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Drive an hour south of Nashville into the rolling countryside of Marshall County, Tennessee — past horse farms, mobile homes and McMansions — and you will arrive in Chapel Hill, population 1,796. It’s the birthplace of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, who helped found the Ku Klux Klan. And it’s the home of Todd Warner, one of the most unlikely and important defenders of America’s besieged public schools.

Warner is the gregarious 53-year-old owner of PCS of TN, a 30-person company that does site grading for shopping centers and other construction projects. The second-term Republican state representative “absolutely” supports Donald Trump, who won Marshall County by 50 points in 2020. Warner likes to talk of the threats posed by culture-war bogeymen, such as critical race theory; diversity, equity and inclusion; and Shariah law.

And yet, one May afternoon in his office, under a TV playing Fox News and a mounted buck that he’d bagged in Alabama, he told me about his effort to halt Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s push for private school vouchers in Tennessee. Warner’s objections are rooted in the reality of his district: It contains not a single private school, so to Warner, taxpayer money for the new vouchers would clearly be flowing elsewhere, mostly to well-off families in metro Nashville, Memphis and other cities whose kids are already enrolled in private schools. Why should his small-town constituents be subsidizing the private education of metropolitan rich kids? “I’m for less government, but it’s government’s role to provide a good public education,” he said. “If you want to send your kid to private school, then you should pay for it.”

The coronavirus pandemic provided a major boost to supporters of school vouchers, who argued that extended public school closures — and the on-screen glimpses they afforded parents of what was being taught to their kids — underscored the need to give parents greater choice in where to send their children. Eleven states, led by Florida and Arizona, now have universal or near-universal vouchers, meaning that even affluent families can receive thousands of dollars toward their kids’ private school tuition.

The beneficiaries in these states are mostly families whose kids were already enrolled in private schools, not families using the vouchers to escape struggling public schools. In larger states, the annual taxpayer tab for the vouchers is close to $1 billion, leaving less money for public schools at a time when they already face the loss of federal pandemic aid.

Voucher advocates, backed by a handful of billionaire funders, are on the march to bring more red and purple states into the fold for “school choice,” their preferred terminology for vouchers. And again and again, they are running up against rural Republicans like Warner, who are joining forces with Democratic lawmakers in a rare bipartisan alliance. That is, it’s the reddest regions of these red and purple states that are putting up some of the strongest resistance to the conservative assault on public schools.

Conservative orthodoxy at the national level holds that parents must be given an out from a failing public education system that force-feeds children progressive fads. But many rural Republican lawmakers have trouble reconciling this with the reality in their districts, where many public schools are not only the sole educational option, but also the largest employer and the hub of the community — where everyone goes for holiday concerts, Friday night football and basketball. Unlike schools in blue metro areas, rural schools mostly reopened for in-person instruction in the fall of 2020, and they are far less likely to be courting controversy on issues involving race and gender.

Demonizing public education in the abstract is one thing. But it’s quite another when the target is the school where you went, where your kids went. For Todd Warner, that was Forrest High School in Chapel Hill. “My three kids graduated from public schools, and they turned out just fine,” he said. “Ninety-five percent of our students, our future business owners, our future leaders, are going to the public schools. They’re not going to private. Why take it away from them?”

The response from voucher proponents to the resistance from fellow Republicans has taken several forms, all of which implicitly grant the critics’ case that voucher programs currently offer little benefit to rural areas. In some states, funding for vouchers is being paired with more money for public schools, to offer support for rural districts. In Ohio, voucher advocates are proposing to fund the construction of new private schools in rural areas where none exist, giving families places to use vouchers.

But the overriding Republican response to rural skeptics has been a political threat: Get with the program on vouchers, or else.

That’s what played out this year in Ohio’s 83rd District, in the state’s rural northwest. Last summer, Ohio adopted universal private school vouchers, with middle- and working-class families eligible for up to $8,407 per high school student and even the very wealthiest families eligible for almost $1,000 per child. Private school leaders urged already enrolled families to seek the money, and more than 140,000 families applied for vouchers. The cost has exceeded estimates, approaching $1 billion, with most of it going to the parochial schools that dominate the state’s private school landscape. Voucher advocates are now pushing to create educational savings accounts to cover tuition at unchartered private schools that are not eligible for the vouchers.

School leaders in Hardin County — with its cornfields, solar panel installations and what was once one of the largest dairy farms east of the Mississippi — are deeply worried that vouchers stand to hurt county residents. Only a single small private school is within reach, one county to the south, which means that virtually no local taxpayers would see any of that voucher money themselves — it would be going to private school families in Columbus, Cincinnati and other large population centers. (And under Ohio law, the very public schools that are losing students must pay to transport any students who attend private institutions within a half-hour drive of the public school.)

Craig Hurley, the superintendent for Hardin’s Upper Scioto Valley District, is a solidly built 52-year-old who calls himself a staunch conservative. He attended the district’s schools and has worked in them for 30 years. He knows that they provide meals to 400 students, nearly two-thirds of whom qualify for free and reduced lunch. Even though the high school can muster only 20 players for football — basketball fares better — the fans come out to cheer. “Our district is our community,” he told me. “The more you separate that, the less of a community we’re going to be.”

Hurley has calculated that local schools are receiving less state funding per student than what private schools now receive for the maximum possible voucher amount. Yet private schools face almost none of the accountability that public schools do regarding how the money is spent and what outcomes it achieves. “We have fiscal responsibility on all of it, on every dime, every penny we spend,” he said. “There’s no audit for them.” Not to mention, he added, “a private school doesn’t have to accept all students, right? They pick who they want.”

Thirteen miles east, Chad Thrush, the school superintendent in Kenton, the county seat, noted that his school system is the second-largest employer in town, after Graphic Packaging, which makes plastic cups for vending machines. He worries that the rising cost of the voucher program will erode state funding for public schools, and he worries about what would happen to his district if a new private school opened in town. Thrush understands the appeal of vouchers for parents who want a leg up for their kid. But, he told me, “we need to be looking at how we’re preparing all students to be successful, not just my student.”

As it happens, the two superintendents have a crucial ally in Columbus: their state representative, Jon Cross. Like Warner in Tennessee, Cross is an ardent pro-Trump conservative and deeply opposed to private school vouchers. At a legislative hearing last year, he cut loose at a lobbyist for Americans for Prosperity — the conservative advocacy group founded by the industrialist Koch brothers — who was testifying for vouchers, one of the organization’s long-standing causes. “Wouldn’t we be better off taking some money in our budget to fix the schools?” Cross said. “I tell you what, I really like my public schools. I’m really proud that Carson and Connor, my sons, go to Kenton City Schools and get an education from there just like I did.”

Cross’ resistance to vouchers earned him the animus of the state Senate president, Matt Huffman, an avid voucher proponent. Huffman encouraged a primary challenge of Cross. So greatly did local school officials value Cross’ support that shortly before the March 19 primary, they held a public meeting to explain the threat vouchers posed, with Cross in attendance. “If the economy goes bad, are we going to pull $1 billion out for private schools?” Thrush said. Or, he continued, would the public schools be left with less money?

The schools in Hardin and Marshall counties are majority white. But some rural Republican legislators in other states have been willing to buck their party leaders on vouchers even in more racially diverse districts. In Georgia, of the 15 Republican state representatives who blocked a voucher proposal last year, more than half came from rural areas with substantial Black populations. One of them was Gerald Greene, who spent more than three decades as a high school social studies teacher and has managed to survive as a Republican in his majority-Black district in the state’s southwestern corner after switching parties in 2010.

Greene believes vouchers will harm his district. It has a couple of small private schools in it or just outside it — with student bodies that are starkly more white than the district’s public schools — but the majority of his constituents rely on the public schools, and he worries that vouchers will leave less money for them. “I just felt like we were abandoning our public schools,” he told me. “I’m not against private schools at all, but I just did not see how these vouchers would help southwestern Georgia.”

After failing to pass a voucher program last year, the state’s Republican governor, Brian Kemp, and proponents in the legislature tried again this year, and this time they succeeded, albeit with vouchers more constrained than elsewhere: They can be used only by students in school districts that are ranked in the bottom quartile and whose families make less than 400% of the poverty level ($120,000 for a family of four), and their total cost can’t exceed 1% of the state’s total education budget, which caps them now at $140 million.

Partisan pressures simply became too strong for some skeptical Republicans, including Greene’s counterpart in the Senate, Sam Watson. Seminole County Superintendent Mark Earnest told me about the conversation in which Watson let him know that he was going to have to support the limited vouchers. “They have turned this into a caucus priority. It’s getting very political,” Watson said. “Thanks for letting me know,” Earnest replied, “but all vouchers are bad for public education.” Watson’s response: “I know, but I couldn’t go with the Democrats. Sorry.” (Watson did not respond to a request for comment.)

The highest-profile rural Republican resistance to vouchers has come in Texas, the land of Friday Night Lights and far-flung oil country settlements where the public schools anchor communities. Late last year, the Texas House voted 84-63 to strip vouchers out of a broad education bill. In response, Gov. Greg Abbott launched a purge of anti-voucher Republicans in this year’s primaries, backed by millions of dollars from the Pennsylvania megadonor Jeff Yass, a finance billionaire.

Among those targeted was Drew Darby, who represents a sprawling 10-county district in West Texas and who frames the issue in starkly regional terms: The state’s metro areas depend on his constituents to provide “food, fiber and hide,” to “tend the oil wells and wind turbines to provide electricity to people who want to be just a little cooler in the cities.” But without good public schools, these rural areas will wither. “Robert Lee, Winters, Sterling, Blackwell,” he said, listing some hamlets — “these communities exist because they have strong public schools. They would literally not exist without a good public school system.”

Darby, a fiscal conservative, is also opposed to a new entitlement for private school families that is projected to soon cost $2 billion a year. “In rural Texas, there’s not a whole lot of private school options, and we want our schools to get every dollar they can. This doesn’t add $1, and it’s not good for rural Texas.”

Darby managed to stave off his primary challenge, but 11 of the 15 voucher resisters targeted by Abbott lost, several in races so close that they went to a runoff. Abbott is unapologetic: “Congratulations to all of tonight’s winners,” he said after the runoff. “Together, we will ensure the best future for our children.” Also succumbing to his primary challenger was Jon Cross, in western Ohio. His opponent, Ty Mathews, managed to make the campaign about more than just vouchers, taking sides in a bitter leadership split within the GOP caucus.

And for all the concerns that local school leaders have about the effect of vouchers, the threat remained abstract to many voters. “I’m not worried about it, because we don’t have the revenue here anyways in this town for anything to be taken from us to be given to a bigger town,” one 60-year-old woman told me after casting her vote for Mathews. A younger woman asked simply: “What exactly are the vouchers?”

But in Tennessee, Todd Warner and his allies staved off the threat again this year. To overcome rural resistance, voucher proponents in the Tennessee House felt the need to constrain them and pair them with hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for public schools, but this was at odds with the state Senate’s more straightforward voucher legislation. The two chambers were unable to come to an agreement before the session’s end in April, by which point the House bill had not even made it to the floor for a vote.

For Democratic voucher opponents in the state, the alliance with Warner and other rural Republicans was as helpful as it was unusual. “It was strange,” Rep. Sam McKenzie, a Black Democrat from Knoxville, told me. McKenzie compared it to “Twins,” a movie in which Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito played unlikely fraternal twins: “Representative Warner and I were in lockstep opposition to this voucher scam.”

One voucher supporter, Rep. Scott Cepicky, told me he was confident that his side would eventually prevail. “We’ll work on this again next year,” he said. “The governor is committed that we’re going to run on school choice again.” And Americans for Prosperity has made clear that it’s coming after voucher opponents. Its Tennessee state director, Tori Venable, told Warner during the legislative session that “I can’t protect you if you ain’t on the right side of this.”

Another conservative group, the American Federation for Children, sent out a text message in March attacking Warner for his opposition to “parental rights,” without using the term vouchers. And a retired teacher in Marshall County, Gwen Warren, told me she and her husband recently got a visit from an Americans for Prosperity canvasser citing Warner’s opposition to vouchers. “She said: ‘We’re going around the neighborhood trying to talk to people about vouchers. We feel like Tennesseans really want the voucher system.’” To which, Warren said, her husband replied: “You’re very much mistaken, lady. We don’t want vouchers in this county, and you need to go away.”

Warner remains unfazed by all this. He is pretty sure that his voucher opposition in fact helped him win his seat in 2020, after the incumbent Republican voted for a pilot voucher system limited to Nashville and Memphis. And he notes that no one has registered to challenge him in the state’s Aug. 1 primary. “They tried to find a primary opponent but couldn’t,” he said with a chuckle. “I was born and raised here all my life. My family’s been here since the 18th century. I won’t say I can’t be beat, but bring your big-boy pants and come on, let’s go.”

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The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to give cities broader latitude to punish people for sleeping in public when they have no other options will likely result in municipalities taking more aggressive action to remove encampments, including throwing away more of homeless people’s property, advocates and legal experts said.

In its 6-3 decision on Friday, the conservative majority upheld Grants Pass, Oregon’s ban on camping, finding laws that criminalize sleeping in public spaces do not violate the Eighth Amendment’s protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

Writing for the majority, Justice Neil Gorsuch said that the nation’s policy on homelessness shouldn’t be dictated by federal judges, rather such decisions should be left to state and local leaders. “Homelessness is complex,” Gorsuch wrote. “Its causes are many. So may be the public policy responses required to address it.”

“At bottom, the question this case presents is whether the Eighth Amendment grants federal judges primary responsibility for assessing those causes and devising those responses. It does not,” he wrote.

A lower court ruling that prevented cities from criminalizing the conduct of people who are “involuntarily homeless” forced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to confront what it means to be homeless with no place to go and what shelter a city must provide, Gorsuch wrote. “Those unavoidable questions have plunged courts and cities across the Ninth Circuit into waves of litigation,” he wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that, for some people, sleeping outside is a “biological necessity” and it’s possible to balance issues facing local governments with constitutional principles and the humanity of homeless people. “Instead, the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested,” she wrote.

Criminalizing homelessness can “cause a destabilizing cascade of harm,” Sotomayor added. When a person is arrested or separated from their belongings, the items that are frequently destroyed include important documents needed for accessing jobs and housing or items required for work such as uniforms and bicycles, Sotomayor wrote.

Advocates and experts said that since the ruling allows municipalities to issue more citations and arrests without violating the Eighth Amendment, the decision could lead to more legal claims over other constitutional protections, which could include the disposal of people’s property during encampment removals. Other legal claims over cities’ treatment of homeless people have focused on rights protecting against unreasonable search and seizure and guaranteeing due process, in the Fourth and 14th Amendments.

“There will be even more of these sweeps and attempts to just close down encampments or harass people who are living on the streets to just basically make them become less visible, maybe leave town,” said Stephen Schnably, a law professor at the University of Miami who has advocated for the rights of homeless people in lawsuits.

If more cities enact camping bans, which could require an increased law enforcement response, those interactions could lead to loss of property, said Ann Oliva, the CEO of the National Alliance to End Homelessness. The ruling “opens that door,” she said.

ProPublica has been reporting on the impact of encampment removals and recently found that the city of Albuquerque, while removing homeless encampments, had discarded personal property in violation of city policy and a court order that has since been lifted. Some people told ProPublica that they had belongings discarded multiple times by city crews. They described losing survival gear, including tents and sleeping bags during freezing weather; important documents such as birth certificates; and irreplaceable mementos like family photos.

Recently, dozens of people with lived experience and advocates from across the country have described to ProPublica having their property discarded during encampment removals.

Legal experts said the practical implications of the decision is that it empowers local governments to issue citations and make arrests with the possibility of jail time.

Donald Whitehead, the executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless, said he expects it will cause communities to think criminalization is the “right direction” and dissuade policymakers from developing new ways to provide more affordable housing. “Why come up with innovative, creative solutions when you can simply raid encampments and put people in jail,” he said.

Whitehead said he is worried that the ruling will lead homeless people to become more isolated and vulnerable to crime.

States have already enacted new legislation that criminalizes camping on public land.

A new Florida law, which takes effect Oct. 1, prohibits counties and municipalities from allowing camping or sleeping on public property. The law directs the state’s Department of Children and Families to certify designated camping areas for people experiencing homelessness. Beginning in January, private citizens, business owners or the state attorney general can sue if a county or municipality fails to adhere to the law.

Kentucky lawmakers overrode a veto by Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, to enact the Safer Kentucky Act, which makes camping on certain private and public property a misdemeanor after multiple violations. The law also allows property owners to use deadly force against people who are illegally camping and goes into effect in July.

Grants Pass, a city of about 39,000, along with a large number of cities and states, asked the Supreme Court to hear the case, arguing that a 2018 lower court ruling, Martin v. Boise, prevented cities across the West from responding to the growth of encampments. The 9th Circuit — covering states with some of the highest populations of people experiencing unsheltered homelessness, including California, Oregon and Washington — ruled that homeless people cannot be punished for sleeping outdoors on public property if they don’t have anywhere else to go.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court, Grants Pass argued that the status quo harms local governments, residents and people experiencing homelessness. “Public camping laws” are a “critical (and constitutional) backstop” to halt the growth of encampments, lawyers wrote.

“Even when coupled with offers of shelter and other services, efforts to enforce common sense camping regulations have been met with injunctions.”

The lawyers representing people experiencing homelessness argued that the 9th Circuit ruling did not deprive cities of their ability to clear encampments. Lawyers pointed out that Grants Pass had continued to dismantle encampments throughout the legal proceedings, “as it is free to do.” “That is a policy choice not a judicial mandate,” the lawyers wrote, adding the politicians have “chosen to tolerate encampments” instead of addressing the West’s severe housing shortage.

Jesse Rabinowitz, communications director for the National Homelessness Law Center, said the Supreme Court’s decision empowers cities and states to play a “national game of human Whac-A-Mole and continually do what they were very clear they wanted to do in Grants Pass, which is to push people into another town. We would see that happening on a national level.”

Bob Erlenbusch, a board member for the National Coalition for the Homeless who has advocated for homeless people for four decades, said that since the Martin v. Boise decision, cities have found other ways to criminalize homelessness and clear encampments.

“It’s an everyday occurrence that encampments are swept,” Erlenbusch said, describing city workers in Sacramento, California, who use bulldozers and shovels and in the process destroy belongings. “And that will increase around the country.”

In an amicus brief in the Grants Pass case, the Western Regional Advocacy Project, an organization led by people with experience living on the streets, described a winter encampment removal in Denver where people lost “food, essential paperwork, sleeping bags, clothing, work tools, medication, identification, blankets, survival gear and more.”

Sara Rankin, a law professor with Seattle University who contributed to the amicus brief and studies the criminalization of homeless people, said the court’s Friday ruling will embolden the dehumanization of unsheltered people. “Cities have always had the ability to sweep and they continue to do that at reckless paces,” she said. “What happens to people? Will people be more harmed as a result? I would say that is a very, very deep concern.”

Have You Experienced Homelessness? Do You Work With People Who Have? Tell Us About Encampment Removals.

Ruth Talbot contributed reporting.

This article was produced by The Salt Lake Tribune, which was a member of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in 2022 and 2023. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

Utah OB-GYN David Broadbent was charged Thursday with forcible sexual abuse, as prosecutors allege he sexually touched a patient during a 2020 exam.

Broadbent has been accused in civil lawsuits of inappropriately touching more than 100 patients during exams — but this is the first time Utah County prosecutors have filed a criminal charge against him. He faces a second-degree felony, which carries a potential penalty of up to 15 years in prison.

Over the past year, The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica have reported multiple stories about the difficulties women faced as they raised complaints of sexual misconduct against Broadbent, including obstacles in the courts and in reporting to police.

In charging records, prosecutors say one of Broadbent’s patients came to see him in 2020 regarding a bump in her vaginal area. Broadbent allegedly instructed the patient to undress from the waist down — but when he returned to the exam room after she changed, prosecutors say he lifted up her shirt and bra and touched her breasts. He then grabbed her leg “in what felt like a sexual manner,” prosecutors say, and began a vaginal examination.

An attorney representing Broadbent in his civil litigation did not respond to a request for comment. No attorney is yet listed in his criminal case.

Deputy Utah County Attorney Tim Taylor, who is a spokesperson for the prosecutor’s office, said Thursday that police and prosecutors are continuing to investigate and are still considering whether to file additional charges against the OB-GYN.

At least 49 women have reported to the Provo police that Broadbent sexually abused them during exams, and prosecutors have been weighing whether to file charges for 18 months. This month, the county attorney’s office agreed to pay for a nurse practitioner who specializes in sexual assault exams to review the evidence that prosecutors have and to do research and advise them on what the standard of care is for an OB-GYN appointment.

Many of the women who made reports to the police allege Broadbent inappropriately touched their breasts, vaginas and rectums during exams — often without warning or explanation and in ways that hurt them and made them feel violated. Other former patients, along with many of the women who went to the police, have also sued Broadbent or the hospitals where he worked, with a total of nearly 120 women making sexual assault allegations in two civil lawsuits.

In September 2022, a judge dismissed one of the civil cases, which was filed by 94 women, when he ruled that it fell under medical malpractice law instead of a civil sexual assault claim. That meant it had faced — and missed — tighter filing deadlines. The women have appealed the ruling to the Utah Supreme Court, and they have been waiting for seven months for its decision.

In a different civil suit, 20 other women sued two hospitals where Broadbent worked and had privileges at, alleging they knew of alleged misconduct and failed to act. That case is still pending; the hospitals have argued in court records that Broadbent’s alleged actions against these women didn’t take place on their premises and therefore they are not liable.

Broadbent has agreed to stop practicing medicine while this criminal investigation is ongoing. In response to the civil case filed by the group of 94 women, Broadbent’s attorneys have said sexual assault allegations against him are “without merit.”

The woman whose report led to the criminal charge saw Broadbent in July 2020. A year and a half later, in December 2021, another former patient of Broadbent’s spoke out publicly on the podcast “Mormon Stories,” describing the painful way she said he had examined her years before and how it left her feeling traumatized.

After the podcast aired, women started coming forward publicly in civil lawsuits accusing Broadbent of inappropriate touching. Former patients also started making reports with the police, though it’s not clear from court records when the woman whose report led to the criminal charge went to law enforcement.

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In 2020, Congress passed the No Surprises Act to protect patients from exorbitant medical bills that had burdened Americans with tens of thousands of dollars in debt. The law was designed to decrease the charges for patients treated by an out-of-network doctor during medical emergencies. Such ER visits often left people vulnerable to so-called surprise bills, in which their insurer would only pay a portion of the expensive treatment.

One of the biggest health care reforms since Obamacare, the No Surprises Act appears to have worked in one important sense. Patients have reported fewer crippling bills. Although little hard data exists, an insurance industry survey found that consumers avoided some 10 million surprise bills in the first nine months of 2023. A think tank report also suggests that people are paying less for the care they receive in the ER and other medical situations covered by the law, such as air ambulance trips.

But a cumbersome government system to resolve payment disputes between doctors and insurers now threatens to undermine the law’s promise, according to interviews with industry players, recent data analyses and government documents.

One potential outcome: higher insurance premiums for everyone.

Another: fewer physicians available to treat rural populations.

Doctors said that insurance companies have been abusing the system to lower payments, stiff medical practices and kick physicians out of their networks.

“I’m trying to think of a polite word to describe the experience, but it has been just chaotic and inefficient,” said Dr. Andrea Brault, the head of the Emergency Department Practice Management Association, a physicians’ trade group. “It’s a costly, lengthy process.”

Insurers, however, charged that big physician groups — some of them owned by private equity investors — are trying to manipulate the process to squeeze out higher payments. “A small but significant number of bad actors” have flooded the system with cases “as a way to maximize revenue,” said Kelly Parsons, a spokesperson for the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. “Should this trend continue, health care costs are likely to rise unnecessarily.”

An official at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services said the rising number of disputes was a byproduct of the law’s success.

“The No Surprises Act is protecting millions of patients from surprise medical bills when they experience an emergency or get care from an out-of-network provider at an in-network facility,” said Jeff Wu, the deputy director of policy of CMS’ Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight. “The incredibly large volume of disputes submitted since the law’s surprise billing protections became effective demonstrates the need for this law.”

For decades, private insurance customers had to worry about receiving giant bills from using out-of-network doctors, who typically charge more for services. This was especially true when they had to go to an emergency room, where people have little ability to choose which doctor or hospital to treat them. The No Surprises Act aimed to fix the problem by protecting ER patients so that they would get billed essentially the same as if they received care from in-network physicians and hospitals.

The law radically changed the dynamics of billing disputes. “Before the No Surprises Act, you had doctors and physicians fighting, with patients stuck in the middle. Now you just have doctors and insurers fighting,” said Zack Cooper, a professor of public health and economics at Yale whose research helped shape the law.

Under the law, out-of-network doctors or hospitals invoice insurers, which counter with their own offer. Some 80% of claims are resolved this way, according to the survey conducted by the insurance trade groups.

But when the two sides can’t agree, they go to battle in a system created by the CMS and other government agencies. There, an independent arbiter weighs various factors and determines the final payment amount. This arbitration is at the heart of many of the law’s unintended consequences.

Originally, the government estimated there would be about 17,000 cases a year. But in 2023, almost 680,000 were filed, according to data released in June. The result is an enormous backlog that has slowed payments to doctors, hospitals and medical groups. Decisions are supposed to take 30 days. Since 2022, however, more than half of the cases remain unresolved. Some have lasted more than nine months. Wu said that arbiters have “scaled up their operations” to reduce the delays.

In addition, the law has been challenged repeatedly in court — health care provider associations and air ambulance groups have filed nearly 20 lawsuits involving the No Surprises Act, according to legal experts at the O’Neill Institute for National and Global Health Law. Two cases have overturned the initial CMS guidelines governing the arbitration. The agency has been forced to make numerous adjustments to the process that have contributed to the long delays.

The most heated debate over the dispute system surrounds the payment and enforcement of arbiters’ decisions.

Federal health officials at first thought that the law would help lower the cost of medical care. Instead, arbiters have awarded higher amounts to doctors and other providers than expected — potentially driving up insurance premiums.

“The most likely outcome is that this law doesn’t save consumers on net and potentially pushes in the opposite direction,” said Loren Adler, a researcher at the Center on Health Policy at Brookings, which issued a recent study on the possibility.

While the amounts are higher than expected, they remain lower than what doctors’ groups have billed. Doctors charge that insurance companies are submitting artificially low payment amounts. As proof, they point to data from June that shows arbiters rule in favor of doctors the vast majority of the time.

Still, overall, providers have seen nearly a 40% decrease in reimbursements since the law took effect in 2022, according to a recent survey by the emergency physicians trade group. At least one doctors’ group, Envision Healthcare, mentioned the No Surprises Act as one of the reasons it filed for bankruptcy. (The company has since emerged from court oversight.)

If revenue decreases continue, some doctors’ groups may have to cut back on services. This would most likely be felt in rural hospitals, which often operate with thin profit margins and already have difficulty recruiting ER doctors. “This is threatening to the sustainability of many, many practices,” said Randy Pilgrim, the enterprise chief medical officer for SCP Health, which provides doctors to emergency rooms across the country. “There have been few practices in the over 30 states where we operate that haven’t been affected by this.”

Doctors have also said that insurance companies are making late or incomplete payments after decisions by the arbiter. Complaints to CMS have been ignored, doctors said. Wu, the CMS official, said the agency actively investigates complaints under its jurisdiction.

It is also not clear whether courts can force an insurance company to pay. Pilgrim said his company had submitted almost 75,000 letters to insurance companies pleading for reimbursements after winning an arbitration decision.

“There’s very little teeth” in the process, he said. “You just continue to plead your case and hope you get somewhere.”

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Brianna Villafane was in Lower Manhattan protesting police violence in the summer of 2020, when officers charged into the crowd. One of them gripped her hair and yanked her to the ground.

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“I felt someone on top of me and it was hard to breathe,” she said. “I felt like I was being crushed.”

The New York City civilian oversight agency that examines allegations of police abuse investigated and concluded that the officer had engaged in such serious misconduct that it could constitute a crime.

Villafane received a letter from the agency about its conclusions. “I was happy and I was relieved,” she recalled. The next step would be a disciplinary trial overseen by the New York Police Department, during which prosecutors from the oversight agency would present evidence and question the officer in a public forum.

Then last fall, the police commissioner intervened.

Exercising a little-known authority called “retention,” the commissioner, Edward Caban, ensured the case would never go to trial.

Instead, Caban reached his own conclusion in private.

He decided that it “would be detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process” to pursue administrative charges against the officer, Gerard Dowling, according to a letter the department sent to the oversight agency. The force that the officer used against Villafane was “reasonable and necessary.” The commissioner ordered no discipline.

Today, Dowling is a deputy chief of the unit that handles protests throughout the city.

Watch video ➜

His case is one of dozens in which Caban has used the powers of his office to intervene in disciplinary cases against officers who were found by the oversight agency to have committed misconduct.

Since becoming commissioner last July, he has short-circuited cases involving officers accused of wantonly using chokeholds, deploying Tasers and beating protesters with batons. A number of episodes were so serious that the police oversight agency, known as the Civilian Complaint Review Board, concluded the officers likely committed crimes.

As is typical across the United States, New York’s police commissioner has the final say over officer discipline. Commissioners can and often do overrule civilian oversight boards. But Caban’s actions stand out for ending cases before the public disciplinary process plays out.

“What the Police Department is doing here is shutting down cases under the cloak of darkness,” said Florence L. Finkle, a former head of the CCRB and current vice president of the National Association for Civilian Oversight of Law Enforcement. Avoiding disciplinary trials “means there’s no opportunity for transparency, no opportunity for the public to weigh in, because nobody knows what’s happening.”

Indeed, the department does not publish the commissioner’s decisions to retain cases, and the civilian oversight agency makes those details public only months after the fact. Civilians are not told that the Police Department ended their cases.

To piece together Caban’s actions, ProPublica obtained internal records of some cases and learned details of others using public records, lawsuits, social media accounts and other sources.

Retention has been the commissioner’s chief method of intervention. He has prevented the cases of 54 officers from going to trial in his roughly one year in office — far more than any other commissioner, according to an analysis of CCRB data. His predecessor, Keechant Sewell, did it eight times in her first year, even as she faced more disciplinary cases.

In addition, under Caban, the Police Department has failed to notify officers that the oversight agency has filed charges against them — a seemingly minor administrative matter that can actually hold up the disciplinary process. The rules say that without this formal step, a departmental trial cannot begin. Seven cases have been sitting with the department since last summer because it has never formally notified the officers involved, according to the CCRB.

These cases are particularly opaque, as there is no publicly available list of them.

In one episode, the CCRB found that an officer had shocked an unarmed man with a Taser four times while he was trying to back away.

“He Tased me for no reason,” recalled William Harvin Sr. “He was coming to me, Tasing my legs, my back.”

The review board found that the officer, Raul Torres, should face trial. But the Police Department has yet to move the case forward, a fact Harvin learned from a reporter. “They take care of their own,” he said, shaking his head. (Torres, who has since been promoted to detective, declined to comment and his lawyer said the officer had “no choice” but to use force.)

Watch video ➜

In more than 30 other instances, Caban upended cases in which department lawyers and the officers themselves had already agreed to disciplinary action — the most times a commissioner has done so in at least a decade. Sewell set aside four plea deals during her first year as commissioner.

For one officer, Caban rejected two plea deals: In the first case, the officer pleaded guilty to wrongly pepper-spraying protesters and agreed to losing 40 vacation days as punishment. Caban overturned the deal and reduced the penalty to 10 days. In the second, the officer pleaded guilty to using a baton against Black Lives Matter protesters “without police necessity.” Caban threw out the agreement, which called for 15 vacation days to be forfeited. His office wrote that it wasn’t clear that the officer had actually hit the protesters, contrary to what the officer himself already admitted to in the plea. The commissioner ordered no discipline.

The under-the-radar moves run counter to Mayor Eric Adams’ pledge during his candidacy to improve policing by “building trust through transparency.” This year, in his State of the City address, Adams also promised that cases of alleged misconduct would “not languish for months.”

In a statement to ProPublica, a spokesperson for the mayor’s office defended the Police Department and Caban’s record: “Mayor Adams has full confidence in Caban’s leadership and ability to thoroughly review all allegations of police misconduct, and adjudicate accordingly.”

A Police Department spokesperson declined to answer detailed questions, responding instead with a one-sentence statement: “The NYPD continues to work closely with the Civilian Complaint Review Board in accordance with the terms of the memorandum of understanding.”

That memorandum stemmed from a political compromise reached about a decade ago. Concerned that the department’s policing tactics were too aggressive, members of the City Council pushed for the CCRB to be able to prosecute cases rather than simply make recommendations to the police commissioner.

The final memorandum, produced after protracted negotiations with the Police Department, included the mechanism that has since allowed Caban to intervene in disciplinary cases. The agreement states that the commissioner may take cases away from CCRB prosecutors if the commissioner determines that allowing the agency to move ahead will be “detrimental to the Police Department’s disciplinary process” or if the “interests of justice would not be served.”

Chris Dunn, the legal director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, objected at the time to that veto power. Shown the number of cases that Caban has retained, he told ProPublica, “This is exactly why we were so concerned about this authority.”

The agreement stipulated that retentions can be used only on officers with “no disciplinary history,” a limitation that Caban and other commissioners have not always followed. Caban has on three occasions retained cases of officers who the CCRB had previously found engaged in misconduct.

While commissioners can still choose to impose significant punishment after retaining a case, they often don’t. In 40% of the cases that Caban has retained, he has ordered no discipline. In the cases in which he has ordered discipline, it has mostly been light, such as the loss of a few vacation days. The most severe punishment, ProPublica found, was docking an officer 10 vacation days for knocking a cellphone out of the hand of someone who was recording him.

Disciplinary trials can produce significant consequences for officers — if they’re allowed to proceed.

In 2018, CCRB prosecutors brought charges against the officer who killed Eric Garner, the Staten Island man whose cries of “I can’t breathe” helped ignite the Black Lives Matter movement. It would be a last chance to hold the officer, Daniel Pantaleo, accountable after a grand jury had declined to indict him. The commissioner at the time, James O’Neill, moved to handle the case internally, according to multiple current and former review board officials. (O’Neill did not respond to a request for comment.)

The CCRB, however, pushed back. “I went to war,” recalled Maya Wiley, the chair of the board at the time, who went to City Hall to argue against the Police Department’s plans. Officials in Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration overruled the commissioner and let the trial move ahead. Pantaleo was found guilty of using a banned chokehold. Amid huge public interest and scrutiny, the police commissioner then fired him.

The current approach to police discipline under Caban is something civil rights advocates attribute to his boss, Adams, a former police captain who has struck a tough-on-crime image and opposed policing reforms since taking office two years ago. “We cannot handcuff the police,” Adams told reporters when vetoing two criminal justice reform bills in January.

Last year, the mayor reportedly urged Sewell to reject recommended disciplinary action against a top uniformed officer, who was also an Adams ally. She declined and pushed to discipline the officer, resigning shortly afterward. Mr. Adams then appointed another close ally to the position: Caban.

Caban has his own history with the disciplinary process. Over his 30 years on the force, he has twice been found by the CCRB to have engaged in misconduct, making him an outlier in the department. The vast majority of officers have never been found by the oversight agency to have committed any misconduct.

In one case, he was ordered to complete more training after he arrested a civilian for not providing ID. In the other, related to refusing to provide the names of officers to a civilian who said they had mistreated her, there is no record of discipline.

The Police Department did not comment on Caban’s record, but it previously said, “Caban’s awareness of that process will only help him bring a fair and informed point of view to those important decisions.”

Caban recently rejected discipline in a case in which two officers had killed a man in his own apartment during a mental health crisis. The chair of the review board criticized the decision, a move that earned Adams’s ire. She also requested more resources to investigate complaints, which rose 50% last year. Instead, the Adams administration imposed cuts, forcing the board to stop investigating various kinds of misconduct, including officers who lie on the job.

“In this administration we have a mayor who runs the Police Department,” said Dunn, of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “He sets the tone, and the tone is ‘we’re cutting police accountability and discipline.’”

The police union, the Police Benevolent Association, disagrees, saying Caban’s actions are a critical counter to what it sees as frequent overreach by the civilian oversight board. “The police commissioner has a responsibility to keep the city safe,” the union’s president, Patrick Hendry, said in a statement. “CCRB’s only goal is to boost their statistics and advance their anti-police narrative by punishing as many cops as possible.”

Last fall, Caban sent his own signal. He gave one of the department’s top positions to an officer who tackled and shocked a Black Lives Matter protester with a Taser in the summer of 2020. Tarik Sheppard, a captain at the time, was heading to a disciplinary trial when his case was retained a year later, with no discipline given. Sheppard is now deputy commissioner for public information. He regularly appeared on television this spring to talk about the Police Department’s response to campus protests over the Israel-Hamas war.

The outcomes have been different for the victims. Destiny Strudwick, the protester who was tackled and shocked with a Taser, has struggled since the encounter nearly four years ago. “Sometimes I feel like the human psyche is only made to handle so much,” she said. “And what happened to me, it just was too much.”

Sheppard did not respond to requests for comment.

The Police Department never informed Strudwick or Villafane that the cases against the officers who hurt them had been upended. After learning what had happened, both felt that the department had denied them justice.

“That makes my heart sink,” said Strudwick, after ProPublica told her of Sheppard’s retention.

As for Villafane, she gasped when she was shown the Police Department letter wiping away the case against Dowling, who did not respond to requests for comment. She slowly read a line out loud, “His actions therefore do not warrant a disciplinary action.”

She shook her head. “He’s supposed to be protecting us and he’s hurting us,” Villafane said. “Who am I supposed to call to feel safe now? Not him.”

Do you have information about the police we should know? You can email Eric Umansky at [email protected] or contact him securely on Signal or WhatsApp at 917-687-8406.

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with High Country News. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

When Yakama Nation leaders learned in 2017 of a plan to tunnel through some of their ancestral land for a green energy development, they were caught off guard.

While the tribal nation had come out in favor of climate-friendly projects, this one appeared poised to damage Pushpum, a privately owned ridgeline overlooking the Columbia River in Washington. The nation holds treaty rights to gather traditional foods there, and tribal officials knew they had to stop the project.

Problems arose when the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the agency in charge of permitting hydro energy projects, offered the Yakama Nation what tribal leaders considered an impossible choice: disclose confidential ceremonial, archaeological and cultural knowledge, or waive the right to consult on whether and how the site is developed.

This put the Yakama Nation in a bind. Disclosing exactly what made the land sacred risked revealing to outsiders what they treasured most about it. In the past, disclosure of information about everything from food to archaeological sites enabled non-Natives to loot or otherwise desecrate the land.

Even now, tribal leaders struggle to safely express what the Pushpum project threatens. “I don’t know how in-depth I can go,” said Elaine Harvey, a tribal member and former environmental coordinator for the tribal fisheries department, when asked about the foods and medicines that grow on the land.

“It provides for us,” echoed Yakama Nation Councilmember Jeremy Takala. “Sometimes we do get really protective.”

Although government agencies have sometimes taken significant steps to protect tribal confidentiality, that didn’t happen with the Pushpum proposal, known as the Goldendale Energy Storage Project. Tribal leaders repeatedly objected, telling the agency that if a tribal nation deems a place sacred, they shouldn’t have to break confidentiality to prove it — a position supported by state agency leaders and, new reporting shows, at least one other federal agency.

Nonetheless, after seven years, in February FERC moved the project forward without consulting with the Yakama Nation.

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The process known as consultation is often fraught. Federal laws and agency rules require that tribes be able to weigh in on decisions that affect their treaty lands. But in practice, consultation procedures sometimes force tribes to reveal information that makes them more vulnerable, without offering any guaranteed benefit.

The risks of disclosure are not hypothetical: Looting and vandalism are common when information about Indigenous resources becomes public. One important mid-Columbia petroglyph, called Tsagaglalal, or She Who Watches, had to be removed from its original site because of vandalism. And recreational and commercial pickers have flooded one of Washington’s best huckleberry picking areas, called Indian Heaven Wilderness, pushing out Native families trying to stock up for the winter.

The Yakama Nation feared similar outcomes if it fully participated in FERC’s consultation process over the Goldendale development. But there are alternatives. The United Nations recognizes Indigenous peoples’ right to affirmatively consent to development on their sacred lands. A similar model was included in state legislation in Washington three years ago, but Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed it.

The requirements of the consultation process are poorly defined, and state and federal agencies interpret them in a broad range of ways. In the case of Pushpum, critics say that has allowed FERC to overlook tribal concerns.

“They’re just being totally disregarded,” said Simone Anter, an attorney at the environmental nonprofit Columbia Riverkeeper and a descendant of the Pascua Yaqui and Jicarilla Apache nations. “What FERC is doing is so blatantly, blatantly wrong.”

The Yakama Nation has been outspoken in its support for renewable energy development, including solar and small-scale hydro projects. But not at Pushpum; it’s sacred to the Kah-milt-pah people, one of the bands within the Yakama Nation, who still regularly use the site.

The proposal would transform this area into a facility intended to store renewable energy in a low-carbon way. Rye Development, a Florida-based company, submitted an application for permits for a “pumped hydro” system, where a pair of reservoirs connected by a tunnel store energy for future use.

FERC has offered few accommodations for the Yakama Nation on the Goldendale project.

FERC spokesperson Celeste Miller told High Country News and ProPublica in an email that “we will work to address the effects of proposed projects on Tribal rights and resources to the greatest extent we can, consistent with federal law and regulations. This is a pending matter before the Commission, so we cannot discuss the merits of this proceeding.”

“FERC legally doesn’t have to do very much here,” said Kevin Washburn, a dean of the University of Iowa College of Law, a citizen of the Chickasaw Nation of Oklahoma and a former assistant secretary of Indian affairs at the Department of the Interior. “Consultation is designed to open the door so tribes can get in the door to talk to decision-makers.” According to experts, the process can range from collaborative planning that addresses tribal concerns to a perfunctory discussion with minimal impacts, depending on the agency.

“This is the problem with consultation and its lack of teeth,” said Anter. “If the federal government is saying, ‘Hey, we consulted, check that box,’ who’s to say they didn't?”

There’s another problem with consultation, too: Any discussions with a federal entity are subject to public disclosure. That’s good for government transparency, Washburn said, but it can make tribal nations even more vulnerable. “And it’s why tribes are right to be cautious in what they share with feds,” he said.

That’s an obstacle at Pushpum. Things became even harder there in August 2021, when FERC notified the Yakama Nation that federal consultation would be carried out not by the agency itself, but by the developer. The Yakama Nation pushed back, asserting its treaty rights to negotiate as a sovereign nation only with another nation, not with a private entity. FERC, however, insisted that designating a third party was “standard practice.” The National Historic Preservation Act, signed into law in 1966, says an agency “may authorize an applicant or group of applicants to initiate consultation,” but maintains that the federal agency is still “responsible for their government to government relationships with Indian tribes.”

The Yakama Nation also worried about commission rules that require anything the tribal nation says to FERC be shared with the developer. “It gets very sensitive when we share those kinds of stories,” said Takala, the tribal councilmember. “We just don’t share to anyone, especially a developer.”

Some say FERC could change that internal rule, since it isn’t required by law. “For them to cite their own regulations and be like, ‘Our hands are tied,’ is ridiculous,” Anter said. For months, FERC and the Yakama Nation went back and forth over the conditions under which the tribal government would share sensitive information, with the Yakama Nation repeatedly asking to share information only with FERC.

This is the problem with consultation and its lack of teeth. … If the federal government is saying, ‘Hey, we consulted, check that box,’ who’s to say they didn’t?

Ultimately, FERC proposed four ways the Yakama Nation could participate in consultation. In the eyes of tribal leaders, all these options either posed significant risks to the privacy of their information or rendered consultation meaningless.

The first three were laid out in a letter from Vince Yearick, director of FERC’s division of hydropower licensing, sent on Dec. 9, 2021. For option one, it suggested the tribal nation request nondisclosure agreements from anyone accessing sensitive information. Yearick did not specify whether FERC would be responsible for issuing or enforcing these NDAs.

Delano Saluskin, then-chair of the Yakama Nation, called this option “far from the requirements of NHPA or in line with the trust responsibility that the Federal Agency has to Yakama Nation,” citing FERC policies and National Historic Preservation Act law in a February 2022 letter to state and federal government officials requesting support. He added that it “describes a process that does not protect information that is sacred and sensitive from disclosure.”

Alternatively, FERC said, the Yakama Nation could simply redact any sensitive information from documents it filed. This option, however, would leave FERC in the dark about the details of what cultural resources the project would imperil. That would make it harder for FERC to require project adjustments or weigh the specific impacts in its decision about whether to permit construction.

Third, the Yakama Nation could withhold sensitive information altogether, which would present similar problems.

Lastly, in a June 2022 follow-up letter, the commission suggested that the Yakama Nation submit a document “with more details regarding the resources of concern” and a request that some of the information be treated as privileged or withheld from public disclosure.

Overall, Saluskin described FERC’s options as a “failure” to conduct legal consultation in good faith.

A federal agency similarly raised concerns: In May 2023, the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which advises the president and the Congress on protecting historic properties across the country, wrote to FERC suggesting that it “provide the Tribes with opportunities to share information that will be kept confidential.” FERC’s rule regarding disclosure, the council said, could insulate the agency from meaningful consultation, “and as a result from any real understanding of the nature and significance of properties of religious and cultural significance for Tribes.”

The concerns over FERC’s engagement with the Yakama Nation are part of a wider discussion of whether and how the U.S. government should protect tribal privacy and cultural resources. Speaking at a tribal energy summit in Tacoma in June 2023, Allyson Brooks, Washington’s state historic preservation officer, said that even though the consent language was vetoed by the governor, state law for protecting confidentiality around tribal cultural properties is still stronger than federal law, which only protects confidentiality if a site is eligible for the National Register of Historic Places.

In Washington, if a tribal historic preservation officer says, “‘X marks the spot; this is sacred,’ we say, ‘OK,’” Brooks declared. She said asking tribal nations to prove a site’s sacredness is like asking to see a photo of baby Jesus before accepting the sanctity of Christmas. “You don’t. You say ‘nice tree’ and take it at face value. When tribes say ‘X is sacred,’ you should take that at face value too.”

That approach is vital to the Yakama Nation, which recently saw a developer involved with a project proposed in nearby Benton County leak information that the nation believed was private.

We don’t write it, you won’t see it posted. You won’t see it in books. It’s our oral history. It’s sacred.

The Horse Heaven Hills wind farm would be the biggest energy development of any kind in Washington state history. But the sprawling 72,000-acre project overlaps with nesting habitat for migratory ferruginous hawks, a raptor state-listed as endangered.

Court documents related to the permitting proceedings show that the Yakama Nation believed it had identified the locations of the ferruginous hawks’ nests as confidential, in part because the hawks are ceremonially important. In May 2023, the Yakama Nation requested a protective order from the Energy Facility Site Evaluation Council, a state-level analog of FERC. The order, which the council issued, instructed all parties to sign a confidentiality agreement before accessing confidential information, similar to the nondisclosure agreements FERC proposed. If any party disclosed that information, they could be liable for damages.

But the order didn’t stop that information from getting out. In February 2024, the Seattle Times published a story on the Horse Heaven Hills wind farm, which included a map of ferruginous hawk nests — a map that was credited to Scout Clean Energy, the developer.

The Yakama Nation quickly filed a motion to enforce the protective order, alleging that Scout Clean Energy had transgressed by passing protected cultural information to the press.

The developer counter-filed, claiming that even if nest locations were a part of confidentiality discussion, the map itself was not, and that it was so imprecise that the critical details remained confidential. The council ultimately agreed.

Despite the risks, Washburn said that tribes should take any opportunity to share their stories with federal officials, even if the conditions aren’t perfect. “I wouldn’t necessarily encourage tribes to give their deepest, darkest secrets to a federal agency,” he said. “But I would encourage them to meet with FERC and try to give FERC a first-person account of why they think this is important.”

Not all experts agree. Brett Lee Shelton, a member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and an attorney at the Native American Rights Fund, said FERC is out of step with other federal and state agencies. “It’s hard to believe that it’s anything but disingenuous, using that tactic,” he said. “It’s pretty well known by any agency officials who deal with Indian tribes that sometimes certain specifics about sacred places need to remain confidential.”

And for Bronsco Jim, a spiritual leader of the Kah-milt-pah people, sharing too many details is out of the question. Cultural specifics stay within the oral teachings of the longhouse, the site of the Kah-milt-pah spiritual community. Jim said he doesn’t even know how to translate all of the information into English. “We don’t write it, you won’t see it posted. You won’t see it in books. It’s our oral history. It’s sacred.”

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The Biden administration released a report last week acknowledging “the historic, ongoing, and cumulative damage and injustices” that Columbia River dam construction caused Northwest tribal nations starting in the 20th century, including decimation of the salmon runs that Indigenous people were entitled to by government treaty.

Across 73 pages, the report from the U.S. Department of the Interior concludes “the government afforded little, if any, consideration to the devastation the dams would bring to Tribal communities, including to their cultures, sacred sites, economies, and homes.”

But here’s what’s not in the report: The injuries to Native people were not just an unforeseen byproduct of federal dam building. They were, in fact, taken into account at the time. And federal leaders considered that damage a good thing.

In government documents from the 1940s and 1950s, obtained by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica, government officials openly discussed what they called “the Indian problem” on the Columbia River, referring to the tribes’ fisheries that were protected under federal treaties. At times, they characterized the destruction of the last major tribal fishery as a benefit that dam construction would bring.

The archival government records were released to Columbia River treaty tribes several years ago under the Freedom of Information Act. They were first made public by OPB and ProPublica in March and April episodes of the podcast “Salmon Wars.”

The documents reveal that the government’s 1950s era of dam building on the Columbia was marked not by a failure to consider tribal impacts, but rather by a well-informed and intentional disregard for Native people.

“These documents shine a spotlight on a historic wrong” U.S. Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, said in a statement to OPB and ProPublica. “The government’s actions wiped out tribal communities, houses, villages, and traditional hunting and fishing sites with thousands of years of history.”

In response to emails detailing what the documents contained, Merkley said he would push the federal government to develop new tribal villages to replace the Indigenous fishing settlements that the dams flooded out.

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden, a fellow Oregon Democrat, said he looked forward to working with tribes and the federal government to “to repair that shameful past.”

The Interior Department’s new report “writes yet one more painful chapter in the awful and deceitful history of federal decisions that willfully ignored Tribal communities’ rights and humanity,” Wyden said in an emailed statement.

The report does not mention any of the discussion from government officials previously reported by OPB and ProPublica.

A spokesperson for the Department of the Interior declined to comment when emailed the documents and asked whether the department was aware of them.

“We have nothing further to add beyond what’s in the extensive report,” press secretary Giovanni Rocco said in an email.

The report is a component of a recent 10-year agreement between the White House and tribes to restore endangered Columbia River Basin salmon populations.

Northwest tribes lauded the report as a long-overdue accounting of harms and a demonstration of the current administration’s commitment to listen to tribes and do right by them.

“The analysis highlights the many different ways the dams have impacted our cultures, lifestyles, diets, and economies and it got this information directly from the tribal people who have been affected,” Corinne Sams, chair of the Columbia River Intertribal Fish Commission, said in an emailed statement. “By listening to and including these testimonies, interviews, and statements, the federal government has taken tribes into consideration on this topic from a relationship of respect and willingness to learn.”

Salmon are estimated to have once totaled more than 10 million in the Columbia River, and they were central to the way of life for many tribes across the river basin. People fished along the river and its many tributaries in what are now Oregon, Washington, Idaho and parts of Canada for thousands of years. Salmon were a fixture of Indigenous people’s diet, religion and commercial trade.

Now, the river system’s salmon hover around 1 million. The decline is attributed largely to dams and other habitat loss stemming from development, along with overfishing.

Documents show government officials in the 20th century came to view the Native presence on the river as a detriment to the government’s own plans for hydropower – and harmful to the fish themselves.

In one memo from 1951, Sam Hutchinson, the acting regional director for the Bureau of Fisheries, summarized a conversation about the anticipated impact of The Dalles Dam, which ultimately drowned the tribes’ last major fishery, at Celilo Falls, when it was completed in 1957.

Hutchinson wrote, “I stated that the beneficial effects would compensate for the detrimental conditions that exist there at present.”

One of those benefits, according to Hutchinson: “The Indian commercial fishery would be eliminated and more fish would reach the spawning grounds in better condition.”

The successor agency to the Bureau of Fisheries, which is now a part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, declined through a spokesperson to comment on Hutchinson’s historical remarks.

Hutchinson’s sentiment was also documented in meeting minutes from a 1947 committee of state, federal and local governments about future dam plans.

“We get up above and we run into the Indian problem at Celilo and other places. They are allowed to fish at will,” said Milo Moore, director of what was then called the Washington Department of Fisheries, according to the minutes. He said the tribes’ fishing made it difficult to maintain a constant supply of fish for the department’s own purposes. The state agency’s role included protecting and promoting the commercial and sport fisheries downriver, whose participants were predominantly white.

The head of the Port of Vancouver at the time, Frank Pender, also told federal officials of “the Indian problem” and said of tribal fishing, “certainly we don’t want it to stand in the way of the development of our own way of life.”

At one point during the proceedings, a man named Wilfred Steve was introduced as “our public relations officer for the Department of Fisheries and the Indians,” meeting minutes say. Steve acknowledged “these dams are going along and they are going to destroy their very life, the essence of life of these various tribes.”

Later in his remarks, the public relations officer praised the potential of education programs to assimilate Native people and stated “we hope that there will be no Indians.” He recommended paying the tribes in exchange for flooding their lands and destroying their fisheries.

Like the others quoted in the documents, Steve is now deceased.

Randy Settler, a Yakama Nation fisherman whose family history of salmon fishing was previously documented by OPB and ProPublica, said the money his family received in exchange for the dam flooding Celilo and other tribal lands amounted to roughly $3,200 per individual.

After dam construction, Congress and agency officials created programs to boost fishing opportunities that involved stocking the river with massive numbers of fish.

The archival government documents detail how these programs were used to justify allowing the dams to block the migration of native salmon. However, 99% of the stocked fish were almost entirely aimed at the fishing grounds below the dams that were used predominantly by white fishermen.

“It was kind of like what happened to the buffalo,” Settler told OPB and ProPublica during the initial reporting for “Salmon Wars.” “If they could rid the natural food of those tribes that they were dependent upon, they could weaken the tribes and get them to stop going across their ancestral territories. They would be more confined to their reservation lands where they could be controlled.”

The Biden administration has promised tribes it will restore wild salmon populations. As part of the 10-year agreement it signed with tribes, which includes a pause on any lawsuits over the dam system, the White House announced a plan to invest heavily in tribal-led salmon restoration and energy projects that could potentially replace the power from some hydroelectric dams. President Joe Biden also signed a memorandum calling for federal agencies to prioritize salmon recovery and to review the work to make sure they’re doing enough.

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One young researcher from Alabama is unearthing the origin stories of schools known as “segregation academies” to understand how that history fosters racial divisions today.

Another is measuring how much these private schools — which opened across the Deep South to facilitate white flight after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education ruling — continue to drain public school enrollment.

And a third is examining how these academies, operating in a “landscape marred by historical racial tensions,” receive public money through Alabama’s voucher-style private school tuition grants.

All three researchers are white women raised in Alabama, close in age, who grew up near these academies. The women — one recently received a doctorate and the other two are working on theirs — approach their research from the varied disciplines of economics, education and history. Their inquiries are probing the very schools some of their family and friends attended.

In an ongoing series this year, ProPublica is examining the continued effects of hundreds of segregation academies still operating in the South. One of the three researchers played a key role in our initial story. Her experiences, both personally and academically, provided essential context to understanding how one segregation academy in rural Alabama has kept an entire community separated by race.

The research conducted by all three women is especially important now. It comes at a time when Southern legislatures are creating and expanding school-voucher-style programs that will pour hundreds of millions of public dollars into the coffers of private schools, including segregation academies, over the coming years.

Annah Rogers was working on her undergraduate degree at Auburn University in 2013 when Republican lawmakers suddenly rushed to pass the Alabama Accountability Act. The legislation created a voucher-style system to pay private school tuition for low-income students. As Rogers followed the debates, she wondered just how accessible private schools are to families with few resources, especially in rural areas. She knew that some of those communities don’t have private schools — and where they do exist, they’re often segregation academies.

Rogers hails from Eutaw, Alabama, a town of 3,000 people located in the Black Belt, a stretch of counties whose dark, rich soil once fueled large cotton plantations. Her parents sent her 45 minutes away to a private Catholic school. (Catholic schools generally aren’t considered segregation academies because most dioceses integrated willingly.) Rogers’ father attended a now-defunct local segregation academy, and her mother went to one in another county.

While working on her doctorate in political science at the University of Alabama, she devoted her 2022 dissertation to examining the state’s voucher-style program and its effects on private schools, including segregation academies. She had expected segregation academies to balk at participating in the program given that more than 60% of students who use it are Black. Yet she found that many do. In fact, they take part at a slightly higher rate — 8% more often — than other private schools.

That discovery prompted more questions: Are the tuition grants enabling Black students to attend segregation academies, making the schools more diverse? Or are the academies merely siphoning off the white students who use the grants?

“The biggest problem is that we don’t know,” said Rogers, who’s now an assistant professor at the University of West Alabama’s education college. She hit a huge hurdle when the state refused to break down by school the demographics of students who use the publicly funded program to pay private school tuition.

Despite that roadblock, she continues to probe these questions while working on related studies, including one that demonstrates how school segregation patterns have continued and even worsened across Alabama’s Black Belt over the last three decades.

Her research will become more critical in the coming years, as more students, including students from wealthier families, will be receiving state money to attend private schools. In March, Alabama lawmakers created a universal voucher-style program to fund private school tuition. It will be open to all children, regardless of household income, starting in 2027.

Danielle Graves grew up in Mobile on the Gulf Coast, where she attended a mostly white private Episcopal school. Although it opened long enough before the Brown v. Board ruling that academics don’t label it a segregation academy, its enrollment still grew substantially during desegregation.

Graves left the South to pursue her master’s and doctorate in economics at Boston University, where she is a fourth-year Ph.D. student. While in the Northeast, she realized that private schools there tend to be much older than in the South. The private school tradition didn’t really catch on in the South until white people thought Black students might arrive at their children’s public schools.

Graves also realized how few people outside of the South knew about segregation academies. Economics literature rarely mentioned them at all.

“I felt like it was this missing piece,” she said.

A lot of economic research on school desegregation and white flight focuses on cities rather than on rural areas “where segregation academies really play a big role,” Graves said. She jumped into that largely empty research lane.

Graves tackles questions like: How have segregation academies affected the average public school enrollment? Are there differences between rural and urban areas?

She taught a class on the economics and history of school segregation at Harvard University this spring and has spent the last two years researching and presenting her work on the impact that segregation academies have on local public schools.

For the dissertation she is finishing, Graves found that on average, when segregation academies opened in Alabama and Louisiana, they caused white enrollment in neighboring public schools to drop by about a third — and the white population did not return over the 15 years that followed.

Now she is measuring the effects of segregation academies on local public school funding, the students who attended them and the communities where they operate.

Unlike the other two researchers, Amberly Sheffield went to her local public schools, which were predominantly Black. As she watched other white families pay to send their children to segregation academies, she wondered: why?

Sheffield grew up in Grove Hill, a town of 2,000 people, where her father briefly attended a local segregation academy. After earning her undergraduate degree, she landed a job teaching history at a segregation academy in neighboring Wilcox County. ProPublica’s first story in its series on these academies focused on Wilcox County and the lasting effect that school segregation has had on community members — including, for a time, Sheffield. 

Almost all of her students at Wilcox Academy were white. The entire faculty was white. Yet Wilcox County is 70% Black.

Like most segregation academies, Wilcox Academy doesn’t advertise itself as such. Some of these schools include their founding years on their websites or entrance signs — as Wilcox Academy does — but mention nothing about the fact that they opened to avoid desegregation.

Sheffield wanted to shed light on the context of the schools’ openings. In her 2022 master's thesis at Auburn University, she chronicled Wilcox County’s history of sharecropping, violence against civil rights advocates, and resistance to school integration.

She also documented the many fundraisers white people held to pay for the segregation academies they rushed to open before many Black students arrived at the white public schools. Families forming one academy held a skit night, barbeque, fish fry, bingo party, pet show and pancake supper. The money raised paid for school equipment and salaries “but equally important, it created a new community for its founders, sponsors, and families,” she wrote.

The schools also joined a new group that provided their accreditation and organized sports events. “These academies allowed whites to gain complete control over their children’s education — they no longer had to answer to any form of government but their own,” Sheffield wrote.

Today, she is continuing her research as a doctoral student in history at the University of Mississippi.

“History is very important in understanding how we’ve gotten to where we are today, especially when you look at public schools in rural communities in Alabama,” Sheffield said. Many of these schools are mostly Black, underfunded and struggling. “I want people to understand how it got that way, and the answer usually is segregation academies.”

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Last year, representatives of New Mexico’s oil industry met behind closed doors with the very groups with which they typically clash — state regulators and environmentalists — in search of an answer to the more than 70,000 wells sitting unplugged across the state. Many leak oil, brine and toxic or explosive gasses, and more than 1,700 have already been left to the public to clean up.

The situation is so dire that oil companies agreed to help try to find a solution.

After months of negotiations, the state regulators who ran the meetings emerged with a proposal that they hoped would appease everyone in the room. The bill would instruct drillers to set aside more money to plug their wells, authorize regulators to block risky sales to companies that would be unlikely to afford to clean up their wells and implement a buffer zone between wells and hospitals, schools, homes and other buildings.

The industry, unhappy with the state’s final language, turned against the bill it helped shape.

The influential New Mexico Oil and Gas Association told its supporters that HB 133 was “a radical and dangerous approach designed to strangle the oil and gas industry” and asked them to send their elected representatives a form letter opposing it. If passed, the trade group proclaimed, the bill would “Destroy New Mexico.” The Independent Petroleum Association of New Mexico, which represents small oil companies, called the bill “overzealous.”

In the face of such opposition, Democrats removed key provisions. The New Mexico Oil and Gas Association eventually changed its position to neutral, but largely stripped of substance, the bill died on the floor of the House of Representatives.

“Industry killing the bills was the dynamic I saw,” said Adam Peltz, a senior attorney with the Environmental Defense Fund who helped write the New Mexico proposal, as well as similar bills in other oil-producing states.

New Mexico faces a multibillion-dollar shortfall between the money companies have set aside to plug wells and the actual cost of doing so, according to state research, a reality mirrored in many states.

Across the country, more than 2 million oil and gas wells sit unplugged, but the money held in cleanup funds, called bonds, is many tens of billions of dollars short of the projected costs, ProPublica and Capital & Main found. Now, a once-in-a-lifetime effort to shrink that shortfall is underway, spurred in large part by federal funding for well-plugging efforts.

As regulators and legislators seek to require that drillers set aside more money for the work, they have invited oil companies and trade groups to help write the regulations. This dynamic — politically expedient in states where the industry wields tremendous influence — has combined with secretive drafting processes and millions of dollars of industry lobbying to weaken or kill proposals in state after state.

In some, including Oklahoma and Utah, lawmakers propose bills only after oil trade groups approve the language. In many others, regulators and drillers work together through organizations such as the quasi-governmental Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission to design policy. But even when given a seat at the table, like in New Mexico, the industry has turned against reform efforts.

Holly Hopkins, a vice president of the American Petroleum Institute, the industry’s largest trade group, said in a statement, “We are continuing to work with policymakers to advance balanced regulations that enhance safety, sustainability and environmental stewardship and help ensure that American energy is produced responsibly from start to finish.”

Those working to reform a status quo that has left potentially millions of wells as orphans disagree. Sen. Jeff Merkley, an Oregon Democrat, is preparing to file a bill in Congress targeting oil companies’ use of bankruptcy to offload cleanup obligations on the public.

“The challenge in anything that involves fossil fuels, and particularly that addresses a profit strategy of fossil fuel companies, is you’re taking on the most powerful lobby in the United States of America,” he said.

After a previous effort to update oil regulations failed in the New Mexico Legislature last year, the state convened a working group. Regulators, the industry and environmentalists spent months negotiating the details. Written with input from this broad coalition, and with the governor’s office and the Legislature in the hands of Democrats, it appeared the political stars had aligned.

But roadblocks quickly appeared. Lawmakers hadn’t been included in the negotiations, even though a sponsor would have to carry the bill through the session, which lasts only a few weeks. The talks were also closed to the public, and some environmental groups had been excluded because of ongoing litigation against the state.

As soon as Rep. Kristina Ortez, a Democrat, filed HB 133, “all hell broke loose,” she said, with infighting from the closed-door negotiations spilling into the Legislature.

“The oil and gas companies didn’t appreciate the language,” Ortez said. “They felt like they weren’t being listened to.”

Some environmentalists, meanwhile, felt that industry representatives had already watered down the bill too much during the negotiations and came out against it, she said.

HB 133 was picked apart further as it worked its way through the legislative process.

With the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association now opposed, House committees submitted substitute measures to shift the industry’s position, gain votes and pass the bill. The amended versions eliminated a requirement that wells be a certain distance from schools and other buildings. Also gone was language to remove a cap on the monetary penalties regulators could assess against oil companies. And bonding requirements were watered down to the point that new, stricter rules would only apply to a handful of drillers.

By the time the rewritten legislation made it to the House floor, “I was so wildly unenthusiastic of the bill,” said Andrew Forkes-Gudmundson, who worked on it for environmental group Earthworks.

Missi Currier, the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association’s president and CEO, said that the group dropped its opposition after the bill was amended. But as the bill’s supporters whipped votes, they still encountered resistance from legislators who had been persuaded by small oil companies’ arguments that the new rules would push drillers out of business, Forkes-Gudmundson recalled.

Having hemorrhaged environmentalists’ support without gaining significant votes from moderates and conservatives, Democratic leadership never brought the bill up for a vote by the full House.

Because the oil and gas industry is largely governed at the state level, states banded together in the 1930s with the approval of Congress, and more recently with federal funding, to share best practices for regulating oil. The resulting organization, the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission, has evolved into a forum where, much as happened in New Mexico, the industry influences the ideas that regulators take back to their states and write into the rules governing oil companies.

This was on full display in October at the commission’s annual conference, hosted among Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, which were blanketed by autumnal reds and yellows. With Chevron, ExxonMobil and Oxy Petroleum among the conference’s largest sponsors, oil and gas regulators from across the country had gathered at the Chateaux Deer Valley, an upscale ski resort overlooking Park City’s renowned pistes.

As the conference began, regulators were clear-eyed that taxpayers could be saddled with the cost of plugging orphan wells.

“This year, I spent $29 million, and somehow that’s still not enough,” Jason Harmon, one of West Virginia’s head oil regulators, said about his state’s well-plugging efforts.

Catherine Dickert, New York’s top oil regulator, noted that wells in her state get passed to ever-smaller companies “until finally they get transferred to somebody who owns two wells that never, ever will be able to plug them.”

And cleanup funds are “woefully inadequate in Pennsylvania right now,” Kurt Klapkowski, the commonwealth’s lead oil regulator, told the attendees. “And we’ve gotten a lot of opposition about increasing that.”

But as the conference progressed, talk of bonding regulations gave way to discussions of repurposing old wells. Perhaps natural gas would still be needed to develop hydrogen fuel, an ExxonMobil representative discussed on a panel at the conference. Or wells could be used for storing captured carbon dioxide, an Oxy Petroleum representative said on another. State regulators returned home with these and other pitches from the oil industry on how to manage aging oil fields.

In addition to conferences, the organization pens pro-oil and gas resolutions that it has placed in state legislatures. In these resolutions, its members have called on the federal government to minimize regulations on climate-warming gasses, increase oil-related tax credits and shield certain royalty owners from cleanup costs. States including Wyoming, Utah and Oklahoma, among others, have passed resolutions pushed by the commission.

By the 1970s, the Department of Justice was arguing that the Interstate Oil and Gas Compact Commission had largely become a lobbying organization. Critics today say the commission is hampering reform.

“They’re this unique mechanism for corporate capture,” said Jesse Coleman, a senior researcher with public interest watchdog organization Documented who has tracked the commission for years. “They get to act as this impartial source of information, when in reality, they’re on the industry side.”

While about 60% of the people involved with the group were government officials, a quarter worked in the oil and gas industry, according to a 2021 membership survey Documented obtained via a public records request. The Environmental Defense Fund is typically the only green group in the room.

The survey also found that people involved with the group saw its role as promoting “diverse viewpoints on climate related issues” and “fighting back against measures that seek to ‘keep it in the ground’” — the “it” referring to climate-warming fossil fuels.

As the U.S. Department of the Interior doles out $4.7 billion to plug orphan wells from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, the commission and its members have helped write guidelines governing the spending, most of which is going to states, documents obtained via public records requests revealed. In many cases, the commission’s suggestions were highly technical and provided assistance to a federal department trying to navigate various states’ unique laws.

But at other times, the commission and its members asked the Interior Department to tear up requirements that states prioritize plugging wells that are emitting methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and pay the regional prevailing wage to workers hired to do the plugging.

In an email responding to questions, Lori Wrotenbery, the commission’s executive director, said the group’s pushback was justified because the Interior Department had exceeded its authority in telling states how to spend the money.

For Coleman, resistance from the commission comes as no surprise.

“The regulations and the resolutions that they promote have allowed a greater degree of pollution,” he said, “and have allowed greater leniency on the oil and gas industry.”

Despite industry pressure, some states have begun addressing the orphan well epidemic. California passed a law in October that could significantly increase oil companies’ bonds. A few weeks later, Louisiana strengthened rules pushing companies to more quickly plug wells that aren’t pumping.

But New Mexico’s story is more typical. There and around the country, reform efforts have foundered.

Oklahoma, for example, faces an estimated shortfall of more than $7 billion between cleanup costs and bonds, according to state data analyzed by ProPublica and Capital & Main. Still, a group of Republican legislators has tried and failed for several years to increase the state’s bonding levels.

This legislative session, Rep. Brad Boles, a Republican, ran a bill to increase the highest level of required bonds from $25,000 to $150,000. Boles told a House committee that he had worked with two oil trade groups on the bill, describing it as “language that helps move the needle but also is not seen as anti-industry.”

His proposal unanimously passed the House of Representatives and a Senate committee. Even so, it died without a vote in the Senate. (Boles declined to “point fingers at any particular person or group” for its failure but said he would try again next session.)

Meanwhile in West Virginia, which has a projected bonding shortfall of more than $15 billion and some of the nation’s weakest bonding laws, a bill to strengthen regulations never made it onto a committee agenda. This is the sixth straight year that such legislation has failed, Mountain State Spotlight reported.

The bill’s lead sponsors did not respond to requests for comment.

“The industry has a pretty solid lock on the Legislature,” said David McMahon, a West Virginia attorney who drafted this year’s bill.

In New Mexico, Ortez, the legislator who ran HB 133, said she was “dismayed” by how the bill fell apart, even though it was “maybe too fair” to oil and gas companies. But she hasn’t given up, pledging to continue pitching the industry on reform and finding language that can secure the necessary votes in advance of next year’s legislative session.

“I feel so strongly about this moving forward,” she said. “We need to make it happen.”

Nick Bowlin of Capital & Main contributed reporting.

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As proponents of private school vouchers racked up win after win across the country in recent years, the largest Republican-led state in the nation remained stubbornly outside their grasp — until now.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott succeeded in persuading primary voters to remove from office members of his party who had defied him by voting against legislation that would allow the use of state money to pay for private school tuition.

Abbott’s success campaigning against fellow Republicans during the primary election sent a clear message that disloyalty would not be tolerated even for those who supported other priorities he outlined. If the pro-voucher candidates who Abbott supported in their primaries win in the November general election, as many are expected to, the governor argues he has the votes to finally pass legislation.

The governor’s voucher crusade represents the culmination of more than three decades of work by Christian conservative donors, whose influence in Texas politics has never been more pronounced. They have poured millions of dollars into candidates and helped lead or fund a network of organizations, such as the influential Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank, to galvanize Republicans around the issue.

“Texas has been kind of an Alamo to the national voucher crowd in the sense that the biggest state down South still hasn’t done it,” said Joshua Cowen, an education policy professor at Michigan State University who opposes vouchers. “When your whole national messaging strategy is based on this unstoppable flood of parents rising up to defeat the woke left in the public schools and Texas is standing there in the middle of the map, the biggest state saying no, that’s just a problem for the overall strategy.”

During his first eight years as governor, Abbott was relatively quiet on vouchers. In 2017, he called on lawmakers to pass such a program for students with disabilities. But Abbott, who did not respond to questions from ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, hadn’t engaged in political warfare on the issue until last year, when he made passing vouchers for all Texas students a top priority. He joined the Texas Public Policy Foundation on a “parent empowerment” tour across the state and urged church pastors to advocate for such legislation from the pulpit.

He also twice ordered lawmakers into emergency legislative sessions to pass measures related to “school choice,” a term supporters have used to describe programs that operate outside of the traditional public school system, including private or religious schools. But lawmakers, including 21 from his own party, rejected the legislation.

Republicans with national ambitions are increasingly expected to fully support vouchers, Cowen said, adding that Abbott’s GOP counterparts in states like Arizona and Florida had overseen successful pushes in their state legislatures.

“Vouchers have absolutely become one of the top issue areas of the litmus test for Republican Party power politics,” Cowen said. “If you want to be a player, you have to really push on the doctrine.”

Supporters say voucher programs give parents more control over their children’s education by allowing them to use public dollars to choose the schools they believe are best, including those that are privately run. Opponents argue that vouchers siphon tax dollars from public education and allow funding to flow into private schools without holding them accountable if they fail children.

The issue has generally been one that falls along partisan lines. But over the years, rural Republicans have broken with their party to vote against vouchers. Public schools, they’ve reasoned, often play a vital role in local communities where private options are limited.

Despite polling showing that slightly less than half of Texas registered voters support vouchers and only 2% of registered Republican voters listed vouchers as a key issue in the GOP primary election, Abbott pursued aggressive campaigns against lawmakers in his party who did not fall in line. Among them were two incumbents he had endorsed two years earlier.

In targeting them, Abbott and his billionaire allies didn’t make vouchers the focus of campaign advertising but rather accused them of being soft on issues like border security.

“In my district, and I think I’ve seen it in other districts as well, the No. 1 issue was the border,” said state Rep. Steve Allison, a San Antonio Republican who lost his primary election in March after voting against vouchers last year. “And school choice was way down the list and behind the economy and behind property taxes. So that’s when he seemed to pivot and say, ‘Well, these guys are weak on the border. They’ve increased property taxes.’ All of that was just absolutely false.”

The primary challenges drew millions in contributions from national groups and billionaire donors like TikTok investor Jeffrey Yass, a Pennsylvania voucher advocate who poured $6 million into Abbott’s campaign. A Texas affiliate of the Betsy DeVos-funded American Federation for Children spent more than $4 million attacking incumbents, and the federal Club for Growth political action committee said it coordinated with another PAC to spend about $8 million on ads targeting Texas voucher opponents.

Allison lost to a challenger who received more than $700,000 in support from Abbott’s campaign.

“Ever since I’ve been in the Legislature, he’s never shown any interest in private school vouchers,” Allison said. “It’s just troubling the way it came out of nowhere and then the way he turned on those of us that just couldn’t go along with him on it. And I have been with him on everything, every single issue request he’s made, except this one.”

Shortly after the March GOP primaries, Abbott received a hero’s welcome while addressing attendees at the Texas Public Policy Foundation’s annual policy summit in Austin. He celebrated unseating five Republicans and stoked enthusiasm for the runoff elections, which he hoped would secure enough wins to pass voucher legislation in 2024. (In the May primary runoff, another three anti-voucher Republicans were unseated.)

“We would not be on the threshold of success if it were not for TPPF,” Abbott told the packed room in March. “I come here today with a heart of gratitude.”

The group has pushed for vouchers since its founding in 1989 by Republican Christian conservative donor James Leininger, who funded a pilot voucher program in his hometown of San Antonio for several years. In 1998, billionaire oilman Tim Dunn joined the board, serving as vice chair for more than a decade as he became one of the state’s most prolific campaign donors. Dunn later helped form Empower Texans, a more confrontational organization that graded Republican lawmakers according to their adherence to hard-right principles and funneled money into campaigns against Republicans deemed insufficiently supportive. Those campaigns featured what opponents have called deceptive mailers and an aggressive in-house media operation.

The groups and the pro-voucher billionaires made strategic investments over the years to advance their cause. In 2006, Leininger, who did not respond to questions from the news organizations, spent $2.5 million in an attempt to oust five House Republicans who voted against vouchers. Two lost their seats. Still, the Texas House voted 129-8 against vouchers the following year.

Dunn and West Texas billionaire evangelical donors Dan and Farris Wilks later contributed millions to Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who breathed new life into the voucher push. “As a conservative leader on many issues, it should be no surprise that conservatives support me,” Patrick said in a statement about the campaign contributions. He added that his support for school choice initiatives, including vouchers, spans decades.

Neither Dunn nor the Wilks brothers responded to questions about the donations or the voucher push. In an opinion piece published by the Midland Reporter-Telegram last year, Dunn said he has never led statewide school choice efforts. Instead, Dunn argued, he has spent his energy building up Midland Classical Academy, the religious private school he founded more than two decades ago.

Despite Patrick’s influence in the Senate, which passed voucher legislation in 2015 and 2017, the Texas House rejected the plans those years, and the voucher push largely died out afterward.

The arrival of COVID-19 helped reignite the embers of the movement. TPPF promoted vouchers as the solution to anger over COVID-19 restrictions and political battles over what is taught in schools.

In August 2020, TPPF published a piece titled “Coronavirus is forcing a wake-up call on Texas’s education opportunities” that called for education dollars to follow children to the school of their choice, including private schools.

“I think a lot of voucher supporters saw COVID and some of the culture wars as a window for pushing vouchers,” said David DeMatthews, a University of Texas educational leadership and policy professor who does not support using taxpayer money to pay for private schools. “Conservative think tanks like TPPF can help with the framing and crafting a narrative to make a very unpopular policy seem more palatable.”

Brian Phillips, a spokesperson for TPPF, did not respond to specific questions about the group’s advocacy but issued a statement anticipating victory next year. “When school choice legislation passes next year, it will be due to the amazing vigilance of thousands of parents, students, educators, policymakers, activists, pastors, volunteers, and, yes, even a few think tanks,” he said in a statement.

While pushing for vouchers, TPPF also capitalized on debates about how race is taught in public schools. The group published a series of stories attacking critical race theory, an advanced academic concept that examines systemic racism. The “long-term solution to fighting CRT begins with parents fighting for the right to choose the best education for their children,” TPPF wrote in a July 2021 article that advocated for a system in which “a child’s public school funding follows him or her to the school of their parents’ choice.”

Later that year, the focus among pro-voucher forces turned to books with LGBTQ+ themes in Texas school libraries. In a November 2021 fundraising letter, TPPF CEO Kevin Roberts claimed that “pornography and explicit literature” could be found in school libraries and that public schools held students as a “captive audience to both Marxist and sexual indoctrination.”

He told potential donors that the solution was an all-out push for school vouchers.

“TPPF’s policy and communications departments are building this army of hundreds of thousands of ‘education freedom fighters,’” wrote Roberts, who did not respond to a request for comment or to written questions. He later left TPPF to lead the influential conservative Heritage Foundation think tank, where he helms Project 2025 to “institutionalize Trumpism.”

It is “now or never,” Roberts wrote. “The time is ripe.”

As TPPF worked to stoke parental anger over public schools, Abbott had not fully jumped into the fray.

Texas Scorecard, a media outlet formed by Empower Texans in 2015 that has since become an independent nonprofit, highlighted that Abbott had left school choice off his legislative priorities in his 2021 State of the State address.

Texas Scorecard, which is chaired by Dunn, did not respond to questions or a request for comment.

Dunn and the Wilks brothers heavily supported Dallas real estate developer Don Huffines, one of Abbott’s far-right challengers, in the 2021 Republican primary. Their political action committee Defend Texas Liberty poured $3.7 million into Huffines’ campaign. Huffines hammered Abbott from the right on various issues, including criticizing him for not doing as much to promote school choice as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis did.

Huffines wrote in a statement to ProPublica and the Tribune that while his goal was to win the election, he “knew that the campaign would force the Governor to adopt many of my policy positions, including school choice, which has been a priority of the National and State Republican Party for decades.”

A campaign stop in San Antonio in May 2022 signaled a new phase for Abbott: a full-throated embrace of vouchers as a top legislative priority.

“Empowering parents means giving them the choice to send their children to any public school, charter school or private school with state funding following the student,” Abbott said.

After his reelection and throughout the 2023 legislative session, Abbott joined TPPF campaign director Mandy Drogin in a series of “parent empowerment” rallies across the state that promoted the benefits of vouchers.

But even with Abbott’s campaigning, the voucher push failed by the end of the session in May.

In September, a month before Abbott called lawmakers back to Austin for an emergency session, TPPF helped organize a teleconference call in which the governor urged pastors to promote vouchers during Sunday church services. During the call, Abbott announced his plan to target Republicans in upcoming primaries if they did not support vouchers during the special session.

He fulfilled his promise this spring.

Kel Seliger, a former state senator who recalls being unsuccessfully targeted by Dunn after voting against vouchers, warned that Abbott’s campaign against fellow Republicans sends a chilling message.

“It says, ‘Do not disagree. We don’t necessarily care about people of conscience or anything like that,’” said Seliger, who in 2021 decided not to seek reelection. “‘We have no interest in any diversity of opinion.’ And that’s a tough message to send to people you are obligated to work with.”

Two days after the May primary runoffs, TPPF hosted another celebratory event at its Austin headquarters.

Corey DeAngelis, a senior fellow with the national voucher advocacy group American Federation for Children, whose PAC had spent more than $7 million in the state as of June, declared Texas the “crown jewel” of the national voucher movement. He predicted even Democratic-led states would follow its lead.

“We gotta get Texas,” said DeAngelis, who did not respond to a request for comment. “When Texas comes, the rest of the monopoly dominoes will start to fall all across the country.”

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Two more states are now scrutinizing a New York boarding school for autistic students and have warned school districts about troubling conditions there.

In Connecticut, education officials visited Shrub Oak International School and alerted districts that a state watchdog group determined there were ongoing “serious safety concerns” at the unregulated for-profit private school. Separately, the state’s Department of Developmental Services, which serves residents with intellectual disabilities and autism, has decided to stop sending more students there, an agency spokesperson told ProPublica. That agency described the facility as looking “more akin to a penal institution than an educational campus.”

Washington education authorities, meanwhile, visited Shrub Oak this month and warned school districts to contact the state before considering enrolling students there. Officials are reviewing the state’s relationship with the school, officials told ProPublica.

The scrutiny of Shrub Oak comes as a ProPublica investigation published in May documented how parents and workers repeatedly asked New York authorities to investigate their concerns at the school to no avail.

In Massachusetts, officials have already set in motion a plan to pull students out by the end of this month after realizing that Shrub Oak had not sought New York’s approval to operate a school for students with disabilities. Shrub Oak, which opened in 2018, has had about 85 students from 13 states this school year. About 20 students came from Connecticut, Massachusetts and Washington combined. Tuition this school year is $573,200 for students who require a dedicated aide for most of the day.

No New York government agency oversees Shrub Oak because it is not an approved special-education program and it is not licensed as a residential facility. “From a child health and safety perspective, that is crazy,” said Sarah Eagan, who leads the Connecticut Office of the Child Advocate. “It’s really unsafe — they’re not subject to regular inspections, not subject to licensing standards.”

Eagan’s office recently joined an investigation of Shrub Oak that was begun last year by Disability Rights Connecticut, a federally funded watchdog that provides legal services and advocacy for people with disabilities. The child advocacy office will be investigating how the state monitors students in out-of-state schools.

Disability Rights Connecticut noted that, during one of its visits, a student was forced to sleep on the linoleum floor with no bed, “covered in a blanket that appeared to be similar to a moving pad.” The organization also said Shrub Oak used a practice called “hold and close,” which involves placing a student in a padded room, closing the door and holding it shut. That method of managing student behavior would be illegal in many states, including Connecticut.

The group urged the Connecticut State Education Department to bar the use of public money to pay tuition at Shrub Oak and stop allowing students to be placed there. The department is considering what to do next.

In its own investigation, Connecticut’s developmental services agency made an unannounced visit in March and concluded that individuals were not in “immediate jeopardy” but that students were being poorly served as staff focused primarily on managing behavior and not on education or life skills. Students were eating from takeout containers because Shrub Oak lacks a working kitchen, which investigators wrote “compromises their dignity, nutrition and overall well-being.”

In Illinois, which has 15 students at Shrub Oak — more students than come from any state other than New York — state education officials contacted school districts to remind them that they’re responsible for students’ safety and well-being. Illinois State Board of Education spokesperson Lindsay Record said state officials don’t monitor students when they’re sent to residential schools that Illinois does not approve, like Shrub Oak. State law requires the department to fund those schools but does not give it the power to investigate them.

“ISBE has no authority to stop allowing or approving the placement of students in any non-ISBE approved program including and not limited to Shrub Oak,” Record wrote in answer to questions from ProPublica.

Chicago Public Schools plans to enroll a student at Shrub Oak starting July 1 at a cost of $597,990 for one year, records show. The district has sent three students to Shrub Oak in recent years but none of them are still there. A district official said in a public Chicago Board of Education meeting on Tuesday that while the district is aware of news stories about problems at Shrub Oak, the student being sent there needs the school’s services and the student’s parent wants the child to attend.

Education officials in New York declined to comment. There were about 30 students from New York at Shrub Oak this past school year; tuition for New York students often is publicly funded. A disability rights group in that state has been investigating Shrub Oak and, according to court records, has found troubling conditions as well.

In at least five incidents involving suspected abuse, Shrub Oak told local police that it had fired employees, records show. One of them, a former employee charged with menacing, harassment and endangering the welfare of a disabled person — a student from Chicago — is due in court this week.

Shrub Oak spokesperson Richard Bamberger previously said that the school contacts police and fires employees who are “involved in an issue.” He did not respond to a request for comment for this story but has said in the past that the school enrolls students who other schools have rejected. Many of them have complex needs and struggle with self-injurious behaviors, aggression and property destruction, Bamberger has said. He has said that security is a top priority and the property is fenced in because some students have left other schools they’ve attended without permission.

School districts in about a dozen states have sent students to Shrub Oak after determining they can’t be served in their local schools — sometimes after parents sued their districts to be able to send their children there. Most students’ tuition is paid by their public school districts, which are legally obligated to educate all students.

As the investigations continue, parents of students with profound disabilities who need a high level of support are fretting over the limited number of school options. Some fear the scrutiny of Shrub Oak could lead more states or school districts to pull public funding, leaving them with one less choice for their children. Some parents have told ProPublica they feel their own children are safe and want them to stay at the school.

Eagan, the Connecticut child advocate, acknowledged the challenges for parents but said having their children at a facility with no oversight isn’t a good solution. “What they need and deserve is a reliable, well-regulated system that ensures their child can access safe and appropriate care in the least restrictive environment. And they’re not getting it.”

A Connecticut mother whose son went to Shrub Oak for five months until January 2023 said she is glad her state is intervening. Celeste and Roger Brouillard pulled their son from Shrub Oak because of indications he was harmed there, records show.

“As a taxpaying citizen, not just a parent who had a child who was physically and emotionally harmed there, they should cease funding immediately,” Celeste Brouillard said, referring to state officials.

Her son Matthew was 17 when he transferred from a different residential school to Shrub Oak after “they made all the promises in the world” that he would get help with daily living and vocational skills as he got older. Instead, “it was five months of hell,” Celeste said. Matthew lost 16 pounds, was left alone in his room for long periods of time, and got multiple black eyes that the staff could not explain, she said.

In December 2022, doctors at the Connecticut Children’s emergency department noted bruising on Matthew’s back, neck and face and tried to report their concerns that he may have been harmed to four New York agencies, according to medical records.

An official at Matthew’s school district, Katie Krasula, also filed an abuse and neglect report in New York in February 2023 after receiving photos, staff names and other information, according to an email she sent to Shrub Oak that ProPublica obtained through an open records request. She told Shrub Oak she had concerns about Matthew’s “continued safety and the ability of your staff to provide appropriate care and supervision for him.”

The school district, Simsbury Public Schools, had contracted to pay more than $530,000 for nearly a year of tuition and an aide for 16 hours a day. Matthew transferred to another residential school.

Shrub Oak’s spokesperson has declined to comment on individual students’ experiences, but after ProPublica’s investigation published last month, the school posted a statement online that downplayed the publication’s findings and told parents “their children are safe, have always been safe, and are being taught and cared for by trained and caring professionals.”

Shrub Oak also has criticized the investigation by Disability Rights Connecticut and another by Disability Rights New York. In an April letter from a Shrub Oak attorney to the watchdog organizations, the school said investigators were unqualified to observe or understand autistic students. The letter criticized the groups for not sharing their findings with the school despite the advocacy organizations having made more than 17 requests for documents and information and more than nine unannounced visits.

The attorney wrote that the school is cooperating but the organizations “are not focused on a complete and balanced understanding of the services and environment SOIS provides to its students. Accordingly, the resulting reports of their investigations are likely to unfairly portray SOIS in a negative light.”

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Last year, I became obsessed with a plastic cup.

It was a small container that held diced fruit, the type thrown into lunch boxes. And it was the first product I’d seen born of what’s being touted as a cure for a crisis.

Plastic doesn’t break down in nature. If you turned all of what’s been made into cling wrap, it would cover every inch of the globe. It’s piling up, leaching into our water and poisoning our bodies.

Scientists say the key to fixing this is to make less of it; the world churns out 430 million metric tons each year.

But businesses that rely on plastic production, like fossil fuel and chemical companies, have worked since the 1980s to spin the pollution as a failure of waste management — one that can be solved with recycling.

Industry leaders knew then what we know now: Traditional recycling would barely put a dent in the trash heap. It’s hard to transform flimsy candy wrappers into sandwich bags, or to make containers that once held motor oil clean enough for milk.

Now, the industry is heralding nothing short of a miracle: an “advanced”type of recycling known as pyrolysis — “pyro” means fire and “lysis” means separation. It uses heat to break plastic all the way down to its molecular building blocks.

While old-school, “mechanical” recycling yields plastic that’s degraded or contaminated, this type of “chemical” recycling promises plastic that behaves like it’s new, and could usher in what the industry casts as a green revolution: Not only would it save hard-to-recycle plastics like frozen food wrappers from the dumpster, but it would turn them into new products that can replace the old ones and be chemically recycled again and again.

So when three companies used ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology to successfully conjure up that fruit cup, they announced it to the world.

“This is a significant milestone,” said Printpack, which turned the plastic into cups. The fruit supplier Pacific Coast Producers called it “the most important initiative a consumer-packaged goods company can pursue.”

“ExxonMobil is supporting the circularity of plastics,” the August 2023 news release said, citing a buzzword that implies an infinite loop of using, recycling and reusing.

They were so proud, I hoped they would tell me all about how they made the cup, how many of them existed and where I could buy one.

So began my long — and, well, circular — pursuit of the truth at a time when it really matters.

This year, nearly all of the world’s countries are hammering out a United Nations treaty to deal with the plastic crisis. As they consider limiting production, the industry is making a hard push to shift the conversation to the wonders of chemical recycling. It’s also buying ads during cable news shows as U.S. states consider laws to limit plastic packaging and lobbying federal agencies to loosen the very definition of what it means to recycle.

It’s been selling governments on chemical recycling, with quite a bit of success. American and European regulators have spent tens of millions subsidizing pyrolysis facilities. Half of all U.S. states have eased air pollution rules for the process, which has been found to release carcinogens like benzene and dioxins and give off more greenhouse gases than making plastic from crude oil.

Given the high stakes of this moment, I set out to understand exactly what the world is getting out of this recycling technology. For months, I tracked press releases, interviewed experts, tried to buy plastic made via pyrolysis and learned more than I ever wanted to know about the science of recycled molecules.

Under all the math and engineering, I found an inconvenient truth: Not much is being recycled at all, nor is pyrolysis capable of curbing the plastic crisis.

Not now. Maybe not ever.

Let’s take a closer look at that Printpack press release, which uses convoluted terms to describe the recycled plastic in that fruit cup:

“30% ISCC PLUS certified-circular”

“mass balance free attribution”

It’s easy to conclude the cup was made with 30% recycled plastic — until you break down the numerical sleight of hand that props up that number.

It took interviews with a dozen academics, consultants, environmentalists and engineers to help me do just that.

Stick with me as I unravel it all.

In traditional recycling, plastic is turned into tiny pellets or flakes, which you can melt again and mold back into recycled plastic products.

Even in a real-life scenario, where bottles have labels and a little bit of juice left in them, most of the plastic products that go into the process find new life.

The numbers are much lower for pyrolysis.

It’s “very, very, very, very difficult” to break down plastic that way, said Steve Jenkins, vice president of chemicals consulting at Wood Mackenzie, an energy and resources analytics firm. “The laws of nature and the laws of physics are trying to stop you.”

Waste is heated until it turns into oil. Part of that oil is composed of a liquid called naphtha, which is essential for making plastic.

There are two ingredients in the naphtha that recyclers want to isolate: propylene and ethylene — gases that can be turned into solid plastics.

To split the naphtha into different chemicals, it’s fed into a machine called a steam cracker. Less than half of what it spits out becomes propylene and ethylene.

This means that if a pyrolysis operator started with 100 pounds of plastic waste, it can expect to end up with 15-20 pounds of reusable plastic. Experts told me the process can yield less if the plastic used is dirty or more if the technology is particularly advanced.

I reached out to several companies to ask how much new plastic their processes actually yield, and none provided numbers. The American Chemistry Council, the nation’s largest plastic lobby, told me that because so many factors impact a company’s yield, it’s impossible to estimate that number for the entire industry.

With mechanical recycling, it’s hard to make plastic that’s 100% recycled; it’s expensive to do, and the process degrades plastic. Recycled pellets are often combined with new pellets to make stuff that’s 25% or 50% recycled, for example.

But far less recycled plastic winds up in products made through pyrolysis.

That’s because the naphtha created using recycled plastic is contaminated. Manufacturers add all kinds of chemicals to make products bend or keep them from degrading in the sun.

Recyclers can overpower them by heavily diluting the recycled naphtha. With what, you ask? Nonrecycled naphtha made from ordinary crude oil!

This is the quiet — and convenient — part of the industry’s revolutionary pyrolysis method: It relies heavily on extracting fossil fuels. At least 90% of the naphtha used in pyrolysis is fossil fuel naphtha. Only then can it be poured into the steam cracker to separate the chemicals that make plastic.

So at the end of the day, nothing that comes out of pyrolysis physically contains more than 10% recycled material (though experts and studies have shown that, in practice, it’s more like 5% or 2%).

Ten percent doesn’t look very impressive. Some consumers are willing to pay a premium for sustainability, so companies use a form of accounting called mass balance to inflate the recycled-ness of their products. It’s not unlike offset schemes I’ve uncovered that absolve refineries of their carbon emissions and enable mining companies to kill chimpanzees. Industry-affiliated groups like the International Sustainability and Carbon Certification write the rules. (ISCC didn’t respond to requests for comment.)

To see how this works, let’s take a look at what might happen to a batch of recycled naphtha. Let’s say the steam cracker splits the batch into 100 pounds of assorted ingredients.

You’ll get some colorless gasses that are used to make plastic: 13 pounds of propylene and 30 pounds of ethylene. You’ll also wind up with 57 pounds of other chemicals.

Propylene makes sturdy material such as butter tubs; ethylene makes flexible plastics like yogurt pouches. Many of the other chemicals aren’t used to make plastic — some get used to make rubber and paint or are used as fuel.

All of these outputs are technically 10% recycled, since they were made from 10% recycled naphtha. (I’m using this optimistic hypothetical to make the math easy.)

But companies can do a number shuffle to assign all of the recycled value from the butter tubs to the yogurt pouches.

Watch video ➜

That way they can market the yogurt pouches as 14% recycled (or “circular”), even though nothing has physically changed about the makeup of the pouches.

Watch video ➜

What’s more, through a method called free attribution, companies can assign the recycled value from other chemicals (even if they would never be turned into plastic) to the yogurt pouches.

Watch video ➜

Now, the yogurt pouches can be sold as 33% recycled.

Watch video ➜

There are many flavors of this kind of accounting. Another version of free attribution would allow the company to take that entire 30-pound batch of “33% recycled” pouches and split them even further:

A third of them, 10 pounds, could be labeled 100% recycled — shifting the value of the full batch onto them — so long as the remaining 20 pounds aren’t labeled as recycled at all.

As long as you avoid double counting, Jenkins told me, you can attribute the full value of recycled naphtha to the products that will make the most money. Companies need that financial incentive to recoup the costs of pyrolysis, he said.

But it’s hard to argue that this type of marketing is transparent. Consumers aren’t going to parse through the caveats of a 33% recycled claim or understand how the green technology they’re being sold perpetuates the fossil fuel industry. I posed the critiques to the industry, including environmentalists’ accusations that mass balance is just a fancy way of greenwashing.

The American Chemistry Council told me it’s impossible to know whether a particular ethylene molecule comes from pyrolysis naphtha or fossil fuel naphtha; the compounds produced are “fungible” and can be used for multiple products, like making rubber, solvents and paints that would reduce the amount of new fossil fuels needed. Its statement called mass balance a “well-known methodology” that’s been used by other industries including fair trade coffee, chocolate and renewable energy.

Legislation in the European Union already forbids free attribution, and leaders are debating whether to allow other forms of mass balance. U.S. regulation is far behind that, but as the Federal Trade Commission revises its general guidelines for green marketing, the industry is arguing that mass balance is crucial to the future of advanced recycling. “The science of advanced recycling simply does not support any other approach because the ability to track individual molecules does not readily exist,” said a comment from ExxonMobil.

If you think navigating the ins and outs of pyrolysis is hard, try getting your hands on actual plastic made through it.

It’s not as easy as going to the grocery store. Those water bottles you might see with 100% recycled claims are almost certainly made through traditional recycling. The biggest giveaway is that the labels don’t contain the asterisks or fine print typical of products made through pyrolysis, like “mass balance,” “circular” or “certified.”

When I asked about the fruit cup, ExxonMobil directed me to its partners. Printpack didn’t respond to my inquiries. Pacific Coast Producers told me it was “engaged in a small pilot pack of plastic bowls that contain post-consumer content with materials certified” by third parties, and that it “has made no label claims regarding these cups and is evaluating their use.”

I pressed the American Chemistry Council for other examples.

“Chemical recycling is a proven technology that is already manufacturing products, conserving natural resources, and offering the potential to dramatically improve recycling rates,” said Matthew Kastner, a media relations director. His colleague added that much of the plastic made via pyrolysis is “being used for food- and medical-grade packaging, oftentimes not branded.”

They provided links to products including a Chevron Phillips Chemical announcement about bringing recycled plastic food wrapping to retail stores.

“For competitive reasons,” a company spokesperson declined to discuss brand names, the product’s availability or the amount produced.

In another case, a grocery store chain sold chicken wrapped in plastic made by ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis process. The producers told me they were part of a small project that’s now discontinued.

In the end, I ran down half a dozen claims about products that came out of pyrolysis; each either existed in limited quantities or had its recycled-ness obscured with mass balance caveats.

Then this April, nearly eight months after I’d begun my pursuit, I could barely contain myself when I got my hands on an actual product.

I was at a United Nations treaty negotiation in Ottawa, Ontario, and an industry group had set up a nearby showcase. On display was a case of Heinz baked beans, packaged in “39% recycled plastic*.” (The asterisk took me down an online rabbit hole about certification and circularity. Heinz didn’t respond to my questions.)

This, too, was part of an old trial. The beans were expired.

Pyrolysis is a “fairy tale,” I heard from Neil Tangri, the science and policy director at the environmental justice network Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives. He said he’s been hearing pyrolysis claims since the ’90s but has yet to see proof it works as promised.

“If anyone has cracked the code for a large-scale, efficient and profitable way to turn plastic into plastic,” he said, “every reporter in the world” would get a tour.

If I did get a tour, I wondered, would I even see all of that stubborn, dirty plastic they were supposedly recycling?

The industry’s marketing implied we could soon toss sandwich bags and string cheese wrappers into curbside recycling bins, where they would be diverted to pyrolysis plants. But I grew skeptical as I watched a webinar for ExxonMobil’s pyrolysis-based technology, the kind used to make the fruit cup. The company showed photos of plastic packaging and oil field equipment as examples of its starting material but then mentioned something that made me sit up straight: It was using pre-consumer plastic to “give consistency” to the waste stream.

Chemical plants need consistency, so it’s easier to use plastic that hasn’t been gunked up by consumer use, Jenkins explained.

But plastic waste that had never been touched by consumers, such as industrial scrap found at the edges of factory molds, could easily be recycled the old-fashioned way. Didn’t that negate the need for this more polluting, less efficient process?

I asked ExxonMobil how much post-consumer plastic it was actually using. Catie Tuley, a media relations adviser, said it depends on what’s available. “At the end of the day, advanced recycling allows us to divert plastic waste from landfills and give new life to plastic waste.”

I posed the same question to several other operators. A company in Europe told me it uses “mixed post-consumer, flexible plastic waste” and does not recycle pre-consumer waste.

But this spring at an environmental journalism conference, an American Chemistry Council executive confirmed the industry’s preference for clean plastic as he talked about an Atlanta-based company and its pyrolysis process. My colleague Sharon Lerner asked whether it was sourcing curbside-recycled plastic for pyrolysis.

If Nexus Circular had a “magic wand,” it would, he acknowledged, but right now that kind of waste “isn’t good enough.” He added, “It’s got tomatoes in it.”

(Nexus later confirmed that most of the plastic it used was pre-consumer and about a third was post-consumer, including motor oil containers sourced from car repair shops and bags dropped off at special recycling centers.)

Clean, well-sorted plastic is a valuable commodity. If the chemical recycling industry grows, experts told me, those companies could end up competing with the far more efficient traditional recycling.

To spur that growth, the American Chemistry Council is lobbying for mandates that would require more recycled plastic in packaging; it wants to make sure that chemically recycled plastic counts. “This would create market-driven demand signals,” Kastner told me, and ease the way for large-scale investment in new chemical recycling plants.

I asked Jenkins, the energy industry analyst, to play out this scenario on a larger scale.

Were all of these projects adding up? Could the industry conceivably make enough propylene and ethylene through pyrolysis to replace much of our demand for new plastic?

He looked three years into the future, using his company’s latest figures on global pyrolysis investment, and gave an optimistic assessment.

At best, the world could replace 0.2% of new plastic churned out in a year with products made through pyrolysis.

Our article is focused on pyrolysis because it’s the most popular form of chemical recycling. Other types of chemical recycling technologies have their own strengths and weaknesses.

There are different variations of pyrolysis, and steam crackers produce a range of ethylene and propylene yields. Companies are secretive about their operations. To estimate the efficiencies of pyrolysis and mass balance, I read dozens of peer-reviewed studies, reports, industry presentations, advertisements and news stories. I also fact checked with a dozen experts who have different opinions on pyrolysis, mass balance and recycling. Some of them, including Jenkins and Anthony Schiavo, senior director at Lux Research, provided estimates of overall yields for companies trying to make plastic. All of that information coalesced around a 15% to 20% yield for conventional pyrolysis processes and 25% to 30% for more advanced technologies. We are showcasing the conventional process because it’s the most common scenario.

We took steps to simplify the math and jargon. For instance, we skipped over the fact that a small amount of the naphtha fed into the steam cracker is consumed as fuel. And we called the fraction of pyrolysis oil that’s suitable for a steam cracker “pyrolysis naphtha”; it is technically a naphtha-like product.

These processes may improve over time as new technologies are developed. But there are hard limits and tradeoffs associated with the nature of steam cracking, the contamination in the feedstock, the type of feedstock used and financial and energy costs.

Clarification, June 27, 2024: This story has been clarified to reflect that a denial to speak about recycled plastic food wrapping came from a spokesperson for Chevron Phillips Chemical.

Graphics and development by Lucas Waldron. Design and development by Anna Donlan. Visual editing by Alex Bandoni. Mollie Simon and Gabriel Sandoval contributed research.

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In September 2020, the Federal Trade Commission joined regulators in four states to sue four men behind a notorious telemarketing company called Outreach Calling. The FTC alleged that the company, which it described as a “sprawling fundraising operation,” had raised millions on the promise of helping the needy — cancer patients, veterans, firefighters — but instead used the money to line its pockets.

The case was meant to put fundraisers on notice. The FTC would not only go after charities that improperly spent donor dollars, but it would “aggressively pursue their fundraisers who participate in the deception,” a news release said.

The executives and corporate entities behind the operation were fined more than $58 million. They were also banned from all charitable fundraising for life. But regulators kept one door open in most of the settlements: the ability to continue fundraising for political purposes.

For Thomas Berkenbush, who was a co-manager at Outreach, that provision would prove to be a windfall.

Before the deal with the FTC was even finalized, Berkenbush filed paperwork to establish a new company, Office Edge LLC. Since then, Office Edge has been paid about $866,000 for fundraising from organizations that similarly claim to be working on behalf of cancer patients, veterans and firefighters. The difference? These groups are not charities, they’re political nonprofits that claim to use donations to influence elections and support broad political causes.

The groups that are hiring Berkenbush are known as 527s, after a section of the tax code. They include federal political action committees — organizations that raise money to elect or defeat candidates and are regulated by the Federal Election Commission — but also a lesser-known group of nonprofits. These 527 groups limit their direct support to political candidates, removing them from the jurisdiction of the FEC or similar state agencies and leaving their regulation to the IRS. They do not have restrictions on how much donors can contribute, but the donations are not tax deductible.

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A ProPublica investigation has connected Berkenbush to a network of at least 10 of these 527 groups that have raised more than $33 million on the promise of supporting admirable causes, but that have spent little on activities that could be construed as having a political purpose. Most of the money goes to fundraisers who have only been paid by 527s in the group ProPublica identified.

Experts say that it’s hard for the public to follow the business practices of 527 groups because of how difficult it is to access the records that the IRS publishes about their activity. Data about 527 organizations is published on an IRS website in a hard-to-use data file with a limited search interface. On top of that, experts said that there is lax oversight by the federal agencies in charge of regulating the groups.

“There is no enforcement whatsoever,” said William Josephson, the former head of the charities bureau within New York’s attorney general’s office. “It’s just not a big enough issue for the IRS.”

None of the organizations responded to ProPublica’s requests for comment. But during the process of our reporting, the eight groups that have websites added prominent “Transparency Statements” with essentially identical language.

“We advocate for the needs of veterans, by informing voters of these needs and asking them to take action. This is our only purpose,” the statement for the National Coalition for Disabled Veterans reads. It also says, “When you make a contribution, we want you to know that a minimum of 90 cents of every dollar will be dedicated to covering our fundraising costs and outreach efforts.”

The vast majority of money raised by a network of 527s identified by ProPublica went to support fundraising efforts. Only a small amount went to media and outreach, according to the groups’ IRS filings.

The IRS did not respond to questions from ProPublica about our findings in any detail. The FTC declined to comment on why some of the settlement agreements in its case against Outreach Calling permitted political fundraising. The New York attorney general’s office, whose lawyers played a significant role in the case, told ProPublica that it can’t prohibit political fundraising because of First Amendment protections. But it maintained that the settlement agreements forbid the defendants from engaging in any fraudulent conduct while fundraising, regardless of the organization’s tax status or stated purpose.

Under the terms of the settlements, the defendants — who did not admit or deny any of the allegations in the FTC complaint — were required to submit yearly compliance reports to New York, disclosing all fundraising activity for five years after the agreement was reached. The office confirmed that some of the defendants have reported business activity with 527 groups but did not say whether this prompted any investigations. Berkenbush did not respond to requests for comment.

One of the organizations ProPublica identified, the American Breast Cancer Coalition, contacted retiree Laurence Eggers in April for a donation.

Eggers lives in Pasadena, California, has Parkinson’s disease and frequently volunteers his time and money for various causes. He made a pledge to give $100 to the group, later telling a reporter that he gives out of appreciation for the people they claim to be helping.

All 10 of the nonprofits in the network paid Office Edge, the company owned by Thomas Berkenbush.

“They really do need it,” he said in an interview. “They’ve worked hard enough to deserve it.”

Eggers has given at least $1,500 to the nonprofit in the past three years. He said his phone rings two to three times a day with different causes asking him for money. However, there is scant evidence the organizations calling Eggers do what they claim.

The American Breast Cancer Coalition, for example, has taken in nearly $9 million from donors since 2019 and has spent less than half of 1% of that on “voter advocacy and outreach.” The rest of the money — millions of dollars — goes to companies with names like Action Committee Marketing, Capital Vendor Management and Berkenbush’s Office Edge. Berkenbush’s company pulled in $222,000 just from this one organization.

The network has paid millions to a handful of other vendors, including one of Berkenbush’s former colleagues at Outreach Calling, whose company brought in more than $3.4 million in expenditures. He and his firm did not respond to requests for comment.

Another man, Alan Bohms, was paid more than $575,000 by the American Breast Cancer Coalition through a company he controlled named Campaign Marketing Inc., which also did business under the names Insight Data Management and Prestige Tax & Payroll. The company has taken in close to $1.5 million from the network of nonprofits ProPublica identified. Bohms was not a member of Outreach Calling or subject to the FTC order, but he has previously paid the company millions to fundraise for one of his nonprofits.

In an email, Bohms defended the money that the groups spend on fundraising, writing that the phone calls are central to “educating and engaging the community about the PAC’s mission and objectives.”

Five of the nonprofits in the network paid Campaign Marketing Inc., a company Alan Bohms controlled that did business under three different names.

ProPublica reporters uncovered the web of connections between the groups by compiling the reports they file into a searchable database, offering a level of visibility similar to what’s available for records collected by the FEC. (Read more about our new database.)

Even on their surface, the connections between these groups are obvious: Six of the organizations in this network have websites that were built using the same platform and share similar designs. All but one process donations using an obscure payment system also used by several political nonprofits that federal prosecutors began investigating after a New York Times story last year.

Nearly all used similar or identical language when describing the purpose of the organization in IRS filings. They share significant overlap in both donors and contractors, and they often reuse the same language when describing expenditures or donors, including multiple organizations listing an identical description for services from different companies: “Fundraising, Donor Management, Database Services, Direct Mail Services, Postage.”

At least half of the organizations ProPublica identified worked with the same Morristown, Tennessee-based accounting firm on their IRS filings, Purkey, Carter, Compton, Swann & Carter. Bohms also uses the firm for his own nonprofit, the Volunteer Firefighter Alliance, telling ProPublica that the firm maintained high standards of integrity. The firm did not respond to requests for comment.

Fire departments across the country warned people against donating to Bohms’ charity, and both he and the charity were written about in a 2020 Salon story that connected Bohms to a network of “scam PACs.”

“VOLUNTEER FIREFIGHTER ALLIANCE is a FRAUD!” exclaimed one 2021 post on Facebook from the Alpha Fire Company in Centre County, Pennsylvania. “Do not give money to this organization! They are not your local fire company.”

Records show that one of the charity’s main fundraisers was Outreach Calling, the company shut down by the FTC. The Volunteer Firefighters Alliance paid $4.8 million to the company for fundraising in total. Bohms defended Outreach’s work, telling ProPublica that he “found Outreach Calling to be very professional and had never experienced any problems with them.”

Bohms’ family members also appear to help run the nonprofits that pay his companies. His sister, Julie Forsythe, is listed as the treasurer of the National Cancer Alliance, which “works to establish the end of childhood cancer by making it a state and national priority.” Another organization, the National Coalition for Disabled Veterans PAC, reports its treasurer as Bohms’ aunt, Judith Gragert. In the last five years, these two organizations have raised over $7 million from more than 700 donors around the country.

Like all of these groups, neither used much of the money they raised in support of their stated efforts. Effectively all of the expenditures that both groups reported were for either fundraising or other administrative costs. Together, the organizations paid more than $300,000 to Campaign Marketing Inc., the company owned by Bohms.

Gragert and Forsythe did not respond to requests for comment. Bohms told ProPublica that he works with 527 groups “strictly in the capacity of a vendor,” and that the payments made to his companies were for legitimate services. He denied any involvement in decision-making at the groups that listed his aunt and sister as treasurer.

“It is important to understand that the payments made to fundraisers encompass more than just fundraising activities,” Bohms wrote in an emailed response. “These funds support a broad range of outreach efforts, including phone calls and direct mail campaigns that are designed to inform the public about the PAC’s goals and initiatives.”

At least one of the groups ProPublica identified has been sued over its fundraising practices. A pair of call recipients filed a lawsuit seeking class-action status in 2022 against the National Police & Sheriffs Coalition PAC. Lawyers for the plaintiffs alleged that the group used prerecorded voice calls to contact potential donors without their consent, in violation of FCC rules that are meant to protect consumers from telemarketers.

“Many of these PACs are illegitimate,” said Eric Weitz, whose law firm is on the team representing plaintiffs. “They prey on people’s political leanings.”

One of the defendants named in the lawsuit was Frank Pulciani, the organization’s treasurer. Pulciani maintained that prerecorded messages were not improperly used in calls to donors, and that the fundraising company the group hired was responsible for ensuring that calls complied with the law. Pulciani settled with the plaintiffs for undisclosed terms, and the organization was dissolved in February of last year.

Pulciani is also closely connected to Bohms. The two men, who both produce and act in low-budget films, recently worked on a project called “Murder by Association.” In its trailer, posted to YouTube, Bohms and Pulciani can be seen decked out in suits and dark sunglasses.

Pulciani did not respond to requests for comment. Robert Bernhoft, whose firm represented Pulciani in the lawsuit, declined to comment.

For Eggers, the donor who gave to the American Breast Cancer Coalition, the revelation that some of the organizations he’s been supporting are using almost none of what they raise for their stated purpose was discouraging.

“I feel like I’m being used and they’re being abused,” he said, referring to those he aimed to help with his donations.

On the mantle above Eggers’ fireplace rests a selection of plaques, framed photographs and certificates that showcase his commitment to giving. One award from 2012, titled “Lending a Helping Hand,” recognizes his 31 years of volunteering for a local organization providing services to the homeless. Another, from a regional branch of the American Red Cross, celebrates his donations to a blood platelet program.

He showed ProPublica a letter he received from the American Breast Cancer Coalition this past April.

“Through your much-needed support, we hope to educate the public about our nation’s important Breast Cancer health bills,” reads the letter, thanking him for his donation. It noted that the group was not a charity — key to the FTC order against former Outreach Calling employees. And further down, it stated, “A large portion of proceeds from this campaign are used to defray the costs of fundraising.”

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Ruth Talbot contributed data reporting. Graphics by Nat Lash.

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Each year, people and companies contribute hundreds of millions of dollars to tax-exempt political organizations in an effort to influence elections nationwide. These organizations, commonly known as 527s after a section of the tax code, can raise unlimited sums for political spending. Today, ProPublica is releasing a database that will allow journalists, researchers and others to more easily search 527s’ finances and find patterns.

It’s a wide-ranging trove of data that includes well-known groups such as the Democratic Governors Association, which influences pivotal races nationwide, and many obscure ones, including the Minnesota-based organization Garbage Haulers for Citizen Choice, which says it advocates for local freedom of choice in waste pickup.

While the organizations in our database can affect the outcome of elections, their direct support of political candidates is often limited. This means much of their activity is not regulated by the Federal Election Committee or a state equivalent, and is therefore unavailable on the FEC’s easily searchable website.

The 527s in our database instead file reports with the Internal Revenue Service, much like charities, but their filings do not appear in the same locations as most nonprofits. Instead, they’re published on an entirely separate part of the IRS website that uses a dated, difficult-to-use search tool. But buried behind that clunky interface is some significant and useful information, from the names of organizations’ leaders all the way down to line-item expenditures and contributions.

We got firsthand experience of the utility of this data last year when former ProPublica contributor Ilya Marritz used it to report on corporations that had resumed making donations to the Republican Attorneys General Association after Jan. 6, 2021.

RAGA, one of the largest and most influential 527s, used robocalls to urge then-President Donald Trump’s supporters to march to the Capitol on that day. In the aftermath of the attack, many of RAGA’s reliable donors publicly condemned its actions, but an analysis of the data showed that many of them merely paused their donations and then quietly returned months later. It was only possible for us to understand this after downloading and parsing the hard-to-use dataset.

Our new database makes it easy to search all the donations to RAGA and discover how companies like Microsoft not only stopped giving to the Republican group but also halted donations to the Democratic Attorneys General Association. It also makes it obvious that Johnson & Johnson cut a large check to the Republican group later that year.

Despite the influence of many 527s, experts said they receive little scrutiny and are rarely audited. Lloyd Mayer, a professor of law at Notre Dame, says that because these organizations’ filings don’t appear in the same place as those of most other nonprofits or political groups, they aren’t viewed as often. “FEC filings are a lot more searchable and therefore a lot more visible, and therefore it’s easier for reporters to make stories based on those and even for opponents or law enforcement investigators to discover stuff,” Mayer told us.

In this environment, questionable spending often goes unnoticed. ProPublica found a network of 527s that purport to support police, veterans, cancer patients and firefighters, but appear to largely be spending their donation money on a small group of fundraisers and administrative companies that support more fundraising efforts. They’ve raked in millions of dollars from Americans but appear to use little of it for their stated causes.

Last year, The New York Times found a group of 527s that similarly appeared to be putting almost all the money they raised into fundraising and organizations affiliated with the founders. ProPublica identified the network we reported on by looking at similar contributions and expenditures to those going to and from the group that the Times uncovered. In our new database, we’ve created a feature that will show you 527s that appear to have similar donors and expenditures so researchers and the public can do the same thing.

The database helps you find interesting things to dig into further. It makes it easy to see that some organizations withhold the names of large donors, pay most of their money to a single company, or appear to give most of their money back to their largest donors. Whether this behavior is legal often depends on the context, experts say.

The American Dental PAC Education Fund, for example, spent so much money on suites and tickets — about $1.5 million between 2005 and 2020 — to see artists like Taylor Swift and Celine Dion that the company that owns the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C., makes up about 12% of the PAC’s reported expenditures. According to experts, if the tickets furthered the organization’s purpose, for instance by being used as prizes in a fundraiser, then that is a valid expense. If it is completely unrelated to furthering a political purpose, it would not be. Emails and phone calls to the group were not returned.

Now that this data is more easily explorable, we look forward to seeing what you discover in it. You can drill into state-level data to find the biggest players and largest organizations in your state, or you can take advantage of the powerful search and look up notable people, or sort and filter to see the largest donations made in a year or to a specific organization.

In addition to our similar organizations feature, we’ve added another way to help you uncover connections across organizations. Each contribution and expenditure has its own page, which uses machine learning to show similar contributions and expenditures, allowing you to do things like find other contributions that likely came from Walmart, regardless of minor variations in name or address.

If you write a story using this new information, come across bugs or issues, or have ideas for improvements, please let us know!

A 527 is a nonprofit formed under Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, which grants tax-exempt status to organizations whose primary purpose is attempting to influence the election of one or more people to public office at the national, state or local level. But contributions to these organizations are not considered tax-deductible, unlike gifts to charities.

This database has at least summary information for any organizations that filed for tax-exempt status with the IRS under Section 527. Additional information, including financial details, is available for organizations whose political activity is not regulated by the Federal Election Commission or state equivalents. The political activity of 527s is often for purposes other than expressly advocating for a federal or state candidate. Depending on the scope of their work, organizations may have filed additional reports or reports covering the same information at the federal or state level.

Visit ProPublica’s site to explore the database.

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After Russian hackers exploited a flaw in a widely used Microsoft product during one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history, the software giant downplayed its culpability. However, a recent ProPublica investigation revealed that a whistleblower within Microsoft’s ranks had repeatedly attempted to convince the company to address the weakness years before the hack — and that the company rebuffed his concerns at every step.

Here are the key things you need to know about that whistleblower’s efforts and Microsoft’s inaction.

In 2016, while researching an attack on a major tech company, Microsoft engineer Andrew Harris said he discovered a flaw in the company’s Active Directory Federation Services, a product that allowed users to sign on a single time for nearly everything they needed. As a result of the weakness, millions of users — including federal employees — were left exposed to hackers.

The Microsoft Security Response Center determines which reported security flaws need to be addressed. Harris said he told the MSRC about the flaw, but it decided to take no action. The MSRC argued that, because hackers would already need access to an organization’s on-premises servers before they could take advantage of the flaw, it didn’t cross a so-called “security boundary.” Former MSRC members told ProPublica that the center routinely rejected reports of weaknesses using this term, even though it had no formal definition at the time.

Following the MSRC’s decision, Harris escalated the issue to Microsoft product leaders who, he said, “violently agreed with me that this is a huge issue.” But, at the same time, they “violently disagreed with me that we should move quickly to fix it.”

Harris had proposed the temporary solution of suggesting that customers turn off the seamless single sign-on function. That move would eliminate the threat but result in users needing to log on twice instead of once. A product manager argued that it wasn’t a viable option because it risked alienating federal government customers and undermined Microsoft’s strategy to marginalize a top competitor.

At the time Harris was trying to convince Microsoft product leaders to address the flaw, the federal government was preparing to make a massive investment in cloud computing, and Microsoft wanted the business. Acknowledging this security flaw could jeopardize the company’s chances, Harris recalled one product leader telling him.

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In 2018, a colleague of Harris’ pointed out how hackers could also bypass a common security feature called multifactor authentication, which requires users to perform one or more additional steps to verify their identity, such as entering a code sent via text message.

Their discovery meant that, no matter how many additional security steps a company puts in place, a hacker could bypass them all.

When the colleagues brought this new information to the MSRC, “it was a nonstarter,” Harris said.

In November 2017, cybersecurity firm CyberArk published a blog post detailing the same flaw Harris had identified.

Microsoft would later claim this blog post was the first time it had learned of the issue, but researchers at CyberArk told ProPublica they had reached out to Microsoft staff at least twice before publication.

Later, in 2019, cybersecurity firm Mandiant would publicly demonstrate at a cybersecurity conference how hackers could exploit the flaw to gain access to victims’ cloud services. The firm said it had given Microsoft advance notice of its findings.

Within months of Harris leaving Microsoft in 2020, his fears became reality. U.S. officials confirmed reports that a state-sponsored team of Russian hackers used the flaw in the SolarWinds hack. Exploiting the weakness, hackers vacuumed up sensitive data from a number of federal agencies, including, ProPublica learned, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which maintains the United States’ nuclear weapons stockpile. The Russians also used the weakness to compromise dozens of email accounts in the Treasury Department, including those of its highest-ranking officials.

Microsoft President Brad Smith assured Congress in 2021 that “there was no vulnerability in any Microsoft product or service that was exploited” in SolarWinds, and he said customers could have taken more steps to secure their systems.

When asked what Microsoft had done to address the flaw in the years before the attack, Smith responded by listing a handful of steps that customers could have taken to protect themselves. His suggestions included purchasing an antivirus product like Microsoft Defender and securing devices with another Microsoft product called Intune.

Hours after the ProPublica investigation was published, Microsoft’s Smith appeared before the House Homeland Security Committee to discuss his company’s cybersecurity failures.

Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., asked Smith about his prior congressional testimony, in which he said that Microsoft had first learned about this weakness in November 2017 from the CyberArk blog post. ProPublica’s investigation, Magaziner noted, found that Harris had raised it even earlier, only to be ignored. The lawmaker asked Smith if his prior testimony was incorrect.

Smith demurred, saying he hadn’t read the story. “I was at the White House this morning,” he told the panel.

He also complained that ProPublica’s investigation was published the day of the hearing and said that he’d know more about it “a week from now.”

However, ProPublica had sent detailed questions to Microsoft nearly two weeks before the story was published and had requested an interview with Smith. The company declined to make him available. Instead, Microsoft had issued a statement in response. “Protecting customers is always our highest priority,” a spokesperson said. “Our security response team takes all security issues seriously and gives every case due diligence with a thorough manual assessment, as well as cross-confirming with engineering and security partners. Our assessment of this issue received multiple reviews and was aligned with the industry consensus.”

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A frustrated woman recently called the Utah official in charge of professional licensing, upset that his office couldn’t take action against a life coach she had seen. Mark Steinagel recalls the woman telling him: “I really think that we should be regulating life coaching. Because this person did a lot of damage to me.”

Reports about life coaches — who sell the promise of helping people achieve their personal or professional goals — come into Utah’s Division of Professional Licensing about once a month. But much of the time, Steinagel or his staff have to explain that there’s nothing they can do.

If the woman had been complaining about any of the therapist professions overseen by DOPL, Steinagel’s office might have been able to investigate and potentially order discipline, including fines.

But life coaches aren’t therapists and are mostly unregulated across the United States. They aren’t required to be trained in ethical boundaries the way therapists are, and there’s no universally accepted certification for those who work in the industry.

Simply put, anyone can call themselves a life coach — an industry that is rapidly growing. The International Coaching Federation has estimated that, in 2022, active life coaches generated more than $4.5 billion in revenue worldwide.

But with that growth have come complaints by clients about mistreatment by their life coaches and growing calls for some type of oversight.

In California, a woman sued her life coach in 2020, claiming the coach convinced her to sign over her home to the coach's nonprofit organization. She settled her lawsuit and got the title to her home back. A Connecticut life coach was given probation after he was charged last year with stealing money from a client with a traumatic brain injury. And this year, a Nevada life coach was sentenced to a year in jail after he admitted to taking money from clients that he was supposed to use for investments on their behalf — but that he spent at casinos instead.

In Utah, there’s a heightened sense of urgency after a therapist-turned-life-coach named Jodi Hildebrandt was sentenced to prison for abusing two of her business partner’s children.

One former client, who was not a part of Hildebrandt’s criminal case, also flagged concerns about how she conducted life coaching with him. Ethan Prete told The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica that Hildebrandt had ordered him to cut off contact with friends and family, and at one point asked him to live in a tent in order to “humble” himself. He also said Hildebrandt told him she didn’t want to be limited by the regulations therapists have to follow in Utah.

“She was like, ‘Without all these rules and regulations, now I have free rein to actually change peoples’ lives because the system is corrupt,’” Prete said.

Right now, the only Utah rules that apply kick in when life coaches diagnose clients or develop plans to manage mental health conditions. When that happens, Utah licensers can cite them with what’s known as unauthorized practice. But a records analysis by The Tribune and ProPublica shows citations and fines are seldom used and aren’t always effective — some life coaches have been cited for this multiple times.

Prosecutors can also file criminal charges, but a review of court records shows that no such cases have been brought against a life coach in at least a decade.

For more than a year, The Tribune and ProPublica have investigated obstacles that Utahns face when seeking justice against medical providers who they say hurt them — including what happens when they go to state licensers to file complaints. An August investigation by the news organizations showed how patients of a Utah County therapist had reported alleged inappropriate touching to both state licensers and local leaders within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; neither group reported the therapist to law enforcement. Both said they take allegations of sexual assault seriously and indicated that they had addressed the complaints through their own processes. The Tribune and ProPublica’s reporting led to a police investigation, and that therapist was charged last summer with nearly a dozen felonies. He’s expected to enter a plea in August.

In light of the growth of the life coaching industry, Steinagel said he feels there’s a legitimate question that he plans to work with state legislators to address: “Has life coaching become one of those fields where the potential to harm people who are vulnerable is great enough,” he asks, “that the government should step in and regulate it? I think both the Legislature and we — from what we have seen, especially in the last few years — we think the answer is probably yes.”

The scope of what life coaches can offer is undefined and broad: They can promise to help someone lose weight, run their business, change their parenting style, have better sex or improve other aspects of their lives.

Onstage at a recent natural health and wellness conference in Utah, near tables advertising essential oils, drink supplements and chiropractic adjustments, one life coach told assembled audiences she could help women reach their weight loss goals; her yearlong course cost $800.

Next on the program were a couple who, based on their experiences of both twice being divorced, said they could help people “untangle” their emotional “chaos”; another life coach advertised that he could “rewire your brain” to rid yourself of anxiety.

When licensers hear complaints about life coaches, they are most often from the customers themselves, or from a concerned family member or therapist whose patient disclosed past care from a life coach that seemed questionable, said Steinagel, DOPL’s director.

Investigators in his office usually ask dissatisfied clients the same questions: Did they diagnose you? Did they create a treatment plan? Did they treat you for anxiety, depression or another mental health disorder? If the person lodging the complaint answers “no” to these questions, Steinagel said, DOPL can’t do anything.

The public also can’t see any of the specific grievances that have been made against Utah life coaches because of this catch-22: DOPL doesn’t release complaints unless they result in disciplinary action — and DOPL can’t discipline life coaches.

A review of records shows that DOPL has cited 25 people for unauthorized practice in the mental health field in the last decade, a number that included four life coaches and at least one online “influencer” offering “therapy” services.

It appears citations have been successful a handful of times — including with the online influencer, who stopped offering those services on her Patreon account.

But at least two men have been cited for unauthorized practice multiple times and still continue working as life coaches.

One was cited twice by licensers — in 2012, and then again a year later — and now runs a program that trains life coaches. He had previously worked as a therapist, according to public records, but his license had expired. In his second citation, licensers fined him $1,000 after they said he advertised himself as a “psychotherapist” in a marketing brochure for a seven-day retreat.

Another man, Denim Slade, was cited and fined $250 just three months after he surrendered his therapy license after DOPL received two reports that he engaged in inappropriate conduct with female clients. DOPL cited him, according to public records, for advertising that he did “Lifespan Integration Therapy” and could treat trauma in his life coaching business. A year later, he was cited again for unauthorized practice after DOPL received reports that he continued to advertise that he treated mental health issues like depression, anxiety, trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder. The life coach told a DOPL investigator he didn’t realize those posts were still active after he gave up his license and agreed to remove them.

Slade told The Tribune and ProPublica that he has never conducted therapy or mental health treatment as a life coach. He admitted that, in his therapy practice, he had allowed “some mild boundaries to be crossed” with one client. But he also said the DOPL records did not contain “the full picture” and that he felt pressured to admit to doing something wrong after licensers received a second report years later; he denied that allegation, but rather than fighting it, he decided to relinquish his license and turned to life coaching.

“I was excited at the prospect of working with an appropriate coaching population and transitioning to helping people who were already doing fairly well in their lives and wanting, but not necessarily knowing, how to excel,” Slade said. And he said while he feels there can be “some overlap” between life coaching and therapy, he believes “these are two definably different populations with different needs. I do not think life coaches should be conducting therapy.”

He also said he believes there are already safeguards in place for people doing mental health work that requires a license, and it’s already against the law to practice therapy without a license.

“I think people ought to be able to hire someone to help them with things in their lives that they want extra help with,” he said. "Do you regulate someone wanting to get help organizing their house, teaching art to kids, teaching piano, coaching Little League sports? I don’t know where that line should be.”

Therapist organizations in Utah have been a driving force in advocating for some measure of state oversight of life coaches. “Regulation really keeps them in their lane, us in our lane, and just increases consumer safety all around,” said Sarah Stroup, a licensed therapist who is on the legislative committee for the Utah Association for Marriage and Family Therapy.

Jessica Black, a licensed therapist who works with the Legislature in her role with the Utah Mental Health Counselors Association, said she sees particular vulnerabilities when life coaches try to help someone struggling with their mental health.

“There’s a difference between a business coach coaching you on how to build a business,” Black said. “But when you’re dealing with somebody’s mental health, or when you’re dealing with their life — that’s how people get taken advantage of.”

There have been Utah therapists who have lost their licenses for misconduct who, despite being deemed unsafe to work with patients, have still been able to continue their careers working in the mental health field — often in the unregulated realm of life coaching.

At least 43 Utah mental health professionals have surrendered their licenses or had them revoked, denied or expired on suspension since 2010, according to a review of publicly available DOPL disciplinary records. Of those, it appears that a third have continued working in mental health, according to searches of LinkedIn profiles and business websites — as mental health “associates,” motivational speakers and life coaches.

Some of those who have continued to work with clients on their mental health or well-being had lost their therapy licenses for serious reasons, DOPL records show. Several struggled with drug or alcohol use. Others lost their licenses after being accused of having inappropriate contact with patients, including Slade, who admitted in 2013 he had an inappropriate relationship with a married client. He gave up his license in 2019 after another patient reported to DOPL that he had engaged in “inappropriate physical and verbal conduct” with her; he denied this accusation in licensing records. A second therapist was charged with sexual exploitation by a medical care professional in Idaho, and a third touched a teenage girl’s leg and torso during a therapy session in an effort to “sexually stimulate” her as part of a therapeutic technique. (This man subsequently got his license back and was again accused of unprofessional conduct; he has now agreed to stop practicing entirely — including as a life coach — while DOPL and the police investigate.)

Steinagel said it’s “very frustrating” when therapists who lose their licenses continue doing mental health work as life coaches. He also said that while licensers can’t prohibit them from working in the unregulated field of life coaching, investigators often keep a close eye on such coaches to ensure they don’t cross into therapy.

In Hildebrandt’s case, it appears she deliberately decided to leave the regulated field of therapy. Over a decade ago, in 2012, promotional materials for her self-help company leaned into her credentials as a licensed therapist and experience as an addiction counselor.

But after more than a decade of running ConneXions Classroom, Hildebrandt had changed her website: References to her credentials as a therapist were gone, and she instead began calling herself a life coach. (At the time, she was still licensed as a clinical mental health worker and could have used that designation.)

“I began practicing in the psychotherapy world, and my patients were not healing,” she wrote on her website in 2022. “When I began empowering people by educating them with principles of Truth (learning to be honest, responsible, and humble), I saw my patients radically change right in front of me!”

Prete, the former client, met Hildebrandt as he was struggling in his marriage during the pandemic and after the birth of their first child. His now-ex-wife wanted to try the ConneXions program, he said.

The help he was seeking came with a cost: To start, he had to pay a monthly charge to participate in a group video call every Saturday morning. He paid another weekly fee to be part of a men’s small group. On top of that, he paid weekly to meet one-on-one with Hildebrandt. In total, he was spending more than $1,000 a month.

“I would meet with her every week for almost a year,” he said of Hildebrandt. “And it was always like, your wife is going to leave you. If you ever want to see her again, you’ll do what I say.”

After Hildebrandt told him to cut off contact with friends and relatives, he said, he was living separately from his family and Hildebrandt told him and his wife not to speak to each other. Hildebrandt, he said, “had complete control.”

Hildebrandt is currently in prison, and DOPL revoked her license as a clinical mental health worker in May in response to her child abuse convictions. Her attorney did not respond to a list of questions sent to him for this article.

In the final days of Utah’s 2024 legislative session, Kevin Franke, the father of the children abused by Hildebrandt, made a plea to lawmakers in a letter, asking them to pass a bill that would require life coach registration.

He wrote about the impact of being a client of Hildebrandt’s with his now-ex-wife, how his marriage ended and how his children were deeply harmed. All of it, he wrote, had been at the directive “of a dangerous mental health professional who believes that she could act outside the ethical balance of her profession by labeling herself as a life coach.“

Franke also asserted that Utah’s culture makes its citizens particularly vulnerable. The state’s attorney general has acknowledged that Utah has held a decades-long reputation for being the “fraud capital of the United States.” That’s in large part because of a local culture of trust in institutions among members of the dominant religion, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Investment fraud targeting LDS church members, Ponzi schemes and scams carried out in a style that mimics Utah’s significant multi-level marketing industry are prevalent in the state.

Black, the therapist with the Utah Mental Health Counselors Association, said that’s why Utah legislators should lead in regulating life coaches.

“I think it is a national problem. I think Utah’s unique in the sense that they’re very easily bought into MLMs,” she said about multi-level marketing. ”That’s kind of the structure of a lot of these life coaches. The more you pay, the more access you get. The more perks you get.”

Legislators in a handful of other states have tried to enact some oversight, but so far no proposals have become law.

New Hampshire legislators debated a bill in 2019 that would have studied whether life coaches should be regulated. The bill didn’t pass.

Two years later, in Oregon, legislators considered establishing a voluntary registry for those who provide “alternative therapy,” like life coaches. It also would have allowed the state to impose discipline for certain violations. But the measure failed after several life coaches pushed back.

“Coaching is not, nor claims to be, a form of therapy,” one Oregon coach wrote. ”Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.”

Life coaches are not required to be certified by the International Coaching Federation or any other organization. There’s no Utah ICF chapter, and the ICF did not respond to interview requests.

The ICF did release a statement to The New York Times, which recently reported the experiences of several people who felt they had been tricked into paying for courses to become life coaches as part of a “pyramid scheme.”

Carrie Abner, the vice president of credentials and standards at the ICF, told the newspaper that coaching is a “self-regulated industry,” and clients should make sure they are working with coaches that are trained, are experienced and have credentials. Credentialed ICF members, she added, agree to abide by an ethics code.

In Utah, state Sen. David Hinkins’ bill to require life coaches to register with DOPL never got past a first hearing. State lawmakers, however, are expected to continue the discussion this month during legislative committee meetings.

Franke said in his letter that he was able to get a measure of accountability because Hildebrandt and his ex-wife — who also participated in abusing the children — broke the law and went to prison. But not every ethical violation is a crime. And people who have been taken advantage of emotionally or financially, he said, have little recourse.

“These individuals are literally ghosts,” he wrote, “and are free to sell their supposed life expertise to anyone willing to purchase it.”

Mollie Simon contributed research, and Jeff Kao contributed data reporting.

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Last fall, out of public view, the North Carolina Supreme Court squashed disciplinary action against two Republican judges who had admitted that they had violated the state’s judicial code of conduct, according to three sources with direct knowledge of the decisions.

One of the judges had ordered, without legal justification, that a witness be jailed. The other had escalated a courtroom argument with a defendant, which led to a police officer shooting the defendant to death. The Judicial Standards Commission, the arm of the state Supreme Court that investigates judicial misconduct by judges, had recommended that the court publicly reprimand both women. The majority-Republican court gave no public explanation for rejecting the recommendations — indeed, state law mandates that such decisions remain confidential.

The sources spoke to ProPublica on the condition of anonymity because many of the actions and decisions of both institutions are confidential and because the sources said they feared retaliation.

When it comes to disciplining judges, North Carolina is one of the most secretive states in America, according to data from the National Center for State Courts’ Center for Judicial Ethics. Over half of states make disciplinary proceedings against judges public once charges are filed with their judicial ethics commission. Another dozen make them public if they reach the state’s supreme court. North Carolina is one of only three states, in addition to the District of Columbia, to release information only at the last possible stage of the process — after the Supreme Court orders discipline.

Stephen Gillers, a professor emeritus at New York University’s law school who specializes in legal and judicial ethics, said that making some parts of disciplinary cases against judges confidential can be necessary to protect private or personal information. But North Carolina goes too far, he added. “While secrecy has a place in judicial discipline, it can be used to conceal wrongdoing,” Gillers said. “Once there is a finding of wrongdoing by a disciplinary commission, the case should become public.”

The North Carolina Supreme Court’s decisions not to publicly discipline the two judges, which have not previously been reported, appear to be the only instances in more than a decade in which the Supreme Court did not follow the commission’s recommendation to issue punishment. Those decisions come at a time of accusations and recriminations about politics influencing North Carolina’s high court. Last year, Justice Anita Earls, a Democrat, sued the commission after it launched an investigation into comments she made suggesting that Republican justices were influenced by conservative ideology, remarks that she defended as free speech. And a Republican justice personally attacked Earls in a Supreme Court order in September. In addition, the year before, outside groups sought recusals of more than half of the court’s justices over various conflict-of-interest accusations.

Spokespeople for the North Carolina Supreme Court and the Judicial Standards Commission declined to comment or respond to a detailed list of questions.

Asher Hildebrand, a professor of public policy at Duke University, explained that in the 2010s, North Carolina had policies designed to keep the judiciary above the political fray, such as nonpartisan judicial elections. However, the gradual dismantling of these policies by the Republican-controlled legislature has driven the court’s polarization, according to Hildebrand.

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Do you have any information about the North Carolina Supreme Court or state court system that we should know? Contact reporter Doug Bock Clark at [email protected] or 678-243-0784. He can be reached securely on Signal at 678-243-0784. If you’re concerned about confidentiality, check out our advice on the most secure ways to share tips.

“While we might long for the days when courts were perceived as being above politics, courts are very much a partisan battleground,” he said.

Bob Orr, a former Republican justice, said partisan disputes over the judicial standards process have intensified in recent years.

“The judicial standards process needs a major overhaul in that I don’t think it was set up to deal with the current political atmosphere that judges have been embroiled in,” said Orr, who back in the early 2000s was investigated and received a private warning from the then-Democratic-controlled commission over comments that it deemed to be an impermissible political endorsement. He left the Republican Party in 2021 after being a vocal critic of former President Donald Trump.

Orr added, “It’s important for all the decision-makers in the judicial standards process — the commission, its staff and the Supreme Court — to act in a nonpartisan way to increase trust in the judicial system.”

Since 2011, North Carolina’s Judicial Standards Commission has referred 19 cases to the Supreme Court for judicial discipline, according to the court’s annual reports. In that time, the court has issued 17 public disciplinary orders, ranging from reprimands to suspensions without pay.

Had the Supreme Court followed the commission’s recommendations in the cases of the two Republican judges, it would have meant publicly reprimanding them ahead of elections for both in 2024. Judge Lori Hamilton, a longtime Republican, had campaigned with the slogan, “the ideal conservative.” Judge Caroline Burnette had previously been a Democrat — but she switched her registration before her case got to the Supreme Court, according to public records.

In September 2021, Burnette was conducting a trial when she got into a shouting match with the defendant, Christopher Vaughan, who was facing charges of false imprisonment. Court recordings later published by WRAL News captured a three-minute argument, which escalated after Burnette told Vaughan to “shut up.” When Burnette ordered the bailiff to “take him,” Vaughan rushed Burnette. The bailiff blocked him, the two grappled, and the bailiff shouted that Vaughan had his gun. A police officer who was in the courtroom to testify shot Vaughan in the head, killing him, an incident that was widely reported.

The commission’s work is confidential, but sources say that it soon began investigating Burnette, who had potentially violated multiple parts of the judicial code, including the requirements that a “judge should maintain order and decorum in proceedings” and a “judge should be patient, dignified and courteous.” Burnette declined to comment. A spokesperson for the state court system said Burnette would not respond to ProPublica’s detailed list of questions.

Not long after, in November 2021, Hamilton was overseeing the trial of a man charged with sex crimes against minors. According to court transcripts, Hamilton accused the victims’ mother of bringing them to court late and previously being uncooperative with the state’s lawyers. “I’m going to take you into protective custody to ensure your appearance here at trial,” Hamilton told the mother, ordering that she be handcuffed, detained throughout the trial and denied an attorney. Hamilton also said that the victims should be turned over to Child Protective Services. Court staff were so unsure of how to execute their orders that the bailiff explained to Hamilton that they “don’t know how to book” the mother.

The mother of the victims, whose name is being withheld to protect the identities of her children, said she spent her four days of incarceration worrying about her daughters, crying and asking court staff, “How can you hold me if I’m not charged with nothing?”

The commission soon launched an investigation into Hamilton, sources say. She had potentially violated multiple canons, including that “a judge should uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary” and that a “judge should be faithful to the law and maintain professional competence in it.” In response to a detailed list of questions from ProPublica, Hamilton answered only one, which asked if she thought that her political affiliation had anything to do with the conservative majority of the Supreme Court going against the commission’s recommendation. “No, I do not,” she replied.

During the commission’s investigations and hearings process, both Hamilton and Burnette stipulated that they had violated the judicial code, according to sources. Those sources said that the commission sent the cases to the Supreme Court to determine final discipline and that the commission recommended that the court give them public reprimands. When the commission determines there to be minor violations, it issues a letter of caution or a verbal warning, which remains private. The vast majority of disciplinary action falls into these categories. But all judicial discipline serious enough to be issued by the Supreme Court becomes public, according to the rules of the commission.

Months after the Supreme Court decided in the fall of 2023 to let Hamilton and Burnette off without public consequences, it issued its most recent disciplinary order. In March 2024, the court concurred with the commission’s recommendation for punishment of Angela Foster, a Black Democratic judge who had pressured a court official to reduce a bond for her son and had taken over a courtroom reserved for other court officials, thereby delaying over 100 cases. The Supreme Court suspended her without pay for 120 days.

At the same time as the court was considering how to handle the two white Republican judges, the commission was weighing another fraught matter.

In March 2023, Earls, the Supreme Court’s lone Black justice and a Democrat, received a letter from the commission informing her that she was under investigation. The letter stated that Earls had been accused of disclosing “confidential information concerning matters being currently deliberated in conference by the Supreme Court.” If the commission found evidence of a serious violation, it could send the case to the Supreme Court, which would make a final determination and could go as far as to expel her.

At the center of the anonymous complaint was the allegation that Earls had told lawmakers and state bar members at two different meetings about proposed rule changes that would give more power to the Republican justices. The complaint, which was made after WRAL News published an article describing the meetings, also alleged that she’d provided confidential information to a reporter.

In her response to the letter, which later was filed in court, her lawyer argued that it had been standard practice for justices to discuss the court’s rule changes with affected parties and that no information had been leaked. Earls’ lawyer also wrote that if the matter proceeded to a hearing, Earls planned to make the investigation public and subpoena “current and former Justices” about their “actions.” In May, the commission dismissed the complaint, providing Earls with verbal and written warnings “to be mindful of your public comments,” according to court documents.

In June, Earls, the only person of color on the court, gave an interview to Law360 in which she criticized Chief Justice Paul Newby and other conservative justices for refusing to address the lack of diversity in the state’s court system. She revealed that Newby had effectively killed its Commission on Fairness and Equity by not reappointing its members and that he had ended implicit bias trainings for judges, which Earls had helped set up. Much of the interview was framed around a Law360 analysis and an outside study that found that the vast majority of state appellate court judges, and the attorneys arguing before them, were white and male. In reference to the findings, Earls said that “our court system, like any other court system, is made up of human beings and I believe the research that shows that we all have implicit biases.” She said that her five Republican colleagues “very much see themselves as a conservative bloc” and that “their allegiance is to their ideology, not to the institution.”

In August, Earls received another letter from the commission alerting her that it had “reopened” the former investigation. The letter warned: “Publicly alleging that another judge makes decisions based on a motivation not allowed under” the code, such as racial or political biases, without “definitive proof runs contrary to a judge’s duty to promote public confidence in the impartiality of the judiciary.”

Rather than letting the investigation proceed in secret again, Earls sued the commission in federal court, seeking an injunction to stop “an on-going campaign” by the commission to “stifle the First Amendment free-speech rights of Justice Earls and expose her to punishment.”

Two weeks after the lawsuit was filed, Democratic state lawmakers held a press conference to call the investigation into Earls “a political hit job” — and one state representative accused Newby of pushing it, though he said he could not reveal his sources. Four sources knowledgeable about Newby’s or the commission’s actions told ProPublica that the chief justice encouraged the investigation. The sources requested anonymity because the inner workings of the commission are confidential and because they feared retaliation.

Newby and Earls declined to comment through a North Carolina Supreme Court spokesperson. Neither responded to questions submitted to the North Carolina Judicial Branch.

The lawsuit led to public outcry, which was fiercely critical of the investigation and which was partially fueled by the fact that Newby had himself made remarkably similar statements alleging that his Democratic colleagues were biased. In the summer of 2019, when Newby was a justice campaigning to become chief justice, he made a speech, first reported by WRAL News, in which he called Earls an “AOC” — referencing progressive U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He also accused Earls of wanting “to cause social change through our judicial branch,” suggested that she was part of a Democratic strategy to “sue till you’re blue” and warned, “See what kind of judicial activism occurs on your North Carolina court.”

After the speech, the commission, which at the time was under a Democratic court, fielded complaints about Newby. The existence of those complaints has not been previously reported. According to multiple sources, the commission issued Newby a confidential verbal warning, emphasizing he should not so overtly criticize his fellow justices again.

At the time, experts told news outlets that Newby’s statements about Earls were probably protected by the fact that he was campaigning, as the code allows justices greater leeway when seeking reelection. However, in 2023, Earls was also technically in campaign mode and subject to the same protections as Newby. According to Earls’ lawsuit, she had declared her candidacy for her next election many years in advance, as had become standard practice among justices.

Two sources with direct knowledge of the investigations into both Newby and Earls said that Earls faced more scrutiny in terms of both the length and depth of the investigative process. One of those sources, however, said that “there was no bias” in the treatment of Earls. The source chalked up the difference between the two investigations to the fact that in the intervening years, the commission had intensified efforts to rein in the justices as they became more openly contentious about their differing political views.

In January 2024, as Earls’ lawsuit barreled toward a trial, the commission abruptly dropped its investigation. It did not recommend the Supreme Court take any disciplinary action against her.

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When the COVID-19 pandemic upended the workplace, jobs went remote, offices had to adopt new technologies and longtime employees suddenly departed. Federal stimulus dollars flooded into state and local government accounts, and fraudsters had a heyday.

The pandemic was only one of several recent disruptions to roil the financial operations of state and local governments, which oversee $4 trillion a year in spending. Payments — and paper trails — have gone digital. Scammers can now use AI tools to streamline their hunt for victims, including within government agencies. And local newspapers in the United States, one historic line of defense against graft, are disappearing at a rate of 2.5 a week.

Few states have a better view into the latest ways people are stealing and otherwise misspending local government dollars than Washington.

Its Office of the State Auditor is the second-biggest state auditing shop in the country by budget ($64 million) and fifth by employee count (400). By state statute, the office must regularly examine the books and operations of Washington’s every town, county, port, stadium authority, asparagus commission, cemetery district, drainage district and mosquito control district. It conducts as many as 2,400 state and local audits a year, rooting out fraud and waste.

To get a better sense of what these audits can tell us about how fraud is evolving, ProPublica met twice recently with Brandi Pritchard, a careerlong Washington auditor who helps lead the state’s fraud-preventing special investigations unit.

In our conversations, which have been edited for length and clarity, Pritchard described how fraudsters seem to be stealing more money more quickly and why her job hasn’t made her lose her faith in humanity.

Right as the pandemic was happening, when everybody was remote, there was a huge increase in fraud risk. All so quickly, governments had to change their entire internal control structure. We’re used to walking into somebody’s office and setting a piece of paper on their desk to review. Now you could no longer do that. But since then it feels like it’s mostly back to normal, with exceptions.

With remote work, we’re starting to see some problems with folks working two “full-time jobs” with different agencies. They’re supposed to be working the full 40 hours from 8 to 5 for two agencies. Clearly, that’s physically impossible.

Another thing that came out of the pandemic: It forced governments to move to a more electronic documentation system. That’s great and more efficient, but the downside is it can be more difficult to spot forgery or somebody making an edit, using Photoshop or other tools, to financial statements. [In one recent case, the auditor’s office said that an altered utility bill led to an investigation of a former city clerk-treasurer, who was eventually charged with forgery involving checks totaling $3,700. Danni Lee Speelman pleaded not guilty and awaits trial in July. According to the auditor’s report, the clerk said she was “not responsible for the altered customer utility statement and attributed it to a computer system change.”]

Obviously, technology has made a lot of advances since the pandemic, AI being a big part of that. There’s FraudGPT, which is like ChatGPT — but it’s for fraudsters. [The bot’s developer claims it can create malicious computer code, write scam letters and hack websites.] It’s paving the path for them to easily get fake checks, fake statement templates, emails to do phishing schemes and so on. We wouldn’t know whether folks are using FraudGPT or not in the schemes we see, but I could guess based on the emails our governments are falling for.

Our governments are required to give us a copy. And it’s amazing how many commonalities I have found, which tells me either these originated from one particular crime ring, or maybe they’re all using FraudGPT. The word “kindly” shows up in almost every email. “Can you kindly change this?” “Kindly reply back to me?” and so on.

There’s a sense of urgency. You know, they’ll wait till the day before payroll, then suddenly it’s, “I know payroll is going out tomorrow. Can you quickly change it to my new bank account?”

I don’t know that our case counts have really changed a ton, but people are stealing more and quicker, and we’ve had a few cases where it didn’t appear that they tried very hard to cover it up.

The town of Cusick is a great example of that. The town’s clerk treasurer drained the bank account from $200,000 to $240-something in a matter of months. It was alarming, the intensity with which that case unfolded. [In March, the clerk treasurer, Luke Michael Servas, was indicted on accusations of wire fraud and bank fraud, among other charges. He pleaded not guilty and awaits trial. Servas did not respond to ProPublica’s requests for comments before publication.]

We were attempting to start a routine audit, reaching out to the clerk treasurer, and to be honest, he was kind of ghosting us. He wasn’t giving us the records we needed. We eventually reached out to the mayor, who worked in concert with a council member to get ahold of the bank statements. As soon as they saw the statement, they noticed.

Most fraud is detected by tips. About 5% of fraud is detected by auditors. I will say that more recently, in the last year or so, it feels like our auditors are finding more. And the cases that involve very, very large dollar amounts, we’re the ones finding those: Pierce County Housing Authority, close to $7 million. [A former Housing Authority executive, Cova Campbell, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in early 2021. Through her attorney, she declined to comment on her case.] We’re drafting a report right now about one we found that was close to a million. Then there’s Cusick. That was hundreds of thousands, and we found that one.

I wish that I knew the answer to that, because then we’d probably find them more quickly. Thinking back, we found most by reviewing bank statements. So that gets down to the question, “Why are governments struggling to do their own reviews?” In some cases, I think it’s because the elected officials didn’t run for election to review bank statements. We try to convince them of their fiduciary role and how down in the weeds that might have to be.

I wish I could say it was an outlier. We have probably four or five other small towns I could name offhand. Because they’re small, they put a lot of trust in the people they hire to do these finance roles. One thing we feel is problematic is when elected officials are related to each other. What good is a review if the person reviewing you is your wife or your mother or your father? But when we talk to governments about this, they say these are the only people who are willing to serve. [In its response to the auditor’s report, the town of Cusick said it opened a new bank account that allows multiple town officials to review online statements and that now its “transactions and payrolls are cross-checked by clerks.”]

One thing we hear a lot is that it wasn’t fraud: “I didn’t take the money. It wasn’t a misappropriation. It was a loan, and I intended to pay it back.” I don’t know if they actually convince themselves of that, but I do feel like some of them have, because it’s easier to look yourself in the mirror as somebody who borrowed money. I could speculate all day long. One thing I do know is that many of them have gambling problems.

Yes and no. My honest answer is that we don’t want to catch it. We want our governments to have the right controls to catch it themselves.

Pierce County Housing Authority comes to mind. As far as we can tell, it’s the largest government misappropriation [by an employee] in Washington state’s history. And considering who the users of that particular district are, low-income folks needing housing assistance, that makes it even more staggering.

But on the fraud-nerdy side of things, it’s a wonderful case study. The way our auditor used professional skepticism was absolutely magnificent, in that she wasn’t just paying attention to the physical pieces of paper in front of her. She was capturing the environment, the culture there, and it felt off to her. The way our subject treated her staff compared to the way she treated the auditors felt off. So by the time the auditor looked at that bank statement and saw that weird wire to some title company, she was on high alert.

She raised her voice quite often at her staff. She did not treat them very well. But when we had a question, she was incredibly kind. The auditor felt like the subject was trying to butter us up. The other part of it was, if we had a question, we weren’t allowed to talk to staff. Everything went straight to our subject, which was another red flag.

Not really. I think working here has made me think better overall of humanity. I’m seeing so many people choose a career in public service. Whether that’s elected officials, department heads or down to the finance staff, there’s just so many people that work so incredibly hard and probably get a lot of grief, unfortunately. We have our fraudsters, but it’s such a small percentage.

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Members of Congress pressed Microsoft on Thursday to strengthen how it handles reported security flaws in its ubiquitous products after a series of cyberattacks struck the federal government.

The criticism from members of the House Homeland Security Committee came in response to a new ProPublica investigation that found Microsoft repeatedly rebuffed a company engineer who, beginning in 2017, warned that a product flaw left millions of users vulnerable to attack, including federal employees. Russian hackers later exploited that weakness in one of the largest cyberattacks in U.S. history, widely known as SolarWinds.

Rep. Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the committee’s top Democrat, entered the news organization’s story into the congressional record. He then asked Microsoft President Brad Smith if the company has since established a process “to ensure that employee concerns about security at Microsoft or their products are prioritized and addressed.”

Smith, sitting alone at the witness table in a packed hearing room, told lawmakers that the company is shifting its approach to security. Microsoft is trying “to empower every employee to focus on continuous improvement and speak up ... and to ensure that those voices are heard and heeded,” he said.

Smith added, “We want a culture that encourages every employee to look for problems, find problems, report problems, help fix problems and then learn from the problems.”

As ProPublica reported, that is not the corporate culture that the former Microsoft engineer, Andrew Harris, encountered in the years leading up to SolarWinds. Harris said product leaders, who were focused on Microsoft’s drive to dominate the cloud computing market, told him that addressing the weakness he’d identified would undermine the company’s business goals of securing federal government contracts and marginalizing competitors.

The federal Cyber Safety Review Board, in its own examination of Microsoft’s role in a separate hack perpetrated last year by Chinese attackers, also found the company’s security culture “inadequate” and in need of an “overhaul.” Microsoft “deprioritized both enterprise security investments and rigorous risk management,” the board found, resulting in a “cascade of … avoidable errors.”

On Thursday, Smith said Microsoft accepted responsibility for the board’s findings and has since moved to tie executive bonuses to cybersecurity. He said security would also be part of every Microsoft employee’s performance review, and thus would indirectly impact compensation across the company.

Microsoft’s promise to change its security culture echoes a similar pledge from founder Bill Gates more than 20 years ago. “When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security,” Gates wrote at the time.

In the decades since, former employees told ProPublica, developing new products and features was often prioritized over fixing security bugs in existing offerings.

While the official subject of Thursday’s hearing was the cybersafety board’s report on the China hack, members of the committee asked Smith question after question about ProPublica’s SolarWinds investigation, which Rep. Delia Ramirez, D-Ill., called a “bombshell report.”

She said the hearing was a “reckoning moment” for the company, which has repeatedly downplayed its role in SolarWinds. One of the flaws the Russians exploited involved a Microsoft application, which was supposed to ensure users had permission to log on to cloud-based programs. The weakness allowed intruders to masquerade as legitimate employees and rummage through sensitive data in the cloud, including emails.

Rep. Seth Magaziner, D-R.I., asked Smith about his prior congressional testimony, in which he said that Microsoft had first learned about this weakness in November 2017, when an outside cybersecurity firm published a report on it. ProPublica’s investigation, Magaziner noted, found that Harris had raised it even earlier, only to be ignored. The lawmaker asked Smith if his prior testimony was incorrect.

Smith demurred, saying he hadn’t read the story. “I was at the White House this morning,” he told the panel.

Later, Smith complained that ProPublica’s investigation was published the day of the hearing and said that he’d know more about it “a week from now.” ProPublica sent detailed questions to Microsoft nearly two weeks before the story was published on Thursday and requested an interview with Smith. The company declined to make him available.

On Thursday, Smith pointed out that the weakness in Microsoft’s product could also be found in other companies’ software. Cybersecurity specialists have noted, however, that Microsoft’s version was one of the most widely used, including by the federal government.

When Ramirez asked how Harris’ discovery would have been handled differently today, Smith said, “I think what’s most important for today is simply to note how we are changing … how we elevate these issues and reward people for finding, reporting and helping to fix problems.”