casap plot unique. “It’s the first time we’re explicitly seeing an individual tie an accelerationist act or plot with the president of the United States as a means of collapsing society,” Kriner said. “I think what we have here is a fairly clear-cut case of an individual who is being groomed to take drastic terrorist action in an accelerationist manner.”

Casap’s public defender could not be reached for comment.

A Telegram spokesperson said, “Telegram supports the peaceful exchange of ideas; however, calls for violence are strictly prohibited by our Terms of Service and are removed proactively as well as in response to user reports."

A ProPublica and FRONTLINE review shows that Casap was recently active in at least five extremist Telegram channels or chat groups, including a Russian-language neo-Nazi chat in which posters uploaded detailed instructions for crafting explosives, poisons and improvised firearms. He was also a member of a chat group with more than 4,300 participants run by the Misanthropic Division, a global neo-Nazi organization.

Casap, according to the federal documents, also sought out information online about the Order of Nine Angles, a cult that blends Satanic concepts and Nazi ideology and has increasingly turned to Telegram to recruit and proselytize.

“This is a clear example of how Terrorgram continues to influence murder,” said Jennefer Harper, a researcher who studies online extremism. “Nikita was influenced online by an assortment of ideologies and groups that intersect with the Terrorgram ecosphere.”

Both places were on the cusp of entering court-enforced agreements to overhaul their police forces after high-profile police killings there sparked a nationwide reckoning over race and policing.

But it’s now clear that the administration’s move will be felt well beyond those two cities. In fact, it throws into question police reform efforts in at least eight other communities across the country, according to a ProPublica review. The need for change in these places was documented in a flurry of investigations published by the Justice Department in the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency. All of the probes found a “pattern or practice” of unlawful behavior that was routine enough that the federal government recommended reforms.

From Phoenix to Trenton, New Jersey, federal officials investigating the eight agencies found unjustified killings, excessive force, debtors’ prisons, retaliation against police critics, racial discrimination, unlawful strip searches and officers having sexual contact with sex workers during undercover operations.

Such findings are typically the first step toward a department agreeing to federal oversight and court-ordered reform. Over the years, the DOJ has credited such agreements, known as consent decrees, for having helped departments reduce unnecessary use of force, cut crime rates and improve responses to people with behavioral health needs. President Donald Trump’s Justice Department, however, has ordered its civil rights attorneys to pause such work until further notice, effectively reinstating the limited approach it took during the president’s first term. Department officials did not respond to questions about the pause or how long it would remain in effect.

For now, that means any reform efforts will be up to local leadership — a dynamic that experts say could bode poorly for communities with long histories of police abuse.

Cliff Johnson, an attorney and director of the Mississippi office of the MacArthur Justice Center, a nonprofit legal organization, was not optimistic.

“While those DOJ reports sometimes can lead municipalities, police departments and other offenders to come to Jesus,” Johnson said, “what we’ve been seeing, from our perspective, is folks saying, ‘I don’t need Jesus. I got Trump.’”

Louisiana leaders, for example, have slammed the Justice Department’s report, which found a pattern of problems in the way the state police used force against civilians. Gov. Jeff Landry said the report was an attempt by the Biden administration to “diminish the service and exceptionality” of the state police. And state Attorney General Liz Murrill said the Justice Department was being used to “advance a political agenda.”

The report was partly spurred by the 2019 death of Ronald Greene, who was killed while in the custody of Louisiana State Police. Officers repeatedly shocked him with a Taser, dragged him by his ankle shackles and then left him face down in the road. Some officers deactivated or muted their body cameras during the incident. Louisiana troopers had claimed Greene died when his car crashed after a high-speed chase. The department was forced to change its story when The Associated Press obtained and published body-camera footage of the incident.

Federal investigators found the episode was not an outlier. According to their report, officers in the department used Tasers without warning and against people who were restrained or who did not pose a threat, didn’t give people the chance to comply before using force, used force against people who weren’t a threat, and used excessive force against people running from officers.

A spokesperson for the Louisiana State Police did not answer questions about the report’s findings but said the agency is working to improve its relationship with citizens and other stakeholders. Landry’s office did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about the report and the state’s response, and Murrill’s office declined to comment.

Across the state line in Lexington, Mississippi, the Justice Department’s shift away from police accountability could also be consequential. Department officials said residents there were so afraid of local police that they were hesitant to meet with investigators in public, fearful of retaliation.

They had good reason to be concerned. In 2023, officers arrested an attorney who was representing citizens in police abuse cases against the department. She had been filming a traffic stop at the time.

The police force — made up of about 10 officers, some of whom are part time — is the smallest the Justice Department has investigated in decades. Federal investigators ultimately found that its officers use excessive force, discriminate against Black people, conduct stops and searches without probable cause, and arrest people purely for not having the money to pay fines.

It’s unclear what steps, if any, the Lexington Police Department is taking in response to the report. Police Chief Charles Henderson declined to comment and directed questions to the city attorney, who did not return a call.

Reform advocates have put their hopes in upcoming elections in Lexington that could bring in new leadership that is more interested in making changes at the police department.

In Mount Vernon, New York, advocates say they’ve seen little movement since the Justice Department found police there use excessive force, conduct unlawful strip and body cavity searches of arrestees, and fail to properly train officers and supervisors. It also found police discriminated against Black people. One group is considering legal action to bring the city to the table.

“It seems like Mount Vernon has put lip service on addressing the findings,” said Daniel Lambright, an attorney with the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It remains unclear actually what they’re doing to address the findings.”

In their report, federal investigators expressed concern that the police department’s “overly aggressive tactics unnecessarily escalate encounters.” In one instance, they wrote, five Mount Vernon officers used force on a man they thought was selling drugs — without announcing their presence or attempting to arrest him peacefully. Instead, one of the officers approached the man from behind and attempted to put him in an “upper body hold,” which started an altercation, according to the report. Police then threw the man to the ground. One officer drove his Taser into the suspect five times while another repeatedly punched him in the head. The man suffered a broken nose.

“The reform efforts have to continue,” said the Rev. Stephen Pogue, a member of the United Black Clergy of Westchester, an organization that works on social justice matters in Mount Vernon and surrounding areas. “We’re not in one of those places where Trump is our god. In Mount Vernon, we still need Jesus.”

Pogue said he hopes the city will host a public meeting about the report before the summer.

Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard and a police spokesperson did not reply to interview requests. But in December, the mayor said in a statement that the city would work with the Justice Department to address its findings. “We wholeheartedly support our good officers and at the same time will not tolerate and will punish unconstitutional policing,” she said.

In Phoenix, city and police officials have sent conflicting signals about the federal investigation, which found the Police Department used excessive and deadly force, violated the rights of homeless people, and discriminated against Black, Latino, Native American people, as well as those who have behavioral disabilities. “Why the hell would anybody ever accept a consent decree?” said one City Council member months before the report was released. Afterward, the head of the police union said the investigation was a “farce” and part of an “unprofessional smear campaign.”

But Mayor Kate Gallego has said the city is taking the report seriously. In September, the City Council passed several police reform measures, including requiring all officers who deal with the public to use body-worn cameras, even the special units that have been at the center of controversial shootings.

“Regardless of the new federal administration, these reforms are moving forward, and the mayor’s commitment to improving the police department is unwavering,” a mayoral spokesperson told ProPublica.

Some of the other cities the Justice Department had targeted are taking small steps toward fixing problems the federal investigators identified, though it’s unclear whether the efforts will result in lasting change.

In Oklahoma City, where Justice found in January that police officers discriminate against people with behavioral health disabilities, the city recently began funding mobile mental health units that can respond to incidents instead of police, said Jessica Hawkins, chair of the city’s Crisis Intervention Advisory Group. She said the city is also working on a written response to the DOJ report but didn’t know when it would be completed.

Police Chief Ron Bacy declined ProPublica’s request for an interview and through a spokesperson said the department was “still reviewing the report.”

In Memphis, Tennessee, where federal investigators found that police use excessive force, conduct unlawful stops and discriminate against Black people, the mayor put together a reform task force, led by a retired federal judge. “The DOJ report, in our case, kick-started a conversation that had sort of gone cold,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, an organization that works on litigation and justice matters in Memphis.

And in Trenton, New Jersey, where the Justice Department found that local police have a pattern or practice of using excessive force and conducting unlawful pedestrian and vehicle stops, City Council member Jasi Edwards has been hosting community meetings to introduce the idea of a civilian complaint review board and build support for the measure. Edwards said she plans to formally put forth her proposal sometime in the fall.

It will likely run into resistance, though. Representatives of the Police Department and mayor told ProPublica that they didn’t believe a civilian review board was necessary because it would be costly and there are existing ways for citizens to complain about police conduct. The DOJ report, they said, highlighted some areas in need of improvement but mischaracterized a number of cases and gave an inaccurate depiction of the department’s culture.

In Worcester, Massachusetts, reforms are already moving forward in response to the Justice Department’s investigation.

Last month, the police chief released a 15-page report on proposed measures intended to remedy the problems identified by federal investigators. The changes, which are still awaiting legal review, include prohibiting police from releasing K-9 dogs into mass gatherings or riot scenes and requiring a supervisor to go to a scene if someone reports being injured by police.

The police chief, Paul Socier, has also proposed several changes to how officers approach prostitution. Investigators found the department engaged in “outrageous government conduct” with sex workers by having sexual contact during undercover operations.

“We are hopefully headed in the right direction,” said Audra Doody, co-executive director of Safe Exit Initiative, an organization in Worcester that provides services, housing and counseling to sex workers who want to leave the sex trade. “With a time of such uncertainty, I want to believe our people in the community are telling the truth and actually are going to do what they say they’re going to do, which they seem like they are, right now.”

Trash is piling up at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, staffers told ProPublica. Ecologists, chemists and biologists at Montlake Laboratory, the center’s headquarters in Seattle, are taking turns hauling garbage to the dumpster and discussing whether they should create a sign-up sheet to scrub toilets.

The scientists — who conduct genetic sampling of endangered salmon to check the species’ stock status and survival — routinely work with chemicals that can burn skin, erupt into flames and cause cancer. At least one said they’d have to delay mission-critical research if hazardous waste removal isn’t restored.

The deteriorating conditions at Montlake stem from a new policy at the Commerce Department that says Secretary Howard Lutnick must personally approve all contracts over $100,000. NPR reported that the bottleneck has disrupted operations at many NOAA facilities.

ProPublica spoke to three Montlake employees who described what it was like to work there as, one by one, service contracts expire and aren’t renewed. People are running around looking for compost bags and wondering who will empty out the female sanitary waste containers in the bathrooms, they said. The floors are getting dirty and workers have no access to vacuums or mops. Some scientists have bought their own soap and cleaning supplies.

Nor can people escape by working from home: the Trump administration has increasingly ordered federal workers to return to the office five days a week. At Montlake, that policy will apply to everyone by April 21.

“It’s making our work unsafe, and it’s unsanitary for any workplace,” but especially an active laboratory full of fire-reactive chemicals and bacteria, one Montlake researcher said.

Press officers at NOAA, the Commerce Department and the White House did not respond to requests for comment.

Montlake employees were informed last week that a contract for safety services — which includes the staff who move laboratory waste off-campus to designated disposal sites — would lapse after April 9, leaving just one person responsible for this task. Hazardous waste “pickups from labs may be delayed,” employees were warned in a recent email.

The building maintenance team’s contract expired Wednesday, which decimated the staff that had handled plumbing, HVAC and the elevators. Other contacts lapsed in late March, leaving the Seattle lab with zero janitorial staff and a skeleton crew of IT specialists.

During a big staff meeting at Montlake on Wednesday, lab leaders said they had no updates on when the contracts might be renewed, one researcher said. They also acknowledged it was unfair that everyone would need to pitch in on janitorial duties on top of their actual jobs.

Nick Tolimieri, a union representative for Montlake employees, said the problem is “all part of the large-scale bullying program” to push out federal workers. It seems like every Friday “we get some kind of message that makes you unable to sleep for the entire weekend,” he said. Now, with these lapsed contracts, it’s getting “more and more petty.”

The problems, large and small, at Montlake provide a case study of the chaos that’s engulfed federal workers across many agencies as the Trump administration has fired staff, dumped contracts and eliminated long-time operational support. Yesterday, hundreds of NOAA workers who had been fired in February, then briefly reinstated, were fired again.

Local management had new service contracts ready to go ages ago, Tolimieri said. The delay from headquarters means employees will struggle to get repairs for their computers or basic building maintenance; the aging elevators at Montlake already break so often that Tolimieri joked it would be easier to send notices on the occasions when they did work.

The fisheries center employs more than 350 people, most of whom work at Montlake. The rest are scattered across several research stations in Oregon and Washington.

Staff at the center conduct research and provide scientific advice for policies on sustainable fishing and endangered species, including a population of orcas in Puget Sound. They test seafood after oil spills to ensure the fish are safe to eat. Their work helps restore native salmon populations and support regional farming.

NOAA is “so uncontroversial,” said the Montlake researcher who’s worried about hazardous waste disposal. Employees are just “trying to do weather reports and give people good seafood.”

The researcher said lab workers are trained in basic lab safety, so the chemicals are properly stored, handled and placed into appropriate waste containers after use. But there’s a limit to how much chemical waste can be kept on site. And the contractors who left were experts on handling emergencies like large chemical spills or serious toxic exposures.

If those contractors don’t return soon, the researcher said, the lab may need to delay or pause important research.

That could include chemical-intensive lab work like testing sea lions, killer whales and walruses from Alaska for environmental contaminants, Tolimieri said.

“For a bunch of people who are screaming about efficiency,” he said, referring to the administration’s efforts to downsize the federal government, “they’ve done the most inefficient things possible.”

The meeting, described in court documents, offered the pair’s fledgling company, Deployed Resources, a key introduction to players doing government contract work for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees not only the nation’s disaster responses but also its immigration system. Over the next two decades, Stapleton and Napior hired more than a dozen former agency insiders as they turned their small-time logistics business, which had helped support outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza, into a contracting giant by building camps for a completely different use: detaining immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more — from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.

In Trump’s second term in office, the government is poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on immigration detention, including unprecedented plans to hold immigrants arrested in the U.S. in massive tent camps on military bases. One recently published request for contract proposals said the Department of Homeland Security could spend up to $45 billion over the next several years on immigrant detention. The plans have set off a gold rush among contractors. All this spending is unfolding at the same time the government has made sweeping cuts to federal agencies and shed other contracts.

Among those seeking a windfall is Deployed Resources, which, along with its sister company, Deployed Services, has adapted to shifting government policies and priorities in immigration enforcement.

Starting in 2016, to help respond to spikes in immigrant crossings that had periodically overwhelmed border stations, Deployed began setting up tent encampments to ease the overcrowding. These temporary structures served as short-term emergency waystations, which several former officials said provided flexibility that the U.S. needed. Many of those arriving — including families and unaccompanied children — were turning themselves in, hoping to be released into the U.S. to apply for asylum. In all, the company has been awarded more than $4 billion in government contracts building and operating border tents, according to an analysis of contracting data by ProPublica.

Since taking office in January, Trump has cracked down on asylum, pushing border crossings to record lows. Last month, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it no longer needed the tent facilities run by Deployed.

Instead, ProPublica found, the military will now be contracting with Deployed to use one of those border facilities to house people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

In March, one of the company’s tent complexes in El Paso, Texas, was handed over to ICE, CBP and ICE spokespeople said. In an unusual move, the Trump administration tapped funds from the Department of Defense to pay Deployed for the facility, citing the president’s declaration of an emergency at the southern border, a DOD spokesperson said. The nearly $140 million contract wasn’t posted publicly and was given to Deployed as the “incumbent contractor,” the spokesperson said, without further explaining why ICE would use military funds. ICE said it started transferring detainees to the site — which currently has the capacity to house 1,000 adults — on March 10.

As immigration raids escalate, detention space in the country’s existing network of permanent ICE prisons is filling up. There are currently around 48,000 immigrants locked up across the country, levels not seen since 2019. Deportations are happening at a slower pace than ICE arrests, according to data shared with ProPublica, so the administration is turning to companies that can quickly set up facilities.

As it looks to expand its capacity, the agency “is exploring all options to meet its current and future detention requirements,” said ICE spokesman Miguel Alvarez.

Yet using tents to house thousands of people arrested by ICE is fundamentally different from using them to house recent border crossers, many of whom weren’t supposed to be held for more than a few days, seven current and former DHS officials who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations told ProPublica.

They said it would be the first time these tent camps would be used for ICE detainees in the U.S. and that it was unclear how they could be constructed to meet the agency’s basic health and safety requirements. These include separate areas for men and women and dedicated zones for families, as well as space to segregate those who are potentially violent, and private meeting areas for lawyers and their clients. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not directly involved in the contracts.

“People that you’ve ripped out of the community, people you’ve arrested, people who want to get back to their children, people who are scared, are going to behave differently than the border crossing population,” said one former ICE official. “You have a lot more fear in the population.”

“It would take a remarkable degree of innovation from a contractor,” said another former DHS official, adding, “It would also be incredibly expensive.”

At a border security conference this week, ICE Acting Assistant Director for Operations Support Ralph Ferguson said that Deployed Resources was modifying the CBP tents in El Paso by adding more rigid structures inside, which he said would make them more secure. Deployed got an additional contract for up to $5 million to provide unarmed guards at the El Paso facility, according to a public notice posted in late March.

The company did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, Deployed says it is “dedicated to safely and efficiently providing transparent facility support and logistical services, anytime, anywhere” and describes itself as “the first-choice provider” for government contracts.

Deployed was also one of the companies interested in operating an immigrant detention camp on the nearby Fort Bliss military base, according to government documents obtained by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the contracting process. ICE was seeking proposals from vendors last month for a 1,000-bed camp that could grow to 5,000 beds, housing women and men, including those deemed high security risks, as well as families with small children. The contractor would be responsible for separating those groups and preventing escapes, documents reviewed by ProPublica show.

The plans are “a recipe for disaster,” said Eunice Hyunhye Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.

“All of the problems that we see with ICE detention writ large, like the abuse of force, the sexual assault, medical neglect, the lack of food, lack of access to counsel, lack of due process rights, lack of access to telephones — the list goes on — all of those things are going to be vastly more complicated in a system where you are literally setting up people in tents that are surrounded by barbed wire and armed military personnel,” Cho said.

Connections and Contracts

Since 2016, Deployed Resources has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on providing CBP with immigration tent structures to help with sudden influxes of immigrants. During the first Trump administration, the contractor set up temporary tent courts for people forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings under a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. The company also earned hundreds of millions of dollars during the Biden years operating emergency detention facilities for unaccompanied minors that were funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.

Though the value of Deployed Resources isn’t publicly known, county real estate records attest to the wealth its owners, Stapleton and Napior, have amassed in the detention business.

In the spring of 2019, shortly after the company landed what was then its biggest immigration contract — a $92 million no-bid award to run two tent facilities in Texas — Stapleton purchased a $5.7 million condo in Naples, Florida. Nearly three years and more than $1 billion in contracts later, he upgraded to a $15 million home a block away from the shore. Napior snapped up a $9 million beachside property near Sarasota, Florida, in 2023. Stapleton did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by phone, Napior said he did not comment to the press and then hung up.

After the meeting at Bonnaroo in 2005, Deployed later hired the former FEMA employee who had checked out its facilities there and to win emergency management contracting work at the agency before moving into immigration detention. In court filings, Deployed said that the meeting did not lead to its FEMA work.

Deployed went on to hire additional former DHS officials over the years, expanding its connections to the federal agencies with which it does business. With a second Trump administration poised to crack down further on the flow of immigrants to the southern border — a potential threat to Deployed’s core business — the company hired several former ICE leaders, according to online searches and current and former officials.

A month after Trump’s victory, former ICE field office director Sean Ervin announced he was joining Deployed as a senior adviser for strategic initiatives. He had previously overseen removal operations across Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The head of field operations for ICE Miami, Michael Meade — an 18-year agency veteran — also joined Deployed that month, according to their profiles on LinkedIn. Meade and Ervin did not respond to requests for comment.

Deployed has continued to win federal business even after the spending on the company’s contracts was criticized by government watchdogs and a whistleblower.

A review by Congress’ Government Accountability Office of one no-bid CBP contract that the first Trump administration awarded to Deployed found that the company’s 2,500-person facility in Tornillo, Texas, averaged just 30 detainees a night in the fall of 2019 and never held more than 68 during the five-month period it was open. It also found that CBP paid Deployed millions for meals it didn’t need to feed people it wasn’t holding. Deployed agreed to reimburse $250,000 for meals not delivered, the GAO said.

A separate whistleblower lawsuit in New Hampshire brought by a former DHS official who worked for Deployed accuses the company of cutting corners on training its staff to detect and report sexual abuse of children in facilities it set up to house unaccompanied minors during the Biden administration. In court filings, Deployed said it “vigorously disputes the allegations” and has moved to dismiss the suit.

Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.

Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.

“I have no idea why they were doing that with government money,” said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract. Deployed did not respond to requests for comment about its Greensboro contract.

Now, with even more money to be spent on immigration detention, Deployed is just one of the companies hoping to benefit. In addition to Fort Bliss more than 10 military sites around the country are being considered for ICE detention facilities, according to a DHS document shared with ProPublica. The New York Times previously reported on elements of the plan.

The Fort Bliss contracting process has proceeded mostly out of public view, and it’s not clear if the project would go forward or fall under the larger $45 billion plan to expand immigration detention. In March, representatives from at least 10 companies, including Deployed Resources, toured Fort Bliss with DHS officials to survey the site, said two people familiar with the visit. Also there were private prison giants The GEO Group and CoreCivic, the sources said.

The GEO Group’s leadership and allied political action groups donated more than $1 million to Trump’s reelection effort, according to a review by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan Washington watchdog group. On its most recent earnings call, GEO’s CEO said Trump’s immigration agenda was an “unprecedented opportunity” for the firm. CoreCivic — which donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee — has also spoken about the business opportunities. After Trump’s election, stock prices for both companies jumped.

CoreCivic said it is in “regular contact” with government agencies “to understand their changing needs” but said that it does not comment on contracts it is seeking. Its contribution to inauguration events was “consistent with our past practice of civic participation” supporting both parties. The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

Deployed Services has largely eschewed political donations, sticking to its strategy — also used by GEO and CoreCivic — of hiring former high-ranking government officials.

A few weeks ago Deployed scored another high-profile ICE hire: Marlen Pineiro joined Deployed after 40 years in government, including more than a decade in ICE’s Senior Executive Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. At a border security conference this week, where several former high-ranking DHS employees hired by Deployed were gathered among industry vets and Trump immigration officials, Pineiro declined an interview request from a ProPublica reporter.

But on LinkedIn, the congratulations rolled in. The acting head of ICE under Trump, Todd Lyons, posted: “Great news.” Two other senior ICE officials who had also recently joined Deployed commented: “Welcome aboard.”

“Let’s sail away,” Pineiro replied. “Woohooo see you soon.”

Note: ProPublica analyzed transaction-level contract data from usaspending.gov for this story. Contract amounts reported are federal obligations over the life of a contract or group of contracts. In the case of the recently announced Department of Defense award to Deployed Resources, the contract is new and worth up to $140 million.

On a late afternoon in November 2017, Witney Arch told her 1-1/2-year-old son to stop playing and come inside. Upset, he grabbed her right breast when she picked him up. She experienced a shock of pain but did not think it was anything serious. A week later, however, the ache had not subsided. After trips to several doctors, a biopsy revealed that Arch had early-stage breast cancer. Her surgeon told her that it was likely invasive and aggressive.

By the end of January, she had made two critical decisions. She would get a double mastectomy. And she wanted her operation at the Center for Restorative Breast Surgery in New Orleans, a medical facility renowned for its highly specialized approach to breast cancer care and reconstruction. The two surgeons who founded it had pioneered techniques that used a woman’s own body tissue to form new breasts post mastectomy. The idea of a natural restoration appealed to Arch. “I don’t judge anybody for getting implants, especially if you’ve had cancer,” she said. “But I felt like I was taking something foreign out of my body, cancer, and I did not want to put something foreign back in.”

Arch was a 42-year-old preschool teacher for her church, with four young children, living in a suburb of New Orleans. The 1-1/2-year-old had been born with Sturge-Weber syndrome, a rare neurological disorder. Caring for him consumed her life. By nature upbeat and optimistic, Arch felt blessed that her son’s act of defiance had led to an early diagnosis. “We’re going to pray about this and we’re going to figure it out,” she told her husband.

Arch asked her insurer, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana, for approval to go to the center for her care, and the company granted it, a process known as prior authorization. Then, a week or so before her surgery, Arch was wrangling child care and meal plans when she got a call from the insurer. The representative on the line was trying to persuade her to have the surgery elsewhere. She urged Arch to seek a hospital that, unlike the center, was in network and charged less. “Do you realize how much this is going to cost?” Arch remembered the agent asking. Arch did not need more stress, but here it was — from her own health plan. “I feel very comfortable with my decision,” she replied. “My doctor teaches other doctors around the world how to do this.” Over the next year, Arch underwent five operations to rid herself of cancer and reconstruct her breasts.

Arch did not know it at the time, but her surgery would become evidence in a long-running legal fight between the breast center’s founders, surgeons Frank DellaCroce and Scott Sullivan, and Blue Cross, Louisiana’s biggest health insurance company, with an estimated two-thirds share of the market. DellaCroce and Sullivan had repeatedly sued the insurer, alleging that it granted approvals for surgery but then denied payments or paid only a fraction of patients’ bills. They pointed to calls like the one Arch received as proof of the company’s effort to drive away patients. The aggressive legal attack, they knew, was fraught. Litigation against the $3.4 billion company would take a long time and a lot of money. The chances of winning were slight. “You fight dragons at great peril,” DellaCroce would tell friends. But this September, after 18 years and several defeats in court, jurors found Blue Cross liable for fraud. They awarded the center $421 million — one of the largest verdicts ever to a single medical practice outside of a class-action lawsuit. In a statement, Blue Cross said it “disagrees with the jury’s decision, which we believe was wrong on the facts and the law. We have filed an appeal and expect to be successful.”

Frustration with insurers is at an all-time high. The December fatal shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson allegedly by Luigi Mangione serves as an extreme and tragic example. Doctors and insurers are locked into a perpetual conflict over health care costs, with patients caught in the middle. Doctors accuse insurance plans of blocking payments for health care treatments that can save the patients’ lives. Insurance companies insist they shouldn’t pay for procedures that they say are unnecessary or overpriced. It is easy to emerge from an examination of the American health care system with a cynicism that both sides are broken and corrupt.

However, interviews with scores of doctors, patients and insurance executives, as well as reviews of internal documents, regulatory filings and academic studies, reveal a fundamental truth: The two sides are not evenly matched. Insurance companies are players in the fight over money, and they are also the referees. Insurers produce their own guidelines to determine whether to pay claims. When a doctor appeals a denial, insurers make all the initial decisions. In legal settings, insurers are often given favorable standing in their ability to set what conditions they are required to cover. Federal and state insurance regulators lack the resources to pursue individual complaints against multibillion-dollar companies. Six major insurers, which include some of the nation’s largest companies, cover half of all Americans. They are pitted against tens of thousands of doctors’ practices and large hospital chains.

The Blue Cross trial provides a rare opportunity to expose in detail the ways that health insurance companies wield power over doctors and their patients. Blue Cross executives testified that the breast center charged too much money — sometimes more than $180,000 for an operation. The center, they said, deserved special attention because it had a history of questionable charges. But the insurer’s defense went even further, to the very meaning of “prior authorization,” which it had granted women like Arch to pursue surgery. The authorization, they said in court, recognized that a procedure was medically necessary, but it also contained a clause that it was “not a guarantee of payment.” Blue Cross was not obliged to pay the center anything, top executives testified. “Let me be clear: The authorization never says we’re going to pay you,” said Steven Udvarhelyi, who was the CEO for the insurer from 2016 to 2024, in a deposition. “That’s why there’s a disclaimer.

From 2015 through 2023, the Baton Rouge-based insurer paid, on average, less than 9% of the charges billed by the breast center for more than 7,800 individual medical procedures — even though it had authorized all of them. Thousands of such claims were never paid at all, according to court records. Testimony revealed that the health plan never considered thousands of appeals filed by the center. Corporate documents showed Blue Cross executives had set up secret processes for approving operations and reimbursing the clinic and its doctors that resulted in reduced fees and payment delays. One lucrative strategy: A national-level policy allowed Blue Cross Louisiana to take a cut of any savings it achieved in paying the breast center on behalf of patients covered by out-of-state Blue Cross companies, meaning the less the insurer paid out, the more it earned.

In Sullivan’s words, the insurer was hypocritical, “morally bankrupt.” Blue Cross had stranded many of the center’s patients with high bills, amounts that it had absorbed over the years. On several occasions, though, Blue Cross executives had signed special one-time deals with the center, known as single case agreements, to pay for their wives’ cancer treatment. To Sullivan, it seemed the insurer was willing to pay the center when patients had connections but would fight when patients did not.

Blue Cross declined to comment on any individual cases but said in a statement that single case agreements were “common in the industry” and were available to all members when needed to access out-of-network providers.

The Center

Nobody would take the breast center and its adjoining hospital as an ordinary medical establishment. The two facilities take up a city block along St. Charles Avenue, the thoroughfare famous for its streetcars, Mardi Gras parades and Queen Anne mansions. Patients access the complex — created by merging a former law office, funeral home, car dealership and Dunkin’ Donuts — by driving around back where a porte cochere leads into a soaring atrium. Light pours in through windows set in the high ceiling. Arrangements of white orchids are scattered among comfortable couches and chairs. Here, women consult with doctors to plan their treatment. Surgeries are performed at the 39-bed hospital, which has an Icee machine in a family room. New-age music plays softly throughout the building. Rooms are designed to be as homey as possible, with medical gear hidden away and seascapes by a local artist hanging on the wall. One patient’s husband referred to it as a “spa-spital.”

The idea of combining the luxury feel of an upscale plastic surgery practice with the mission-driven zeal of a medical clinic came to DellaCroce and Sullivan while they were young surgeons. The two grew up in Louisiana. Sullivan spent much of his childhood in Mandeville, a suburb of New Orleans on the north side of Lake Ponchartrain, his dad employed in the oil and gas industry. His mother wanted him to be a priest or a doctor. “I definitely was not going to become a priest,” he said. DellaCroce’s father worked at the paper mill in West Monroe in the state’s northern neck. His mother, a nurse, gave him an appreciation for medicine as a career that was “meaningful and challenging.”

They became friends while working at the Louisiana State University medical center, where they earned the nickname “the Sushi Brothers” for their favorite lunch. They were drawn to microsurgery and breast reconstruction because it was an emerging field that was innovating and improving care. Both men became board-certified in plastic surgery. Sullivan, 60, is the hard-charging businessman, stocky, direct and blunt. DellaCroce, 58, with a ponytail, goatee and soft drawl, is more the diplomat, patient and cerebral. The pair have lectured around the world and written numerous medical journal articles.

They opened their first office in 2003 in a single room rented from a fellow doctor at what was then known as Memorial Medical Center, the hulking private hospital in New Orleans. They performed operations at facilities throughout the region but found that most gave little consideration to their patients’ comfort. They wanted to build a different kind of hospital. “Can we give them that little bit of extra without breaking the budget to make the experience less awful? Can’t make it great, but can you make it less awful?” DellaCroce explained. “Can you attend to the human side of this patient and give them the added value of peace and confidence?” Hurricane Katrina set back their construction plans, and the new edifice, named the St. Charles Surgical Hospital, did not open its doors until 2009. It boasts of being the only hospital in the country devoted solely to care for breast cancer patients who have received mastectomies. The center does not provide radiation or chemotherapy treatments. The majority of patients come from out of state.

Women seeking to have their breasts restored after a mastectomy face two paths. Some choose a relatively straightforward surgical procedure using implants filled with silicon or another gel. The center specializes in the other option, what’s known as autologous tissue reconstruction, where a woman’s own fat is taken from one part of the body, like the bottom or the stomach, and used to rebuild the breast. The procedure requires a longer recovery time, but the new breasts become part of the body.

The transplant surgery is lengthy and complex. Operations can last up to 12 hours with big medical teams involved. One surgeon performs the mastectomy while another creates a new breast by knitting together layers of fat and tissue. Concentration is intense. The surgeons stare through glasses with microscopes to connect new blood vessels with a needle that’s thinner than an eyelash, using thread less than half the width of a human hair. DellaCroce and Sullivan invented techniques, for example, allowing tissue to be taken from multiple sites when a woman did not have enough fat in one part of her body for a full restoration.

One afternoon last fall, DellaCroce strode into a cavernous operating room to check on a patient. On the table in front of him, a woman lay covered in curtains of blue surgical cloth, only her torso exposed. Earlier in the day, a surgical oncologist had removed her right breast as part of a mastectomy to treat her cancer. Later, another surgeon had taken flaps of fat from her stomach and interlaced them with blood vessels to create a new breast to replace the lost one. Now, in the fifth hour of surgery, a physician’s assistant leaned over her midsection, closing an incision along her side with some final stitches. Nurses hurried around the space, preparing to wrap up the operation. Paul Simon’s “You Can Call Me Al” played in the background. The smell of burnt flesh hung in the air. A blue light signaled that the new arteries were successfully pumping blood. “Wow, that woman looks really good,” DellaCroce told the physician’s assistant. “Nice job.”

There is no denying that the center’s high-end treatment means high costs. The median charge for an operation and hospital stay is about $165,000. DellaCroce and Sullivan hired consultants to review other well-regarded practices, who advised them their prices were competitive with their peers. “We weren’t asking to be paid Lebron James, best of the best, even though we feel we’re in the top 1 or 2% of the country,” Sullivan said. “We just wanted something fair.”

Blue Cross and Blue Shield

It is one of the quirks of the American health care system that insurers almost never pay the prices for procedures demanded by doctors and hospitals.

To understand why requires a tour of the grand bargain at the heart of the health insurance system. Insurance companies negotiate with hospitals and doctors to discount reimbursements on medical procedures, like office visits or MRI scans. Providers who sign these contracts are in network. Insurance companies like in-network doctors because they can budget for health expenses and set premiums accordingly. Doctors and hospitals agree to be in network because they get a steady stream of insured patients.

DellaCroce and Sullivan held contracts with insurers that resulted in average payments to the center’s doctors in the $20,000 to $30,000 range. But DellaCroce and Sullivan never came to an agreement with Blue Cross. That made them an exception in Louisiana — the insurer is so dominant that 97% of local physicians and hospitals are in network. DellaCroce and Sullivan said the company was not offering them enough money — in some cases not even enough to cover the cost of the surgeries, they argued in court documents. The doctors and their hospital remained out of network, meaning they charged Blue Cross the full price for their procedures.

Such charges are controversial. Insurance companies and many health experts say they are too often inflated and untethered from actual costs. Physicians and hospitals say their fees are justified, reflecting the true price of medical care. In the end, insurers — especially in states like Louisiana, with few competitors — use their market power in negotiations to set reimbursements at what they want to pay, not what doctors charge.

At Blue Cross, Dwight Brower was charged with reviewing the bills from the breast center. He had worked as a physician at a small family practice in Baton Rouge and then at a local hospital before joining Blue Cross as a medical director. He helped oversee prior authorizations. While many patients assume that an approval means an insurer will pay for an operation, it is simply a recognition that a procedure is medically necessary. Federal law mandates that private insurers cover breast restorations for women who undergo mastectomies because of cancer or genetic risk. And patients, in general, are allowed to choose their own doctors.

However, since the center was out of network and had no contract with the insurer, Blue Cross determined how much it would pay for the treatment, and Brower believed that the breast center’s bills were exorbitant. “I did not think that they were reasonable,” he would later testify. Surgeons doing lung transplants or brain surgery rarely billed Blue Cross more than $50,000 for their work. Why should DellaCroce and Sullivan get so much more? “Don’t get me wrong. The surgeons at the center are extremely skilled,” he acknowledged. The operations were often lengthy. “But so are open-heart surgeries,” he said. “Relative to some of the other extremely complicated surgeries done by other surgeons in other areas of the body, it just seemed like their fee schedule was extremely high.”

Blue Cross Louisiana executives testified that they did not even consider doctors’ invoices when making decisions on what to reimburse because such charges were “unregulated” and “nonstandard.” Instead, they paid “an amount we establish” — unless the doctor’s bill was cheaper. In the end, the insurer said it settled on reimbursing the breast center about the same as in-network doctors performing similar operations, even though DellaCroce and Sullivan did not benefit from having patients referred to them. In practice, that meant the insurer paid out a fraction of the breast center’s bills. Of the 7,837 medical procedures in dispute in the lawsuit, involving 1,680 patients, Blue Cross paid about $43 million on invoices totaling $500 million. Some 60% of the claims weren’t reimbursed at all. The difference between the bill and the payment could be striking. For example, in the case of Arch, Blue Cross paid $8,580 out of $102,722 for one operation. For another, it paid $3,190 out of $34,975.

Executives said the Blue Cross reimbursements were fair, designed to keep premiums low for the nearly 2 million Louisianans who depended on the insurer to cover their health care. Paying the breast center’s full fees would add to its customers’ burden, they said. “If we were to just agree to any rates or any prices set by physicians or any providers, it would cause cost to be exorbitantly high for both the plan and for members particularly, because we wouldn’t be able to forecast or make sure those plans are actually sound,” said Curtis Anders, the vice president of provider networks for Blue Cross. “Premiums would increase.”

For many out-of-network doctors, payments lower than their invoices are an infuriating part of doing business. They absorb the costs, or pass them on to their patients, a practice known as balance billing that can result in medical debt. DellaCroce and Sullivan were the rare physicians with the tenacity to fight. The center collected money from both insurers and patients — but it carried the unpaid portion of invoices on its books. That amount grew every year as it battled Blue Cross.

DellaCroce and Sullivan were convinced that Blue Cross had singled them out for their obstreperousness, but they had no proof. Then, during a phone call one day, an employee for the center was talking to a Blue Cross representative to obtain a prior authorization. The representative let slip that the request required special handling. The breast center’s doctors were flagged on an internal roster. It was called the targeted list.

Discoveries

On Dec. 8, 2023, several dozen attorneys and paralegals from Chehardy Sherman Williams, one of New Orleans’ top law firms, were celebrating their annual holiday party. They had gathered in a private dining room with gilded mirrors and shimmering chandeliers at Arnaud’s restaurant, a bastion of Creole cuisine in the heart of the French Quarter. The waiters served shrimp remoulade, prime rib and turtle soup. Small talk filled the air.

Suddenly, several attorneys’ cellphones buzzed as they all received the same email, a message from the lawyers for Blue Cross. It contained discovery for the case, more than 42,000 pages of internal documents, emails and policies. Matthew Sherman, one of the attorneys representing the center, turned to a colleague. “Can you believe this?” he asked. It was like something from a John Grisham novel, the kind of thing he and his friends had joked about at law school, a document dump at Christmas time. By long tradition, many of New Orleans’ biggest law firms hold their holiday parties on the same Friday afternoon in December. Afterward, rival attorneys from around town gather for drinks under a flag of truce at a local bar. Sherman realized there would be no afterparty this year. Nor much of a holiday vacation.

The delivery of the documents was a Christmas gift nearly 20 years in the making. DellaCroce and Sullivan’s first lawsuits against Blue Cross, involving 88 breach-of-contract claims filed in a Louisiana civil court beginning in 2006, were dismissed because of a federal court ruling regarding jurisdiction. A second lawsuit, which lasted from 2010 through 2017, resulted in limited discovery and a two-day trial in federal court. Jurors found that Blue Cross had failed to tell the center how much it would pay for procedures, but they also ruled the center had not been financially harmed. A judge dismissed the remaining claims.

DellaCroce and Sullivan launched their third lawsuit in February 2017 with a novel legal theory: They accused Blue Cross of fraud. They contended that for years the insurer had issued prior authorizations without the intention of paying the actual bills. Their lawyers had sought the targeted list during discovery to help prove the case. Blue Cross denied it existed.

But now, as Sherman and fellow attorney Patrick Follette began poring over the thousands of documents, they came upon a spreadsheet that said “Targeted Provider List.” The first names on the list were DellaCroce and Sullivan. It was labeled “confidential” and dated June 2007 — about a year after the pair had filed their first lawsuit against Blue Cross alleging nonpayment. More digging turned up other documents. There was a “blocked” list that also featured the two doctors.

A corporate policy document provided what DellaCroce and Sullivan considered the most revealing explanation for Blue Cross’ financial motivation. Blue Cross insurers are independent companies that operate under a common set of rules, similar to franchisees in a fast-food chain. When a person covered by Blue Cross in their home state receives treatment in another state, the Blue Cross where the treatment occurs pays the provider and then recoups the cost from the home-state plan. What the attorneys discovered was that Blue Cross Louisiana would receive a share of any savings it could generate for the home-state plan. Say, for instance, Blue Cross Alabama was facing a bill of $5,000 for a procedure. If Blue Cross Louisiana instead paid $1,000, it saved the Alabama plan $4,000. The policy allowed Blue Cross Louisiana to earn 16% of the savings — in this scenario, $640.

For DellaCroce and Sullivan, the revelations cemented their belief that Blue Cross was a bad corporate actor more interested in power and control than health care. The percentage fee incentivized the insurer to pay the doctors as little as possible. The bigger the savings, the more Blue Cross made. “It’s win-win,” DellaCroce said. “That’s their pay day.”

As the trial approached, Blue Cross attempted to settle the case. DellaCroce and Sullivan refused the offer as too low.

The Trial

On the afternoon of Sept. 5, 2024, the case — St. Charles Surgical Hospital, L.L.C. and Center for Restorative Breast Surgery, L.L.C. v. Louisiana Health Service & Indemnity Company D/B/A Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Louisiana, Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Louisiana, Inc. and HMO Louisiana, Inc. — opened in Division C of the Orleans Parish Civil District Court, a high-ceilinged room with dark brown benches and tables, fake marble columns and fluorescent lights. James Williams, the chief litigator for the hospital, had already impressed the 45 potential jurors by memorizing all their names and backgrounds during jury selection. Now, he stood up and placed a football on the plaintiff’s table in front of the 12 chosen to try the case, which included a third grade teacher, a movie stunt double and a hotel manager. He warned them that they would hear a lot of “insurance talk” from Blue Cross. “I’m going to ask you, ladies and gentlemen on the jury, keep your eye on the ball. Keep your eye on what this case is about,” Williams told them. “If they start saying things like, ‘Well, oh, we paid them what we thought was fair, 9%,’ keep your eye on the ball, right?”

Over 10 days — interrupted by a two-day break to allow a hurricane to pass across Louisiana — Williams made his case that Blue Cross had defrauded his clients by making promises to pay but failing to deliver.

Much of Blue Cross’ defense had relied on the notice that a prior authorization was no guarantee of payment. The insurer had not committed fraud, it said, since it never explicitly promised the center to reimburse anything. Udvarhelyi, the former CEO, had insisted on that. But on the stand, Blue Cross witnesses provided a more nuanced explanation. They acknowledged that the disclaimer was not meant as a general excuse to free the company from paying bills. A prior authorization “usually” resulted in a payment, testified Brower, who reviewed the center’s bills. He said that the notice was intended for specific situations. For instance, Blue Cross would not cover a woman who dropped out of her insurance before the operation. Nor would it pay anything if a patient had not met her deductible. But otherwise, Brower said, Blue Cross intended to compensate for a procedure that it had authorized. “It’s inappropriate for us as a company to approve a code and then turn around and deny it,” Brower said.

Over the years, the center had appealed thousands of reimbursements for being too low. It hired additional employees to manage the paperwork. At the trial, Blue Cross revealed that it had never considered any of the appeals — nor had it ever told the center that they were pointless. “An appeal is not available to review an underpayment,” acknowledged Paula Shepherd, a Blue Cross executive vice president. The insurer simply issued an edict — the payment was correct.

This was the core of the case. The insurer set the rules. The insurer set the prices. Doctors could appeal to a state insurance regulator. But if that failed, and it often did, the only recourse was a long, costly lawsuit.

Williams summed up for the jury the center’s treatment at the hands of Blue Cross: “Our payments are slow pay, low pay or no pay.”

In countering those arguments, Blue Cross witnesses explained that the insurer was committed to paying for Louisianans’ health care and keeping costs low. As a nonprofit, it directed any excess revenue from operations back into the business. (Udvarhelyi, the CEO, did acknowledge that his salary, over $1 million, included bonuses that depended on hitting revenue targets and increasing membership.)

Brian West, a Blue Cross executive who monitored payments, said the center had engaged in “egregious” billing practices. “They are bad actors in the billing world,” he said. But company witnesses offered only a handful of examples. Sometimes the center mistakenly coded its bills in a way that appeared to charge for four separate breast reconstructions in a single operation. In other cases, the center asked for payment for two surgeons in the room at the same time. But Blue Cross, following Medicare guidelines, would pay two surgeons only 20% more than the reimbursement for a single surgeon.

Blue Cross did not accuse the center of any intentional miscoding — but the sloppy billing led to additional scrutiny, the company’s witnesses said. The targeted list, a witness testified, had been created especially for the center, requiring all prior authorization requests to bypass normal routes for a special review by company doctors. The blocked list meant that each bill from the center received a manual scrub by payment specialists before reimbursement. Blue Cross acknowledged the careful checking often resulted in the need for more information from the center, which could result in slower processing of claims. But the lists, executives insisted, were not designed to reduce payments. “Basically, no harm was done,” said Becky Juncker, who was involved in approving surgical procedures.

Company witnesses explained that the 16% received in saving money for out-of-state Blue Cross insurers was a fee to cover the costs of handling adjustments of the claim — though they were not able to explain why Blue Cross did not charge a flat fee for its services.

Blue Cross also defended itself against the accusation that it had paid nothing for 60% of the charges for individual procedures. Witnesses said the insurer had followed industry practice in bundling charges to make a single payment for an operation. An attorney for the center noted that it had never agreed to take bundled payments — Blue Cross had imposed them.

As to the calls to women like Arch? That was an effort to save members money. “Our medical area would reach out to our members who were utilizing out-of-network providers to help them understand the, I would say, the financial implications,” said Shepherd, the Blue Cross executive vice president, in a deposition. “It could be financially catastrophic to a member to have an out-of-network claim that they are financially responsible for. It’s a huge difference.”

In summing up the case, Kim Boyle, the lead attorney for the company, told jurors that Blue Cross had not committed fraud. It had acted to ensure the company and its members paid a fair price for the center’s services, she said. “There’s no scheme. There’s no plot. There’s no mafia. There are no Blue Cross employees of Louisiana that are sitting in some smoke-filled room in Baton Rouge, plotting against these plaintiffs on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans,” Boyle said. “It’s fiction; it’s fancy; it’s completely made up.”

On Sept. 20, at 1:57 p.m., Judge Sidney H. Cates IV sent the jurors to deliberate. The center attorneys retreated to a nearby hotel to await the verdict. About two hours later, they were summoned back to Division C. Williams put his head down and swore. He worried that such a quick return in the legally complex case meant victory for Blue Cross.

The center’s lawyers paid close attention to Cates as he reviewed the jurors’ decision. It was a two-page form. If the jurors found in favor of Blue Cross, the judge would have no reason to read on. Cates flipped to the second page: The jurors had found Blue Cross liable for fraud. “Please express in dollars the total monetary compensation, if any, Blue Cross owes the hospital and the center for the damages,” Cates said, reading from the verdict. “Net damages, $421,488,633.” The center’s lawyers stood and shook hands as the insurer’s attorneys prepared to leave the courtroom.

DellaCroce was in surgery at the hospital, having expected a longer deliberation. Sullivan was in the courtroom to hear the verdict. Afterward, jurors approached and thanked him for his work. He teared up. “We would have given more if we had been asked for more. That’s how egregious the fraud was,” Juliet Laughlin, a 58-year-old property manager who served as forewoman, later said. “There had been wrong done.”

Blue Cross has appealed the verdict. A health insurance trade group has warned that the finding sets a dangerous precedent. If allowed to stand, insurance companies in Louisiana may find themselves forced to pay whatever price is demanded by out-of-network doctors — which in turn could raise health insurance premiums across the state, the Louisiana Association of Health Plans said in a statement.

For DellaCroce and Sullivan, the verdict was vindication. They had refused to sign contracts they thought unfair. They had rejected settlement offers they thought too low. The trial had revealed Blue Cross’ domineering behavior. “Fundamentally, I think their problem was that we were doctors who had control,” DellaCroce said. “That was regarded as a threat.”

In the months since the judgment, Blue Cross has not changed its practices, the doctors said. It has not approached with an offer that would bring the hospital in network. It still issues prior authorizations for women’s surgeries. And it still pays only a fraction of the billed fees.