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by Patrick Rucker, The Capitol Forum, and David Armstrong, ProPublica

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In late 2020, Dr. Debby Day said her bosses at Cigna gave her a stark warning. Work faster, or the company might fire her.

That was a problem for Day because she felt her work was too important to be rushed. She was a medical director for the health insurer, a physician with sweeping power to approve or reject requests to pay for critical care like life-saving drugs or complex surgeries.

She had been working at Cigna for nearly 15 years, reviewing cases that nurses had flagged for denial or were unsure about. At Cigna and other insurers, nurses can greenlight payments, but denials have such serious repercussions for patients that many states require that doctors make the final call. In more recent years, though, Day said that the Cigna nurses’ work was getting sloppy. Patient files that nurses working in the Philippines sent to her, she said, increasingly had errors that could lead to wrongful denials if they were not corrected.

Day was, in her own words, persnickety. If a nurse recommended denying coverage for a cancer patient or a sick baby, she wanted to be certain it was the right thing to do. So Day said she researched guidelines, read medical studies and scrutinized patient medical records to come to the best decision. This took time. She was clearing fewer cases than many of her peers.

Some of her colleagues quickly denied requests to keep pace, she said. All a Cigna doctor had to do was cut and paste the denial language that the nurse had prepared and quickly move on to the next case, Day said. This was so common, she and another former medical director said, that people inside Cigna had a term for these kinds of speedy decisions: “click and close.”

“Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers,” said Day, who worked for Cigna until the late spring of 2022. “If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.”

In a written response to questions, Cigna said its medical directors are not allowed to “rubber stamp” a nurse’s recommendation for denial. In all cases, the company wrote, it expects its doctors to “perform thorough, objective, independent and accurate reviews in accordance with our coverage policies.” The company said it was unaware of the use of the term “click and close” and that “such behavior would not be tolerated.”

During Day’s final years at Cigna, the company meticulously tracked the output of its medical directors on a monthly dashboard. Cigna shared this spreadsheet with more than 70 of its doctors, allowing them to compare their tally of cases with those of their peers. Day and two other former medical directors said the dashboard sent a message loud and clear: Cigna valued speed. (ProPublica and The Capitol Forum found these other former Cigna doctors independently; Day did not refer them.) One of Day’s managers in a written performance evaluation called the spreadsheet the “productivity dashboard.”

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Measuring the speed and output of employees is common in many industries, from fast food to package delivery, but the use of these kinds of metrics in health care is controversial because the stakes are so high. It’s one thing if a rushed server forgets the fries with your burger. It’s another entirely if the pressure to act fast leads to wrongful denials of payment for vital care. Walgreens in 2022 dropped measurements of its pharmacists’ speed from their performance reviews after some alleged that practice could lead to dangerous mistakes.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum examined Cigna’s productivity dashboards for medical directors from January and February 2022. These spreadsheets tallied the number of cases each medical director handled. Cigna gave each task a “handle time,” which the company said was the average amount of time it took its medical directors to issue a decision.

Day and others said the number was something different: the maximum amount of time they should spend on a case. Insurers often require approval in advance for expensive procedures or medicines, a process known as prior authorization. The early 2022 dashboards listed a handle time of four minutes for a prior authorization. The bulk of drug requests were to be decided in two to five minutes. Hospital discharge decisions were supposed to take four and a half minutes.

“Medical directors would message me and say, ‘We can’t do these cases in four minutes. Not if you want to do a good job,’” Day recalled.

Deny, deny, deny. That’s how you hit your numbers. If you take a breath or think about any of these cases, you’re going to fall behind.

—Dr. Debby Day, a former medical director at Cigna

As ProPublica and The Capitol Forum reported last year, Cigna built a computer program that allowed its medical directors to deny certain claims in bulk. The insurer’s doctors spent an average of just 1.2 seconds on each of those cases. Cigna at the time said the review system was created to speed up approval of claims for certain routine screenings; the company later posted a rebuttal to the story. A congressional committee and the Department of Labor launched inquiries into this Cigna program. A spokesperson for Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, the chair of the congressional committee, said Rodgers continues to monitor the situation after Cigna shared some details about its process. The Labor Department is still examining such practices.

One figure on Cigna’s January and February 2022 dashboards was like a productivity score; the news organizations found that this number reflects the pace at which a medical director clears cases.

Cigna said it was incorrect to call that figure on its dashboard a productivity score and said its “view on productivity is defined by a range of factors beyond elements included in a single spreadsheet.” In addition, the company told the news organizations, “The copy of the dashboard that you have is inaccurate and secondary calculations made using its contents may also be inaccurate.” The news organizations asked what was inaccurate, but the company wouldn’t elaborate.

Nevertheless, Cigna said that because the dashboard created “inadvertent confusion” the company was “reassessing its use.”

Day was afraid to look at the dashboards. Anyone could see that by Cigna’s measures, she was a laggard. In January 2022, only a third of her peers had lower scores, and in February 2022, it was just a quarter.

In a recorded phone call and in emails with supervisors, Day complained that Cigna’s metrics failed to account for the quality of decisions. She said she and others asked higher-ups how often medical director decisions were overturned on appeal but nobody would say.

Day gave Cigna written permission to discuss her employment with ProPublica and The Capitol Forum.

The company described Day as a “disgruntled former employee” and said her “personal view is not an accurate representation of the work of the many medical directors and clinicians we employ.” Cigna added that prior authorization requests are often time-sensitive and the company’s “mission is to ensure our patients receive the right care as quickly as possible.”

Cigna rejected the assertions that denying cases was an effective way of working faster. “Even if medical directors were incentivized to review more claims — which they are not — it makes no sense to suggest that this incentivizes denials; it would be far quicker to approve all claims,” the company spokesperson wrote. The insurer said that denials take more time because they require a deeper review of clinical data, potentially requesting additional reviews by senior clinical directors, drafting denial letters and possibly phoning the treating physicians.

But another doctor who had worked at Cigna also said that denying a request for payment was far quicker than approving one since the nurses served up language that could be used to justify the denial. That former Cigna medical director said, “Sometimes you just have to accept the nurse and click and close if you had too much work.” (That doctor asked not to be named because they feared repercussions if they commented publicly.)

When Debby Day got her job at Cigna in November 2005, she thought it was a godsend.

She had been working for a health insurance startup in North Carolina. The charismatic founder of the company, Day said, had told her and a handful of principal executives to expect a windfall when the company went public. That never happened, and Day was eventually left with no job and no severance.

When a recruiter mentioned the medical director job at Cigna, it sounded like a perfect fit. The job was based in North Carolina, but Cigna didn’t mind that she was licensed in California, where she did her residency at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. She was ready to leave the executive track, and the position allowed her to put her medical training to good use without the daily grind of working in a clinic.

The daughter of an ophthalmologist, Day had watched her father perform eye surgery when she was a child, and she found medicine fascinating. When Day started practicing, she learned quickly that while she enjoyed the intellectual challenges of medicine, the hands-on work of seeing patients drained her. As a medical director, she said, “I could really take care of patients without having to talk to them all day long.”

Cigna, like all health insurers, makes patients get approval in advance for certain treatments. Day became one of the people who reviewed these prior authorization requests, deciding what to cover and what to deny. Everyone Day worked with was under one roof in Raleigh, North Carolina. The office buzzed with conversations among colleagues, and she was able to consult with specialists on complex cases.

She never felt pressure to do anything but make the right decision for the patient. At the same time, she said, she didn’t hesitate to reject treatment she thought was improper.

Day describes herself as persnickety but feels that the time she spent reviewing case files was essential to reaching the right decision. (Andrea Bruce for ProPublica)

A couple years into her time at Cigna, Day noticed some doctors prescribing a costly treatment called intravenous immunoglobulin, or IVIG, that helps patients with weakened immune systems fight off infections. Only she found they were prescribing it in cases where it didn’t make any medical sense. That wasn’t good for patients or for Cigna. “Some of these guys were pouring it into every patient they could get their hands on and then making hundreds of thousands of dollars billing for it,” she recalled.

At the time, Cigna didn’t have a policy for when IVIG should be used, so Day developed one based on the scientific evidence available at the time. Day said this saved millions of dollars and that Cigna rewarded her with bonuses and stock options.

“In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business,” she said.

As Day neared the end of her first decade at Cigna, the company closed regional offices in favor of a nationwide review system, she said. With medical directors working from home, Day could no longer pop down the hallway to consult with doctors in other specialities.

Cigna had used a productivity dashboard for years, but by 2019, these metrics began playing a more prominent role in the company’s evaluations of medical directors, Day said. Now, making a fast decision seemed more important than making the right decision, she said. In February 2019 emails to her managers, Day openly questioned this system.

Her boss responded: “We all understand that many cases are involved and take more time,” he wrote. “We have tried to account for that additional time in the allotment allowed for certain cases.”

Still, he made it clear that transaction volume — the metric on the dashboard that was similar to a productivity score — was one of the factors “we use to determine merit raises, bonus” and stock awards. When asked about this, Cigna said that “any assertion that our Medical Directors’ compensation (cash or stock) is tied to denials or their handle time for cases is false.”

In that same 2019 email, Day’s boss added, “We want to assist every medical director who wishes to improve his or her efficiency.”

Day shot back, “Some of our newer MDs are quite terrified of the ‘counting,’” she wrote. “All ask — ‘how is quality measured?’”

Soon, Day realized that her boss wasn’t talking in the abstract about improving efficiency; he was talking about her. She learned that managers were going to help her pick up the pace of her reviews.

When bosses reached out, they didn’t discuss whether she was making the right call, only how long it took her to decide, she said.

In my head I truly believed that you could marry good health care with business.

—Day

By then, Day said, Cigna had shifted much of the nursing work to the Philippines. She found mistakes in the case files that these nurses sent. In an email to Day, a fellow medical director lamented the amount of time it took to untangle one case and said the reports by “the overseas nurses” were “messes.”

Some of the more astonishing problems that Day spotted have stayed with her. In a case involving a newborn who needed an epilepsy evaluation, Day noticed that a Cigna nurse had listed the mother’s name as the patient, rather than the baby’s. Day fixed that mistake, avoiding what certainly would have been a denial. In another case, a nurse recommended denying payment for an ultrasound of the neck because the treatment wasn’t medically necessary. But the nurse had gotten the body part wrong. It was a hip that was injured, and the imaging was needed. An appeal that landed on Day’s desk involved Cigna’s decision to reject payment for a test because it wasn’t medically necessary for a patient with a sexually transmitted disease. But Day figured out that the patient had toenail fungus, not an STD.

Day said her bosses didn’t want to hear that she was catching errors. By October 2020, Cigna had placed Day on a performance improvement plan that required her to raise her “productivity level” — referring to the score on the dashboard — to at least 70%, which would be a significant jump for her but was slightly below the median for medical directors. The company made the consequences crystal clear: If she failed to successfully complete the plan, she could be terminated.

ProPublica and The Capitol Forum asked Cigna how it calculated that score, but the company wouldn’t say. “Transaction volume helps gauge productivity and efficiency — the amount of work done, not the speed at which it is done,” a Cigna spokesperson wrote. The company said this metric measured the time a medical director spent on tasks involving medical judgment versus other work, such as internal meetings or training.

On the early 2022 productivity dashboard, though, a different calculation could explain Day’s score, and this math reflects how fast medical directors reviewed cases. ProPublica and The Capitol Forum multiplied the number of cases Day handled by the time Cigna allotted for each type of case, then divided that total by the hours she worked that month. The resulting percentage equaled her score. Medical directors who spent every available minute of their workdays clearing cases within the time constraints Cigna set would score at least 100%. Indeed, some medical directors had scores greater than 100%, meaning they cleared cases in even less than the allotted time. The newsrooms’ formula accurately reproduced the scores of 87% of the Cigna doctors listed; the scores of all but one of the rest fell within 1 to 2 percentage points of the number generated by this formula. When asked about this formula, Cigna said it may be inaccurate but didn’t elaborate.

Day said her bosses told her that the way to boost her score was to review more cases during her normal work hours.

Responding to questions, Cigna said the productivity dashboard was “primarily used to ensure that we have enough medical directors to perform the amount and type of work that needs to be done.” It is not used, the company said, to evaluate the performance of medical directors or track the speed at which individual doctors do their work.

Cigna, however, later said of the dashboard that “in the unusual situation that a medical director is a significant outlier to peers performing similar types of reviews, managers might use this metric as one data point to understand and discuss the variance with the medical director.” It also said Day was placed on a performance improvement plan “to help her meet the most basic standards to support patient care.”

During the time Day spent on the performance improvement plan, she refused to change her approach, which she felt was necessary to make the right call.

In December 2020, she appealed to the human resources department, figuring that colleagues there would see that it was wrong to fire a medical director for taking care to decide critical medical questions.

She was wrong.

“You feel that the time constraints/metrics, which are in place to review these cases are unreasonable, for some cases are very complex consisting of multiple pages to review,” a Cigna human resources employee wrote, summing up Day’s feelings as the matter escalated.

And while Day’s supervisor “appreciates your attention to detail,” the human resources employee wrote, he “also realizes that there are metrics in place that he must hold everyone to.”

When asked about this, Cigna said, “Dr. Day raised questions about her performance improvement plan through appropriate internal ethics channels available to all employees, and there was no wrongdoing found.”

Eventually, the daily stress of being pushed to work faster coupled with the threat of being fired took a toll on Day. Sleepless and fighting depression, Day was at the breaking point.

“I actually sort of had a mental breakdown,” she recalled.

At the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.

—Day’s supervisor

On a recorded call with her boss about her lagging productivity score, Day brought the subject back to the quality of the decisions she was making. Her boss made it sound like Day was a broken record.

“We have the same discussion every time we talk,” he said. While saying “nobody’s asking you not to do quality work,” her boss said, “you must know I just have to redirect our discussion.”

But Day continued: “When there is no measurement of quality, then the discussion will continue to have that element to it.”

The supervisor said he heard Day’s concerns “loud and clear” but warned that “at the end of the day, we need to get your productivity up and we don’t have a lot of time to do that.”

The focus on metrics was proof Cigna was losing its way, Day told her boss. When she started working at Cigna 15 years earlier, there was a “commitment to quality and taking care of our customers.” Day said that it was still important to her and other medical directors that “we go home at the end of the day and think we’ve done a good job for Cigna.”

In a response to questions, Cigna said the supervisor, who works in California, was unaware that he was being recorded and that under that state’s laws, it is illegal to record a private phone call without all parties’ consent. Day said that she was in North Carolina during the call and that North Carolina law allows a person on a call to record without getting the consent of others.

Day took a monthslong leave from the job in mid-2021 that allowed her to work part time, and she found a therapist who helped her manage the depression. When she returned, Day said, it was more of the same.

In the late spring of 2022 she decided to retire from Cigna.

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Maya Miller contributed reporting.

by Lee Zurik, Samantha Sunne and Dannah Sauer, WVUE-TV, data analysis by Joel Jacobs, ProPublica

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

The city of Gretna, Louisiana, in the shadow of New Orleans, brings in more money through fines and related fees than some larger cities in the state. An investigation by WVUE-TV and ProPublica shows that much of that money comes from drivers who rack up multiple violations and hefty fines.

Defendants in Gretna’s mayor’s court, a unique justice system found only in Louisiana and Ohio, are charged with more violations — and face greater fines as a result — than those in seven other cities and towns we looked at. Many of those charges in Gretna are for nonmoving violations such as an expired license plate or vehicle inspection sticker.

And if a defendant misses a payment and doesn’t come to court to explain why, the court often adds a contempt charge, with an additional $150 fine. About half of Gretna’s cases over a three-year period included contempt charges.

A city representative said that officers charge people with violations only when they have probable cause, and that such fines deter motorists from breaking the law. A former New Orleans police chief, however, said cities can get people to follow the law without issuing lots of tickets.

How We Reported This Story

For this story we obtained via a public records request a dataset of all charges filed in Gretna’s mayor’s court from 2020 through 2022. Nearly 21,000 cases were included in the data, most of which consisted of traffic violations.

We obtained similar data for seven other municipalities in southeastern Louisiana. These included six towns with mayor’s courts — Harahan, Kenner, Covington, Ponchatoula, Grand Isle and Westwego — as well as the city of New Orleans, which has traffic and municipal courts. For municipalities with mayor’s courts, we obtained data for the same time period; for New Orleans we obtained data for 2022.

We confirmed with municipalities that the data accounted for all court costs and fees as of the date they were provided. Fine amounts for cases that were open when the data was provided may have changed since.

We calculated the average fines and fees for all cases in each town. Gretna had the highest average amount levied: $457 per case. We found this was 67% higher than the average of all the other municipalities’ average per case, which was $273. We also calculated the number of violations per case, not including contempt charges; again, Gretna was the highest, with 2.4 violations per case, compared with an average of 1.4 across the other municipalities.

These figures include all cases, both open and closed, as well as a relatively small number of cases involving nontraffic violations. Fines are often reduced when people go to court, so we also analyzed fines for open and closed cases separately, as well as traffic cases alone. Across all those analyses, Gretna’s assessments per case and the number of violations remained above average compared with other towns.

In addition, we studied the most common violations in Gretna, finding that a large number were nonmoving violations. Nearly half of all violations (not including contempt of court) were for violations of law related to driver’s licenses, vehicle registration or insurance or inspection stickers.

Contempt of court was charged in about half of the cases in Gretna, which was more than other towns with comparable data. A few municipalities were excluded from this comparison because they did not list contempt as a separate charge.

We used audits on file with the state to compare how much Gretna collected in fines and forfeitures to other municipalities. Over several months last year, we reviewed annual audits for all 301 municipalities and two combined city-parish governments required to file reports with the state. A small number of audits did not include a line item for fines and forfeitures. Gretna had the highest revenue from fines and forfeitures of any town with a mayor’s court, according to our review, and the third highest of any municipality.

There is no official government definition of fines and forfeitures in those audits, but the terms generally cover penalties for breaking the law and associated fees. In some places, they could include collections outside court, such as library fines and traffic camera tickets. Gretna’s fines and forfeitures include revenue from traffic cameras, which don’t go through mayor’s court. But the city’s revenue from mayor’s court alone in fiscal year 2022 exceeded most cities and towns’ overall collections in fines and forfeitures, including some larger cities.

by Jeremy Schwartz

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A Texas state appeals court on Thursday ordered the dismissal of a 2018 defamation lawsuit against ProPublica and the Houston Chronicle brought by famed Houston heart surgeon Dr. O.H. “Bud” Frazier, ruling that a 2018 investigation into the doctor was a “fair, true, and impartial account” of accusations against him.

Frazier was also ordered to pay the publications’ attorneys fees related to the appeal.

Frazier filed the suit in Harris County District Court, challenging a 2018 story and subsequent reporting that examined concerns with the doctor’s conduct, including that a hospital investigation had found that Frazier and his team implanted experimental heart pumps in patients who did not meet medical criteria to be included in clinical trials.

Frazier, a high profile heart transplant surgeon at Baylor St. Luke’s Medical Center and the Texas Heart Institute, claimed that the articles included errors and misleading statements “calculated to falsely portray Dr. Frazier as an inhumane physician.”

The suit also named the stories’ authors, Charles Ornstein of ProPublica and Mike Hixenbaugh, then of the Chronicle, as defendants.

The news outlets sought to dismiss the lawsuit under the 2011 Texas Citizens Participation Act, which allows for speedy dismissals of what the Texas Supreme Court has defined as “retaliatory lawsuits that seek to intimidate or silence (citizens) on matters of public concern” or “chill First Amendment rights.”

The appeals court decision potentially signals the close of a nearly six-year legal battle.

In 2018, Harris County District Judge Wesley Ward first denied the news outlets’ motion to dismiss under the TCPA, ruling that Frazier had shown enough evidence to establish his defamation claim. The news outlets appealed the ruling to the First District Court of Appeals in Houston, which determined in January 2020 that the trial court had failed to consider the news outlets’ evidence and arguments and sent the case back to the trial court. Frazier appealed the appeals court ruling to the Supreme Court of Texas, which denied his petition.

In March 2022, the district court once again denied the news outlets’ motion to dismiss under the TCPA. The publications filed a second appeal two months later, arguing Frazier had failed to establish the elements of his defamation claim.

This time, the appeals court definitively reversed the lower court’s decision and on Thursday ordered the trial court to dismiss the case, concluding that the news outlets “established by a preponderance of the evidence their defenses of substantial truth and nonactionable opinion.”

“This is a huge victory for journalism and the truth on an issue of immense public importance,” said Jeremy Kutner, ProPublica’s general counsel. “After six long years, the court found what was clear to every reader of this story. It was fair, accurate and backed up by a mountain of documentation and evidence. However important their contributions to society, pioneering leaders are not above scrutiny.”

Neither Frazier nor his attorneys immediately responded to a request for comment.

ProPublica was represented by Laura Prather and Catherine Robb of Haynes and Boone LLP.

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by Lexi Churchill and Jessica Priest

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues.

Last year, in an effort to bring greater transparency to local elections, the Texas Legislature mandated that school districts, municipalities and other jurisdictions post campaign finance reports online rather than stow them away in filing cabinets.

But many agencies appear to be violating the law that took effect in September.

ProPublica and The Texas Tribune examined 35 school districts that held trustee elections in November and found none that had posted all of the required disclosures online that show candidates’ fundraising and spending. (Two of the districts did not respond to questions that would allow us to determine whether they were missing these reports.) And the agency tasked with enforcing the rules for thousands of local jurisdictions does not have any staff dedicated to checking their websites for compliance.

“The public not having access to those records because they’re not turned in or not posted in a timely fashion means that the public can’t make an informed decision based on where that candidate’s financial support is coming from,” said Erin Zwiener, a Democratic state representative from Driftwood who has pushed for campaign finance reform.

The interest in more transparency in local elections is bipartisan. “The local level has an amazing amount of funding and activity going through their respective districts, whether it be a school district, the city councils and the counties,” said Republican Carl Tepper, the state representative from Lubbock who authored the bill.

Of all the local government offices now required to upload campaign finance information online, the newsrooms focused on school boards because of the growing push by hard-line conservatives to reshape the elected bodies and advance vouchers as an alternative to public schools. Over the past several years, school boards across the country have shifted from traditionally nonpartisan bodies to increasingly polarized ones grappling with politically charged issues like mask mandates, book bans and bathroom policies for transgender people.

“If candidates are being pushed and funded to fight a proxy culture war in our school districts, I hope that that information can at least be public and easily available and that we can know how frequently that’s happening in Texas,” Zwiener said in an interview.

ProPublica and the Tribune contacted each of the school districts to ask about the missing documents. Some districts said they were aware of the mandate but still had not complied. Among their explanations: They did not receive enough instructions about the implementation and their websites were undergoing changes. A spokesperson for Lago Vista Independent School District, outside Austin, said simply, “Unfortunately, with the multitude of legislative mandates following the 88th session, this one got by us.”

Most often, school leaders said they had not known about the new law and subsequently uploaded the reports. The vast majority of districts, however, were still missing filings on their website because they never received or lost required reports from at least one candidate, actions that violate other parts of the state’s election law.

The newsrooms also found a handful of instances in which candidates or school districts hid donor names and parts of addresses, even though the law doesn’t allow for those redactions.

Had the late filings been submitted in one of Texas’ statewide races, they would have been flagged by the Texas Ethics Commission, the agency tasked with enforcing the state election laws, and the campaigns would have been automatically fined. For each of the 5,000 elected officials and candidates running for state office each year, the agency sends notices about upcoming filing deadlines, penalizes late filers and then considers their subsequent requests to reduce those fees. The commission also compiles all of their campaign finance reports into one searchable online database going back decades.

The agency does not follow any of these steps for local candidates. Instead, it investigates only when it receives a complaint.

None of the districts that responded to our questions sent a complaint to the commission. (The Texas Ethics Commission does not require them to do so.)

Matthew Wilson, an associate professor of political science at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, said it is reasonable to cut districts some slack for now because it’s a new requirement. But over time, without effective enforcement, local agencies won’t feel any pressure to comply with the new law.

“It’s one thing to have a law, but if it’s a law for the violation of which no one ever gets punished, you’re going to have a low level of compliance,” he said. “The ball is really in the court of TEC to decide whether this law is going to have teeth.”

The new law applies to elected officials and candidates seeking local positions across the state’s 254 counties, more than 1,000 school districts and roughly 1,200 cities and towns. In the past, their campaign finance details were kept on handwritten forms that offices were required to keep on file for two years before destroying them. They now have to be maintained online for five years.

Of the districts that uploaded their records after being contacted by ProPublica and the Tribune, most candidates raised a few thousand dollars or less, though the newsrooms found a few who had raised at least $10,000 or had the support of political action committees. Voters did not have easy access to this information at the time of the elections, which was the law’s intent.

One candidate in West Texas, Joshua Guinn, raised more than $30,000 in his run for Midland ISD school board. During a public forum in October, a few weeks before the election, Guinn said his large fundraising haul was attributable to “family, friends, just people that believe in me.” His filings showed that he spent more than $20,000 on advertising and consulting services provided by CAZ Consulting, a firm that the Texas Observer has connected to a widespread effort to support far-right candidates. Guinn ultimately lost his race to the former board president.

A spokesperson for Midland ISD said the district aims to be compliant with all legislative requirements but that it did not receive a specific notification from TEC or state education regulators about the new law. Christopher Zook Jr., president of CAZ Consulting, said in an email, “All campaign finance reports should be easily accessible to the public. Publicly available finance reports allow for greater transparency in the political process for everyone.”

In a Houston-area school district, Aldine ISD, campaign finance reports were not posted online for seven of the 10 candidates seeking a position on the board. Once the newsrooms reached out, the district uploaded a report from incumbent William Randolph Bates Jr. It showed that he raised more than $30,000, including $4,000 from two PACs. But the school district said Bates and six other candidates did not turn in their mandated filings before the election. Bates won reelection.

Neither Guinn nor Bates responded to interview requests.

And until we asked, Princeton ISD, about 40 miles north of Dallas, did not post the campaign finance reports for any of the four candidates seeking two at-large positions on the school board in November. This made it more difficult for voters to know who was behind a mailer sent by the Collin Conservatives United PAC. The two-sided pamphlet contrasted incumbent school board President Cyndi Darland, whom it said “we can trust,” against another candidate, Starla Sharpe, whom it claimed will encourage a “woke agenda,” won’t stop critical race theory and “won’t get rid of sexually explicit materials that harm our children.”

Sharpe said in an interview with the news organizations that the mailer contained false statements about her and that Darland told her she had nothing to do with the mailer. But when the district posted Darland’s report following our inquiries, it revealed that she contributed to the PAC behind the mailer.

“I absolutely think this would have been important for voters to be aware of and to see the caliber of the individuals that you are voting for and the integrity they have,” Sharpe said.

Darland declined a phone interview and did not answer questions by email because she said she had been in a car wreck and was in pain and on medication. Laura Dawley, treasurer of the Collin Conservatives United PAC, declined to comment. Darland and Sharpe won the two open seats.

Political activity within local races like school boards has not been a major concern until the last few election cycles, according to Brendan Glavin, deputy research director at OpenSecrets, a nonprofit that collects state and federal campaign finance data. Glavin said it is somewhat common for states to have local candidates’ filings remain at the local level, given those races historically do not generate a lot of money and were not considered overtly political.

“This is an area where the disclosure law is lagging behind what is becoming the political reality,” Glavin said, as these races become higher profile and attract money from outside the community.

Tepper, the Lubbock representative, began last year’s legislative session with a far more ambitious proposal to create a searchable database for all filings. But he quickly abandoned the idea once TEC officials told him it would cost around $20 million to maintain — a fraction of the cost of the state’s leading priorities like its $148 million program to bus newly arriving migrants out of state. Tepper told the newsrooms he thought the estimate was “a little outlandish” but decided to take “the path of least resistance” with his online posting idea instead.

Later that session, Zwiener alternatively proposed to require all local candidates and officeholders who raise or spend more than $25,000 to send their reports to TEC, but the Legislature did not move forward with that idea either.

TEC Executive Director J.R. Johnson said Tepper’s initial proposal would have increased the agency’s workload from 5,000 filers currently to nearly 50,000 filers each year if just two candidates ran for every local office.

Johnson would not comment on whether the agency has enough funding to keep up with its current tasks but instead referred the news organizations to the commission’s reports to the Legislature, which detail its rapidly increasing workload, “persistent staffing shortages” and practically stagnant budget.

The commission wrote that campaign finance reports have been “growing dramatically,” with statewide candidates’ average contributions quadrupling from $5.6 million in 2018 to $25.7 million in 2022. The resulting reports are lengthy — one surpassed 100,000 pages — and “have been testing the limits of the TEC’s server hardware for years,” the agency wrote. Yet when the commission requested funding to help the system run smoother in 2022, lawmakers denied the request. Shortly after, the servers failed.

All other regulatory agencies in the state receive more funding than TEC, the office wrote in a report to the Legislature, including the Texas Racing Commission, which oversees horse and greyhound races. “We were unable to find any state that invested less in its ethics agency on a per capita basis,” the report said.

The Legislature did increase the agency’s budget by about $1.2 million last year, which Johnson said has helped prevent turnover.

Johnson said the commission has made “significant efforts” to ensure that local authorities know about the new law, such as sending notices and presenting at the annual secretary of state conference for local jurisdictions, but that it can take time for entities to become educated about an updated requirement.

Tepper said he hopes the lack of compliance was due to the districts not knowing about the updated requirement and not flouting the law. He said in an interview that he appreciated the newsrooms “calling around and putting some spotlight on this so maybe they’ll be informed now and can comply with the state law.”

Methodology

The newsrooms aimed to examine compliance among all of the districts with November 2023 trustee elections, the first races since the new law went into effect in September. We reached out to more than a dozen statewide election and education agencies and associations to locate a calendar with all school board races dates, but none could provide one. In the absence of an official source, the Tribune and ProPublica pieced together our own list of November races through media clips and contacted 35 school districts.

Of those, we did not find any that were in full compliance with the state’s election laws. Two districts did not respond to questions that would allow us to determine whether they followed the rules. They are Spring ISD in north Houston, and Pleasant Grove ISD in East Texas.

Of the 33 districts we found out of compliance with state election laws, 21 had at least some reports on file but had not uploaded them, which broke the new regulation established by House Bill 2626. At least 16 of those districts were missing at least one report, though typically multiple reports, that they never received from candidates. Most of these districts have since uploaded their missing reports, though two districts have still not done so: New Caney and Shepherd ISDs, north of Houston.

The 12 other districts said they either never got any filings from candidates or they lost the records that should have been posted online. The ethics commission told the newsrooms this is not technically a violation of HB 2626, but it breaks other election laws that require candidates to file certain reports and mandate that districts keep them on file.

Jeremy Schwartz and Dan Keemahill contributed research.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with WPLN/Nashville Public Radio. Sign up for Dispatches to get stories like this one as soon as they are published.

A bill that would strengthen oversight of Tennessee’s juvenile detention centers has failed, despite a concerted push for reform after multiple county-run facilities were found to be locking children alone in cells.

The bill was introduced in the state legislature in January after a WPLN and ProPublica investigation last year reported that seclusion was used as punishment for minor rule infractions like laughing during meals or talking during class. One facility, the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center in Knoxville, was particularly reliant on seclusion, in violation of state laws and standards that banned the practice as a form of discipline.

“If we can’t get behind independent oversight and transparency as a good thing in the juvenile justice system, there will never be meaningful accountability and our system can’t change for the better,” Zoe Jamail of Disability Rights Tennessee said. “So it is frustrating and disappointing.”

The oversight bill aimed to give an independent agency the power to require changes at facilities that violate state standards, effectively forcing Tennessee’s Department of Children’s Services to act.

Currently, the ombudsman at that agency, the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth, responds to family complaints about DCS but doesn’t have enforcement power. Under the bill, if a facility didn’t follow those recommendations, the department would have been required to suspend the site’s license or stop placing kids there until the violations are fixed.

It was sponsored by two prominent Republicans and one Democrat, and a version of the legislation had the department’s backing. It wouldn’t have cost the state any money, according to the bill’s fiscal note.

Usually in Tennessee, that would be a recipe for a bill to become a law. But the legislation was sent to what is called “summer study,” a maneuver that allows lawmakers to continue working on the legislation but is typically used to effectively kill a bill. Its sponsors and child welfare advocates are baffled as to why.

“I can’t think of a reason for not wanting oversight unless there’s something to hide,” Jamail said.

One of the first signs of trouble occurred when the bill was heard in a House subcommittee in late March. State Rep. Andrew Farmer, an East Tennessee Republican who was not involved in the bill’s creation, introduced an amendment that removed the robust oversight powers. That move boiled the bill down to little more than one sentence, requiring DCS to publish its inspection reports online.

Rep. Andrew Farmer, R-Sevierville, said he wanted to repeal a law that strictly limited the seclusion of children at juvenile detention centers. (George Walker IV/AP)

After the hearing, Farmer said he was unfamiliar with WPLN and ProPublica’s reporting on the Bean Center that bill sponsors said inspired the legislation. He said he opposed the original legislation because of how much state oversight it introduced, and he criticized the sponsors for not clearly explaining the reasons for the bill.

“I think there was a failure to communicate the issue that they seek to address and establish a reason why they went from a county-run facility in Knoxville to try to have this sort of intrusion all over the state,” Farmer said.

State Sen. Heidi Campbell, a Nashville Democrat and sponsor of the original bill, said she believes part of the reason the bill failed was the influence of Jason Crews, who runs privately operated juvenile detention and residential treatment centers in Tennessee. Campbell and others working on the bill said a lobbyist for Crews’ business spoke to them about removing privately run facilities from the bill. One amendment filed in the House would have done just that.

“It really does feel like this is about the lobbying influence that Jason Crews has in the legislature,” Campbell said.

Crews is the executive director of Middle Tennessee Juvenile Detention Center as well as Wayne Halfway House, a company that also operates residential treatment centers for kids in Tennessee and Florida.

WPLN and ProPublica reached out to Crews for comment. His spokesperson emailed a statement from Nicole Polk, the government affairs director with Wayne Halfway House.

Polk said the company had concerns about the bill giving regulatory power to an independent agency “without more extensive consideration about whether it’s a good idea and how such a step would affect accountability in the governance of youth corrections in Tennessee. The legislature clearly agrees with that concern.”

In addition to lobbying against the bill, Crews has donated to the campaigns of the lawmakers who sunk the bill’s chances. Rep. William Lamberth, a Republican from Middle Tennessee who sent the bill to “summer study,” has received $13,000 from Crews’ super PAC, Focus PAC, since 2021. Farmer received $4,500 from the PAC since 2021. One of Crews’ facilities, Mountain View Academy, is in Farmer’s district.

“Like many individuals and businesses, we participate in the electoral and policy arena,” Polk said. “We support strong leaders to serve our state, and do so through donations that are fully disclosed, within legal requirements.”

Lamberth did not respond to requests for comment. “No contribution I have accepted will ever influence my vote on a piece of legislation,” Farmer said in an emailed statement.

Farmer was one of the sponsors of the 2021 bill that limited the time children could be kept in seclusion in juvenile detention centers and put in place some of the state rules that the Bean Center was violating. Despite that, after that House hearing in March, he told WPLN that he thought that law should be repealed altogether, saying that in retrospect, he thinks facilities should have more discretion.

“Frankly, if it was up to me, I would reverse the seclusion law that we passed and be sure that youth that are violent, that attack guards, that attack other children, can be put into a place by themselves until they calm down,” Farmer said.

Richard Bean, superintendent of the center that bears his name, did not respond to requests for comment.

Research over the past decade has shown that isolating children doesn’t improve their behavior — if anything, it could worsen it. Solitary confinement can cause psychological impacts like depression, anxiety or psychosis, and young people are especially vulnerable to those effects. The majority of suicides inside juvenile correction facilities in the United States happen when a child is isolated.

State Sen. Kerry Roberts, a Republican from Middle Tennessee who chairs the government operations committee, was one of the reform bill’s sponsors. He said that in his years in the Senate, he has never seen a lawmaker who wasn’t involved in the original bill introduce an amendment that completely gutted it — let alone a member of his own party.

“Anytime you have a supermajority, you know, you’re going to have factions develop,” Roberts said. “That’s just part of the dynamic of where we are in Tennessee today.”

Roberts said he’s both surprised and disappointed that it got killed, and he doesn’t understand why.

But Roberts said the bill’s failure this year is not going to stop him from reforming the system.

“I’m just going to take the lemons and try and make some lemonade,” he said. “And we’ll see if we can’t come up with an even better, more robust inspection program than what we proposed.”

by Nicole Carr, ProPublica, and Mike Jordan, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Ryan Millsap, a powerful Atlanta movie executive who has relied on relationships with Black and Jewish leaders to advance his business endeavors, has issued an apology after an investigative report that exposed his racist and antisemitic messages was published by ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The apology comes as several influential government and entertainment figures acquainted with Millsap said they were disappointed by his derogatory rhetoric about “Fucking Black People” and “nasty Jews,” revealed in public records tied to an ongoing legal dispute with Millsap’s former attorney.

“Those comments were deplorable, and I don’t appreciate them,” said DeKalb County commissioner and CEO candidate Larry Johnson, who is Black.

Millsap, who is white, is a mainstay in Atlanta real estate, political and entertainment circles. He responded to the report with a statement issued three days after publication. He’d been made aware of the contents of the story weeks ahead of publication, but he did not respond to questions after journalists sent him the material that would be reported.

The messages, filed publicly as exhibits in two separate Fulton County Superior Court cases, contained racist and antisemitic comments made between Millsap and his girlfriend at the time, who was also an investor in his real estate business. In those messages, the couple complained about how Black people smell and how Jewish people do business. In a subsequent hearing, Millsap chalked up some of his rhetoric about Jewish people to “locker room” talk, according to transcripts.

“Unfortunately, in the course of this litigation, comments which I never intended to share publicly have come to light, and people I care about and who have put their trust in me have been hurt. I want to extend my sincere apologies to my dear friends, colleagues and associates in both the black and Jewish communities for any and all pain my words have caused,” Millsap wrote on Sunday.

“My sincere hope is that the bonds and friendships that we have forged speak far louder than some flippant, careless remarks. I intend to work privately with all of you to use this as an opportunity to have a healthy and authentic dialogue about race and culture, in a productive, not destructive, manner.”

In emails to ProPublica and the AJC that were cited in the story published last week, Millsap’s ex-girlfriend apologized for the texts and wrote: “I severed all personal and professional ties with Mr. Millsap years ago because our values, ethics, and beliefs did not align. As a passive investor in Blackhall, I was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, nor have I been party to any of the lawsuits involving Blackhall. I consistently encouraged Mr. Millsap to treat his investors and community supporters with fairness and respect.”

Todd “Speech” Thomas, a Grammy-winning artist and the front man for Atlanta hip-hop group Arrested Development, issued a blistering statement on Wednesday criticizing Millsap and his comments. Thomas was a guest on Millsap’s podcast last year.

“While I previously had a positive experience interacting with Millsap, the gravity of his words cannot be ignored or excused,” Thomas said. “His recent ‘apology’ rings hollow without concrete actions to address the harm caused. Mere words are not enough; we demand meaningful steps toward education, understanding, and genuine change.”

Millsap, the former owner of Blackhall Studios, has been celebrated for his commitment to diversity in the workplace.

In 2019, as he planned to expand his movie studio, he courted a South DeKalb Black community in his effort to get the approval of county commissioners like Johnson for a land swap. Millsap had promised the community $3.8 million in improvements — including trails and a public park — as a perk for the swap. He sold the studio in 2021, and the 40 acres of land that he acquired a year earlier (and still owns) is now part of a fierce environmental dispute tied to an area that will house the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — a $90 million police training facility that is under construction. (Critics call the project Cop City.)

Johnson, who was among the government officials who publicly supported the swap, said the proposal would not have gotten his vote had he known of Millsap’s messages.

Had Millsap’s texts been made public at the time he was pursuing the land swap, “he would have never gotten a chance to talk to me or anybody, with the community and myself — he would have been ran out of there,” Johnson said, adding. “It would have never gotten to this point. He talked about African Americans and our people, and you don’t do that.”

Johnson said Millsap presented an alternate public persona to the majority Black area as neighbors largely supported the land swap.

“We can’t go back in time on those things, but my goal is to use this as a learning opportunity to talk about how we have to combat that stuff,” Johnson said.

Millsap, in a written statement issued Wednesday, responded to Johnson’s comments and defended the land swap deal.

“I care about DeKalb County and its citizens and would hope Commissioner Johnson feels the same way,” he said. “The commissioners, including Commissioner Johnson, agreed at the time of the land swap that it was the best thing for the county, and they voted for it on that basis. That’s what good leaders should do, and that’s exactly what they did.”

DeKalb CEO Michael Thurmond, who is Black, said he was advised by the county attorney against speaking about the text messages because of pending litigation involving Millsap, his real estate company and the county.

One of those matters is a state Court of Appeals case in which environmentalists have sued Millsap and the county over the swap, claiming changes made by the Trust for Public Land and the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation to a deed agreement violated original terms that confirmed the land “shall be used in perpetuity as park property.”

It’s unclear what Millsap’s plans for the land are.

Millsap’s text messages have also caused a stir within the entertainment industry, where he allied himself with Black leaders and spoke publicly about the importance of the Black community’s contributions. Several people contacted by reporters said they didn’t want to speak publicly about such a discomforting subject.

Isaac Hayes III, founder of the Atlanta-based social media platform Fanbase and a record producer, was a guest on Millsap’s podcast in an episode posted in December 2022.

In an interview on Monday, Hayes said Millsap’s disparaging text messages were distasteful, but he’d be willing to talk with Millsap if he reached out.

“I wish him success in finding the pathway to, you know, dialogue — constructive dialogue — that results in those types of conversations for him in his life,” Hayes said. “I don’t speak about, you know, races of people in that fashion. It’s disappointing, but I wish him luck.”

by Sharon Lerner

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

When you bite into a piece of celery, there’s a fair chance that it will be coated with a thin film of a toxic pesticide called acephate.

The bug killer — also used on tomatoes, cranberries, Brussels sprouts and other fruits and vegetables — belongs to a class of compounds linked to autism, hyperactivity and reduced scores on intelligence tests in children.

But rather than banning the pesticide, as the European Union did more than 20 years ago, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed easing restrictions on acephate.

The federal agency’s assessment lays out a plan that would allow 10 times more acephate on food than is acceptable under the current limits. The proposal was based in large part on the results of a new battery of tests that are performed on disembodied cells rather than whole lab animals. After exposing groups of cells to the pesticide, the agency found “little to no evidence” that acephate and a chemical created when it breaks down in the body harm the developing brain, according to an August 2023 EPA document.

The EPA is moving ahead with the proposal despite multiple studies linking acephate to developmental problems in children and lab rats, and despite warnings from several scientific groups against using the new tests on cells to relax regulations, interviews and records reviewed by ProPublica show.

To create the new tests designed to measure the impact of chemicals on the growing brain, the EPA worked with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which comprises some of the world’s wealthiest democratic countries and conducts research on economic, social and scientific issues. The OECD has warned against using the tests to conclude a chemical does not interfere with the brain’s development.

A scientific advisory panel the EPA consulted found that, because of major limitations, the tests “may not be representative of many processes and mechanisms that could” harm the developing nervous system. California pesticide regulators have argued that the new tests are not yet reliable enough to discount results of the older animal tests. And the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, a second group of advisers handpicked by the EPA, also warned against using results of the nonanimal tests to dismiss concerns.

“It’s exactly what we recommended against,” Veena Singla, a member of the children’s committee who also teaches at Columbia University, said of the EPA’s acephate proposal. “Children’s development is exquisitely sensitive to toxicants. … It’s disappointing they’re not following the science.”

The EPA’s proposal, which could be finalized later this year, marks one of the first times the agency has recommended changing its legal safety threshold largely based on nonanimal tests designed to measure a chemical’s impact on the developing brain. And in March, the EPA released a draft assessment of another pesticide in the same class, malathion, that also proposes loosening restrictions based on similar tests.

The proposed relaxing of restrictions on both chemicals comes even as the Biden administration has been strengthening limits on several other environmental contaminants, including some closely related pesticides.

In response to questions from ProPublica, the EPA acknowledged that it “will need to continually build scientific confidence” in these new methods but said that the introduction of the nonanimal tests to predict the danger chemicals pose to the developing brain “has not been done in haste. Rather, a methodical, step-wise approach has been implemented over the course of more than a decade.”

The agency said its recent review of acephate included a thorough examination of a variety of scientific studies and that, even with its proposed changes, children and infants would still be protected.

The EPA expects to start accepting public comments on the acephate proposal in the coming months before it makes a final decision. The agency anticipates soliciting comments on malathion this summer.

Some environmental scientists strongly oppose loosening the restrictions on both acephate and malathion, arguing that the new tests are not reliable enough to capture all the hazards a chemical poses to the developing brain.

“It will put children at an increased risk of neurodevelopmental disorders like autism and ADHD that we already know are linked to this class of chemicals,” said Rashmi Joglekar, a toxicologist at the Program on Reproductive Health and the Environment at the University of California, San Francisco.

Health and environmental scientists are concerned about more than the direct impact of having potentially greater amounts of acephate and malathion on celery and other produce. They also worry that using the new tests as a basis for allowing more pesticides on crops will set a dangerous precedent for other brain-harming chemicals.

“I think the companies see this as a new way over a 10- or 20-year period to gradually lobby” the EPA “to allow higher levels of pesticides in food,” said Charles Benbrook, an agricultural economist who has monitored pesticide regulation for decades. “If they can convince regulators to not pay attention to animal studies, they have a very good chance of raising the allowable exposure levels.”

Industry Helped Fashion EPA’s Testing Strategy

Since its founding in 1970, the EPA has relied on studies of mice, rats, guinea pigs and other species to set exposure limits for chemicals. The lab animals serve as a proxy for humans. Scientists expose them to different doses of substances and watch to see what levels cause cancer, reproductive problems, irritation to the skin and eyes, or other conditions. Some tests look specifically at chemicals’ effects on the offspring of rats exposed during pregnancy, and some of those tests focus on the development of their brains and nervous systems.

But over the past decade, chemical manufacturers and animal rights advocates have argued for phasing out the tests on the grounds they are impractical and inhumane. The animal experiments are also expensive, and the pesticide industry, which by law shoulders the cost of testing its products, is among the biggest proponents of the change.

The EPA has allowed the chemical industry and animal rights groups to help fashion its testing strategy. Agency officials have co-authored articles and held workshops on the use of the cell-based tests to regulate chemicals alongside representatives of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals as well as Corteva Agriscience, BASF and Syngenta Crop Protection, companies that make pesticides regulated by the EPA.

The EPA said its scientists have been working to develop the nonanimal tests for decades with other government and scientific organizations, both nationally and internationally.

“It is absurd to describe those scientific efforts as an apparent conflict of interest,” the agency said in a statement.

The EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs has previously come under fire for its willingness to allow pesticides onto the market without required toxicity testing. In 2018, as The Intercept reported, staff members held a party to celebrate a milestone: The number of legally required tests the office had waived for pesticide companies had reached 1,000. A science adviser to the office at the time said the move spared companies more than $6 million in expenses.

While phasing out animal experiments would save money and animal lives, experiments involving collections of cells do not always accurately predict how entire organisms will respond to exposure to a toxic chemical. The new cell-based tests and computer techniques that are sometimes used with them can be reliable predictors of straightforward effects like eye or skin irritation. But they are not yet up to the task of modeling the complex, real-world learning disorders that have been linked to acephate and malathion, according to Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy organization.

(Photo illustration by Lauren Joseph/ProPublica. Source images by Getty and the Environmental Protection Agency)

The new tests can show whether a chemical can kill a brain cell. And they can show if a chemical affects how a brain cell connects with other brain cells, said Sass.

“But these tests can’t show that a kid is going to be able to sit through class and not go to the principal’s office,” she said.

While the cell-based tests may point to certain harms, they are likely to miss others, said Sass, who likens their use to fishing with a loose net. “You only know what you caught — the big stuff,” she said. “You don’t know about all the little stuff that got through.”

A 2023 study revealed the failure of the cell-based tests to detect certain problems. In it, scientists exposed brain cells to 28 chemicals known to interfere with the development of the nervous system. Although the tests were specifically designed to assess whether chemicals harm growing brains, they failed to clearly identify harm in one-third of the substances known to cause these very problems. Instead of registering as harmful, the test results on these established developmental neurotoxins were either borderline or negative.

Because of these potential blind spots and other uncertainties associated with the tests, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development has advised against interpreting results of the nonanimal tests as evidence that a chemical doesn’t damage the brain. Several scientific groups have recommended that the EPA do the same.

A federal advisory panel of scientists assembled to advise the EPA on pesticide-related issues published a 2020 report that identified numerous limitations and gaps in the nonanimal studies, finding that they “underestimated the complexity of nervous system development.”

In 2021, the Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee, a group the EPA created to provide advice on how to best protect children from environmental threats, warned the agency that, “due to important limitations,” the test results “cannot be used to rule-out a specific hazard.”

In comments to the EPA, California’s Department of Pesticide Regulation also cautioned the agency against using the tests to conclude that a chemical doesn’t cause specific harms. The California regulators emphasized that the traditional battery of animal tests was still necessary to understand complex outcomes like the effects on children’s developing brains.

“To abandon it at this time would be to abandon a critical support for health-protective decisions,” they wrote.

EPA Accused of Double Standard

As much as 12 million pounds of acephate were used on soybeans, Brussels sprouts and other crops in 2019, according to the most recent estimates from the U.S. Geological Survey. The federal agency estimates that up to 30% of celery, 35% of lettuce and 20% of cauliflower and peppers were grown with acephate. Malathion is used on crops such as strawberries, blueberries and asparagus. (The U.S. Department of Agriculture prohibits the use of most synthetic pesticides, including acephate and malathion, to grow and process products certified by the agency as organic.)

Acephate and malathion belong to a class of chemicals called organophosphates, which U.S. farmers have used for decades because they efficiently kill aphids, fire ants and other pests. But what makes the pesticides good bug killers — their ability to interfere with signals sent between nerve cells — also makes them dangerous to people. For years, there has been a scientific consensus that children are particularly vulnerable to the harms of pesticides, a recognition that led the EPA to strengthen restrictions on them. But with both acephate and malathion, the agency is now proposing to remove that extra layer of protection.

The EPA effectively banned another organophosphate pesticide, chlorpyrifos, in 2021, based in part on evidence linking it to ADHD, autism and reduced IQ in children. (In response to a lawsuit brought by a company that sells the pesticide and several agricultural groups, a court vacated the ban in December, allowing the resumed use of chlorpyrifos on certain crops, including cherries, strawberries and wheat.) While some health and farmworker groups are petitioning the EPA to ban all organophosphate pesticides, the agency is arguing that it can adequately protect children by limiting the amount farmers can use.

Several studies suggest that, even at currently allowable levels, acephate may already be causing learning disabilities in children exposed to it while in the uterus or in their first years of life. In 2017, a team of University of California, Berkeley researchers, partly funded by the EPA, found that children of Californians who, while pregnant, lived within 1 kilometer of where the pesticide was applied had lower IQ scores and worse verbal comprehension on average than children of people who lived further away. Two years later, a group of UCLA scientists reported that mothers who lived near areas where acephate was used during their pregnancies had children who were at an increased risk of autism with an intellectual disability.

The EPA considered this research when deciding to relax the limits on acephate use but stated that flaws and inconsistencies made these epidemiological studies “not compelling.” The agency also dismissed a rat study submitted to the EPA in 2005 in which the pups of mother rats exposed to higher levels of acephate were, on average, less likely to move than the pups of mothers exposed to lower levels. The EPA told ProPublica that “no conclusions could be drawn” from the experiment, citing the “high variability of the data” it produced. But some scientists outside the agency find that study a particularly worrisome indication of the pesticide’s potential to harm children.

In its proposals to increase the allowable amount of both acephate and malathion on food, the EPA also had to look past other potentially concerning test results. Some of the cell-based tests of acephate showed borderline results for interference with brain functions, while some of the tests of malathion clearly indicated specific problems, including interference with the connections between nerve cells and the growth of certain parts of nerve cells. Several scientists interviewed by ProPublica said that such results demand further investigation.

Some scientists see a double standard in the agency accepting the imperfect nonanimal tests while citing flaws in other research as reasons to dismiss it.

“They’re acknowledging limitations in epidemiology while at the same time not acknowledging the even greater limitations of using a clump of cells in a petri dish to try to model what’s happening in a really complex organism,” said Nathan Donley, a scientist at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy organization.

Asked about the criticism, an EPA spokesperson wrote in an email to ProPublica that the agency “does not believe there was a double standard applied.”

by Lizzie Presser

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Federal lawmakers introduced a legislative package on Tuesday that would expand heirs’ property owners’ access to disaster relief and provide assistance in clearing titles. Heirs’ property refers to land that has been passed down informally within families; without clear titles, owners can be ineligible for government aid and their land vulnerable to forced sales. Rep. Lizzie Fletcher, a Democrat from Texas, decided to introduce legislation after reading a ProPublica-New Yorker investigation on the legal and financial risks of holding land as heirs’ property.

More than a third of Black-owned land in the South is heirs’ property. The practice of conveying land without a will dates to Reconstruction, when many Black families did not have access to courts, and it continued through the Jim Crow era. The ProPublica-New Yorker story examined how heirs’ property owners can be locked out of federal assistance and compelled by courts to sell their land against their will.

The first of two bills, the HEIR Act of 2024, sponsored by Fletcher, along with Rep. Nikema Williams, a Democrat from Georgia, and Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, a Democrat from Missouri, proposes amending Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations to ensure that heirs’ property owners without a clear title can use alternate documentation to qualify for disaster aid. The language echoes a policy adopted by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in 2021, after a Washington Post analysis revealed a pattern of denying assistance to heirs’ property owners.

Fletcher noticed that HUD did not make similar changes. “When you look at the big picture data, it is really staggering to see the amount of lost generational wealth because of how this system operates,” she said. “The ProPublica article really brings to light what an incredible injustice this is and has been, and we need to be thinking creatively and holistically about how we can use the tools we do have to solve these problems.”

Nketiah Berko, an Equal Justice Works fellow, sponsored by the Rossotti Foundation, at the National Consumer Law Center, says that increasing heirs’ access to federal aid is critical. “When it comes to disasters, so many of the places that are most environmentally vulnerable are also areas that have histories of different types of property ownership — whether that’s uncleared title or communal homeownership,” he said. “It’s crucial that federal disaster relief programs recognize this and are tailored to the needs of these most vulnerable communities.”

A second bill, the HEIRS Act of 2024, sponsored by Williams and Rep. Byron Donalds, a Republican from Florida, along with Fletcher and Cleaver, proposes two programs to fund legal assistance for heirs’ property owners, who often cannot afford legal services to safeguard their ownership. The bill would authorize $300 million over 10 years for HUD to reward states that adopt or have adopted the Uniform Partition of Heirs Property Act; the law expands heirs’ rights when their ownership is challenged. These HUD grants could be used to help heirs’ property owners clear titles and cover associated fees. In addition, the bill would create a $10 million program for each of the next five years for HUD to fund eligible nonprofits that provide legal assistance to heirs’ property owners.

“This is really significant,” said Heather K. Way, director of the Housing Policy Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law. “More and more pro-bono legal programs have been popping up to help heirs’ property owners, but even if they have access to attorneys, there are fees and expenses associated with clearing title that can be a major impediment. This program would provide funding for those costs.”

Way also noted that HUD could make some of these proposed changes on its own by encouraging states to allow heirs’ property owners greater flexibility in qualifying for disaster aid, before federal legislation works its way through Congress.

In a statement, a HUD spokesperson wrote: “Strengthening the way HUD’s disaster recovery funds serve survivors is one of HUD’s highest legislative priorities.” The department made no comment on the specific bills.

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by Logan Jaffe

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James and Barbara Johnson flip through a book of their memories. They arrive at a photograph Mr. Johnson snapped as a surprise: a photograph of the long-married couple’s first kiss.

Even after all this time, Barbara Johnson quietly says to herself, “I don’t know how he did that.”

“Me neither,” James Johnson says with a laugh.

James Johnson kept this selfie of his and Barbara’s first kiss. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO. Original photograph by James Johnson.)

The Johnsons are the center of a short documentary ProPublica released last year. The documentary, “Uprooted,” is part of an investigative project reported by Brandi Kellam and Louis Hansen, both of the Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism at WHRO, in partnership with ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network and co-published by the Chronicle for Higher Education and Essence. The investigation examines a Black community’s decadeslong battle to hold on to its land as city officials wielded eminent domain to establish and expand Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.

Now in his 80s, James Johnson has spent decades chronicling through photographs the life of a neighborhood that for the past several decades he’s watched disappear. The Johnsons live in one of five remaining homes of what was once a flourishing middle-class Black community, with roots that extend to the late 1800s. James Johnson’s grandfather, in 1907, purchased slightly more than 30 acres of land in what’s called the Shoe Lane area.

Mother and daughter Ellen Williams Francis and Mannie Francis Johnson (Courtesy of James Johnson)

Eventually, the Shoe Lane community expanded from mostly a community of farmers and laborers to a growing middle-class community including dentists, teachers and a NASA engineer in 1960. This was during a time when racial segregation was a legal pillar of American society, and all-white communities, including the then-all-white Christopher Newport University, enjoyed systematized benefits not afforded to Black people.

The Johnsons’ home as they were building it in 1964 (Courtesy of James Johnson) Johnson and his son during the home’s construction in September 1964 (Courtesy of James Johnson)

As Brandi reported, the 110-acre Shoe Lane area was adjacent to one of the city of Newport News’ most affluent white neighborhoods. So, when the Johnsons made it known they intended to subdivide more of their 30 acres to help provide Black families with opportunities for homeownership, the all-white City Council perceived it as a threat. Like many localities in midcentury America, the Newport News City Council had weaponized urban renewal against Black people to maintain racial segregation and the illusion of white superiority.

Brandi found that in 1961, the city used eminent domain to “seize the core of the Shoe Lane area, including the Johnsons’ farmland, for a new public two-year college — a branch of the Colleges of William and Mary system.” That college eventually became Christopher Newport University.

The Johnsons raised three children in their Shoe Lane home. (Courtesy of James Johnson)

At the time, the university and City Council all but ignored the community’s protests. Instead, the narrative conveyed by the white newspaper was that the Black people of Shoe Lane were against the university because they were anti-education.

For a story that for so long had been told wrong, Brandi saw an opportunity for her reporting to get the story right.

Watch “Uprooted: What a Black Community Lost When a Virginia University Grew”

As bulldozers and trucks filed into Shoe Lane over various waves of university expansion, James Johnson turned to his camera to preserve what he could. His photographs became evidence Brandi relied on in her reporting. While investigative reporters often use Freedom of Information Act requests and government data to document the past, Johnson’s personal archive told the story of what happened to Shoe Lane better than the official records.

268 Prince Drew Road, built in 1972 and demolished in September 2010 (Courtesy of James Johnson) 63 N. Moores Lane demolition in late January 2005 (Courtesy of James Johnson) After homes are demolished, trucks haul away the debris. (Courtesy of James Johnson)

“I just started knocking on doors,” Brandi told me of how her reporting began two years ago. “The person who opened the door for me was Mrs. Johnson.”

When Brandi eventually met James Johnson, she sat with him for hours. She said she let him teach her what happened; she absorbed the history like a sponge.

“He just started opening up these notebooks,” recalled Brandi. “I almost fainted.”

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He had kept the original deeds to the land his grandfather bought. He printed out parcel data that was no longer publicly available. He had photographed the front of dozens of homes that no longer existed, writing on sticky notes captions that could only hint at the emotional weight they carried to a community as it was systematically dismantled.

“He collected this not because he was looking for someone to tell the story,” said Brandi. “He did it because he was deeply hurt by what happened to his community.”

What Johnson’s archive documented was, in one light, a story of loss. But, said Brandi, his documenting was also an act of love.

A wedding in the Johnsons’ backyard (Courtesy of James Johnson)

His photographs of his own family and of the community depict lifetimes of what the people of Shoe Lane had earned and experienced for themselves. Today, the Johnsons’ home — the one they built with their own hands — is only one of five remaining. The university’s updated site plan calls for acquiring the last houses in the neighborhood by 2030, Brandi reported.

Barbara and James Johnson sit in their living room in July. They helped build the home on family property almost 60 years ago. (Christopher Tyree/VCIJ at WHRO)

But, for the first time, the university is publicly reckoning with the damage it’s caused to the Shoe Lane area. In January, the university announced its launch of a joint task force with the city of Newport News to reexamine decades of records regarding the neighborhood’s destruction. It may also recommend possible redress for those uprooted families. That reckoning is because of Brandi’s reporting and the accountability lens she’s brought to the story of Shoe Lane. But, Brandi said, her work is building on James Johnson’s project of making sure people don’t forget about Shoe Lane.

The investigation has also prompted attention from Virginia lawmakers, who’ve approved a commission to examine universities’ displacement of Black communities. That commission would consider compensation for dislodged property owners and their descendants.

The 25-minute documentary, which was directed by Brandi and produced by ProPublica’s Lisa Riordan Seville, recently won first place in the documentary journalism category of the Pictures of the Year International Competition. You can read the first installment of Brandi’s investigation, “How a Virginia College Expanded by Uprooting a Black Neighborhood,” and her essay on why the destruction of Shoe Lane matters to her.

by ProPublica

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Citing ProPublica’s reporting on barriers to mental health care access for veterans, the chairman of the Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee, Jon Tester, called on VA Secretary Denis McDonough to increase the number of providers in rural parts of the country.

Tester sent a letter to McDonough this month raising concerns about mental health staffing shortages nationwide. In it, he referenced ProPublica’s investigation into a VA clinic in Chico, California, that went five years without a full-time, on-site psychiatrist and failed to have same-day appointments for patients in crisis. Two veterans who struggled to get treatment there killed their mothers during acute mental health episodes in January 2022.

“While I understand the Chico (clinic) now has several full-time mental health care providers and offers same-day appointments, I am concerned this was not an isolated issue considering VA’s shortage of mental health care providers,” Tester wrote.

Tester asked McDonough how many VA clinics currently lack in-person mental health providers and how many are equipped to facilitate telehealth appointments. He also inquired about how the VA ensures same-day mental health visits are available at all facilities.

“I commend the Department for all of its efforts to decrease veterans’ barriers to mental health care and bolster suicide prevention efforts,” he wrote. “Nevertheless, VA must continue to lead the effort to increase the number of mental health providers and ensure those providers are in locations where veterans need them most.”

In a statement to ProPublica, VA Press Secretary Terrence Hayes said the agency appreciated Tester’s letter and would respond directly.

Hayes noted the agency has several initiatives to increase capacity for mental health care, including an expansion of virtual services and a new team focused on growing the staffing pipeline. “One of our top priorities is to provide the world-class mental health care that Veterans deserve, whenever and wherever they need it,” he said.

ProPublica’s reporting grew out of an inquiry by the VA’s inspector general into one of the two Chico cases. The inspector general concluded the clinic had mismanaged that patient’s medications and failed to give her an appointment with a prescribing provider when she showed up at the clinic in crisis.

The patient, ProPublica learned, was a 27-year-old Navy veteran named Julia Larsen who had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and was experiencing symptoms of psychosis. When Larsen couldn’t get an appointment that day, she went home with her parents and fired a handgun inside their home. One of the bullets she discharged struck her mother in the thigh, killing her.

ProPublica’s reporting revealed that a second veteran who had been receiving mental health treatment at the clinic also shot his mother that same week. Andrew Iles had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder and believed his relatives were conspiring against him. The day after Larsen’s shooting, he called the Chico clinic to speak with a mental health doctor. Instead, he was put through to a pharmacist. He killed his mother the next afternoon. Both Larsen and Iles have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to a state-run psychiatric hospital.

ProPublica found evidence of systemic staffing issues in the clinic’s mental health department. The VA had tried to plug the holes with telehealth providers, but several had quit or stopped seeing Chico patients. Employees begged regional leaders for more personnel and resources, they told ProPublica. One said she warned her colleagues, “We are going to kill someone.”

ProPublica also found failures in mental health care at VA clinics across the country. At least 16 veterans who received substandard care since 2019 killed either themselves or other people, a review of records revealed.

After ProPublica’s investigation was published in early January, McDonough traveled to Chico and promised to increase staffing in the clinic’s mental health unit. “We have a very fast-growing veteran population here in Chico,” he told a local reporter. “We have to make sure that we are growing commensurate with that population so that they can get the timely access to care and the timely access to benefits that they have earned.”

Tester’s letter raised continued concerns. He pointed to a December 2023 report from the VA that found the number of outpatient mental health encounters or treatment visits ballooned from 11.4 million in 2008 to 21.8 million in 2019 and that staffing shortages have persisted. Tester also noted in-person mental health services tend to be clustered at large VA medical centers in urban areas, while nearly a third of veterans enrolled in VA health care live in rural areas.

In rural regions, Tester wrote, “losing just one or two providers can have a massive impact on essential access to mental health care and once those providers are gone, it can take years to fill their vacancies and even longer to encourage those patients to return to care.”

Tester acknowledged the VA’s recent progress in improving access to mental health services. But he urged McDonough to press forward.

“More needs to be done,” he wrote, “specifically in rural areas, to keep pace with increased demand and prevent gaps in care that can have dire impacts on veterans and their families.”

by Mark Olalde, ProPublica, and Nick Bowlin, Capital & Main

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For the first time in more than 60 years, the Bureau of Land Management will force oil and gas companies to set aside more money to guarantee they plug old wells, preventing them from leaking oil, brine and toxic or climate-warming gasses.

The rule, finalized this month, comes at a critical time. Money previously set aside to clean up wells on federal land would have covered the cost of fewer than 1 out of 100, according to the government’s own estimates, and the vast majority of the country’s wells sit inactive or barely producing, meaning they’ll soon need to be plugged.

But the federal agency’s work falls short of protecting taxpayers from the oil industry’s cleanup costs, according to a ProPublica and Capital & Main review of contracts or other cost estimates at tens of thousands of wells across the country. While the updated rule will shrink the gap between companies’ financial guarantees to plug wells, known as bonds, and the cost of the work, it still leaves a significant shortfall.

One math error alone leaves taxpayers on the hook for roughly $400 million more than they should be. A Bureau of Land Management employee’s arithmetic mistake yielded an incorrect average cleanup cost for wells that the agency has plugged, largely at taxpayer expense. That artificially low cost estimate became the foundation of the new bonding requirements.

When ProPublica and Capital & Main pointed out the error in December, and that it could potentially cost taxpayers — and save oil companies — hundreds of millions of dollars when multiplied across the many thousands of wells the new rule would touch, the agency downplayed the miscalculation.

A spokesperson said the bureau “recognized the issues,” but they weren’t “significant enough” to correct. The proposed bond amounts are minimums, which “may be adjusted” through a review every five years. Staff can then demand companies set aside more money, the spokesperson said.

But over the most recent five-year period, oil companies ignored the Bureau of Land Management’s demands to increase their bonds more than 40% of the time, a ProPublica and Capital & Main review of agency data found. The final rule did not change how these reviews are carried out or enforced.

Evidence abounds of regulators’ past failures to hold the industry to account for cleanup: hundreds of thousands — potentially millions — of so-called orphan wells that companies have walked away from and left to the government to plug. Environmentalists, researchers and some politicians worry the window is closing to fix the problem while the industry is still profitable and there’s political momentum.

Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, along with environmental groups and taxpayer advocates, heralded the changes. “These reforms will help safeguard the health of our public lands and nearby communities for generations to come,” Haaland said. The Wilderness Society called the rule a “big step forward for the woefully outdated oil and gas program,” while the Sierra Club said it would help in “limiting harmful impacts to lands, wildlife and community health.”

Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado Law School professor who studies natural resources, agreed that the changes are an improvement over what was there before, “but it does not go far enough.” A ProPublica and Capital & Main investigation found that the country faces a shortfall well into the tens of billions of dollars between the cost to plug wells and the money available to do so. Unaddressed, those costs could be passed on to taxpayers.

“We have too many abandoned oil and gas wells that were not adequately bonded,” Squillace said.

Bad Math at the Bureau of Land Management

The Bureau of Land Management oversees an estimated 30% of the country’s mineral wealth, including oil and gas, but its oil bonding rules hadn’t been updated since they were written in 1951 and 1960, not even to account for inflation.

A 2019 Government Accountability Office report found that, as a result, bonds were insufficient to cover the cleanup costs of 99.5% of wells on federal land. (The bureau never fulfilled a public records request filed in May 2023 seeking updated details on bonds or a related request filed in September 2019.)

The Biden administration attempted to rectify bonding issues via the Inflation Reduction Act, but the Senate parliamentarian stripped reform provisions from the bill, saying they were not germane. The executive branch then launched a process to rewrite administrative rules that apply to the nearly 90,000 wells on federal public land, where cleanup costs vary widely depending on the depth and condition of the well, among other factors.

Republicans unsuccessfully attacked that process, with the House of Representatives in March passing a bill sponsored by Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert to stop the rule and bar the agency from ever completing similar regulatory updates. It was not passed by the Senate.

The Bureau of Land Management published its final rule this month. It increased from $10,000 to $150,000 the minimum bond required to cover a group of wells, called a lease, and from $25,000 to $500,000 the minimum to cover all of a company’s wells in a state. The rule also requires the amounts to be adjusted every decade to account for inflation.

Bureau of Land Management research found differing costs to plug and reclaim a typical orphan oil or gas well. The agency used the lower estimate in determining how much additional money to require companies set aside in bonds. (Bureau of Land Management)

The agency based the required bond amounts on the cost to plug a typical orphan well, which it estimated to be $71,000. It drew from a narrow sample — 22 wells the agency recently paid to plug in three states — contending that was “a sufficient representation of wells to support the rulemaking.”

But the agency acknowledged higher per-well cleanup costs elsewhere in its own research, stating that it expects to spend between $112,500 and $180,000 to plug each orphan well in the future. The agency did not explain why it appears to contradict itself.

Adding to skepticism over the agency’s calculations, three wells included in the agency’s sample cost only $500 each to plug.

That figure is “hard to imagine,” said Chris McCullough, an engineer who previously managed complex plugging projects for California. At one site McCullough helped plug, two wells were leaking gas into a densely populated neighborhood a mile from Dodger Stadium. His crew spent $1.2 million overall to seal the wells, move infrastructure and set up a shuttle service for residents while the job was in progress.

Meanwhile, Bureau of Land Management records show that a single well in Alaska, for example, recently cost the government more than $13 million to plug. This project, however, was not included in the agency’s calculation. (An agency spokesperson said the well was “not a useful comparison” because plugging wells in Alaska includes costs that would be unusual at orphan wells in the Lower 48.)

The agency’s decision to factor in low-cost outliers while eschewing the most expensive sites ignores the reality that plugging wells brings unexpected challenges, according to geologist Dan Dudak, who also oversaw cleanup work for California and now owns an environmental consulting firm alongside McCullough. Doing such work in Alaska, Dudak explained, requires setting up “small, mobile, self-contained towns” to support “the personnel and equipment necessary to plug a single well.”

In the Lower 48, plugging costs are also high. Across Indian Country, for example, it would cost an average of more than $82,000 to plug a typical well, not counting the millions of additional dollars needed to first find the wells and study what sort of cleanup is needed, according to Interior Department data published in 2023. The department also allocated $150 million to plug roughly 600 polluting or dangerous orphan wells elsewhere on federal land — $250,000 per well.

Even more wells are plugged by states’ oil agencies, which recently offered a glimpse into what experts consider realistic plugging costs in their applications for federal funds to support that work. Alaska, California, New Mexico, North Dakota and West Virginia regulators all told the Interior Department that it takes more than $150,000 to plug a typical orphan well and address pollution around it.

Energy finance think tank Carbon Tracker Initiative in April published a report analyzing the impact the federal agency’s new bonding levels would have in Wyoming’s Big Horn Basin. The study, authored by petroleum reservoir engineer Dwayne Purvis, found that, while the rule would require drillers to set aside millions of dollars in additional bonds, it would still only be enough to cover 3% of the projected cleanup cost.

“Despite the progress in the new rules,” Purvis said after reviewing the final version, “I’m convinced that the situation merits much more financial assurance in one form or another than this change provides.”

(Illustration by Peter Arkle, special to ProPublica) Cracks in the System’s Foundation

While the Bureau of Land Management’s updated rule focused on how much money should be set aside to clean up wells, it ignored another looming threat: cracks in the key financial tool oil companies use as bonds.

In public comments on the rule, both environmental groups and oil industry representatives asked it to address the shriveling market for surety policies, which are the most common type of oil cleanup bond and are similar to insurance policies in that a third party guarantees wells are plugged.

The bureau did nothing to mitigate that risk in the final rule. As evidence that bonds are secure, the agency instead pointed to a Small Business Administration program that helps small oil companies obtain surety bonds if they aren’t financially strong enough to purchase such policies from the market.

Meanwhile, many insurers are already declining to provide surety bonds to oil and gas companies or are requiring unobtainable levels of collateral as drillers become a riskier bet, surety brokers in three oil-producing states and state regulators in several others confirmed to ProPublica and Capital & Main.

Trevor Gilstrap, senior vice president of AssuredPartners, an insurance brokerage firm, called the surety market “so stinking bad right now.” Surety providers, he said, went from asking oil companies for as little as no collateral when underwriting a bond a decade ago to between 50% and 100% collateral now.

“Throughout my more than a decade in the insurance industry, with a strong focus on placing insurance and bond programs for oil and gas companies, I have never encountered a more challenging surety market,” he wrote in a letter commenting on oil bonds in New Mexico.

Insurance providers’ shrinking interest is all the more reason to require sufficient bonds now before oil companies walk away from their wells, researchers and activists say.

“Challenges in the oil and gas surety market should be taken as a giant flashing alarm for the financial health of the oil and gas industry itself,” said Andrew Forkes-Gudmundson, who works on bonding reform with environmental group Earthworks. The government must take this moment seriously, he added, otherwise “they and the taxpayers will be left holding the bag.”

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by Brett Murphy

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Israel’s leaders are fiercely pushing back against U.S. plans to withhold American assistance from an Israeli unit accused of human rights abuses.

Axios and Israeli news outlets reported over the weekend that Secretary of State Antony Blinken intends to ban U.S. support to Israel’s Netzah Yehuda unit, the country’s all-male, ultra-Orthodox battalion at the center of several controversies in the West Bank that go back years. Netzah Yehuda has been repeatedly accused of shooting and assaulting civilians, including in a 2022 case in which several commanders handcuffed, gagged and left for dead an elderly Palestinian-American man in Israel’s West Bank.

“Sanctions must not be imposed on the Israel Defense Forces!” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. “The intention to impose a sanction on a unit in the IDF is the height of absurdity and a moral low.” Blinken told reporters traveling with him in Europe on Saturday that he’ll make an official announcement about his decision in the coming days.

The public dispute between Israel and the United States follows a ProPublica article Wednesday that revealed Blinken has failed to act for months after a special State Department panel recommended that he disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. assistance after reviewing allegations that they had committed flagrant violations, including extrajudicial killings and rape.

Until now, the State Department has never disqualified an Israeli military unit from receiving aid, which would make Blinken’s decision a significant shift in U.S. foreign policy. “This is a very important law,” he told reporters over the weekend, “and it’s one that we apply across the board.”

Neither Blinken nor department spokespersons have addressed the reason for the delay since the forum’s first recommendation that he take action, which was sent to Blinken in December, according to someone familiar with the memo. “This process is one that demands a careful and full review,” a State Department spokesperson told ProPublica last week.

Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid and war cabinet member Benny Gantz are pressing the U.S. to reverse course, as well. Gantz reportedly spoke with Blinken personally on Sunday and asked him to reconsider.

On Saturday, the House voted 366-58 to approve an additional $26 billion in aid to Israel after months of delay. The Senate will likely review the legislation, a package that includes aid to Ukraine as well, early next week before sending it to President Joe Biden for his signature.

After the disclosure last week that Blinken had been urged by his own agency to impose penalties, human rights and Arab groups pushed for results. On Thursday, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., told ProPublica he was also seeking answers from the State Department. “This report that the administration is sitting on its hands in the face of known violations is deeply troubling and, if true, would undermine the credibility of America’s commitment to applying our human rights laws in a uniform and unbiased manner,” Van Hollen said in a statement.

The State Department panel that originally made the recommendations is known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. The panel, made up of Middle East and human rights experts, is named for former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chief author of 1997 laws that require the U.S. to cut off American-financed arms and training to any foreign military or law enforcement units that are credibly accused of flagrant human rights violations. Unlike individual sanctions that are up to the president’s discretion, implementing the Leahy Laws is supposed to be a requirement.

A State Department spokesperson declined to comment on the status of the other cases involving possible wrongdoing by Israeli units or confirm the substance of Blinken’s upcoming announcement. The Israeli outlet Haaretz also reported on Saturday that Netzah Yehuda is the unit he intends to ban from assistance.

The Israeli military said it has not yet been informed of Blinken’s decision about Netzah Yehuda, which is currently operating in Gaza amid the government’s campaign to eradicate Hamas following the terrorist attacks on Oct. 7. “The IDF is not aware of the issue,” a military spokesperson said, according to Reuters. “If a decision is made on the matter it will be reviewed.” The Israeli government has repeatedly argued that it has its own independent justice system in place to hold accountable those responsible for human rights abuses.

“This is a welcome first step, albeit very, very late,” said Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights and a former participant in the Israeli vetting forum. “There are dozens more Israeli security force units that have committed gross violations of human rights and should not be receiving US security assistance.”

It’s not clear if Netzah Yehudah is currently receiving security assistance from the U.S., other Middle East experts noted. Some said Blinken’s determination, while important symbolically, should have been made previously and without having to clear so many of the bureaucratic hurdles that do not apply to other countries. Critics have long assailed what they view as a double standard for Israel, which receives billions more in U.S. military financing than any other country.

“We are sending the IDF weapons on a daily basis for what are clear [human rights violations] in Gaza,” said Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and a member of the vetting forum. “It’s the impression of action without any actual impact.”

Do you have any information about American assistance to countries accused of human rights violations? Contact Brett Murphy at brett.murphy@propublica.org or by Signal at 508-523-5195.

by Vianna Davila and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Davis Winkie, Military Times

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This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans, and with Military Times, an independent news organization reporting on issues important to the U.S. military. Sign up for newsletters from The Texas Tribune and Military Times.

The U.S. Army, the country’s largest military branch, will no longer allow military commanders to decide on their own whether soldiers accused of certain serious crimes can leave the service rather than go on trial.

The decision comes one year after ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and Military Times published an investigation exposing how hundreds of soldiers charged with violent crimes were administratively discharged instead of facing a court martial.

Under the new rule, which goes into effect Saturday, military commanders will no longer have the sole authority to grant a soldier’s request for what is known as a discharge in lieu of court martial, or Chapter 10, in certain cases. Instead, the newly created Office of Special Trial Counsel, a group of military attorneys who specialize in handling cases involving violent crimes, must also approve the decision. Without the attorneys’ approval, charges against a soldier can’t be dismissed.

The Office of Special Trial Counsel will have the final say, the Army told the news organizations.

The new rule will apply only to cases that fall under the purview of the Office of Special Trial Counsel, including sexual assault, domestic violence, child abuse, kidnapping and murder. In 2021, Congress authorized creation of the new legal office — one for each military branch except the U.S. Coast Guard — in response to yearslong pressure to change how the military responds to violent crimes, specifically sexual assault, and reduce commanders’ control over that process. As of December, attorneys with this special office, and not commanders, now decide whether to prosecute cases related to those serious offenses.

Army officials told the news organizations that the change in discharge authority was made in response to the creation of the Office of Special Trial Counsel.

As far back as 1978, a federal watchdog agency called for the U.S. Department of Defense to end its policy of allowing service members accused of crimes to leave the military to avoid going to court. Armed forces leaders continued the practice anyway.

Last year, ProPublica, the Tribune and Military Times found that more than half of the 900 soldiers who were allowed to leave the Army in the previous decade rather than go to trial had been accused of violent crimes, including sexual assault and domestic violence, according to an analysis of roughly 8,000 Army courts-martial cases that reached arraignment. These soldiers had to acknowledge that they committed an offense that could be punishable under military law but did not have to admit guilt to a specific crime or face any other consequences that can come with a conviction, like registering as a sex offender.

The Army did not dispute the news organizations’ findings that the discharges in lieu of trial, also known as separations, were increasingly being used for violent crimes. An Army official said separations are a good alternative if commanders believe wrongdoing occurred but don’t have the evidence for a conviction, or if a victim prefers not to pursue a case.

Military law experts contacted by the news organizations called the Army’s change a step in the right direction.

“It’s good to see the Army has closed the loophole,” said former Air Force chief prosecutor Col. Don Christensen, who is now in private practice.

However, the Office of Special Trial Counsel’s decisions are not absolute. If the attorneys want to drop a charge, the commander still has the option to impose a range of other administrative punishments, Army officials said.

Christensen said he believes commanders should be removed from the judicial process entirely, a shift he said that the military has continued to fight. Commanders often have little to no legal experience. The military has long maintained that commanders are an important part of its justice system.

“They just can’t break away from commanders making these decisions,” said Christensen, who’s been a vocal critic of commanders’ outsize role in the military justice system. “They’re too wedded to that process.”

The Army told the newsrooms that additional changes to DOD and Army policy would be required to remove commanders entirely and instead give the Office of Special Trial Counsel full authority over separations in lieu of trial.

The news organizations reached out to several military branches to determine how the creation of the Office of Special Trial Counsel will affect their discharge processes. The U.S. Navy has taken steps similar to the Army’s. In the U.S. Air Force, the Office of Special Trial Counsel now makes recommendations in cases involving officers, and the branch is in the process of changing the rules for enlisted members. The U.S. Marines confirmed to the news organizations that it has not yet changed its discharge system.

by Connor Goodwin

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With record-setting blazes becoming more and more common, the demands placed on wildland firefighters are greater than ever. Already this year, the Smokehouse Creek Fire, which broke out in the Texas Panhandle in February, has become the second-largest wildfire in U.S. history, burning nearly 1.1 million acres. Last year, a relatively quiet fire season, saw the Lahaina fire on Maui, Hawaii’s largest-ever wildfire and one of the deadliest on record, with at least 100 fatalities. The previous year, New Mexico experienced its biggest and second-biggest fires simultaneously — the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire in the northern half of the state and the Black Fire down south.

But at this crucial hour, America’s last line of defense against fires is fraying. A recent ProPublica investigation found that the Forest Service is losing wildland firefighters, suffering an attrition rate of 45% among its permanent employees in the past three years. The investigation spotlighted the challenges that wildland firefighters face: weeklong stretches away from family, a bureaucracy indifferent to physical and mental health concerns and a byzantine pay structure that incentivizes risk.

When asked about the attrition, a Forest Service spokesperson wrote, “It is accurate to say that the U.S. Forest Service has lost firefighters to better paying jobs,” adding that the dynamic “is more pronounced in specific regions and states.”

For the fire-prone West, the stakes could not be higher. In 2022, the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire began when a federal prescribed burn escaped and merged with the smoldering remnants of another controlled burn to become New Mexico’s biggest-ever wildfire. ProPublica and its Local Reporting Network partner Source New Mexico spent more than a year reporting “The Long Burn” series, which chronicled the slow recovery from the fire. The reporting revealed that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had only paid out 1% of the $4 billion fund to compensate victims seven months after Congress approved it and that the agency had provided little temporary housing for survivors. The reporting also spotlighted ongoing lawsuits victims filed against FEMA to gain compensation for noneconomic damages and survivors’ hard-earned lessons learned from navigating disaster aid.

The U.S. Forest Service has said the wildfire prompted the agency to examine how to do its work more safely. FEMA officials have said they moved as quickly as possible to set up a claims office to pay for damages, a mission quite different from what it normally does, which is to provide short-term disaster aid. As of April 8, FEMA had paid out about 12% of the $4 billion fund.

At a recent virtual event in partnership with Source New Mexico and Outside Magazine, ProPublica convened a roundtable featuring the reporters and their sources to discuss these investigations. The first half of the hourlong discussion outlined the factors contributing to the exodus of firefighters from the Forest Service and what could be done to stem it. The second part examined the devastating aftermath of the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire, the grinding machinery of recovery under FEMA and the state of rebuilding efforts. Speakers included:

• Kit Rachils, senior editor at ProPublica
• Ben Elkind, wildland firefighter with the U.S. Forest Service
• George Broyles, former wildland firefighter and public information officer, who spearheaded the Forest Service’s research into the physiological impacts of wildfire smoke from 2008 to 2014
• Pat Lohmann, reporter for Source New Mexico
• Yolanda Cruz, New Mexico resident affected by the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon fire
• Antonia Roybal-Mack, founder and managing partner of Roybal-Mack & Cordova PC and an attorney representing many New Mexico families affected by the fires

This interview, based on that event, has been edited for clarity and concision.

More Fires, Fewer Firefighters

Kit Rachlis: Ben, can you describe the challenges you face as you enter your 17th season fighting fires?

Ben Elkind: This year I took a job that’s three hours away from where I’ve been working for the last 10 years. The first thing I think about is, I’ve got a family in Redmond, Oregon, and we’re lucky we don’t own a house there, because now I’ve got to move. Just a few years ago, the Forest Service had a program where they would have bought your house and helped you with moving costs. Child care is difficult. One of the reasons we’re moving is so my mom can help out with child care.

Rachlis: What are the health risks of fighting wildfires? And what accounts for the Forest Service’s extraordinarily slow response to those concerns?

George Broyles: Their slowness to research dates back to 1989, when the National Wildfire Coordinating Group recommended that research needed to be done. Those experts understood there is a concern for cancer and respiratory disease for men and women like Ben who spent their career in smoke. I’m a proponent of research, but to a large degree, we’re past the point of needing research. It’s absolutely clear that wildland firefighting is a cancer-causing occupation.

Rachlis: What changes would you like to see in the Forest Service?

Broyles: I think they really need to be transparent with their employees. Exposure to noise is another topic I spent years researching, and it’s extremely hazardous. It causes hearing loss. It causes mental decomposition. It literally makes it harder to comprehend speech and think clearly, which is critical when you’re in that environment. The law is very clear on what employers have to do when folks are exposed to noise.

The agency had a small publication put out a few years ago, talking to people who wanted to become firefighters about what the risks are, but the word “cancer” was not in that. The term “noise-induced hearing loss” was not in there. These are really critical health issues that our firefighters face on a daily basis, and the agency continues to bury its head in the sand. I’ve had cancer, and I’ve got hearing loss. The young men and women coming in absolutely need to know what they’re facing. The agency has to say, “This is what we’re going to do to protect you, because when you retire, we want you to be healthier.”

Elkind: The way that we pay people with hazard pay is probably one of my top issues. The way the system works is: You’re actively incentivized to take on more risk to increase your pay for the day. You may have a lifelong illness — cancer, hearing issues — all these things you don’t get hazard pay for, even though it was from the work you did. When you retire, your hazard pay doesn’t count for your retirement pension. Also, your hazard pay doesn’t count for your worker’s compensation. It’s this pretty significant part of our income we rely on. People are getting 2,000 hours of hazard pay a year, and it’s 25% of your base pay. I think the incentives that we put in front of firefighters really need to be looked at in a holistic way, because I don’t think we’ve looked at how we’re paying people in a long, long time.

Watch the Virtual Event When a Controlled Burn Becomes a Wildfire

Rachlis: Through its Local Reporting Network, ProPublica worked with Source New Mexico to examine the grinding machinery of recovery under FEMA. Pat, could you provide some context about the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire and summarize the aftermath?

Pat Lohmann: New Mexico was the national epicenter for wildfire throughout the summer of 2022, where we had not only the biggest wildfire in our history, but the second biggest in southern New Mexico, called the Black Fire. What makes the Hermits Peak and the Calf Canyon fire different from the other 20 that were burning simultaneously in New Mexico is that both of them were the result of botched prescribed burns, ignited by the Forest Service on federal land. Ultimately those two fires merged and became what we know as the Hermits Peak-Calf Canyon Fire, which, over the course of several months, burned more than 530 square miles of land in a section of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, taking with it several hundred homes and acres of trees on federal and private land.

In late 2022, Congress approved nearly $4 billion to fully compensate victims of this fire. Beginning in January of last year, the question became: When the government makes a mistake this massive, what is it going to do to fully compensate the victims of that mistake? That was the question that undergirds most of our reporting, from examining the Stafford Act programs, which are the way FEMA handles every disaster that occurs, to the establishment of the claims office and this $4 billion fund.

Rachlis: Yolanda, can you tell us about the losses you and your family have endured in the fire and the status of your claims?

Yolanda Cruz: My family and I have 10 acres of property between Sapello and Rociada, and the fire crossed over the entire 10 acres. We were very fortunate that it did not take our home. The high-severity burn came right up to where we had raked and watered. We did lose about half of the trees on the property as well as a lot of personal items — vehicles and other items in our yard. My parents live in Las Vegas, New Mexico, and they had to leave because of medical reasons. So their losses were more along the lines of smoke damage and evacuation.

I have a few proofs of loss with FEMA right now. I have received a settlement offer on the smaller claim, and I have not heard anything on the other ones. The larger one was lost by FEMA, and I found that out about a week ago. Then on my parents’ claims, I was able to help them get the one settled for their evacuation, but it did take about nine months.

Rachlis: Antonia, as the attorney for many of those families, can you describe how FEMA has handled this, or not handled this, and what you’re trying to do to rectify the situation?

Antonia Roybal-Mack: FEMA is not set up to handle large volumes of claims. FEMA does not have the legal resources, the experts or the personnel to do this. There are companies around the country that could come in and set up a large claims process like this, and FEMA has refused to do that. What we’re trying to do is get transparency for the families, get speed and make sure that families receive 100% of what they lost, because this was the fault of the federal government. I represent hundreds of families, and we just want FEMA to do their job and get people paid and get people back in homes with as little litigation as necessary.

Rachlis: Yolanda, it’s been nearly two years since the fire. What do you and your neighbors need the most right now?

Cruz: We need this to be done, so we can move forward with our lives. There are still many people who have not been able to rebuild. As I’ve said, we were very fortunate that our home was still there. But we did have substantial damage to our well, to our septic system, to our road. There’s been so much anger and mistrust, but also a lack of resources. There are people who’ve had to relocate, who’ve been displaced, and the longer this takes to get settled, the longer it takes for people to heal and move forward.

Rachlis: What lessons are to be taken away from these experiences?

Roybal-Mack: I think what we learned is that rural America is not prepared for disaster. What we also learned is that on a national level, FEMA, the agency that we think is going to show up and help when there’s a disaster, is not well prepared to do so. I think as a country, we really need to look at the role of FEMA and put resources in our Department of Homeland Security. I think governments need good emergency management plans that are updated annually, and people need to just really be prepared for disaster for themselves and for their families, because FEMA is not up to the task.

Cruz: When President Biden visited the area and said everyone would be compensated and we heard that as well from our elected officials, the private philanthropy dollars began to slow down, because everyone thought the government had this. When that didn’t happen, the local community continued to care for the people who are impacted. Now things finally seem to be moving slowly with FEMA, but it’s not enough. There is so much bureaucracy and red tape. It shouldn’t take so long. You go through a “navigator” who goes through their supervisors, who go through three or four levels up and then come three or four levels down. In that process, paperwork gets lost, people are asked to do things over and over again. And a lot of people are just giving up with the whole process. The government just needs to figure out a better way to get resources on the ground.

After publication of the wildland firefighters story, the reporter and ProPublica learned that Ben Elkind is a nephew of staff reporter Peter Elkind. Peter Elkind had no involvement in the reporting, editing or preparation of the article.

by Nicole Carr, ProPublica, and Mike Jordan, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

Update, April 22, 2024: This story has been updated with a statement sent by Ryan Millsap days after the original article was published.

When Ryan Millsap arrived in Atlanta from California a decade ago, the real estate investor set his sights on becoming a major player in Georgia’s booming film industry. In just a few years, he achieved that, opening a movie studio that attracted big-budget productions like “Venom,” Marvel’s alien villain, and “Lovecraft Country,” HBO’s fictional drama centered on the racial terror of Jim Crow America.

As he rose to prominence, Millsap cultivated important relationships with Black leaders and Jewish colleagues and won accolades for his commitment to diversity. But allegations brought by his former attorney present a starkly different picture. In private conversations, court documents allege, Millsap expressed racist and antisemitic views.

Various filings in an ongoing legal fight show Millsap, who is white, making derogatory comments regarding race and ethnicity, including complaints about “Fucking Black People” and “nasty Jews.”

“Ryan’s public persona is different from who he is,” John Da Grosa Smith, Millsap’s former attorney, alleges in one filing, adding: “Ryan works hard to mislead and hide the truth. And he is very good at it.”

Smith submitted troves of text messages between Millsap and his former girlfriend as evidence in two separate cases in Fulton County Superior Court. The messages, reviewed by ProPublica and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, represent a fraction of the evidence in a complex, yearslong dispute centered on compensation for the work Smith performed for Millsap.

In response to a request for an interview about the text messages and related cases, Millsap wrote that this “sounds like a strange situation,” asking “how this came up” and requesting to review the material. After ProPublica and the AJC provided the material cited in this story, he did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Days after this story was published, Millsap sent a statement on April 21 to ProPublica and the AJC. It included an apology and said that his comments in the texts were never intended to be shared publicly.

“I want to extend my sincere apologies to my dear friends, colleagues and associates in both the black and Jewish communities for any and all pain my words have caused,” his statement said. “My sincere hope is that the bonds and friendships that we have forged speak far louder than some flippant, careless remarks.”

Many of the text messages filed with the court were sent in 2019, an important year for Millsap. He was planning an expansion of his Blackhall Studios that would nearly triple its soundstage space. Instead, Millsap ended up selling Blackhall, now called Shadowbox, for $120 million in 2021. The following year he announced plans to build a massive new complex in Newton County, about 40 miles east of Atlanta.

Smith started working for Millsap in August 2019, representing the film executive and his companies in a lawsuit brought by a business associate who claimed a stake in Blackhall. In May 2020, Smith became Blackhall Real Estate’s chief legal counsel.

Their relationship soured in early 2021. In the ensuing feud, Smith claimed that Millsap had promised him a third of his family company, as well as compensation for extra legal work — and, in a letter from his attorney, demanded that Millsap pay him $24 million within four business days: “We, however, have no interest in harming Mr. Millsap or disrupting his deal, his impending marriage, his future deals, or anything else.”

In the arbitration proceeding that followed, Millsap’s attorneys described the letter as “extortionate” and claimed that Smith was trying to “blow up” Millsap’s personal and business life and stall the sale of Blackhall Studios. “Smith breached the most sacred of bonds that exist between a lawyer and his or her clients: the duty of loyalty,” lawyers for Millsap later wrote.

In the same proceeding, Smith accused Millsap of firing him after he raised allegations of a hostile and discriminatory workplace, referencing Millsap’s text messages. Smith’s late father was Jewish.

In January 2023, an arbitrator sided with Millsap, ordering that Smith pay him and his companies $3.7 million for breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty. She ruled that Smith’s conduct was “egregious and intended to inflict economic injury on his clients.”

Through his attorney, Smith declined to be interviewed. In response to a list of questions, he wrote, “This has been a tireless campaign of false narratives and retaliation against me for more than three years.” He claimed that his employment agreement with Millsap guaranteed him a cut of the profits he helped generate and that an expert estimated his share to be between $17 million and $39 million.

Even as Millsap won his legal fight with his former attorney, Smith has continued to press the court battle. In an April 2023 motion to vacate, Smith called the arbitration process a “sham” and the award a “fraud,” and he is now appealing a judge’s decision to uphold the award. In January, a lawyer for Smith filed hundreds of pages of Millsap’s texts in a separate legal dispute in which Millsap is not a party.

In a city with dominant Black representation and a significant Jewish population, maintaining a positive relationship with these communities — or at least the appearance of one — is essential to doing business.

“Mr. Millsap knows,” Smith alleged in one filing, “these text messages are perilous for him.”

On a Thursday night in January 2019, Millsap stood near the pulpit at Welcome Friend Baptist, a Black church 10 miles from downtown Atlanta in DeKalb County, near where he was planning the expansion of his movie studio.

Securing support from the community would be key in convincing the county commission to approve a land-swap deal that would be necessary for the expansion. Several commissioners saw the project, including Millsap’s promise to create thousands of jobs, as a way to revitalize the area.

Dozens of longtime residents, most of them Black, sat in the sanctuary’s colorful upholstered chairs. The attendees received information sheets on Blackhall’s plans, which cited $3.8 million in public improvements, including the creation of a new public park. They asked about internship opportunities for their children and restaurants Millsap might help bring.

Millsap raised the possibility of a restaurant, one he said could offer healthy meals. Several older Black women in the church nodded in agreement and one clapped, Millsap’s pitch seemingly helping him appeal to those whose buy-in he needed.

Two months later, Millsap sent his then-girlfriend a text that Smith’s lawyers later alleged shows he “laments his political work with African Americans and his distaste for having to do it.”

In the text exchange, which was filed in court, Millsap wrote: “Well, it’s like me w black people in ATL!! Bahahahahaha!! Political nonsense everywhere!! … I’m so ready to be finished w that.”

Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 (Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January)

In another text filed in court, Millsap’s girlfriend alluded to the damage she’d caused another vehicle in a car accident: “So the black girl wants $2500 to fix her car on a quote that was $1800.” He responded that she should pay the woman rather than filing an insurance claim, adding, “Fucking Black People.”

Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 (Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January)

Court records and Millsap’s own testimony show that his girlfriend at the time, Christy Hockmeyer, was an investor in his real estate company, and their text messages show she played an active role in his business dealings. In a filing that claims the company had a “hostile and discriminatory work environment,” Smith alleged that Blackhall Real Estate “through its CEO, Ryan Millsap, and one of its influential investors, Christy Hockmeyer, disfavors African- Americans and Jews.”

When Hockmeyer texted Millsap after a doctor’s visit, complaining that a nurse was “retarded,” Millsap responded: “Not shocked. Black or Asian?” Hockmeyer wrote back: “Black.” Millsap replied, “Yes.”

Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 (Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January)

In other exchanges filed with the court, Hockmeyer complained to Millsap, “My uber driver smells like a black person. Yuck!” He echoed her sentiment, writing back, “Yuck!” While on a flight, Hockmeyer wrote to Millsap that a “large smelly black man is seated next to me.” Millsap wrote back, “Yucko!!”

And while passing through an airport in France, Millsap texted Hockmeyer, “The smells here are unreal” and “I can't even imagine if your sensitive nose was here!!”

Hockmeyer responded, “I am so self conscious about bodily smells because there is nothing worse. I mean. Makes you dread it when you see a black person.”

Messages sent between Ryan Millsap (green) and Christy Hockmeyer (blue) in 2019 (Screenshot from a court exhibit filed by John Da Grosa Smith’s attorney in January)

Smith alleged that the conversations between Millsap and Hockmeyer reveal how they think about people with whom they conduct business. “The insidious belief that ‘black’ people are beneath them and not worthy of being hired is a theme that persists in their private writings to one another,” Smith said in the filing.

At a time in 2019 when Millsap was looking to hire an executive with a track record in the Atlanta film industry, Hockmeyer texted him that he might consider bringing on someone from Tyler Perry Studios, a 12-stage southwest Atlanta lot named after its founder, one of the highest-profile Black film producers in the country. “And taking someone from Tyler Perry would be fine too,” she wrote in a text exchange filed with the court. “As long as they are white.”

She also offered another name for Millsap to consider, adding: “He’s even a Jew. That’s good for this role.” Millsap responded, “Teeny tiniest Jew.”

On another occasion, Hockmeyer “opined that Anglo-Americans do not do business with Jewish people,” Smith alleged in a court filing, referencing a text message exchange in which she wrote to Millsap: “You know why wasps won’t do deals with Jews? Because they know that Jews have a different play book and they might get screwed.” Smith also claimed in a court filing that Millsap described to Hockmeyer “a terrible meeting with one of the most nasty Jews I’ve ever encountered.”

In an email to ProPublica and the AJC, Hockmeyer wrote: “I severed all personal and professional ties with Mr. Millsap years ago because our values, ethics, and beliefs did not align. As a passive investor in Blackhall, I was not involved in the day-to-day operations of the company, nor have I been party to any of the lawsuits involving Blackhall. I consistently encouraged Mr. Millsap to treat his investors and community supporters with fairness and respect.”

In a subsequent email, she apologized for the texts between her and Millsap. “There were times when I may have become angry or emotional and tacitly acknowledged statements he made or said things that do not reflect my values or beliefs, and I deeply regret that,” she wrote, adding: “I made comments and used language that was inappropriate. I referred to people in ways I shouldn’t have. I’m sincerely sorry for what I said. Those comments do not reflect who I am and I disavow racism and antisemitism as a whole.”

Smith claimed in a court filing that Millsap regularly expressed disrespect toward Jewish people, describing three of his Jewish colleagues and investors as “the Jew crew,” calling one of them “a greedy Israelite” and saying another had “Jew jitsued” him. Millsap concluded, according to Smith, that “no friendship comes before money in that tribe.”

During the arbitration, Millsap testified in August 2022 that his remarks about people of the Jewish faith constituted “locker room talk.”

In December 2019, Millsap received several warnings from Hockmeyer, according to arbitration records that highlight excerpts from some of her text messages. (Other exhibits in the case show the couple’s relationship had become strained around that time.)

“Ryan you have to understand why people are over your bulls**t,” she wrote that month, according to the records. “They feel lied to taken advantage of and stolen from.”

The following month, she wrote: “Wow. You are going to get lit the f**k up. Holy s**t you are such a bad person. You are a f**king crook!”

During the arbitration hearing, one of Smith’s attorneys asked Millsap about some of Hockmeyer’s December 2019 warnings. He responded, “These are the text messages of a very angry ex-girlfriend.”

As Smith began taking on more responsibility for his client in 2020, Millsap continued to connect with Black influencers and cement himself as a cultural force in Atlanta.

In December of that year, Millsap was a guest on an episode of actor and rapper T.I.’s “Expeditiously” podcast. After discussing the differences between the Atlanta and Los Angeles entertainment markets, Millsap praised what he called “a very robust, Black creative vortex” in Atlanta. And he went on to offer more praise. “There seems like a particular magic in Atlanta about being Black.”

He also talked about his studio expansion plans amid the land-swap deal in a majority-Black DeKalb County neighborhood, telling T.I., “It’s been a fascinating study in race actually.”

Millsap went on to explain how his business interests aligned with the desires of residents. “What pushed this through was Black commissioners supporting their Black residents who wanted to see this happen, right?” he said. “They’re fighting against one white commissioner and a lot of her white constituents who took it upon themselves to be against this when they’re not even the residents who live nearby.”

One evening in August 2021, Millsap stepped onto the stage at the Coca-Cola Roxy theater in Cobb County. He and a dozen other people had been named the year’s Most Admired CEOs, an honor awarded by the Atlanta Business Chronicle. The CEO’s were recognized for, among other things, their “commitment to diversity in the workplace.”

As the dispute between Smith and Millsap unfolded, Millsap expanded his business interests to Newton County, where he purchased a $14 million, 1,500-acre lot in 2022. He said at the time that his vision is to make Georgia a “King Kong of entertainment” by building a production complex on the site and launching a streaming service that, in his words, would be “something on the scale of Netflix.” He later invested in a vodka brand with the aim, he said, of it becoming “quintessentially” Georgia, “like Coca-Cola and Delta.”

Earlier this year, Millsap sat down in his stately home office, decorated with Atlanta-centric trinkets like a model Delta plane, to record an episode of his “Blackhall Podcast with Ryan Millsap.” T.I. has been a guest, as have Isaac Hayes III, son of the iconic soul singer Isaac Hayes and a social media startup founder, and Speech, the frontman for the Atlanta-based, Grammy-winning musical act Arrested Development.

On this day, Millsap talked about race and culture, pointing out that one of his best friends is a “Persian Jew in LA.”

Millsap noted that his understanding of “Black and white” was formed on the West Coast, where he had “a lot of Black friends” — “very Caucasian Black people” who had adopted white cultural norms.

“I grew up thinking like I had no racial prejudice of any kind,” Millsap said. “I thought we were beyond all that stuff.”

Rosie Manins of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution contributed reporting.

by Brett Murphy

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

A special State Department panel recommended months ago that Secretary of State Antony Blinken disqualify multiple Israeli military and police units from receiving U.S. aid after reviewing allegations that they committed serious human rights abuses.

But Blinken has failed to act on the proposal in the face of growing international criticism of the Israeli military’s conduct in Gaza, according to current and former State Department officials.

The incidents under review mostly took place in the West Bank and occurred before Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. They include reports of extrajudicial killings by the Israeli Border Police; an incident in which a battalion gagged, handcuffed and left an elderly Palestinian American man for dead; and an allegation that interrogators tortured and raped a teenager who had been accused of throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails.

Recommendations for action against Israeli units were sent to Blinken in December, according to one person familiar with the memo. “They’ve been sitting in his briefcase since then,” another official said.

A State Department spokesperson told ProPublica the agency takes its commitment to uphold U.S. human rights laws seriously. “This process is one that demands a careful and full review,” the spokesperson said, “and the department undergoes a fact-specific investigation applying the same standards and procedures regardless of the country in question.”

The revelations about Blinken’s failure to act on the recommendations come at a delicate moment in U.S.-Israel relations. Six months into its war against Hamas, whose militants massacred 1,200 Israelis and kidnapped 240 more on Oct. 7, the Israeli military has killed more than 33,000 Palestinians, according to local authorities. Recently, President Joe Biden has signaled increased frustration with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the widespread civilian casualties.

Multiple State Department officials who have worked on Israeli relations said that Blinken’s inaction has undermined Biden’s public criticism, sending a message to the Israelis that the administration was not willing to take serious steps.

The recommendations came from a special committee of State Department officials known as the Israel Leahy Vetting Forum. The panel, made up of Middle East and human rights experts, is named for former Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the chief author of 1997 laws that require the U.S. to cut off assistance to any foreign military or law enforcement units — from battalions of soldiers to police stations — that are credibly accused of flagrant human rights violations.

The Guardian reported this year that the State Department was reviewing several of the incidents but had not imposed sanctions because the U.S. government treats Israel with unusual deference. Officials told ProPublica that the panel ultimately recommended that the secretary of state take action.

This story is drawn from interviews with present and former State Department officials as well as government documents and emails obtained by ProPublica. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to discuss internal deliberations.

The Israeli government did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the years, hundreds of foreign units, including from Mexico, Colombia and Cambodia, have been blocked from receiving any new aid. Officials say enforcing the Leahy Laws can be a strong deterrent against human rights abuses.

Human rights organizations tracking Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 attacks have collected eyewitness testimony and videos posted by Israeli soldiers that point to widespread abuses in Gaza and the West Bank.

“If we had been applying Leahy effectively in Israel like we do in other countries, maybe you wouldn’t have the IDF filming TikToks of their war crimes now because we have contributed to a culture of impunity,” said Josh Paul, a former director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political-Military Affairs and a member of the vetting forum. Paul resigned in protest shortly after Israel began its bombing campaign of Gaza in October.

The Leahy Laws apply to countries that receive American-funded training or arms. In the decades after the passage of those laws, the State Department, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, followed a de facto policy of exempting billions of dollars of foreign military financing to Israel from their strictures, according to multiple experts on the region.

In 2020, Leahy and others in Congress passed a law to tighten the oversight. The State Department set up the vetting forum to identify Israeli security force units that shouldn’t be receiving American assistance. Until now, it has been paralyzed by its bureaucracy, failing to fulfill the hopes of its sponsors.

Critics have long assailed what they view as Israel’s special treatment. Incidents that would have disqualified units in other countries did not have the same result in Israel, according to Charles Blaha, the former director of the State Department’s Office of Security and Human Rights and a former participant in the Israeli vetting forum. “There is no political will,” he said.

Typically, the reports of wrongdoing come from nongovernment organizations like Human Rights Watch or from press accounts. The State Department officials determining whether to recommend sanctions generally do not draw on the vast array of classified material gathered by America’s intelligence agencies.

Actions against an Israeli unit are subject to additional layers of scrutiny. The forum is required to consult the government of Israel. Then, if the forum agrees that there is credible evidence of a human rights violation, the issue goes to more senior officials, including some of the department’s top diplomats who oversee the Middle East and arms transfers. Then the recommendations can be sent to the secretary of state for final approval, either with consensus or as split decisions.

Even if Blinken were to approve the sanctions, officials said, Israel could blunt their impact. One approach would be for the country to buy American arms with its own funds and give them to the units that had been sanctioned. Officials said the symbolism of calling out Israeli units for misconduct would nonetheless be potent, marking a sign of disapproval of the civilian toll the war is taking.

Since it was formed in 2020, the forum has reviewed reports of multiple cases of rape and extrajudicial killings, according to the documents ProPublica obtained. Those cases also included several incidents where teenagers were reportedly beaten in custody before being released without charges. The State Department records obtained by ProPublica do not clearly indicate which cases the experts ultimately recommended for sanctions, and several have been tabled pending more information from the Israelis.

Israel generally argues it has addressed allegations of misconduct and human rights abuses through its own military discipline and legal systems. In some of the cases, the forum was satisfied that Israel had taken serious steps to punish the perpetrators.

But officials agreed on a number of human rights violations, including some that the Israeli government had not appeared to adequately address.

Among the allegations reviewed by the committee was the January 2021 arrest of a 15-year old boy by Israeli Border Police. The teen was held for five days at the Al-Mascobiyya detention center on charges that he had thrown stones and Molotov cocktails at security forces. Citing an allegation shared by a Palestinian child welfare nonprofit, forum officials said there was credible information the teen had been forced to confess after he was “subjected to both physical and sexual torture, including rape by an object.”

Two days after the State Department asked the Israeli government for information about what steps it had taken to hold the perpetrators accountable, Israeli police raided the nonprofit that had originally shared the allegation and later designated it a terrorist organization. The Israelis told State Department officials they had found no evidence of sexual assault or torture but reprimanded one of the teen’s interrogators for kicking a chair.

Do you have any information about American arms shipments to countries accused of human rights violations? Contact Brett Murphy at brett.murphy@propublica.org or by Signal at 508-523-5195.

Alex Mierjeski contributed reporting.

by Aliyya Swaby

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive our stories in your inbox every week.

After a former student killed six people last year at the private Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, state leaders have been looking for ways to make schools safer. Their focus so far has been to ramp up penalties against current students who make mass threats against schools.

Months after the killings, legislators passed a law requiring students who make such threats to be expelled for a year (unless a school superintendent decides otherwise) and allowing schools not to enroll them afterward. This year, the legislature passed bills that make the offense a felony and that revoke driving privileges for a year.

But a large body of research shows these zero-tolerance measures are not the most effective way to prevent violence in schools. In fact, some experts say those measures can counteract what they consider a crucial tool for protecting students as well as the larger community: threat assessments. When carried out correctly, threat assessments sort out behavior intended to cause real physical harm from simply disruptive acts and provide troubled students with the help they need.

The Secret Service pioneered threat assessments to help identify viable threats against public officials. After the Columbine High School massacre in 1999, a team of University of Virginia professors began adapting Secret Service and FBI threat-assessment recommendations for use in schools. They relied on reports from the two agencies showing that school shooters typically expressed their intentions well before acting violently, but that those statements and the underlying potential for harm were seldom thoroughly investigated.

In the course of their research, they learned that educators were concerned about overreacting to students who did not pose a serious threat.

“We also know that students frequently make threatening statements just in the routine course of their day. We have to be very careful that we don’t confuse the two,” said psychologist Dewey Cornell, who led the University of Virginia research and continues to study threat assessments. “And so we need a systematic process to sort out serious threats from threats that are not serious.”

We spoke to Cornell about how schools are handling threat assessments and his concerns about their overreliance on harsh discipline. More than two decades after he began his research, a growing number of states, including Tennessee, require school districts to adopt threat-assessment policies. But Cornell worries that too many are not properly carrying them out.

How Threat Assessments Work

Threat assessments are intended to be an alternative to zero tolerance, giving school leaders a way to resolve problems before they escalate to violence and allowing them discretion over whether and how to discipline students.

Cornell helped create a process to help school administrators carry out threat assessments, starting by interviewing anyone involved with the threat to assess the risk of serious injury. His research shows that the majority of the time, the assessment reveals there was no threat or no serious threat. The threat-assessment team should warn the intended victims of any major threats it finds, take necessary precautions to protect them and seek ways to resolve conflict.

One of the most important parts of the process requires the threat-assessment team to refer students to mental health services they may need, no matter the level of threat. And the process states that law enforcement involvement and harsh disciplinary penalties should be reserved for the most serious cases.

Cornell’s initial research in Florida and Virginia shows that, when done well, threat assessments reduce expulsions and keep more students in school. In 2013, Virginia was the first state to mandate that public schools adopt threat-assessment teams. By 2018, nearly 80% of schools in the state reported at least one threat-assessment case; about three-fourths of cases resulted in students being referred for counseling, mental health treatment or psychological assessments. Most students were not expelled, placed in an alternative school or juvenile detention, or hospitalized as a result of a threat assessment.

A 2024 study of Florida public schools conducted over three years found that the implementation of threat assessment had been “widely, but not uniformly, successful,” with a third of cases resulting in a student being referred for mental health services and just 2% resulting in an expulsion.

“We’re not just looking for the needle in the haystack, that rare student, the one in a million students who’s going to actually shoot someone,” Cornell said. “We’re actually dealing with thousands and thousands of kids who maybe are angry or upset and so they say something threatening. Maybe they’re being bullied. We have an opportunity to intervene and work with them long before there’s any issue, if there is any issue at all.”

Threat Assessments and Zero Tolerance Don’t Work Together

According to Cornell, zero-tolerance policies and threat assessments are “antithetical” approaches to handling school safety. Tennessee legislators, however, passed a law mandating that school districts conduct threat assessments less than two weeks after they passed a law requiring expulsion for mass threats.

Zero tolerance requires school officials to automatically punish students who act out, no matter the circumstances. Threat assessment, on the other hand, requires officials to consider the context and motivation of the behavior before deciding how to respond.

There is no research showing that zero-tolerance policies make schools safer, according to a review of available evidence by the American Psychological Association. In fact, such policies can harm Black students and students with disabilities, who are more likely to be suspended or expelled from schools with zero-tolerance discipline policies and, by extension, more likely to end up in the criminal justice system, studies show.

“So we have a disciplinary practice that research tells us does not work, yet we keep doing more and more of it,” Cornell said. “It’s the educational equivalent of bloodletting. The medical field for years would bleed people, and when they didn’t get better, they concluded they didn’t bleed them enough.”

After Tennessee lawmakers made “threats of mass violence on school property” a zero-tolerance offense last year, they received numerous complaints about students being arrested and disciplined even when they clearly didn’t pose a serious threat. At a recent education committee hearing, a lawmaker referred to a case in which a middle schooler threatened to fly a plane into the school. “I don’t know too many 12-year-olds that either A, have access to an aircraft, or B, know how to fly it,” he said. Tennessee has not released statewide numbers on expulsions for threats of mass violence.

Lawmakers are now considering a bill that would require a threat assessment to be completed and the threat to be deemed valid before an expulsion. Cornell said that limiting expulsions to valid threats still could pose safety risks. “If I am really concerned that a child is dangerous, I don’t want to turn them loose in the community without supervision,” he said. “I want to try to reach them and work with them and convince them that there is a better way to deal with whatever problem or concern they have.”

When Threat Assessment Goes Wrong

Civil and disability rights advocates argue that threat assessments can do more harm than good and point to examples of school officials referring students with disabilities and students of color for threat assessments more often. In Albuquerque Public Schools, for example, children with disabilities and Black children made up a disproportionately high percentage of those referred for threat assessments, according to a Searchlight New Mexico report. A study of four Colorado school districts found that Black students, Native American students, male students and students with disabilities were overrepresented in the threat-assessment data. No national study exists showing how schools are implementing threat assessments; Cornell has conducted studies in Virginia and Florida and is working on a national one with funding from the federal Department of Justice.

A Texas Observer investigation into threat assessments showed the vast majority of districts in the state failed to properly implement them. Only a small percentage of districts provided students with needed mental health support and other services as required by state law. In Tennessee, school officials are required to include law enforcement in their assessment of whether a student poses a threat — but including mental health professionals is optional.

“If you’re installing threat assessment in a school that doesn’t have a school psychologist, doesn’t have a school social worker and has one counselor for every thousand students, you’re gonna have a problem. It’s like putting new tires on a car with a busted engine,” Cornell said. “We have a school system that is strained and stretched to the limits.”

But Cornell said the reports of schools failing to properly carry out threat assessments shouldn’t serve to indict the entire idea. His research in Florida shows that Black students experienced slightly higher rates of out-of-school suspensions and expulsions than white students — a much smaller disparity than the national average. Students with disabilities did not receive harsher discipline or legal action than other students after a threat assessment.

“States seem to be willing to spend millions of dollars on security hardware, but almost nothing on training and coaching,” he said. “The result is many schools are implementing threat assessment without adequate training, without the time allotted to them to carry out the procedures that are required. So they end up cutting corners.”

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by Ava Kofman

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The Environmental Protection Agency will drastically reduce cancerous air pollution from chemical plants. The regulation, announced last week, comes two years after a ProPublica analysis identified more than a thousand toxic hot spots that elevate the cancer risk of millions of Americans.

“This is an incredibly significant rule that will curtail some of the nation’s biggest drivers of cancer risk,” said Adam Kron, a senior attorney at Earthjustice, an environmental advocacy group.

The rule specifically targets ethylene oxide, a colorless gas, which is used to sterilize medical devices and has been labeled by the agency as “one of the most potent cancer-causing chemicals.” ProPublica’s analysis of emissions data found that between 2014 and 2018 ethylene oxide was the single biggest contributor to excess industrial cancer risk from air pollutants nationwide. The EPA expects that under the new regulation, annual emissions of ethylene oxide will fall by 80%. The rule also updates the standards for five other highly toxic chemicals: chloroprene, benzene, 1,3-butadiene, ethylene dichloride and vinyl chloride.

The hazards of such pollutants have not been borne equally. In predominantly Black census tracts, ProPublica found that the estimated cancer risk from toxic air pollution is more than double that of majority-white tracts. Many of the most dangerous chemical plants are in communities of color in Texas and Louisiana, along an 85-mile stretch of land that has come to be known as “Cancer Alley.”

In November 2021, three weeks after ProPublica published its analysis, the EPA administrator, Michael S. Regan, visited this heavily polluted corridor as part of his “Journey to Justice” tour. At elementary schools and churches, Regan vowed to local activists that he would use the tools at his disposal to rectify environmental inequities. Last week, at the signing ceremony at the EPA’s headquarters, Regan thanked leaders in these communities for continually holding “our feet to the fire.”

Nalleli Hidalgo, a community outreach liaison with Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services, attended the signing last week, after meeting with Regan on his listening tour. She told ProPublica she was overwhelmed by the people missing from the room who were not alive to witness this achievement. “We have lost too many loved ones as a result of bureaucratic inertia,” she said, noting that the EPA has long been required by law to update its risk standards for these chemicals. “Our communities should not have to wait one more day for fence line monitoring to take effect.”

For years, Texans like Hidalgo, living near chemical plants, have asked the agency to measure what they’re breathing in. ProPublica’s analysis found that for many homes closest to the fence lines of petrochemical plants in cities like La Porte and Port Neches, Texas, the estimated excess risk of cancer ranges from three to six times the level that the EPA considers acceptable. Our analysis, however, was based on the self-reported estimates from facilities, which can be unreliable and even underestimated. Without real-time monitoring data, it’s difficult for the agency to take action against polluters, even when residents point to unnerving patterns of headaches, asthma and cancers among their neighbors.

Under the new rule, hundreds of chemical plants will have to install monitoring for six hazardous chemicals at the fence line and share their data publicly online. When levels of these toxics exceed permitted amounts, facilities will be required to take corrective action to reduce them. The ExxonMobil plant in Baytown, Texas, just outside of Houston, for instance, is one of the largest refineries on the planet. It will now need to monitor for the carcinogen 1,3-butadiene, which its self-reported data shows it emits in large quantities. But, as Hidalgo noted, the EPA is still years behind updating its risk standards for other harmful air toxics, including ethylene, toluene and propylene. These chemicals are also emitted by the Baytown facility, according to its emissions data. (The facility did not respond to a request for comment.)

When the Biden administration introduced the rule last year, industry groups commented that curbing pollution would pose an undue and unnecessary burden. (The agency estimates that it will cost polluters roughly $1.8 billion to comply with the rules.) “I think people don’t appreciate how difficult it is to get a regulation of this magnitude promulgated,” said Scott Throwe, a former senior staffer in EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. “This is an industry that is very organized and has a great deal of impact on legislation and lobbying groups.” The American Chemistry Council said in a statement that the rule “will have significant implications on the production of key chemistries such as ethylene oxide” and that it remained “concerned with the recent onslaught of chemical regulations being put forth by this Administration.”

President Joe Biden has made environmental justice a centerpiece of his legislative agenda, but the legacy of some of his policies may depend on future presidents who do not share his priorities. The Trump administration, for instance, rolled back more than a hundred environmental protections, including two dozen air pollution and emissions policies. This current rule, however, will be hard to dismantle, experts say, because of the provision for continuous fence line monitoring. “If levels are being exceeded and there is no follow-up, the community will now have the actual data, and the opportunity to take their own action through citizen suits if they have not been sufficiently protected,” said Victor Flatt, an environmental law professor at Case Western Reserve University. “Even without much enforcement, the monitoring gives citizens a recourse.”

Throwe agreed. “The work that ProPublica did in identifying some of these disproportionately impacted communities helped draw attention to this issue,” he said. “We’ve seen the leverage these communities have when they have access to this information and can tell regulatory agencies that the levels they are exposed to are completely unacceptable.”

Lisa Song contributed reporting.

by Lisa Song

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Nearly 100 people crowded into the library in Calvert City, Kentucky, in February when the Environmental Protection Agency hosted a public meeting on air pollution. Many had discovered flyers in their mailboxes explaining how the agency had found “elevated levels” of chemicals that “can pose an increased risk of cancer.”

The EPA aimed to deliver a simple message that evening: Local petrochemical plants were leaking toxic air pollutants and regulators were working to fix them. And what played out next was predictable to anyone who has been to one of these meetings. There were concerned questions (Would you hesitate to live here? What are you going to do today?), unsatisfying answers (We’re working with the plants on voluntary measures) and pleas for action that regulators said couldn’t happen “overnight.”

What made this meeting remarkable, however, was a sobering truth that bubbled up amid the exasperated grumbles and earnest assurances.

Once a community becomes a hot spot for these pollutants, it’s nearly impossible to clean it up for good. In fact, ProPublica found, such a success story is virtually unheard of.

In 2021, we published a cutting-edge national map of more than 1,000 communities that had become what are known as “sacrifice zones” — areas caught in clouds of cancerous pollution that seep from the refineries, chemical plants and plastic producers that power America. We highlighted all of the ways state and federal regulators had failed to protect those places, by not installing air monitors, or alerting residents, or penalizing polluters.

In Calvert City, though, all of that had already happened.

Since the early 2000s, monitors near three facilities owned by Westlake Corp. have captured alarming levels of ethylene dichloride, which is linked to stomach cancer, pancreatic cancer and leukemia. One was found emitting more of it than any other industrial facility in America.

ProPublica has written stories about the city’s problem, and the local news has followed up.

The U.S. Department of Justice has even gotten involved, forcing the company to pay a $1 million fine and spend another $110 million to fix equipment at its facilities in Calvert City and Louisiana.

None of it had stopped the poison.

Westlake didn’t respond to requests for comment. The company previously told the nonprofit newsroom Kentucky Lantern that it would work with environmental regulators and had “engaged a consultant” to study the EPA’s air-monitoring report. In response to the $1 million fine from 2022, Westlake told Law360 that it was “​​pleased to have reached an agreement with the United States Environmental Protection Agency and is making investments to reduce environmental emissions in concert with the company’s sustainability strategy.”

One of the Westlake facilities in Calvert City (Joseph Ross, special to ProPublica)

In an interview, EPA officials said they have inspected Westlake’s facilities, have updated a federal rule on industrial pollution and are working with Westlake on voluntary measures to reduce emissions in Calvert City.

“EPA is concerned about the concentrations here, and we are committed to protecting public health in this community,” said Daniel Garver, an environmental scientist in the EPA office that oversees Kentucky.

During the meeting, an older man on oxygen said he wished he’d been warned before he moved to town years ago. A woman who had never worked in a chemical plant, but had developed a rare cancer linked with industrial workers, asked the EPA to offer community cancer screenings.

A resident speaks at the EPA public meeting on air pollution. (Joseph Ross, special to ProPublica)

And Steve Miracle, the school district superintendent, was worried about his youngest students. An air monitor near the elementary school playground had captured toxic concentrations that were many times the level that triggers EPA concern for cancer risk.

Thus far, the best fix regulators had offered were indoor air filters at the school, which would do nothing to protect the kids the moment they stepped outside.

Talking to ProPublica earlier that day, Miracle asked, “Is it going to take another two years before we get a solution in place?”

Through interviews with air pollution experts, former EPA employees and public health professionals, ProPublica found it will likely take much longer — if real change happens at all.

We asked environmental experts if they knew of communities where excess toxic air pollutants had been tamed after regulators and residents interceded.

“I don’t know of one,” said Jim Pew, an attorney at the environmental law nonprofit Earthjustice. “I think the answer is really depressing.”

The inability to stop Westlake from polluting is really an indictment of the rules that govern toxic air pollution, experts told ProPublica. Scott Throwe, a former senior EPA enforcement official, put it this way: If Westlake followed every regulation, the emissions “would still be significant.”

The EPA regulates only a handful of pollutants with enforceable standards for outdoor air quality. Air monitors track those compounds, like particulate matter and lead, and when concentrations hit a certain limit, regulators must intervene to bring them down. That might involve limiting the construction of new industrial plants or requiring emissions testing on residents’ cars.

The law governing ethylene dichloride doesn’t work like that. The EPA regulates it and 187 similar air toxics in a less direct way, by enforcing standards for the technology that polluters must install to lower emissions.

A facility like Westlake has dozens of smokestacks, tanks and other points where air toxics are supposed to be released. The company has to install pollution-control equipment on these devices to reduce emissions.

Many of them have specific emissions limits, like 2 pounds of ethylene dichloride per hour. But there’s little to no direct air monitoring to ensure the limit is met, and generally no cap on the total emissions that are allowed to come from a plant. If one of the Westlake facilities expands production and adds three smokestacks permitted at 10 pounds of ethylene dichloride per hour, it’s not required to cut back on 10 pounds in another part of the facility.

And not all air toxics come out where they’re supposed to. So-called “fugitive” emissions can escape from pumps, valves and thousands of other places. Westlake is supposed to conduct routine maintenance to identify and repair leaks. But at the end of the day, no one knows exactly how many tons of air toxics are streaming out of a particular plant.

A screenshot from a video captured by the EPA of gas leaking from a Westlake facility during an inspection. The agency used an infrared camera to visualize gas leaks (in this case, the white plume at the center) that are invisible to the human eye. (Environmental Protection Agency. Screenshot by ProPublica.)

The law has a backstop to alleviate these weaknesses: Every eight years, the EPA is supposed to review its chemical plant regulations and update them as needed. That might involve requiring newer and better pollution-control technology. Additionally, the EPA might conduct risk studies by estimating the total amount of air toxics coming from these plants and modeling how they disperse into communities. If the results show a lot of residents at high risk, that adds urgency to tightening controls.

But the agency is so understaffed that these reviews can take decades. Westlake Vinyls, one of the plants in Calvert City, got a stricter rule in April for many of its processes — the first revision since 2006.

EPA rarely conducts these reviews for industrial polluters until they’re “practically under pain of death to do it,” often due to lawsuits from environmental groups, Throwe said.

There’s ample evidence that Westlake’s emissions have gotten out of hand. The Calvert City facilities have been repeatedly fined for leaking air toxics since at least 2010. When the EPA inspected the plants in September 2022 — several months after ProPublica wrote about alarming air-monitoring results — inspectors found multiple leaks, including one estimated at 170,000 parts per million. Throwe called it a “huge” deal, considering the EPA typically counts anything above 500 parts per million as a leak. In April 2023, EPA inspectors showed up with experts from the agency’s National Enforcement Investigations Center, an elite unit whose involvement shows the case’s escalating importance. They documented additional problems in an inspection report, including a pipe with “a visible gap or hole allowing emissions to be released.”

But EPA staff are spread thin. The National Enforcement Investigations Center has five inspectors handling air-pollution violations. They’re supported by additional inspectors from other EPA offices; the one in charge of Kentucky refused to say how many air-pollution inspectors they have. (The vast majority of inspections are conducted by state and local regulators. The EPA has more of an oversight role.)

To wrap up its most recent investigation, the EPA can’t just lean on the dozen or so leaks its inspectors witnessed. If the agency wants real improvements from Westlake, it needs proof of systemic problems. It needs to examine Westlake’s records for patterns of poor maintenance and prior leaks, a labor-intensive process that could take many months.

“It is totally unacceptable” for the EPA not to act more quickly to protect the public, said Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert who advises communities on air pollution. She said the agency should know which parts of the facilities are prone to leaks based on its history and target enforcement to immediately fix those weak spots.

Once the EPA is ready to penalize Westlake, any kind of significant fine requires input from the Department of Justice, Throwe said. If the agency accepts an EPA referral, he said, negotiating a settlement with Westlake could take three to five years.

Then, whatever penalty comes out of this process would be added to the other fines the company has faced in the past.

The recent $1 million fine, for example, took eight years to levy.

The company’s net worth is $19 billion.

Residents are tired of waiting for the pollution to stop. “It’s time for EPA to really take some action,” Jim Borders, a retired credit union manager, said at the meeting, calling the government’s recent fine “chump change.”

When an EPA scientist mentioned how the agency was continuing to take air samples, a resident interrupted, “You’ve been monitoring for years!”

The updated EPA regulations for Westlake Vinyls could make a real difference, said Michael Koerber, former deputy director of EPA’s Office of Air Quality Planning and Standards. The new rule, released this month, is giving chemical plants like Westlake a two-year deadline to install ethylene dichloride air monitors along their perimeters. If concentrations exceed a certain limit, Westlake would need to investigate the cause and fix the leaks responsible for high emissions.

Koerber said the monitors could provide an early warning system and force faster repairs.

The state’s regulatory agency is working with Westlake to adopt the new regulations sooner than required, said John Mura, a spokesperson for the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. Kentucky will also apply state guidelines for cancer risk “to protect the health of Calvert City residents,” he added.

The samples merit urgent action, particularly the ones captured around the elementary school, said Koerber. The federal agency calculated that the air toxics raised chronic cancer risk to 60 in a million — meaning that if 1 million people were continuously exposed to those levels for 70 years, 60 people would likely develop cancer. That far exceeds the level that triggers EPA concern but is still below the maximum level the EPA considers acceptable.

“If I’m a parent sending my kid to this school? I’d be concerned,” Koerber said.

Children are particularly vulnerable to this kind of pollution, said Carol Ziegler, a family nurse practitioner and co-founder of the Climate, Health and Energy Equity Lab at Vanderbilt University. “Those numbers are just appalling,” she said, adding that they raise a key question: “How many sick kids are OK with you?”

Rhonda Fratzke, the woman who asked the EPA for cancer screenings, fears the pollution has caused illnesses that are difficult to diagnose. Several years ago, Fratzke learned she had angiosarcoma of the liver — a rare cancer linked to workers who handle vinyl chloride, a colorless gas used to make plastic. Fratzke lived near one of the Westlake facilities for nine years while it released vast plumes of the compound. Now, the 62-year-old just wants to see her teenage granddaughter graduate from high school. “With what time I got, I want people to know that it is your right to stand up and say, ‘Hey, just fix it.’”

Rhonda Fratzke has a rare form of cancer linked to an air pollutant emitted by Westlake’s facilities. She lived near the chemical plants for years. (Joseph Ross, special to ProPublica)

Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, said regulators aren’t doing nearly enough to help communities like Calvert City. If residents want to see the best results they can get, they should look to Louisville, Kentucky, the closest experts could come to finding a partial success story. Air toxics from Rubbertown, a part of the city with a cluster of industrial plants, had affected nearby neighborhoods — largely populated by communities of color — for decades.

In 2005, local officials adopted an air toxics reduction program that was stricter than the EPA’s. Eboni Cochran, a homeschool mom and co-director of the grassroots group Rubbertown Emergency ACTion, said her organization was largely responsible for getting community support. Volunteers packed government hearings, held protests and canvassed neighborhoods to collect thousands of signed postcards urging officials to act. The group was following in the footsteps of years of activism led by the Rev. Louis Coleman Jr., who died in 2008.

Cochran said the program led to initial improvements. Even before it was fully in place, one major polluter drastically reduced its emissions, she said.

But no victory is final, Cochran added. There were years without air monitoring due to inadequate funding, and residents still complain about ineffective investigations, she said. Cochran has repeatedly sacrificed time with her husband and son to continue her advocacy.

With this kind of community work, she said, “99.9% of the time there’s no clear win.”

by Ken Armstrong

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

A new motion has accused the elected prosecutor in Elkhart, Indiana, of misconduct, alleging she presented contradictory versions of the truth against two men in connection with a shooting that occurred more than 20 years ago.

The case stems from the drive-by shooting death of a woman on Aug. 13, 2003. Prosecutors have always maintained the shooter was Ignacio Bahena. But as to who gave Bahena the gun, the prosecution offered two different versions, pinning the act on one man, then pinning it on another, according to a motion filed by one of the men’s lawyers. Both men went to prison, and one of them is still serving time for the crime and challenging his 55-year sentence.

The Elkhart case is another in a line of instances across the country in which prosecutors have been accused of presenting contradictory accounts in court, depending on the defendant they’re trying. At least 29 men have been sentenced to death in the U.S. since the 1970s in cases where prosecutors were accused of presenting opposing versions of the truth, according to a search of legal cases.

ProPublica wrote in February about a case in Baltimore in which federal prosecutors offered opposing versions of the truth while securing a conviction on a gun charge against a man named Keyon Paylor. Two days after that story was published, the Department of Justice reversed course and agreed Paylor’s conviction should be thrown out, writing, in a court filing, that “public confidence cannot sustain irreconcilable versions of one event.”

The motion in Elkhart focuses on the actions of the county’s top prosecutor and asks that her office be disqualified from handling the case further. The motion marks another challenge to the workings of Elkhart’s criminal justice system, which has been the subject of a joint investigation by ProPublica and the South Bend Tribune. The two news organizations, as part of ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, have reported extensively on Elkhart’s system of law enforcement, chronicling wrongful convictions, prosecutorial misconduct, and dubious investigative tactics and criminal wrongdoing by police.

The Elkhart case traces to the shooting death of 20-year-old Karla Castro, who was killed when Bahena shot at and wounded her boyfriend, according to court records. Bahena fired from an SUV that pulled up next to a Ford Mustang driven by Castro’s boyfriend, according to court testimony.

Bahena has never been caught. But prosecutors did charge two men who were in the SUV with him.

One of the two men, Eduardo Brena, appeared in Elkhart Circuit Court in June 2004 and pleaded guilty to a felony charge for providing the gun to Bahena on the day Castro was killed. During the plea hearing, the judge walked Brena through the charge’s factual basis, making sure Brena understood and admitted each element.

“Did you provide a handgun to him?” the judge asked Brena.

“Yes,” Brena told the judge.

The judge later asked, “Mr. Brena, did these acts occur on Aug. 13, 2003, in Elkhart County, Indiana?”

“Yes, sir,” Brena told the judge.

Representing the state at this hearing was Vicki Becker, who was then Elkhart County’s chief deputy prosecuting attorney. Asked if she wanted the court to accept Brena’s guilty plea, Becker told the judge, “Yes, I do, your Honor,” according to a court transcript.

The following month, in July 2004, Becker represented the state at Brena’s sentencing. She said Brena “recklessly provided that handgun” to Bahena and “enabled” the shooting to happen. The judge sentenced Brena to six years on the gun charge.

The second man charged in this case, Rodolfo Alexander, stood trial in March 2005, accused of being an accomplice to Castro’s murder. Alexander had been driving the SUV at the time of the shooting, prosecution witnesses told the jury.

The prosecutor at Alexander’s trial was Becker, the same prosecutor who had been in court for Brena’s guilty plea.

She called Brena as a witness, and Brena, on the stand, contradicted what he had said in court the year before.

He testified that he gave the gun not to Bahena on the day of the shooting, but to Alexander a couple of days before the shooting. Alexander thereafter passed the gun along to Bahena, the eventual shooter.

“And so was it OK with you” that Alexander gave the gun to Bahena? Becker asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Brena said.

By putting Brena on the stand at Alexander’s trial — and having Brena provide an account that contradicted what he had said at his own plea hearing — Becker committed misconduct by knowingly presenting false testimony, the recent motion from Alexander’s lawyers says.

Alexander was convicted of murder, as an accomplice, and sentenced to 55 years. Prosecutors maintained that in addition to supplying the weapon, Alexander positioned the SUV in a way that helped Bahena open fire on the other car. Alexander’s initial appeal was denied in November 2005; his subsequent appeals have dragged on for years.

Becker, the prosecutor in both the Brena and Alexander cases, won election in 2016 to be the county’s top prosecutor. She has held the position ever since.

When contacted by ProPublica, Becker declined to comment on the allegation from Alexander’s attorneys that she committed misconduct. “As this is an actively pending matter, I am not able to engage in an interview of any kind regarding the case, nor may a representative of the State. All information should come from observing the public proceedings at this time. Thank you for reaching out,” Becker wrote in an email.

One of Alexander’s lawyers, Kevin Murphy, with Notre Dame Law School’s Exoneration Justice Clinic, also declined to comment. (Christian Sheckler, a former South Bend Tribune reporter who worked with ProPublica on stories published in 2018 and 2019 about Elkhart’s criminal justice system, became an investigator for the clinic in 2022.) ProPublica could not locate Brena to seek comment.

In March, Alexander’s lawyers filed a motion asking that a special prosecutor be appointed to the case and that Becker and her office be disqualified. The lawyers expect Becker to be a central witness in an upcoming appellate hearing, so she has a conflict of interest, the motion says.

As of Thursday, Becker’s office had not yet filed a response to the motion and its allegations, according to court records.