by Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy, ProPublica, and Le Van for ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. In mid-February, Trump administration leaders received a desperate warning from their diplomats posted in Vietnam, one of the most important American partners in Asia. Workers were in the middle of cleaning up the site of an enormous chemical spill, the Bien Hoa air base, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio abruptly halted all foreign aid funding. The shutdown left exposed open pits of soil contaminated…
Author: James Anderson
Ministers seek carve-out from import taxes before 2 April deadline – but critics believe they may have offered too many concessions UK ministers and senior officials at every level are holding talks with US counterparts this weekend in a last-ditch effort to secure a carve-out from swingeing import taxes. Government sources said ministers were raising Donald Trump’s looming tariffs as the “No 1” issue in every conversation with the US.
by Christopher Bing, Avi Asher-Schapiro and Annie Waldman ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. When President Donald Trump announced his marquee government cost-cutting initiative, he left no doubt about whom he intended to run it: Elon Musk. Still, questions about the scope of Musk’s authority have hounded the newly formed Department of Government Efficiency ever since. As DOGE began to order massive budget cuts and layoffs, and those affected by the moves began to raise questions in the press and in court about their…
hen I moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, less than a year ago, I could never have imagined that writing a critical piece about the US government could put me at risk of deportation, threatening the life and career I’ve built here. But today, that threat is very real. Just this week, Rumeysa Ozturk, a doctoral student at Tufts University, was arrested mere blocks from where I live after publishing an op-ed in her university newspaper describing Israel’s military campaign in Gaza as genocide. That was the full extent of her activism, yet despite having all her documentation in order, she was taken abruptly…
by Lomi Kriel, Perla Trevizo and Mica Rosenberg ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. The text came from inside a Panamanian government outpost, set hours away from the country’s capital, on the edge of the Darien jungle. It had been written by a migrant who’d managed to smuggle a cellphone into the facility by hiding it in his shorts. He said authorities had detained him without providing him access to a lawyer or any means to communicate with relatives. He was hungry because all…
A behind-the-scenes legal effort to force Congress to call a convention to amend the Constitution could end up helping President Donald Trump in his push to expand presidential power. While the convention effort is focused on the national debt, legal experts say it could open the door to other changes, such as limiting who can be a U.S. citizen, allowing the president to overrule Congress’ spending decisions or even making it legal for Trump to run for a third term. Wisconsin Watch and ProPublica have obtained a draft version of a proposed lawsuit being floated to attorneys general in several…
The Republican-led House Judiciary Committee is looking into whether the Biden administration tried to “censor” artificial intelligence. Representative Jim Jordan has sent subpoenas to sixteen different tech companies that work with AI in some capacity to ask for any and all communications from the previous administration about limiting “harmful bias” and “algorithmic discrimination.” Subpoenas were sent to Adobe, Alphabet, Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, International Business Machines Corp. (IBM), Inflection AI, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, Open AI, Palantir, Salesforce, Scale AI and Stability AI, and each requests an extensive amount of information, covering five years from January 1, 2020 to January 20, 2025. Essentially any…
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published. If you ask a National Park Service ranger how the Trump administration’s cost cutting will affect your next park visit, you might get talking points instead of a straight answer. A series of emails sent late last month to front-line staff at parks across the country provided rangers with instructions on how to describe the highly publicized staff cuts. Park leaders further instructed staff to avoid the word “fired” and not blame closures on staffing levels. On Feb.…