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Blown wildly out of proportion in large format, the slime molds that British photographer Barry Webb captures seem atmospheric and sculptural. Stemonitis, for example, looks like dozens of thin pieces of wire with their ends coated in colored wax. But this fungi-like form is one of hundreds of kinds of slime mold, and it typically only reaches a height of about two centimeters at the most. Thanks to Webb’s macro photos, we glimpse a phenomenally beautiful world up-close that is otherwise virtually invisible.

Scientists have documented hundreds of these organisms, which aren’t actually related to plants, fungi, animals, or molds—despite the name. They comprise a unique group unto themselves, more closely related to amoebas. And new discoveries are being made all the time. From mottled gray bulbs that look like snow-covered trees to pink, coral-like tendrils, Webb chronicles a huge array of colors and shapes. He also consistently submits images to local and national botanical records so that researchers have access to high-resolution imagery.

Webb’s image of a species called Lamproderma scintillans, partly engulfed by a water droplet, won the Botanical Britain category of the British Wildlife Photography Awards. Several of his photos are on display in large format in the exhibition Mythos Wald at Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany, which continues through the end of the year. And in the U.K., see Webb’s awarded images in the 2026 International Garden Photographer of the Year exhibition at Cambridge University Botanic Garden. Find more on his Instagram.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Barry Webb Documents a Marvelous, Macro Array of Colorful Slime Molds appeared first on Colossal.

Aqqaluk Lynge was 19 years old when an American B-52 bomber carrying four thermonuclear weapons as well as conventional bombs crashed off the northwest coast of Greenland, the island where Lynge was born and raised. That was January 1968, and the plane was headed to Thule Air Force Base, a U.S. military installation in Greenland, now known as Pituffik Space Base. When the plane hit the Arctic waters, the conventional bombs detonated but the nuclear weapons did not.

Six American military personnel parachuted from the plane before it crashed, shivering on the frozen ground before Inuit dog sled teams found them and saved their lives. One service member trapped on floating ice 6 miles from Thule survived the negative 21-degree Fahrenheit weather by wrapping himself in his parachute. 

Now, aged 78, Lynge wonders if the United States remembers that Inuit dogsleds saved American lives. Or the fact that Greenlanders fought for the U.S. in Afghanistan as enlisted members of the Danish military, dying at the second-highest rate of any country besides the U.S. That U.S. Air Force base is still operational and 150 American military personnel are currently stationed there. “Why should a friend for so many years be treated like this?” Lynge said. “We need support from democratic-minded people in the United States.” 

President Donald Trump has demanded that the United States acquire Greenland and said that control of the island is necessary for national and international security. He has threatened European allies with tariffs and even hinted at seizing Greenland by force. On Wednesday, Trump backtracked on both threats and said he’d reached a “framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” without giving any details; however Trump’s behavior over the island has already undermined America’s relationship with Europe by threatening longstanding alliances. 

Less publicized is how Trump’s threats have refocused attention on the United States’ relationship and history with Indigenous peoples: Greenland is 90 percent Inuit and has maintained its traditions, language, knowledge, and land despite centuries of colonial rule, and is viewed as a model of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty.

Lynge, who is Inuit, is part of that history. He co-founded the Inuit Ataqatigiit, a democratic socialist party in Greenland that advocates for independence. He helped lead the Inuit Circumpolar Council, an organization that represents Indigenous peoples in the Arctic. And he’s a former member of the Greenlandic Parliament, as well as the U.N. Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, which helps advise the U.N. Economic and Social Council on issues related to Indigenous peoples.

Greenland is still part of the Kingdom of Denmark, a colonial relationship that’s existed since the 18th century, but thanks to the work of people like Lynge, the island has achieved a level of political independence that many Indigenous peoples aspire to. “The extensive self-governance of Greenland is an inspiring example of the implementation of Indigenous self-determination for many Indigenous Peoples worldwide,” said the United Nations special rapporteur on the rights of Indigenous peoples, José Francisco Calí Tzay, in 2023.

Yet despite the still-strong presence of Inuit peoples in Greenland, Stefan Aune, a historian and the author of the book Indian Wars Everywhere, said he’s been struck by how much Trump’s threats have been framed as conflict between the U.S. and Denmark or the U.S. and European countries, ignoring the presence of Indigenous peoples. “This really kind of evokes the way the history of North America often gets narrated, which is a kind of imperial squabble between the British, the French, and the Spanish, and then later the United States, despite the fact that there’s all these different Native nations that play a really equally important role in the war, the politics, the economics, and the diplomacy on the continent,” Aune said. “So there’s definitely a parallel there.”

Aune is among many experts who see Trump’s policies and rhetoric as echoes of historical entitlement to Native land reframed as a defensive struggle against Indigenous nations or other threats. “The iconic image of this is the surrounded wagon train, which you can see in all kinds of art, paintings, and then later movies and television and video games,” Aune said. “Settler colonialism consistently gets reframed as a defensive struggle rather than an invasion.”

Peter Mancall, a historian and author of the book Contested Continent, said he was struck by how quickly Trump pivoted from the security reasons to capture Venezuela’s president to his plans to sell 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil. “The rapid pivot from the pretext of the invasion to the extraction of resources [in Venezuela] was quicker than anything I had seen in the early American period,” he said. “We’ve seen this before, and it has often had catastrophic consequences for Indigenous peoples as well as deleterious impacts on various environments.” 

Jonathan Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, the dean of Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawaiʻi, sees parallels to the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, which he wrote about in his book Dismembering Lāhui. In the late 1800s, the U.S. was motivated to annex Hawai’i in order to cement economic control over the islands’ sugar plantations and to establish military control over Pearl Harbor.

“The fact that the president of the United States no longer feels that it’s necessary to justify imperialism in any other way except that ‘We need it’ is deeply revealing and clarifying,” Osorio said. “When you remove all of the pretext and you realize that all this has ever been about has been the acquisition of opportunities and other peoples and other peoples’ countries … it’s never been any different.”  

Greenland is three times the size of Texas and home to about 56,000 people. The island has 39 of the 50 minerals that the U.S. considers to be critical for military technology and the U.S. economy, many of which are used for clean energy technology like electric vehicle batteries. Investors are hoping that melting ice caps due to climate change will make it easier for companies to mine minerals like gallium, which can be used to create computer chips. 

But Paul Bierman, a geoscientist who has studied ice sheets in Greenland, is skeptical. He said melting permafrost has led to cratering on U.S. Air Force runways and thinks mining infrastructure would face similar challenges. “If you’ve ever stood next to a melting glacier, you’re not putting a mine there. The ice is literally melting below your feet. It’s crumbling, it’s collapsing,” he said. “The idea that we’re going to walk in and in a year, start up mines and have minerals coming out and be rich, it’s a complete and utter fantasy. It doesn’t match the reality of being on the ground.” 

That hasn’t stopped wealthy investors from yearning to profit from Greenland, from billionaire Ronald Lauder to Peter Thiel. Bierman said the greater risk to humanity is allowing climate change — which Trump has called a hoax — to continue to melt ice caps and inundate low-lying cities like Jakarta, eventually dislocating an anticipated half a billion people. “Compared to the value of strategic minerals in Greenland, it’s orders of magnitude more in damages from letting the ice melt,” said Bierman, who wrote a book on Greenland called When The Ice Is Gone.

Denmark has recognized Greenland as self-governing with a right to its own mineral resources, and Greenlanders have been extremely clear about their desire to maintain their sovereignty, as well as their affiliation with Denmark. “It is our country,” Lynge said. “No one can take it.” 

Since World War II, Greenland has been a close military ally of the U.S., hosting not just Pituffik Space Base — which displaced an Inuit village — but also more than 20 American military bases that were eventually abandoned. Treaties dating back to 1941 give the U.S. enormous sway over what its military can do on the island and prevents other militaries from operating there, even though Trump has repeatedly claimed that Russia and China are doing so. 

“[According to an] agreement from 1951, the United States is free to do what they want, and from 2014, they can do that by talking to us and the Danes,” said Lynge from Greenland. “The U.S. is the only military presence here in Greenland, so what’s the problem?”

After two centuries of colonial rule, in the 1960s, Denmark began taking steps to limit Inuit population growth by inserting intrauterine devices in about 4,500 women, including girls as young as 12 years old. The Danish government apologized last year and agreed to compensate the women who sued, arguing the government violated their human rights. The population limitation process was extremely effective, dropping birth rates substantially among Indigenous families and causing permanent infertility among some women. Denmark also has a decades-long history of removing Inuit children from their homes against their parents’ will, with research as recent as 2022 showing that Inuit children are seven times more likely to be removed from their parents’ homes than Danish children. In 2023, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples issued a report on the status of Greenland that said Denmark needs to implement many reforms to fully respect Indigenous rights, including embracing a reconciliation process to address historical trauma.

Despite these traumas, and perhaps motivated by them, Greenland’s independence movement has gained ground in recent decades, securing several major wins. In 1979, more than 70 percent of Greenland’s mostly Inuit residents voted in favor of more independence from Denmark. The referendum made the island a “constituent country” of the Kingdom of Denmark, rather than just a colony, and gave Greenlanders control over domestic policies such as their education, environment, health, and fisheries. The law also established the Greenlandic Parliament. 

In 2008, more than three-fourths of Greenlanders again voted in favor of self-governance, expanding their control over the police and courts and giving Greenland more of a say over foreign policy. The law also made Kalaallisut, an Inuit language of Greenland, the official language of the country, and restored Greenland’s control over its mineral and oil revenue, with provisions for remitting some funding to Denmark. It also established a pathway to full independence, without a specific timeline, as the move would require support from both Greenland and Denmark.

Political leaders in Greenland have continued to explore the possibility of full independence, drafting a potential constitution as recently as 2023, and last year, polls showed that most people in Greenland wanted independence from Denmark, although voters differed on how and when it should happen. The vast majority, 85 percent, oppose any type of union with the U.S. 

“They serve as a model for how to practice self-governance,” said Gunn-Britt Retter, the head of the Arctic and environmental unit of the Saami Council, which represents Indigenous Saami people in Europe. The council has come out in support of Greenland against Trump’s threats, and has been a longtime ally of theirs in the fight for climate action and Indigenous rights internationally. She added that the idea of the U.S. buying Greenland from Denmark makes no sense. “You can’t buy something that is stolen.” 

To Lynge, Trump’s threats are not only misinformed, but also threaten the political autonomy that he has spent his lifetime building. And he doesn’t think Greenlanders are the only people at risk. 

“We are in the middle of a situation in the world where small nations like us would be crushed if we don’t do anything,” Lynge said. “If the world allows what is happening right now, it will continue and destroy the world order as we know it.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Greenland is a global model for Indigenous self-governance. Trump’s demands for the island threaten that. on Jan 22, 2026.

The Associated Press this week reported a stunning fact: Of the 13,000 homes destroyed a year ago in the extraordinary wildfires in and around Los Angeles, fewer than a dozen have been rebuilt.

The massive, fast-moving wildfires that tore through Los Angeles County last January directly killed at least 31 people and sickened many more, torching more than 16,000 structures in total. With an economic toll estimated as high as $275 billion, the 2025 Los Angeles fires may be the costliest disaster in U.S. history.

The flames driven by hurricane-strength Santa Ana winds ignited on top of a severe housing crisis in the region.

“Los Angeles residents faced a tight rental housing market even before these unprecedented wildfires forced thousands from their homes and compounded the problem,” Tomiquia Moss, California Business, Consumer Services, and Housing Agency secretary, said in a press release.

According to the housing research firm Up for Growth, California is short of nearly 840,000 homes, with the L.A. region in particular at a deficit of nearly 340,000 residences. What’s worse, the Palisades and Eaton fires displaced about 100,000 people as their flames engulfed entire neighborhoods within hours.

The disaster has created immense political pressure to rebuild as fast as possible and, indeed, California state officials say that things are moving much faster than in past disasters. But even faster than ever still isn’t fast enough.

The state government and local officials signed orders to speed up permitting and waive environmental reviews to try to accelerate the reconstruction effort. A year after the 2018 Camp Fire in Northern California burned down a comparable number of homes, just 385 rebuilding permits had been issued. The state reports that of the 6,191 rebuilding permit applications received in areas afflicted by last year’s fires, 2,617 have been approved.

But even with the ramped-up effort, only about 900 homes are under construction, and less than a city block’s worth have been rebuilt to date.

Even with strong political backing, tens of thousands of lives, and billions of dollars at stake, L.A.’s slow restoration is a grim warning of what’s to come in a state facing growing wildfire risks as more people encroach on regions primed to burn and as the planet continues to warm. It’s not just houses and neighborhoods that have to adapt to higher levels of risk; fire-prone regions need more effective public policy.

“The system structurally is not built for rebuilding and recovery,” said Minjee Kim, an assistant professor of urban planning at the University of California Los Angeles. “You just need a whole different animal to enable comprehensive reconstruction.”

What’s still holding back fire recovery

Reemerging from the ashes of a wildfire is always a long process.

The Los Angeles Times reported in September that of the 22,500 homes lost in the most destructive fires between 2017 and 2020, only 38 percent have been rebuilt to date.

The Palisades and Eaton fires together burned close to 40,000 acres across all tiers of wealth, from multimillion-dollar coastal mansions to inner-city apartment complexes. According to Realtor.com, the communities that experienced the brunt of the blazes — Altadena and Pacific Palisades — lost $8.3 billion in home values. Residents are also struggling to pay for reconstruction as insurance payouts have been slow to process. Many wildfire victims didn’t have insurance coverage at all.

Faced with rising risks, falling property values, tight budgets, and mounting reconstruction costs, only a small fraction of Angelenos afflicted by fires say they plan to rebuild. At least 600 homeowners have already decided to sell what’s left of their land.

But for those looking to stay, it’s going to take a while to move back in.

There are several key reasons why. One is that building a home in the Los Angeles area, even in ideal conditions, takes longer than the national average, anywhere between 10 to 18 months.

Of course, the aftermath of a wildfire is anything but ideal. The flames leave behind toxic debris that can contaminate the air, the water, and the soil. Simply cleaning up the ashes of an inferno can take months, and many homes in the area still face chemical hazards.

Almost every step of the rebuilding process requires permits — clearing debris, construction, connecting power and water lines — and each permit takes time to process. The city of Los Angeles reports it has received more than 3,000 permit applications for more than 1,400 addresses — still already a small fraction of what was lost. Even so, the city issued just under half of these permits.

Los Angeles County, which includes unincorporated areas, notes that it takes on average 95 business days to issue new residential construction permits. Of the 2,905 rebuilding applications received, only seven homes have been completed.

These permits help ensure that rebuilt and new homes meet a minimum standard of safety and quality, but the tradeoff is that they require time and money. “When you zoom into regulation as an issue, it’s not individual departments that are delaying the process — it’s more like the entirety of the network of reviews that needs to happen that is an impediment to a faster recovery,” Kim said.

And all these hurdles stand in your way if you want to rebuild close to exactly as you were. Most of the efforts to accelerate the permitting process apply to “like-for-like” construction, meaning the rebuilt structure doesn’t exceed 110 percent of the original building’s height and area.

If you’re an Angeleno who wants to build bigger, with greater density, or modify your home significantly to better withstand future fires, you’ll have to jump through another set of hoops.

The fact that so many people are trying to rebuild their homes at the same time has also caused shortages of labor and construction materials, further hobbling the pace of recovery. The Trump administration’s tariffs are further driving up costs on vital building supplies like lumber. Federal immigration raids have made it harder to recruit construction workers in the Los Angeles area, many of whom are undocumented.

All of this is dashing the hopes that the 2025 Los Angeles fires would at least be an opportunity to rethink and rebuild communities better.

Some experts thought that the wake of the disaster would encourage communities to work together on coherent fire mitigation strategies, harden houses against ignition, pull back from the riskiest areas, and spur work to conserve water, reduce natural fuels, and mitigate climate change. In other fire-prone regions like around Lake Tahoe in California and Nevada, communities have found some success in being proactive about reducing fire risks and saving money on their insurance rates.

But once a fire has already occurred, especially in one of the most housing-starved regions in the country, the focus remains on getting homes built as fast as possible. Broader efforts to adapt to a hotter, more fiery world take a back seat.

“Our faith is up to individual decisions made by the homeowners,” Kim said. “I don’t think there is a higher-level neighborhood-scale rethinking of fire resiliency that is happening at this point.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why almost none of the homes burned in LA have been rebuilt since last year’s fires on Jan 14, 2026.

It’s a universal fact that as any 3D object, from a Platonic sphere to a cell to an elephant, grows outward in all directions, its total surface area will increase more slowly than the space it occupies (its volume). If the object’s geometry and shape remain the same as it gets bigger, then its surface area will increase roughly as fast as its volume to the two-thirds power. For centuries…

Source

The largest herds of caribou in the world make their homes here. Polar bears give birth to cubs in dens dug into this soil, some of them more than 200 years old. And birds like the Arctic tern fly north every summer, some from as far south as Antarctica, to breed and lay their eggs.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in northern Canada, a 90-million-acre area stretching from northern Manitoba to Quebec, are a haven for biodiversity, home to more than 1,000 species of plants and 175 species of birds. But the secret of this unique ecosystem lies below the surface, in a buildup of water-saturated mosses called peat.

Though it looks like little more than fibrous dirt, peat has near-magical properties.

Acidic and anaerobic, it can preserve artifacts, food, and even human remains for centuries or more. And because the process of decomposition slows down in such environments, they trap carbon dioxide and keep it out of the atmosphere, slowing the process of climate change.

The Hudson Bay peatlands in particular store five times as much carbon per acre as the Amazon rainforest, Janet Sumner, executive director of the Wildlands League, a Canadian conservation group, told me. Indigenous nations around Hudson Bay call the area “the breathing lands.”

“It’s the world’s temperature regulator,” said Valérie Courtois, executive director of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative, which works on Indigenous-led conservation efforts in Canada. “It’s like we have a big fridge on top of the planet that is helping keep everything the way that it should be.”

But now, the fridge is hanging open.

Though they cover only 3 percent of the earth’s surface, peatlands store nearly one-third of the world’s carbon. And these ecosystems around the world are vulnerable to development and destruction. Today, only 17 percent of the world’s peatlands fall within a protected area, according to a recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society.

The world’s peatlands are increasingly at the center of conflicts over resource extraction, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

In northern Canada, one of the biggest fears for peat conservationists is mining for rare-earth minerals. Part of the Hudson Bay peatland sits atop the Ring of Fire, a mineral deposit containing nickel, chromium, and other metals used in clean energy technologies like electric vehicle batteries. Some experts see the minerals there as key to Canada’s clean-energy transition and a crucial part of the fight against climate change. And it’s true; minerals like the ones found around Hudson Bay are necessary for solar panels, batteries, and other technologies we need to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels.

But in the process of mining them, we may just destroy a crucial climate regulator.

The government of Ontario, where the Ring of Fire is located, sees mining in the area as necessary for Canadian energy independence, especially amid President Donald Trump’s trade wars. “This is how we make ourselves less reliant on the United States,” Ontario Premier Doug Ford said this summer.

And already, the area’s peatlands are at risk from mining expeditions, which experts say have disturbed the ecosystem even though no mineshafts have yet been sunk. First Nations and conservation groups are working to protect the lands around Hudson Bay, but it’s a race against the clock as mining exploration ramps up with support from the Canadian government.

The carbon stored in the Hudson Bay peatlands took thousands of years to build up, said Lawrence Martin, director of lands and resources for the Mushgewok Council, a group representing several First Nations in the area. If it’s released now, it could take thousands of years to replace. And if humans want to avoid the worst effects of climate change, we don’t have that kind of time.

“These are the lungs of the earth,” Martin told me. “If you start tampering with that, you have to be really, really careful.”

The power of peat

Peat is a kind of soil that forms whenever organic matter builds up faster than it can decompose, said Dan Zarin, executive director for forests and climate change at the Wildlife Conservation Society. The bogs of northern Europe, famous resting places for uncannily preserved bog bodies, are made of peat. But peat can also be found in the United States, in the Adirondacks of upstate New York and the huge Okefenokee Swamp in Georgia.

The soil also forms in the tropics, often in damp, forested areas where layers of different plant species stack on top of one another. In Panama, for example, peat can form giant domes, several meters deep and thousands of years old.

In colder climates like northern Canada, peatlands are usually created by colonies of sphagnum moss — a simple, easily overlooked plant that’s also a climate hero.

The structure of sphagnum includes large, empty cells that make the plant into a kind of sponge, absorbing up to 20 times its weight in water. Moss was so well-known for its absorbent properties that First Nations peoples once used it for menstrual products and diapers, Courtois said. That absorbency helps create the wet, low-oxygen conditions that slow down decomposition and aid in carbon capture.

There’s more carbon stored in peatlands than in all the trees in the world — or about two-third of the world’s petroleum reserves — Zarin said. The peatlands in the Congo Basin store the equivalent of several years’ worth of carbon emissions for the entire world. That’s why peat is so critical to the world’s climate future, Zarin said, and yet, “it’s not really getting anything near the attention it deserves.”

Around the world, ecosystems like tropical forests and mangroves are much more likely to be protected than peatlands, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society. And nearly a quarter of peatlands are under heavy pressure from human development.

In Indonesia, for example, forested peatlands are being cleared, drained, and planted with palms to feed the rapidly growing global demand for palm oil, a common ingredient in products from toothpaste to peanut butter. In Patagonia, they’re threatened by urban development, Jorge Hoyos-Santillán, a research associate at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, told me. Around the world, peat is harvested and sold for use in potting soil — an 8-quart bag retails for less than $10 at U.S. hardware stores, where Americans can purchase it for their berry patches and flower beds.

And now, increasingly, peatlands are at risk, as governments and private industry seek new sources of the minerals needed for the batteries and related technologies that will likely power the world in the future.

Why damaging peatlands is so dangerous

Around Hudson Bay, conservation groups are watching with concern as mining companies begin to survey fragile wetland ecosystems. “People focus on the mining, but there’s a lot of damage that occurs before mining,” Sumner of the Wildlands League told me.

Mining exploration requires test drilling and the use of heavy machinery on a sensitive landscape, which can change its hydrology, causing areas of peatland to dry out, Sumner said.

When peat dries out, its carbon-storing superpower becomes a liability.

As water leaves the environment, decomposition starts again, and the soil begins to release all the carbon it’s stored up over thousands of years. You can think of it like the burning of fossil fuels, Julie Loisel, a professor of geography at the University of Nevada, Reno, told me. “It took a long time to put that carbon down into the soil, and then you really quickly release it back to the atmosphere.”

Drying peat also turns it into a frighteningly powerful fuel for fires — in fact, communities in Ireland and elsewhere have long burned peat as an alternative to coal. Today, peatland fires can be especially insidious, because even when they appear to be extinguished, they can continue to burn underground for months and re-spark — a phenomenon known as a “zombie fire.”

Peatland fires can release 100 times the carbon of a wildfire and produce large amounts of noxious smoke. In Indonesia in the 2010s, peat fires released as much carbon in a single day as the entire emissions of the United States, Zarin of the Wildlife Conservation Society told me. Fires are already burning in the peatlands of northern Canada, spurred on by climate change, and experts fear they’ll only become more devastating if the landscape isn’t protected.

And now, research indicates we may have entered a new age of fire — where massive blazes around the world will be more frequent and destructive. It’s even more urgent to prevent peatlands from drying out and becoming fuel for these conflagrations.

“We want to keep the peatlands doing what they do, which is breathing for the planet,” Sumner said.

Protecting the world’s climate regulator

The carbon calculus involved in trading peatlands for EV batteries is a complicated one.

But conservation groups say mining in Canada’s Ring of Fire is less important for the clean energy transition than proponents have claimed. One issue is the remoteness of the area: the mining sites are currently accessible only by ice-road or float-plane, and a plan to build a major road to the area could take a decade, Sumner said.

Other sites in Ontario have more critical minerals, are more accessible, and are located in areas that are already environmentally degraded, Sumner said. Mining in the Ring of Fire “feels more like a dream than it does a reality, and it’s not going to meet the need for energy transition in any short timeline, which is what we need,” Sumner said.

Meanwhile, First Nations have been at work for years on their own plans for the Hudson Bay lowlands. The Mushkegowuk Council is leading an effort to establish an Indigenous-led conservation project in northern Ontario that could protect peatlands and other ecosystems as well. The Kitchenuhmaykoosib Inninuwug First Nation has also proposed a protected area including peatlands around the Fawn River in northern Ontario.

“What makes an Indigenous approach to planning is that you look at what you need to keep in those ecosystems as opposed to looking at what you can take,” Courtois of the Indigenous Leadership Initiative said. Under such an approach, Indigenous leaders can also identify less vulnerable areas where activities like mining could occur.

“The more that provinces embrace the practice of land use planning — or land relationship planning as we like to call it — the better the conditions are for the exploration of potential development,” Courtois said.

Representatives of the Mushkegowuk Council have also said mining could potentially coexist with conservation. “You do need to reach into the ground to pull out the resources necessary to keep us fed,” the Council’s Martin told me. “But we need to do this with great conscience.”

The fate of the conservation project remains unclear, however, and Martin said the Council is still working to get the Ontario government on board.

Meanwhile, peatlands around the world remain at risk, as lack of knowledge and political will collide with economic development. In some parts of the world, they’ve “been treated as wasteland areas,” Zarin said. Indeed, the swampy bogs of the global north are a common setting for horror stories, seen as a place humans should avoid and fear.

The first step toward changing that is a better understanding of peatlands, experts say. These ecosystems are often in remote locations that are difficult for humans to navigate, and since peat lies beneath the surface, it’s often invisible even to researchers. The peatlands in the Congo Basin, for example, were only documented by scientists in the 2010s, and their full size — as big as England and Wales combined — was revealed only in 2023. Those discoveries have helped drive funding and conservation efforts to the area, said Hoyos-Santillán, from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.

Beyond understanding, people around the world need an appreciation of peatlands and their value, conservationists say. “My hope is that the province of Ontario and other places that have these sorts of landscapes look at them not just as some sort of breadbasket for the development of the province, but also see it as a feature of who they are,” Courtois said.

“You can’t destroy everything for capitalism,” Martin said. “You have to be able to save enough for your children, for your future generations, for them to enjoy life.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The humble plant that could save the world — or destroy it on Oct 22, 2025.

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers stormed through Santa Ana, California, in June, panicked calls flooded into the city’s emergency response system.

Recordings of those calls, obtained by ProPublica, captured some of the terror residents felt as they watched masked men ambush people and force them into unmarked cars. In some cases, the men wore plain clothes and refused to identify themselves. There was no way to confirm whether they were immigration agents or imposters. In six of the calls to Santa Ana police, residents described what they were seeing as kidnappings.

“He’s bleeding,” one caller said about a person he saw yanked from a car wash lot and beaten. “They dumped him into a white van. It doesn’t say ICE.”

One woman’s voice shook as she asked, “What kind of police go around without license plates?”

And then this from another: “Should we just run from them?”

During a tense public meeting days later, Mayor Valerie Amezcua and the City Council asked their police chief whether there was anything they could do to rein in the federal agents — even if only to ban the use of masks. The answer was a resounding no. Plus, filing complaints with the Department of Homeland Security was likely to go nowhere because the office that once handled them had been dismantled. There was little chance of holding individual agents accountable for alleged abuses because, among other hurdles, there was no way to reliably learn their identities.

Since then, Amezcua, 58, said she has reluctantly accepted the reality: There are virtually no limits on what federal agents can do to achieve President Donald Trump’s goal of mass deportations. Santa Ana has proven to be a template for much larger raids and even more violent arrests in Chicago and elsewhere. “It’s almost like he tries it out in this county and says, ‘It worked there, so now let me send them there,’” Amezcua said.

Current and former national security officials share the mayor’s concerns. They describe the legions of masked immigration officers operating in near-total anonymity on the orders of the president as the crossing of a line that had long set the United States apart from the world’s most repressive regimes. ICE, in their view, has become an unfettered and unaccountable national police force. The transformation, the officials say, unfolded rapidly and in plain sight. Trump’s DHS appointees swiftly dismantled civil rights guardrails, encouraged agents to wear masks, threatened groups and state governments that stood in their way, and then made so many arrests that the influx overwhelmed lawyers trying to defend immigrants taken out of state or out of the country.

And although they are reluctant to predict the future, the current and former officials worry that this force assembled from federal agents across the country could eventually be turned against any groups the administration labels a threat.

One former senior DHS official who was involved in oversight said that what is happening on American streets today “gives me goosebumps.”

Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the official rattled off scenes that once would’ve triggered investigations: “Accosting people outside of their immigration court hearings where they’re showing up and trying to do the right thing and then hauling them off to an immigration jail in the middle of the country where they can’t access loved ones or speak to counsel. Bands of masked men apprehending people in broad daylight in the streets and hauling them off. Disappearing people to a third country, to a prison where there’s a documented record of serious torture and human rights abuse.”

The former official paused. “We’re at an inflection point in history right now and it’s frightening.”

Although ICE is conducting itself out in the open, even inviting conservative social media influencers to accompany its agents on high-profile raids, the agency operates in darkness. The identities of DHS officers, their salaries and their operations have long been withheld for security reasons and generally exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. However, there were offices within DHS created to hold agents and their supervisors accountable for their actions on the job. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, created by Congress and led largely by lawyers, investigated allegations of rape and unlawful searches from both the public and within DHS ranks, for instance. Egregious conduct was referred to the Justice Department.

The CRCL office had limited powers; former staffers say their job was to protect DHS by ensuring personnel followed the law and addressed civil rights concerns. Still, it was effective in stalling rushed deportations or ensuring detainees had access to phones and lawyers. And even when its investigations didn’t fix problems, CRCL provided an accounting of allegations and a measure of transparency for Congress and the public.

The office processed thousands of complaints — 3,000 in fiscal year 2023 alone — ranging from allegations of lack of access to medical treatment to reports of sexual assault at detention centers. Former staffers said around 600 complaints were open when work was suspended.

The administration has gutted most of the office. What’s left of it was led, at least for a while, by a 29-year-old White House appointee who helped craft Project 2025, the right-wing blueprint that broadly calls for the curtailment of civil rights enforcement.

Meanwhile, ICE is enjoying a windfall in resources. On top of its annual operating budget of $10 billion a year, the so-called One Big Beautiful Bill included an added $7.5 billion a year for the next four years for recruiting and retention alone. As part of its hiring blitz, the agency has dropped age, training and education standards and has offered recruits signing bonuses as high as $50,000.

“Supercharging this law enforcement agency and at the same time you have oversight being eliminated?” said the former DHS official. “This is very scary.”

Michelle Brané, a longtime human rights attorney who directed DHS’ ombudsman office during the Biden administration, said Trump’s adherence to “the authoritarian playbook is not even subtle.”

“ICE, their secret police, is their tool,” Brané said. “Once they have that power, which they have now, there’s nothing stopping them from using it against citizens.”

Tricia McLaughlin, the DHS assistant secretary for public affairs, refuted descriptions of ICE as a secret police force. She called such comparisons the kind of “smears and demonization” that led to the recent attack on an ICE facility in Texas, in which a gunman targeted an ICE transport van and shot three detained migrants, two of them fatally, before killing himself.

In a written response to ProPublica, McLaughlin dismissed the current and former national security officials and scholars interviewed by ProPublica as “far-left champagne socialists” who haven’t seen ICE enforcement up close.

“If they had,” she wrote, “they would know when our heroic law enforcement officers conduct operations, they clearly identify themselves as law enforcement while wearing masks to protect themselves from being targeted by highly sophisticated gangs” and other criminals.

McLaughlin said the recruiting blitz is not compromising standards. She wrote that the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center is ready for 11,000 new hires by the beginning of next year and that training has been streamlined and boosted by technology. “Our workforce never stops learning,” McLaughlin wrote.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson also praised ICE conduct and accused Democrats of making “dangerous, untrue smears.”

“ICE officers act heroically to enforce the law, arrest criminal illegal aliens and protect American communities with the utmost professionalism,” Jackson said. “Anyone pointing the finger at law enforcement officers instead of the criminals are simply doing the bidding of criminal illegal aliens and fueling false narratives that lead to violence.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, the Trump pick who fired nearly the entire civil rights oversight staff, said the move was in response to CRCL functioning “as internal adversaries that slow down operations,” according to a DHS spokesperson.

Trump also eliminated the department’s Office of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, which was charged with flagging inhumane conditions at ICE detention facilities where many of the apprehended immigrants are held. The office was resurrected after a lawsuit and court order, though it’s sparsely staffed.

The hobbling of the office comes as the White House embarks on an aggressive expansion of detention sites with an eye toward repurposing old jails or building new ones with names that telegraph harsh conditions: “Alligator Alcatraz” in the Florida Everglades, built by the state and operated in partnership with DHS, or the “Cornhusker Clink” in Nebraska.

“It is a shocking situation to be in that I don’t think anybody anticipated a year ago,” said Erica Frantz, a political scientist at Michigan State University who studies authoritarianism. “We might’ve thought that we were going to see a slide, but I don’t think anybody anticipated how quickly it would transpire, and now people at all levels are scrambling to figure out how to push back.”

“Authoritarian Playbook”

Frantz and other scholars who study anti-democratic political systems in other countries said there are numerous examples in which ICE’s activities appear cut from an authoritarian playbook. Among them was the detention of Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk, who was apprehended after co-writing an op-ed for the campus paper that criticized the school’s response to the war in Gaza. ICE held her incommunicado for 24 hours and then shuffled her through three states before jailing her in Louisiana.

“The thing that got me into the topic of ‘maybe ICE is a secret police force’?” said Lee Morgenbesser, an Australian political science professor who studies authoritarianism. “It was that daylight snatching of the Tufts student.”

Morgenbesser was also struck by the high-profile instances of ICE detaining elected officials who attempted to stand in their way. Among them, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander was detained for demanding a judicial warrant from ICE, and U.S. Sen. Alex Padilla was forcibly removed from a DHS press conference.

And David Sklansky, a Stanford Law School professor who researches policing and democracy, said it appears that ICE’s agents are allowed to operate with complete anonymity. “It’s not just that people can’t see faces of the officers,” Sklansky said. “The officers aren’t wearing shoulder insignia or name tags.”

U.S. District Judge William G. Young, a Ronald Reagan appointee, recently pointed out that use of masked law enforcement officers had long been considered anathema to American ideals. In a blistering ruling against the administration’s arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters, he wrote, “To us, masks are associated with cowardly desperados and the despised Ku Klux Klan. In all our history we have never tolerated an armed masked secret police.” The Trump administration has said it will appeal that ruling.

Where the Fallout is Felt

The fallout is being felt in places like Hays County, Texas, not far from Austin, where ICE apprehended 47 people, including nine children, during a birthday celebration in the early morning of April 1.

The agency’s only disclosure about the raid in Dripping Springs describes the operation as part of a yearlong investigation targeting “members and associates believed to be part of the Venezuelan transnational gang, Tren de Aragua.”

Six months later, the county’s top elected official told ProPublica the federal government has ignored his attempts to get answers.

“We’re not told why they took them, and we’re not told where they took them,” said County Judge Ruben Becerra, a Democrat. “By definition, that’s a kidnapping.”

In the raid, a Texas trooper secured a search warrant that allowed law enforcement officers to breach the home, an Airbnb rental on a vast stretch of land in the Hill Country. Becerra told ProPublica he believes the suspicion of drugs at the party was a pretense to pull people out of the house so ICE officers who lacked a warrant could take them into custody. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment.

The Trump administration has yet to produce evidence supporting claims of gang involvement, said Karen Muñoz, a civil rights attorney helping families track down their relatives who were jailed or deported. While some court documents are sealed, nothing in the public record verifies the gang affiliation DHS cited as the cause for the birthday party raid.

“There’s no evidence released at all that any person kidnapped at that party was a member of any organized criminal group,” Muñoz said.

McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, did not respond to questions about Hays County and other raids where families and attorneys allege a lack of transparency and due process.

In Plain Sight

Months after ICE’s widely publicized raids, fear continues to envelop Santa Ana, a majority-Hispanic city with a large immigrant population. Amezcua, the mayor, said the raids have complicated local policing and rendered parents afraid to pick up their children from school. The city manager, a California-born citizen and Latino, carries with him three government IDs, including a passport.

Raids of car washes and apartment buildings continue, but the community has started to “push back,” Amezcua said. “Like many other communities, the neighbors come out. People stop in the middle of traffic.”

With so few institutional checks on ICE’s powers, citizens are increasingly relying on themselves. On at least one occasion in nearby Downey, a citizen’s intervention had some effect.

On June 12, Melyssa Rivas had just started her workday when a colleague burst into her office with urgent news: “ICE is here.”

The commotion was around the corner in Rivas’ hometown, a Los Angeles suburb locals call “Mexican Beverly Hills” for its stately houses and affluent Hispanic families. Rivas, 31, the daughter of Mexican immigrants, belongs to Facebook groups where residents share updates about cultural festivals, church programs and, these days, the presence of Trump’s deportation foot soldiers.

Rivas had seen posts about ICE officers sweeping through LA and figured Downey’s turn had come. She and her co-worker rushed toward the sound of screaming at a nearby intersection. Rivas hit “record” on her phone as a semicircle of trucks and vans came into view. She filmed at least half a dozen masked men in camouflage vests encircling a Hispanic man on his knees.

Her unease deepened as she registered details that “didn’t seem right,” Rivas recalled in an interview. She said the parked vans had out-of-state plates or no tags. The armed men wore only generic “police” patches, and most were in street clothes. No visible insignia identified them as state or federal — or even legal authorities at all.

“When is it that we just decided to do things a different way? There’s due process, there’s a legal way, and it just doesn’t seem to matter anymore,” Rivas said. “Where are human rights?”

Video footage shows Rivas and others berating the officers for complicity in what they called a “kidnapping.” Local news channels later reported that the vehicles had chased the man after a raid at a nearby car wash.

“I know half of you guys know this is fucked up,” Rivas was recorded telling the officers.

Moments later, the scene took a turn. As suddenly as they’d arrived, the officers returned to their vehicles and left, with no apology and no explanation to the distraught man they left on the sidewalk.

Through a mask, one of them said, “Have a good day.”

The post Unfettered and Unaccountable: How Trump Is Building a Violent, Shadowy Federal Police Force appeared first on ProPublica.

The best perk of Alberto Maspero’s job, he says, is the view from his window. Situated on a hill above the ancient port city of Trieste, Italy, his office at the International School for Advanced Studies overlooks a broad bay at the northern tip of the Adriatic Sea. “It’s very inspiring,” the mathematician said. “For sure the most beautiful view I’ve ever had.” Italians call Trieste la città…

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by Melissa Sanchez and Mariam Elba

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She desperately wanted to get out of the country.

It was mid-May and Pérez, a Venezuelan mother of two, couldn’t survive on her own in Chicago anymore. She’d been relying on charity for food and shelter ever since her partner had been detained by immigration authorities after a traffic stop earlier in the year.

Pérez, 25, thought it’d be safer to return to Venezuela with her children than to stay in the U.S. Her request for asylum was still open and she had a permit to work legally, but so did a lot of other Venezuelans getting picked up on the streets and taken into custody. Authorities were detaining immigrants regardless of whether they’d followed the rules.

She had also seen how President Donald Trump singled out her countrymen, calling them gang members and terrorists, even sending hundreds to a foreign prison. She was terrified of getting detained, deported and, worst of all, separated from her young daughter and son. They were the reason the family had come to the U.S.

Then she heard about Trump’s offer of a safe and dignified way out.

“We are making it as easy as possible for illegal aliens to leave America,” the president said in a video on social media in May announcing the launch of Project Homecoming.

He spoke about a phone app where “illegals can book a free flight to any foreign country.” And he dangled other incentives: Eligible immigrants wouldn’t be barred from returning legally to the U.S. someday, and they’d even get a $1,000 “exit bonus.” Believing the president’s words, Pérez downloaded the CBP Home app and registered to return to Venezuela with her children.

Months passed. Her partner was deported. In July, Pérez said, she got a call from someone in the CBP Home program telling her she’d be on a flight out of the country in mid-August. She began packing.

But as the departure date neared and the plane tickets hadn’t arrived, Pérez got nervous. Again and again, she called the toll-free number she’d been given. Finally, somebody called back to say there might be a delay obtaining the documents she’d need to travel to Venezuela.

Then there was silence. No further information, no plane tickets. Pérez registered on the app again in August, then a third time in September, as immigration arrests ramped up in Chicago.

Today, Pérez feels trapped in a country that doesn’t want her. She’s afraid of leaving her apartment, afraid that she will be detained and that her children will be taken away from her. “I feel so scared, always looking around in every direction,” she said. “I was trying to leave voluntarily, like the president said.”

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown is having the intended effect of terrifying people into trying to leave. There have been some 25,000 departures of immigrants from all countries via CBP Home, according to U.S. Department of Homeland Security data obtained by ProPublica.

The data indicates that of those 25,000 people, a little more than half of them returned home with DHS assistance; nearly all the others who left the U.S. ended up returning on their own.

And it’s not just CBP Home. Applications for voluntary departures — an alternative to deportation granted to some immigrants who leave at their own expense — have skyrocketed to levels not seen since at least 2000, reaching more than 34,000 since Trump’s second administration began, immigration court data shows. (The number is higher than in years past, but nowhere near the number of immigrants the administration has deported this year.)

But for many recent arrivals from Venezuela — arguably the community most targeted by the Trump administration, and whose country is now bracing for the possibility of a U.S. invasion — leaving has not been as simple as the president has made it sound.

ProPublica spoke with more than a dozen Venezuelans who said they wanted to take the U.S. government’s offer of a safe and easy return. They signed up months ago on the CBP Home app and were given departure dates. But after those dates came and went, these immigrants said they feel betrayed by what the president told them.

Part of the problem is tied to the lack of diplomatic relations between Washington and Caracas. There are no consular services for Venezuelans in the U.S. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who migrated to the U.S. in recent years seeking asylum or other humanitarian relief entered without valid passports, as Pérez did. But to get on a plane for Venezuela, they’re being told they’ll need a special travel document known as a “salvoconducto,” or “safe passage,” from their government.

And relations between the two countries are getting worse. The Trump administration has pushed for regime change in Venezuela, sent warships to the Caribbean and, in recent weeks, blew up four Venezuelan boats it claimed were transporting drugs to the U.S. Bracing for an invasion, Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has said he’s ready to declare a state of emergency to protect his country, which could make it harder for Venezuelans abroad to return home.

The Venezuelans who want to leave the U.S. described how CBP Home representatives told them that their lack of passports wouldn’t be a problem and that the U.S. government would help them obtain the travel documents they needed. Now they are being told that they’re on their own — if they get any response at all.

The Trump administration was aware of the potential challenges from the start. In his May proclamation, the president directed the State and Homeland Security departments to “take all appropriate actions to enable the rapid departure of illegal aliens from the United States who currently lack a valid travel document from their countries of citizenship or nationality.”

In a statement, a DHS spokesperson said the agency is working with the State Department “to acquire travel documents for those who lack safe passage. So far thousands of Venezuelans have already self-departed using CBP Home.” The State Department referred questions to DHS.

The internal DHS records obtained by ProPublica show nearly 3,700 departures of Venezuelans via CBP Home through late September. It’s unclear how many Venezuelans have applied. The DHS spokesperson said the agency could not confirm the numbers and would not say whether the program is meeting projections. (A congressional committee has directed DHS to include information about CBP Home departures in monthly reports the agency previously published, but has not published in this administration.)

An estimated 10,200 Venezuelans were deported between February and early October, according to deportation flight data tracked by the nonprofit Human Rights First’s ICE Flight Monitor.

Many of the Venezuelans interviewed by ProPublica are mothers of young children who say they decided to take the president’s offer after their work permits expired, their temporary protected status was canceled or their spouses were deported. Few are willing to return by land because of the dangers posed by cartel violence and kidnappings in Mexico — dangers many of them experienced when they migrated here.

Nearly all of them, like Pérez, asked not to be identified by their full names because they’re afraid of bringing unwanted attention to themselves and of the potential consequences of such attention. Interviews with Venezuelan immigrants were conducted in Spanish.

Before their departure dates came and went, they had made preparations to leave — turning over the keys to their apartments, pulling their children from school, shipping their belongings to Venezuela. And they have sunk deeper into poverty as the weeks and months pass.

Pérez applied for her family to return to Venezuela through the CBP Home app months ago but has been stuck in limbo in Chicago without a clear path forward. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

In Los Angeles, a family of four slept in their tiny Toyota Echo for weeks to save on rent as they waited for their departure date. They sold the car and other belongings to pay for bus tickets back the way they’d come. Nearly two months after their return to Venezuela, they said they’re still waiting for the exit bonuses they’d hoped would help them start over.

In Youngstown, Pennsylvania, a mother of two said she didn’t enroll her 8-year-old son in school this fall because she assumed they would be gone by now. She recently moved into a friend’s apartment in New York City and plans to turn herself in to immigration authorities and ask to be deported.

“I don’t want to be here anymore,” the woman said, between sobs. “What am I supposed to do?”

Several immigration attorneys and advocates told ProPublica that they don’t trust the CBP Home app or the Trump administration’s promises to help immigrants self-deport. The National Immigration Law Center recently published a guide explaining some of the potential risks of using the app, such as leaving the country without closing an immigration court case and becoming ineligible for a future visa. Some lawyers said they discourage clients from using the app at all.

Ruben Garcia, director of Annunciation House, a nonprofit in El Paso that supports migrants and refugees, said in the current climate, he understands why some people might consider the administration’s offer to leave. But, he said, the offer has to be backed by action.

“If you’re going to say you’re going to do this,” Garcia added, “then you damn well better make sure that it’s truthful and that it works.”

Emily, a Venezuelan immigrant in Columbus, Ohio, holds her phone showing an email from the CBP Home program. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

CBP Home replaced an earlier app that the Biden administration had promoted to try to bring order to the soaring numbers of migrants attempting to enter the country. Pérez and other asylum-seekers used that earlier version, CBP One, to make appointments to approach the border. Trump, who campaigned on the promise of mass deportations, ended that option on his first day back in the White House.

In March, he reintroduced the app with the new name and function, allowing immigrants to alert the government of their intention to self-deport. It was part of a $200 million advertising blitz meant to encourage immigrants to “Stay Out and Leave Now.” Two months later, Trump unveiled Project Homecoming and the added incentives of free flights and exit payments. The administration moved State Department funds meant to aid refugees resettling in the U.S. to DHS to help pay for the flights and stipends, according to federal records and news reports.

DHS officials have mentioned the app in dozens of press releases about policy changes and enforcement operations. For example, in the September announcement that DHS was ending temporary protected status for Venezuelans, officials also encouraged Venezuelans to leave via CBP Home. And immigrants who show up for their hearings at immigration court see posters taped on the walls about the benefits they could get if they “self-deport using CBP Home instead of being deported by ICE.”

Emily and Deybis downloaded the app in June, when it seemed as if their life in the U.S. was collapsing. They said they used the earlier CBP One app to approach the border with their two children in January 2024 and were allowed into the country with protections that were supposed to last two years. They settled in Dallas, applied for asylum and got work permits; Deybis found a job in a hotel laundry and Emily at a Chick-fil-A. Then, this spring, the Trump administration ended protections for immigrants like them and canceled their work permits.

They lost their jobs and could no longer afford their rent. On the app’s sky-blue home screen, they saw a drawing of a smiling man and woman holding hands with a child. “Let us help you easily leave the country,” another screen told them in Spanish. They agreed to share their phone’s geolocation, entered personal information and uploaded selfies.

They received an automated email from “Project Homecoming Support” explaining that they would be contacted soon by someone from a toll-free number who would help coordinate their travel. Within weeks, they got a call from an operator at that number who said she worked on behalf of DHS.

Emily said she made clear the family didn’t have Venezuelan passports but was told that wouldn’t be a problem; the U.S. government would procure any necessary documents for them. They said the operator gave them an Aug. 1 departure date and told them to expect their plane tickets by email.

Emily and Deybis sold their car and moved with their children to Columbus, Ohio, where Deybis’ nephew let them stay in his unfinished basement apartment until their departure. The plane tickets never came.

Then the nephew was detained in a traffic stop and deported. Panicked, Emily and Deybis said they called the toll-free number again and again, leaving messages that went unanswered. Emily submitted a new application and sent more emails.

In mid-September, they got an email from the “CBP Home team” telling them to contact the Venezuelan embassy in Mexico to get travel documents on their own.

“We are working very hard on your case,” the email assured.

When they called the embassy, though, the number was busy. They found travel agencies that offer to procure travel documents at a cost but said they were told the Venezuelan government requires an arrival date and proof that plane tickets have been purchased. Emily and Deybis can’t afford them.

“Thank you so much for your patience and we understand your frustration,” they heard back in another email. “Wait for new instructions from DHS.”

As they wait, they worry about how they’ll survive when winter comes. Most days, Deybis visits local food pantries and looks for discarded items in alleys and on street corners that they can resell. A few weeks ago, they sold their daughter’s bed to help pay the rent.

“We’d rather be in Venezuela with our family than suffer here,” he said.

Emily and Deybis share a basement apartment in Columbus, Ohio with their two children. They’re unable to work and have resorted to selling the few possessions they have to feed the family. (Maddie McGarvey for ProPublica)

Pérez said her daughter was the family’s main motivation to come; the girl had been born with a heart defect and needed surgery they could not find in Venezuela, where hospitals operate through power outages and have limited capacity for advanced surgeries, not to mention supplies.

“We didn’t come for the American dream, or for a house, or for some life of luxury,” said Pérez. “What we wanted is for our daughter to live.”

She and her partner made the trek to the U.S. in 2023, with her daughter, then 6, and their 4-year-old son. Pérez thought they did it “the right away” by waiting in Mexico for weeks until they got an appointment to approach the border via CBP One. After they were processed, the family headed to Chicago, a city they had heard was a sanctuary for immigrants. At first they took shelter inside a police station, as hundreds of new immigrant families were doing at the time. Pérez said medical workers who visited the station learned about her daughter’s condition and connected the family to a hospital charity care program. The following spring, the frail little girl with dark brown eyes got the operation she needed.

In late 2024, the family moved to South Florida, where Pérez’s partner found work rebuilding homes damaged by hurricanes. Then in February, he was arrested for driving without a license or registration. He spent about two months in jail before he was transferred into immigration custody.

Pérez didn’t feel safe in Florida anymore. She returned to Chicago with her children.

But as the months pass without an answer from the CBP Home program, Chicago doesn’t feel safe, either. This fall, the Trump administration zeroed in on the city for immigration enforcement, sending in the U.S. Border Patrol. Pérez recently downloaded another app that tells her whether there’ve been sightings of federal immigration agents nearby, and she watches videos of other immigrants getting arrested. One day in September, a federal agent shot and killed an immigrant in a nearby suburb. Pérez wonders if she might die, too.

On a sunny September afternoon, Pérez peered down the street outside her children’s school, scanning for suspicious vehicles. Her daughter, who is now 8, bounded down the steps first, wearing a pink bow and a broad smile. Her son, now 6, in a Spiderman shirt and a blue cast from a playground accident, appeared next.

They share their mother’s anxiety. On their walk home, Pérez’s daughter leaned over her brother and chided him for speaking Spanish in public. The girl said her teacher had warned her that federal agents might be listening.

It reminded Perez that she now needs to leave the U.S. for the same reason she came: her children. She plans to register yet again on the CBP Home app.

Pérez plays with her two children in Chicago. Her partner was deported earlier this summer, leaving her unable to support the family alone. (Jamie Kelter Davis for ProPublica)

Jeff Ernsthausen contributed data analysis.

In the lush highlands of northern Nicaragua, nestled between two natural reserves, La Cumplida isn’t your average coffee farm. Over two decades, massive reforestation and innovative agriculture practices have allowed it to transform the region, showing how a different approach to coffee farming can help restore ecosystems and shore up rural livelihoods.

The sprawling farm, acquired by French agronomist Clément Ponçon in the 1990s, now covers over 5,400 acres in the central valleys of the country. Now led by Clément’s son Eric Ponçon, La Cumplida sells shade-grown coffee and hardwood timber, while tending primary forests placed in conservation. 

Over the years, Ponçon and La Cumplida have made long-term investments in agricultural methods that strengthen crop resilience and bolster livelihoods. Coffee is lovingly tucked under a canopy of native trees, improving pollination and reducing pests. When the plants’ leaves fall to the ground, the soil retains more water and birds and insects flourish.

The farm has worked with the Rainforest Alliance to get their practices certified under the organization’s newly announced Regenerative Agriculture Standard. The non-profit’s global lead for regenerative agriculture, Juliana Jaramillo, explains that this certification measures the farm’s standards for soil health and fertility, biodiversity, and climate resilience. “We always look for different practices or areas that deliver multiple benefits,” Jaramillo said. Reducing the use of pesticides and synthetic fertilizers have lowered farm costs, and allowed different coffee varieties to be planted at the farm. “As you move into the regenerative space, you start to see that the ecosystem recovers and starts to deliver better services,” she added.

Some of the trees that shelter the coffee — such as mahogany and walnut — have been sustainably harvested and sold to build homes and schools in the local community, providing the farm an additional income source. La Cumplida focuses on planting a mix of trees and crops so that farmers can harvest multiple products over time, creating a more stable and reliable income. Beyond timber, trees in this canopy produce flowers rich in nectar and pollen, and La Cumplida has recently started selling honey. “We had the first harvest this past year, and we’re very excited because it’s pesticide-free honey and a product of agroforestry flowers,” Ponçon said. Next, he hopes to introduce melipona honey, the prized medicinal honey once used by the Mayans and Aztecs for healing and ritual.

These practices have helped biodiversity return to La Cumplida. As with much of Central America’s highlands, Nicaragua’s Matagalpa region was deforested in the late 19th century for livestock and coffee farming. But La Cumplida’s approach to coffee crops is now enhancing both the land and the ecosystem’s health. “We immediately saw the link between birds and the regenerative actions that were on the ground,” said Viviana Ruiz-Gutierrez, a quantitative ecologist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology who visited the farm in 2018. 

Since her visit, Ruiz-Gutierrez has worked with the local community to survey birds, collecting information on the ground at the farm and through the worldwide database eBird. Warblers, for instance, are one of 240 species of birds now around the farm. These surveys can help tease out how smart agricultural practices can continue to improve the ecosystem. For example, Ruiz-Gutierrez added, farmworkers have learned that leaving more standing dead trees leads to more woodpeckers. “Birds are not just really good indicators — they’re fun to monitor. Most farmers are very proud of what they protect. The birds are the testament of their labor.”  

For Ruiz-Gutierrez, La Cumplida offers a glimpse of what the future of farming in the region could look like. “I’ve worked in coffee for a long time,” Ruiz-Gutierrez said. “But the systems that I worked in had not incorporated as many different regenerative practices. La Cumplida is such a big farm, and the family has been committed to sustainability for so long. It’s really unique.”

Key to the farm’s success is continuously modifying its approach, says La Cumplida’s director of certification programs, Migdalia Espinoza Luna. “We’re always looking for alternatives to implement,” said Espinoza Luna, who has worked at La Cumplida for two decades. “Over time, you have to try different coffee varieties, experiment in different kinds of partnerships, and document everything so we can look for areas to improve.”

To Ponçon, regenerative coffee production needs to also benefit local farmers and the surrounding rural communities. He’s focused on identifying needs like housing, water access, and education, including holding summer camps for local children. The neighboring communities are made of farmworkers, many of whom are illiterate, Ponçon said. “Investing in their needs allows La Cumplida to continue attracting a labor force.”

He’s learned there are some significant barriers for farmers, including steep up-front costs for farm owners and the need to update farmers’ skillsets. “It’s a long-term investment,” Ponçon said, while the coffee market is very volatile. Still, studies show that over time, a regenerative approach can increase net farm income by 20 to 30 percent. 

Experts like Jaramillo of the Rainforest Alliance believe that profit will grow with increasing consumer interest. “Consumers are more and more aware of the benefits of good farming, the benefits of adaptation to climate change, biodiversity conservation, and its links to better health and livelihoods,” Jaramillo said. 

“Regenerative agriculture is no longer a choice — it’s a necessity now.”

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Conventional agriculture is one of the biggest drivers of climate change and global biodiversity loss—and continuing business as usual is simply not an option. What if we could radically overhaul our global farming system? What if we could not only reduce the harm it causes, but actively repair damaged ecosystems and heal the health of the Earth? Regenerative agriculture is emerging as one of the most promising answers. Together with millions of farmers and rural workers around the world, the Rainforest Alliance is helping lead the transition towards a more resilient, equitable, and regenerative future for coffee.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline La Cumplida shows how coffee can restore ecosystems and economies on Sep 29, 2025.

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Thurston’s Orange Peel Theory

Every spring, investors flock to Omaha, Nebraska, for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting, where Warren Buffett holds court. Insiders call it “Woodstock for Capitalists,” and CNBC covers it with the fervor of Fox Sports on Super Bowl Sunday. 

Last year’s meeting held particular weight. Investors were watching closely to see if Buffett, the company’s 93-year-old CEO, would name Greg Abel, Berkshire’s vice chairman, as his successor, and how the company would weather the billions in wildfire lawsuits threatening its energy utilities. Buffett dodged the succession question, but the meeting revealed something just as consequential: the company’s strategy to avoid wildfire liability. 

Two months earlier, the Utah legislature had passed a law allowing utilities to charge their own customers to build a fund for future fire damages. The state also has a 2020 law on the books that capped the amount fire victims could sue utilities for in damages. Combined, the two laws mean that if homes in Utah burn down due to a power company’s faulty electrical line, the financial damages residents can seek are limited — and they may already have been paying into the fund that covers them. For utilities, the result is reduced costs.

At the shareholder meeting, Abel singled out Utah as “the gold standard” of utility protection — a model he urged other states to adopt. “As we go forward,” he told the crowd, “we need both legislative and regulatory reform.”

Berkshire Hathaway Energy, or BHE, Buffett’s $100 billion energy arm, operates a vast power grid that stretches across the West. BHE subsidiaries such as Rocky Mountain Power and PacifiCorp are responsible for maintaining more than 17,000 miles of transmission lines that serve roughly 10 million customers across 10 states. In recent years, BHE has been slapped with lawsuits in Oregon worth nearly $10 billion for fires caused by its faulty equipment. For BHE, the Utah laws were a significant win, shielding the company from that kind of liability in at least one state. Across the West, BHE-owned utilities and their lobbyists are now trying to replicate that success, securing laws that both cap wildfire damages and shift costs onto customers. 

“It’s infuriating to me that they are creating these situations,” said Stephanie Chase, a research and communications manager at the Energy & Policy Institute and a former consumer advocate in the Washington state Attorney General’s Office. “They’re not doing a good job at maintaining their power lines. Then when they start fires, they don’t want to pay for them.”

BHE’s infrastructure is aging, and maintaining it is expensive. Climate-proofing measures, like running power lines underground, can easily cost more than $1 million per mile, according to the Institute for Energy Research, and would put the cost of sending all BHE-owned equipment into the ground at well over $17 billion. Other resilience measures, such as trimming branches that grow over power lines and inspecting equipment in rural areas, are also expensive. 

“Vegetation management is not one of the things that they receive a return on investment,” said Chase. State regulatory agencies typically set utility prices using a formula known as the rate base, which excludes routine maintenance like managing vegetation. By contrast, utilities earn a return when investing in new infrastructure, Chase added. “Utility companies have a much bigger incentive because they’re receiving a return on equity on any funds that they put into capital expenditures: building a new plant, building construction, building new lines,” she said. BHE did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Earlier this summer, the Wyoming legislature passed a law that limits damages that can be awarded to victims of a utility-caused fire, so long as the company followed its own wildfire plan. In July, Idaho also enacted a similar law, shielding utilities from negligence if they prove they adhered to their wildfire plan. According to state regulatory filings, at least one representative for Rocky Mountain Power and other utilities operating in the state lobbied lawmakers in March and April to get the law passed.

One state senator who voted against Idaho’s law, Bruce Skaug, told Grist that it leaves little regard for residents who may have legitimate grievances. “We don’t want to bankrupt utilities,” Skaug said. “At the same time, if they burn down your house, you shouldn’t have any trouble getting the claim through a jury trial.” Yet, the law could do just that, he said. Skaug hopes to tweak the law to better protect residents during the next legislative session, which begins in January.

PacifiCorp is also running the same playbook in Washington. The company has petitioned state regulators to start tracking the cost of insurance increases and wildfire liability, which Chase calls a “stepping stone to getting those costs included in customer rates.” From there, utilities could begin to press regulators or legislators for permission to pass those costs on to customers.

In Utah, Rocky Mountain Power’s lobbyists benefited from a friendly legislature. Carl Albrecht, a co-sponsor of the two bills, spent decades working for utilities — including 23 years as CEO of a small electric cooperative — and takes several thousand dollars in political contributions from the energy utility industry and Berkshire Hathaway each year, according to campaign finance disclosures. Perhaps most crucially, Utah hasn’t had any major wildfires in recent memory. 

That’s not the case in Oregon. In September 2020, fires enveloped hundreds of thousands of acres across the state, burning down 4,000 homes — including a state senator’s — and killing 11 people. In the aftermath, PacifiCorp became the state’s arch-villain — and a chance at the perks it won in other states vanished.

Soon the public learned that at least some of the half-dozen fires burning across Oregon that Labor Day stemmed from downed power lines owned by PacifiCorp. A subsequent investigation by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, an agency that oversees energy markets and transmission, found that the distance between vegetation and power lines did not meet safety standards and that some of these violations were so severe that “at least 45 percent of PacifiCorp’s BES lines” should not have had any power running through them at all. 

Public outcry turned into class action lawsuits against PacifiCorp, which turned into a costly lesson for BHE. Since 2020, juries have awarded more than $300 million to several dozen plaintiffs. Yet the fate of thousands of other claimants remains unresolved as the lawsuits drag out in court. In the end, the company may be on the hook for around $8 billion more in potential damages. 

But the lawsuits may not bring much relief to the victims. 

“Warren Buffett is not just going to dump billions in to settle,” said Bob Jenks, executive director of Oregon Citizens’ Utility Board, a consumer advocacy group. More likely than meeting the claimants’ demands, Jenks predicted that “the company will go into bankruptcy.” 

Despite its pariah status in Oregon, PacifiCorp has been trying to secure the same protections that it has in Utah. Earlier this year, when state representatives introduced utility-friendly bills in the Oregon legislature, they were dead on arrival. “I didn’t expect the degree of anger at PacifiCorp that’s out there,” Jenks said. “I understand. Your house burns down, and PacifiCorp is playing hardball and doing everything they can to prevent liability.” 

The notion of offering some financial support to utilities in the form of ratepayer funds isn’t inherently problematic, experts acknowledge. For example, utilities in California rely on wildfire funds to pay for damages caused by their fires. As in Utah and other states, ratepayers contribute to the pot. But unlike other states, a government entity called the California Earthquake Authority — and not the utilities — oversees the distribution of that fund when it’s needed. After a tree felled a PG&E power line in 2021 and sent the Dixie Fire burning across Northern California, the fund has provided $445 million in support to the utility. As a result of the program, utilities like PG&E can avoid bankruptcy, but aren’t allowed to pass on the costs directly to their own customers.

So far, catastrophic fires haven’t hit states where PacifiCorp has won liability caps since they’ve taken effect. But with the track record of BHE subsidiaries and rising temperatures drying out Western forests, experts believe that it’s only a matter of time. 

“The risk is there,” Jenks said. “Climate change has made our forests so much drier than they used to be, and we don’t have the same June rain. Our forests weren’t designed for this.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Who pays for wildfire damage? In the West, utilities are shifting the risk to customers. on Sep 19, 2025.

Last week, the Trump administration announced that it plans to end a federal program for greenhouse gas emissions reporting from thousands of facilities such as power plants and oil refineries. 

“As the agency continues to Power the Great American Comeback,” the Environmental Protection Agency wrote in a press release announcing the proposed rule change, “this proposal represents a significant step toward streamlining operations, cutting unnecessary red tape, unleashing American energy, and advancing EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment.” 

Legal experts say that the move undermines U.S. obligations under international law, including legal obligations that were clarified in a landmark ruling by the world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, or ICJ, less than two months ago. The case was brought by Vanuatu and other Pacific island states who are experiencing the harmful effects of climate change in the form of sea level rise and extreme weather, and is the culmination of decades of international litigation seeking to hold the U.S. and other major greenhouse gas emitters accountable for harming the planet. 

The case included arguments by Indigenous attorneys and testimonies from Indigenous Pacific communities about how climate change-fueled extreme weather is threatening their traditional ways of life. In Vanuatu, for example, entire Indigenous villages have been forced to relocate due to landslides brought by heavy rains, leading to the loss of traditional knowledge and place-based customs. 

“Entire schools have had to be relocated due to coastal erosion,” said Arnold Kiel Loughman, the attorney general of Vanuatu, who argued before the ICJ. “Every year you have to focus on rebuilding instead of developing the country.” 

Maria Antonia Tigre, director of global climate change litigation at the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia Law School, said the ICJ’s ruling this summer made clear that all members of the United Nations have an obligation to exercise due diligence to mitigate the climate crisis. 

“The greenhouse gas reporting program has been a corner store of transparency in climate governance for a long time, and the data is really indispensable,” Tigre said. “Dismantling that system would really undermine the very possibility of evidence-based regulation and enforcement.” 

The ICJ ruling also said that all countries are responsible for regulating major emitters within their jurisdictions. “A State may be responsible where, for example, it has failed to exercise due diligence by not taking the necessary regulatory and legislative measures to limit the quantity of emissions caused by private actors under its jurisdiction,” the court said.

A spokesperson for the EPA said that the agency is acting within the boundaries of U.S. law, including the Clean Air Act.

“We are committed to respecting the boundaries of that authority and ensuring that EPA’s requirements are reasonable and do not impose billions of dollars in cost without justification,” the agency said. “Any interested party is welcome to submit comments on the proposed rule during the public comment period, and we look forward to reviewing and responding during the rulemaking.”

Despite Trump’s “America First” policies, Tigre and other legal experts say that the U.S. is still bound by what is known as “customary international law,” which applies to all countries that are parties to the United Nations, which still includes the United States.

“I think this is precisely why this court put this [decision] out, to prevent the precise behavior that America is showing right now,” said Johanna Gusman, a Fiji-based senior attorney at the Center for International Environmental Law. “The U.S. can’t pretend that it doesn’t apply to them.” 

The International Court of Justice was created in the wake of World War II to provide a legal venue to settle disputes peacefully between countries. The U.S. initially accepted the court’s jurisdiction when it opened in 1946, but former President Ronald Reagan officially rescinded that in 1985 after Nicaragua brought a case against the U.S. alleging the American military had violated its sovereignty. (The court ruled against the U.S. in 1986.)

In the first nine months of Trump’s second time as president, his administration has pulled the U.S. out of several U.N. organizations including the World Health Organization, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and the U.N. Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, also known as UNESCO. Trump is also withdrawing the U.S. from the 2015 Paris Agreement, a landmark climate treaty that sought to prevent global warming from exceeding the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius, echoing the same decision in his first term.

The U.S.’s rejection of the ICJ’s jurisdiction does make it more complicated to hold the country accountable. Gusman said she expects further domestic and international litigation down the line to cite the ICJ ruling and to see attorneys seek creative ways to hold the U.S. accountable. On Monday, Vanuatu plans to announce a new resolution to be introduced at the U.N. General Assembly to effectuate the ICJ’s ruling. 

“There is an international responsibility here, even if the U.S. still tries to deny that there is one,” Tigre said. 

The ICJ is not the only court that has ruled that countries have a responsibility to prevent climate change. Last year, Vanuatu and other Pacific island nations won a similar case at the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, which said states have an obligation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In July, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued a lengthy ruling concluding similarly, and wrote specifically that states have an obligation to generate accurate information to mitigate climate change. 

“They have an obligation, a rock-solid obligation, to collect this information,” said Kelly Matheson, deputy director of global strategy at the nonprofit Our Children’s Trust. “What the Trump administration is doing is, full stop, a violation of international law.” 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Trump axes climate reporting program, ignoring international courts and frontline communities on Sep 18, 2025.

When President Donald Trump campaigned for his second term on the promise of deporting millions of undocumented workers from the United States, farm groups were quick to voice their discontent. An immigration policy focused solely on removing those without legal status “would cripple agricultural production in America,” according to the American Farm Bureau Federation, a powerful agricultural lobbying group. 

Economists, labor organizers, and immigrant rights advocates agreed. About 40 percent of farmworkers in the country are foreign-born, unauthorized workers, the U.S. Department of Agriculture recently found. Some farmers already complain that it’s hard enough to fill agricultural jobs domestically; without foreign labor, they argue, the nation’s food system would grind to a halt. 

Now, the Trump administration appears to be making moves aimed at alleviating some of the economic burden felt by farm employers. Late last month, the Department of Agriculture announced the agency would end the survey used to set minimum wages for migrant farmworkers on temporary visas. Some farm groups welcome cheaper labor costs, but experts say falling wages — coupled with the administration’s mass deportation agenda — will ultimately scramble the business of hiring farmworkers.

The H-2A visa program allows farmers to hire seasonal workers from abroad, the vast majority of whom come from Mexico. These workers are paid according to something called the Adverse Effect Wage Rate, or AEWR. Every year, the AEWR is determined using the previous year’s Agricultural Labor Survey — more commonly referred to as the Farm Labor Survey, or FLS, which asks farm employers about their workers’ hours and wages. In a sense, the AEWR sets a wage floor for all farm laborers: U.S.-born workers must earn at least as much as H-2A workers when performing the same job. 

In an announcement on August 28, the USDA said the agency would discontinue its use of the FLS, calling it “no longer necessary.” Without this mechanism in place, wages for farmworkers — regardless of their legal status — are likely to fall, experts say.

Some farm groups celebrated the move, arguing that AEWRs in recent years have grown too high and present a burden to their business. Daniel Costa, director of immigration law and policy research at the Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank, argued that ending the FLS would usher in a new “wage rule employers have been begging for.” 

But labor groups contend that farmworkers — whether they are guest workers, U.S.-born, or undocumented — are not paid a fair or even livable wage. 

“What the Trump administration just did, it essentially liberalizes the entire labor market in the food system,” said Jose Oliva, campaigns director at the HEAL Food Alliance, a coalition of groups representing workers in the food supply chain. The resulting financial precarity would add another layer of risk to a profession that’s already one of the lowest paid in the country — as well as on the front lines of the climate crisis. 

Heat is the deadliest extreme weather event. For farmworkers, whose jobs include strenuous outdoor physical activity, that risk is even more pronounced. Researchers have found that workers in the agriculture industry are 35 times more likely to die from heat-related illness than any other workers.  Beyond high temperatures, farmworkers are also especially vulnerable to other climate impacts — such as wildfire smoke and flash flooding. 

“The job is already one of the more hazardous, dangerous, and deadly jobs, according to statistics,” said Costa, from the Economic Policy Institute. “It’ll probably get worse,” he added, noting that the Trump administration may or may not choose to implement a nationwide heat safety standard for workers currently under review by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

The USDA did not respond to a request for comment. 

“It is clear that the Trump administration is moving to cut wages for the H2A program,” Teresa Romero, president of United Farm Workers, a labor union, said in a statement to Grist. “Beyond the obviously harmful impact on H2A workers themselves, this will also undercut the wages of local farmworkers, of all statuses including U.S. citizens.”

The H-2A visa program has grown steadily over the years, as farm employers have struggled to fill jobs with U.S. citizens. Some farmers call the program overly bureaucratic and burdensome — but many feel bringing in migrant workers is their only, or best, option when it comes to hiring, especially in an era where the federal government is set on deporting undocumented workers. Immigration raids on U.S. farms, part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation strategy, will likely make farmers even more reliant on the migrant visa program, according to labor experts.

Brooke Rollins, the Trump agriculture secretary, has claimed the administration will create a farm workforce that’s “100 percent American.” But currently, minimum wages for farmworkers are so low that they do not attract very many U.S.-born workers to the agriculture industry, said Edgar Franks, political director for Familias Unidas por la Justicia, a farmworker labor union. “If you’re trying to attract local workers, the AEWR is going to be way too low,” said Franks. 

Oliva, at the HEAL Food Alliance, argued that if wages for farm work fall even lower, employers will see a drop in able and willing workers. “What you’re essentially going to see — and this is something I am 100 percent convinced of — is an even lower participation in the job market,” he said. Franks disagreed. “I still think, even if the wages go down to $10 an hour, people from other countries would still line up to come and work under the H-2A visa,” he said, adding that their economic opportunities are often far worse in their home country. 

Despite the grueling nature of farm work, the H-2A visa program — which allows agricultural employers to hire temporary or seasonal workers from abroad — is arguably in more demand than ever. The program was developed in 1986 during the Reagan administration, as part of a broader immigration reform package aimed at cracking down on unauthorized migration into the U.S. It has grown dramatically over time; the USDA found that H-2A certifications tripled from 2010 to 2019. (There is no cap on how many H-2A visas are offered annually.) Last year, nearly 400,000 visas were issued, according to the Farm Bureau. 

If wages for agricultural workers fall, Oliva said, those who do take those jobs may feel pressure to work longer hours to make ends meet. 

Farmworkers lack many labor protections at the federal level; for example, they are excluded from receiving overtime pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act. In the absence of stronger labor rules, “workers are discouraged from taking breaks and drinking water because you’re not going to make any money if you’re not working,” said Oliva. That level of physical exertion is dangerous when combined with climate change driving up high temperatures. 

Following the USDA’s announcement, the Department of Labor published an interim final rule aimed at adjusting its AEWR methodology — although it’s unclear exactly how the agency plans to do so. (The labor department did not respond to a request for comment.)

This is not the first time that federal agencies under a Trump administration have tried to revamp how seasonal migrant farm laborers are paid. During the first Trump administration, the USDA similarly moved to end the FLS; United Farm Workers sued, successfully blocking the decision. 

In her statement, United Farm Workers president Romero said the labor union is committed to “fighting exploitation and deportation at the same time.” 

Asked whether the group would sue the USDA over its move to end the FLS a second time, a spokesperson for the union said it was too soon to tell. 

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Farmworkers already face harsh conditions. Now they may have to deal with a pay cut. on Sep 17, 2025.

The food that makes it to your plate is but a fraction of what actually grew in a field somewhere. Cassava, corn, wheat, rice — all critical crops produce waste biomass that farmers might be burning or throwing into piles to rot, both of which send planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere. Increasingly, though, they are turning all those husks and stalks into biochar that captures carbon and improves yields.

This material is a simple, clever way to catalyze photosynthesis. As plants grow, they suck CO2 out of the air, but that carbon returns to the sky when they die and decompose. Heat those dead plants in a low oxygen environment, though, and they turn to concentrated, crumbly carbon that’s a magnet for nutrients. Workers “charge” this biochar by soaking it in manure or other fertilizers,​​ then farmers add it to their fields. (They can even infuse it with mycorrhizal fungi, which helps plants proliferate and captures still more carbon. Beneficial microbes love growing in the rough structure of charred material.) Research has found that this can significantly boost the growth of crops and help soils retain water.

The trick is creating the right conditions to produce quality biochar without combusting and destroying the biomass. To that end, the worker cooperative PlantVillage+ is deploying an automated “PyroTower” in communities in the developing world, a solar-powered furnace that blasts waste with temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. During an eight-hour run, the device can generate nearly 2,000 pounds of biochar for locals to put back in the ground. It takes about two hours to assemble and disassemble to move from one place to another. 

“For us, it was keeping it as simple as possible and as manageable as possible,” said Sheldon Indanya, who owns Indan Engineering Solutions Ltd. in Kenya and engineered the PyroTower. “The whole concept as we started designing was that this is a machine that will be deployed in very rugged areas where availability of resources, let’s say electricity and such stuff, won’t be available.”

The PyroTower is relatively cheap to set up and run, too, at a cost of around $15,000 — 100 times cheaper than industrial production. Because PlantVillage+ is a cooperative, members vote on how the program should operate. “Workers own the means of production,” said David Hughes, a professor at Penn State and founder of the organization. “So they own all of the assets in the organization, and we vote. The mission of PlantVillage+ is to eradicate poverty and reverse climate change.”

The PyroTower is an investment that should pay dividends over time. Whereas offsetting emissions by paying to plant trees is somewhat precarious because those forests can be lost to wildfires, biochar is more durable — it can persist in soil for millennia. Biochar is also more easily quantifiable than a forest, because PlantVillage+ knows how much carbon is being stored based on the weight of what’s produced. Individuals and corporations can pay for its production through a subscription, so operators make money both locally and internationally. Because this is a cooperative, 95 percent of the money goes to workers. “That, together with the biochar, starts to bring in revenue,” said Dries Roobroeck, owner and CEO of AgCinX, which helped develop the PyroTower.

In contrast to other carbon removal technologies like direct air capture, in which facilities suck CO2 out of the air at a significant cost, biochar has the potential to simultaneously improve the livelihoods of small-holder farmers while sequestering loads of carbon on the cheap. “Africa has natural abilities to be the world’s carbon factory,” Hughes said. “There is a lot of water, if you can hold onto it. You have water plus sunshine — photosynthesis — you can just grow a lot. And our thesis is that you can increase food productivity, creating lots of jobs.”

Some soils benefit more from biochar than others, though. Already-fertile dirt, for example, might not need the nutritional boost. And soils rich in clay already hold onto water well. 

But fast-draining sandy ground can benefit enormously, said Sanjai Parikh, a soil chemist at the University of California, Davis, who wasn’t involved in the PyroTower project. Tropical soils — which are “weathered,” having lost nutrients over time — also get a major boost from biochar. Indeed, thousands of years ago, the Indigenous peoples of the Amazon added table craps and charcoal to the Earth to create terra preta, a highly productive soil. “If you add in something like biochar, it will benefit those highly weathered soils, because it now has something that can hold those nutrients,” Parikh said. “So that’s really where biochar comes in best, is in tropical soil.”

Even if it’s not dramatically improving soil, biochar has serious potential as a negative-emissions technology. Startups are exploring how they might bury biochar, essentially putting coal back in the ground. Otherwise, crop dregs left to rot or burn will remain a major contributor to climate change. “Biomass is an enormous problem, and there have to be good ways to dispose of that,” Parikh said. “If we’re talking just climate change mitigation, maybe just burying big piles of biochar is the way to go.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This new machine churns out carbon-storing biochar on the cheap on Sep 17, 2025.

Some people think poverty is what results when employers exploit workers on the bottom of the labor market. Other people think poverty is what results when individuals behave in dysfunctional ways. These two dominant theories then generate a variety of policy ideas, including increasing educational attainment and work incentives to improve labor market outcomes, changing employment rules so as to increase pay for lower-level workers, and instructing people to change the way they engage in family formation, among other things.

When I first got interested in practical poverty policy nearly two decades ago, I went into it with these two theories in mind, assuming that what I was likely to find was that employer exploitation was the better theory of the two. What I found instead was that both theories are way off the mark and that poverty in developed countries is actually much simpler and much dumber than all of that. It’s not bad behavior by employers or degenerates. It’s just what happens when the following conditions are present:

1. The national income is distributed using payments to laborers and capital owners.
2. Capital ownership is very unevenly distributed across families.
3. A large share of the population is not working at any given time.
4. Nonworkers are unevenly distributed across families.

People really seem to want poverty to be something much bigger than all of that. Its existence in a rich society is so troubling that it seems to call out for a heavier explanation. But it really is just a simple math problem that has a very straightforward solution.

The Problem of Nonworkers in Capitalism

The way a simplified version of a capitalist economy works is that land, capital, and labor are supplied as inputs to production, the owners of those inputs receive payments, and then those payments can be used to buy the outputs of production. Because these payments — variously called factor payments, factor income, or market income — only go out to laborers and capital owners, anyone who is neither of those things will not receive direct, personal income in this system.

In our society, the ownership of capital is very highly concentrated, meaning that very few people own significant amounts of capital and therefore very few people receive significant capital income.

You could imagine creating a society where capital ownership is not so highly concentrated. This could be achieved fairly simply by creating a social wealth fund where much of the nation’s capital stock is held collectively and each person is entitled to an equal share of the investment return. Alaska has a modest fund like this that significantly reduces alternatively-measured wealth inequality in the state while paying out thousands of dollars each year to every resident. These universal dividend payments reduce the number of impoverished Alaskans by 20 to 40 percent every year.

Norway has a huge fund like this that radically reduces alternatively-measured wealth inequality in the country, but it uses the return as a source of general government revenue, not to fund individual dividends.

Whatever the merits of these alternative approaches to managing capital ownership, they are not relevant to our analysis of poverty in America because the country does not use them. Overall, capital ownership in the US is very skewed towards the top of the society and therefore has little impact on keeping poverty low.

With capital income out of the equation, all that is left is labor income: wages, salaries, self-employment income, and similar. Labor income is more evenly distributed than capital income, but its ability to keep poverty low is hampered by the fact that, at any given time, around half of the population is not working and therefore does not receive any personal labor income.

As with capital ownership, I suppose you could imagine a society where nonworkers were somehow evenly distributed across families such that every family had an equal number of workers and nonworkers. Unlike with capital ownership, it is not very easy to come up with a mechanism that could achieve such a thing and it seems undesirable in other respects, but it is at least possible in the abstract. Because poverty is measured on the family level, a society so composed would be one where each nonworker would be effectively assigned income from a cohabitating worker, thereby keeping poverty low.

But in reality, nonworkers are very unevenly distributed across households. Forty percent of people live in families where more than half of the members work. Another 40 percent live in families where less than half of the members work. Sixteen percent of people live in families where none of the members work. Only 20 percent of people live in families that have the 1-to-1 ratio of workers to nonworkers. The graph below shows what this all looks like across the entire distribution.

This point about the unequal distribution of nonworkers across families can be illustrated in a number of other ways as well. The below graph simply counts the raw number of nonworkers in each person’s family and shows that across the distribution. At the most extreme end, there is a family with 12 nonworkers in it. Around 22 percent of individuals live in families with three or more nonworkers in them while 25 percent live in families with no nonworkers in them.

We can even produce this same graph using “net workers,” which I define as the number of workers minus the number of nonworkers in each family. At the extremes, there is a family with 12 more nonworkers than workers and a family with 8 more workers than nonworkers. Predictably, at the median, it is a wash: there are as many workers as nonworkers, generating an outcome of zero net workers.

One last way of illustrating this is by adding up the number of hours worked by each family and dividing it by the number of family members. As can be seen in the graph below, about 16 percent of people live in families with no hours worked. The first plateau between the 50th and 60th percentiles are families with 1,040 hours worked per family member, which is equivalent to one full-time worker for every nonworker. The second plateau between the 80th and 90th percentiles are families with 2,080 hours worked per family member, which are families exclusively composed of full-time workers with no nonworkers.

The problem created by this unequal distribution of nonworkers across families is that, at the bottom, you wind up with too few workers attempting to support too many nonworkers. The labor income that makes it into these families simply gets stretched too thin. We can see this in the next two graphs, which show the market poverty rates of families with different mixes of workers and nonworkers and different amounts of hours worked per family member. The phrase “market poverty” refers to individuals who are in poverty if we exclude government benefits. In these graphs, each bar represents about 20 percent of the US population.

The bottom 20 percent of individuals so defined make up a little over two-thirds of the market poor. The bottom 40 percent make up over 90 percent of the market poor. Notably I was able to deduce all of this without ever peaking to see what any given individual’s wage rate was. That’s because it is the uneven distribution of nonwork across families that is driving all of this.

Who Are the Nonworkers?

The presentation above lends itself to the natural conclusion that we could whip poverty by simply converting a bunch of these nonworkers into workers. But when we look at who the nonworkers actually are, we quickly see that this is not really possible or desirable.

As noted above, around 48 percent of the population does not work in a given year. In the graph below, I sort all of these nonworkers into one of eight categories. Individuals who fall into more than one category are assigned to the first category they qualify for in order from the top of the graph to the bottom of the graph.

Together, children and elderly people make up nearly three-fourths of all nonworkers. Adding the disabled and students gets you to 86 percent of all nonworkers. There are things you could do to activate some of these nonworkers into the labor market, such as providing child care benefits to reduce the number of at-home caregivers, if that is the kind of thing that excites you. But, for the most part, unless you want to relax child labor laws or take away retirement security, this is just what society looks like.

Not surprisingly, market poverty plagues the nonworkers. In the below graph, we see the market poverty rate for these eight categories. At the bottom I’ve added a bar for individuals who worked 50 or more weeks during the year for comparison.

The Obvious Solution

When I started this piece, I claimed that poverty occurs when the following four conditions are present:

1. The national income is distributed using payments to laborers and capital owners.
2. Capital ownership is very unevenly distributed across families.
3. A large share of the population is not working at any given time.
4. Nonworkers are unevenly distributed across families.

One could do more, but I think I have demonstrated this all pretty well using the most recent Census income microdata. If this is a correct diagnosis of the problem, then the solution involves flipping one or more of these four conditions.

Some social conservatives implicitly argue for flipping the last condition by somehow (they never quite explain the mechanism) increasing parental cohabitation or perhaps even increasing the number of multi-generational households. If that’s a lifestyle you like and you want to convince others to adopt it, that’s fine. But it doesn’t seem likely to move the needle much and I do think it is wrong for a society to economically coerce individuals to live together by threatening poverty if they don’t.

As noted already, there are some things you could do to reduce the number of nonworkers a bit, but absent pretty repugnant reversals in our views about child labor and retirement security, the third condition is not likely to change significantly.

Flipping the second condition by redistributing capital ownership is actually a reasonably fruitful path to poverty reduction. In Alaska, it reduces poverty by 20 to 40 percent, and they could certainly go further with it than they have. I like this idea for lots of reasons, though I don’t think it would be adequate by itself.

So what we are left with is flipping the first condition and using mechanisms other than payments to laborers and capital owners to distribute the national income. This is called the “welfare state” and it is, as a factual matter, how low-poverty countries come to be that way.

Indeed, if you look at the categories of nonworkers in the graphs above, you might notice that they map perfectly onto the populations that welfare states are designed to serve. In good welfare states:

1. Children receive a monthly child benefit check, child care, pre-k, K-12 education, among other things.
2. Elderly receive an old-age pension.
3. Disabled receive disability benefits.
4. Students receive tuition subsidies, living stipends, and subsidized loans.
5. Carers receive paid leave and home care allowances.
6. Unemployed receive unemployment benefits.

Even the US has some of these benefits and they work in proportion to their coverage and generosity. We can see this in the below graph where I introduce a bar for disposable income poverty, which counts government benefits.

Pushing the black bars lower is just a matter of introducing or increasing benefits for each category. I have written extensively about how exactly to do that (Family Fun Pack, Cleaning Up the Welfare State).

One of the most interesting things about poverty reduction is that you actually don’t need “anti-poverty” policy to achieve it. In fact, the extent to which a society has low poverty seems to be almost inversely related to how much of their welfare state is specifically focused on “the poor” through means-tested benefits. All you really need to do to achieve low poverty is provide benefits universally to all nonworkers without regard to their family income. This approach smooths out inequalities up and down the income ladder by placing the burden of providing for nonworkers on the entire society instead of dumping it unequally on each particular family.

I wish I could say I was the first to come up with this, but I am actually one of the last. In the early 20th century, this was a much more common way of understanding the welfare state. Indeed, everything I’ve written so far was neatly summarized in this 1940s graphic from Switzerland, which we have remade in English below.

It Can Happen to You

To close this out, I think it is important to emphasize that “the poor” are not a static population. It is easy to imagine, as Matt Yglesias does in his recent piece, that poverty afflicts a particular group of people and that those people are different from everyone else:

By contrast, the domestic poor are — unless they are recently arrived immigrants — often people who, for one reason or another, are struggling to get their lives together in a very wealthy country. If they were thrifty and diligent, they wouldn’t be poor in the first place. Putting money in their pockets doesn’t make them thrifty and diligent, so it doesn’t really alter their lives that much.

One way we can see whether this is true is by looking at the extent to which poverty is persistent. The poverty data comes from the Current Population Survey, which has a longitudinal component to it that allows you to track one-fourth of the sample across two consecutive years. By following these people, we can see what percent of people who are poor one year are also poor in the prior or subsequent year.

Using this method, we see that only 41 percent of the 2018 poor were also poor in 2017 under the disposable income poverty metric. Likewise, only 39 percent of the 2018 poor went on to become the 2019 poor. Poverty rates don’t move much year to year, but there is massive churn in and out of the category.

Another interesting thing we can do is look at where the newly poor came from and where the formerly poor wind up. In this next graph, I took everyone in the sample who was poor in 2018 but not poor in 2017 (so newly poor) and then looked to see what income quintile they came from (income quintile here is defined according to income as a percent of the SPM poverty line).

More are coming from the bottom than the top, but still 37 percent of the newly poor came from the middle quintile or above. And this is with just tracking people for a single year.

We can do the same kind of thing for people who were poor in 2018 but not in 2019 and see where they wound up. It shows the same thing.

Where Yglesias goes wrong is quickly handwaving over the idea of “getting their lives together in a wealthy country.” A wealthy country by definition produces a lot of income. But how it chooses to distribute that income — most crucially the degree to which it relies on payments to labor and capital — will decide whether poverty is low. Poverty hits people as they move in and out of different life stages and events. Job loss, disability, divorce, having children, family deaths are things that can and do happen to anyone. And when they do, if the welfare state is not there for them, they will often dip into poverty, at least for a bit.

The other mistake in Yglesias-style thinking is mixing up thrift and diligence with economic success. As with anything else, these traits are distributed throughout all populations, including poor and non-poor populations, which are, in fact, mostly the same people in different years. There are plenty of people who currently have high incomes who nonetheless are not thrifty, not particularly diligent, and have any number of other problems, including addictions to vices, mental health problems, domestic violence, and so on, just as there are plenty of people who currently have low incomes who have none of these problems. It’s just that when we find it in a poor person, we blame their income situation on it, not because one actually follows from the other, but because it makes us feel better about things.

Conclusion

I’ve been doing this long enough to know that, with the exception of certain autistic people, nobody finds the realities of poverty in America as described above very exciting. They really want it to be something more than that, something that you can really sink your teeth into about the fallenness of man or the viciousness of big corporations or whatever. But it really is basically a technical problem in the way that factor payments are misaligned with the distribution of people across households that you can pass a few laws to fix. It is unclear how exactly to get people in the US to go ahead and do that, but it is not unclear what needs to be done.

A novel solar power project just went online in California’s Central Valley, with panels that span across canals in the vast agricultural region.

The 1.6-megawatt installation, called Project Nexus, was fully completed late last month. The $20 million state-funded pilot has turned stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District’s canals into hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.

Project Nexus is only the second canal-based solar array to operate in the United States — and one of just a handful in the world. America’s first solar-canal project started producing power in October 2024 for the Pima and Maricopa tribes, known together as the Gila River Indian Community, on their reservation near Phoenix, Arizona. Two more canal-top arrays are already in the works there.

In California, the solar-canal system was built in two phases, with a 20-foot-wide stretch completed in March and a roughly 110-foot-wide portion finished at the end of August. Researchers will study the project’s performance over time, while a new initiative led by California universities and the company Solar Aquagrid will push to fast-track the deployment of solar canals across the state.

Proponents of this emerging approach say it can provide overlapping benefits.

Early research suggests that, along with producing power in land-constrained areas, putting solar arrays above water can help keep panels cool, in turn improving their efficiency and electricity output. Shade from the panels can also prevent water loss through evaporation in drought-prone regions and can limit algae growth in waterways.

Plus, solar canals could offer a faster path to clean energy development than utility-scale solar farms, especially in rural parts of the U.S. where big renewables projects increasingly face community opposition. Placing solar panels atop existing infrastructure doesn’t require altering the landscape, and the relatively small installations can be plugged into nearby distribution lines, avoiding the cumbersome process of connecting to the higher-voltage wires required for bigger undertakings. 

“Why disturb land that has sacred value when we could just put the solar panels over a canal and generate more efficient power?” said David DeJong, director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, which is developing a water delivery system for the Gila River Indian Community.

The purpose of these early arrays is primarily to power on-site canal equipment like pumps and gates. But such projects could eventually help clean up the larger grid, too. A coalition of U.S. environmental groups previously estimated that putting panels over 8,000 miles of federally owned canals and aqueducts could generate over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy — enough to power nearly 20 million homes — and reduce water evaporation by possibly tens of billions of gallons.

Still, the technology isn’t an obvious choice for many canal operators.

Elevating solar panels over canals is more expensive and technically complex than installing conventional ground-mounted solar arrays on trackers, and it can involve using more concrete and steel. Wider canals may also require support structures for panels within the waterway, which can disrupt the flow of water.

Earlier this year, a senior engineer at Arizona’s Salt River Project recommended that the power and water utility not pursue a solar-canal pilot ​“based on cost estimates and project concerns,” after comparing the unique design to both rooftop and utility-scale solar alternatives.

Solar-canal developers are hoping they can still gain a toehold in irrigation districts that are grappling with high electricity costs and have limited options for generating cheap power, said Ben Lepley, the founder of engineering firm Tectonicus, which designed the Gila River Indian Community’s 1.3-megawatt system south of Phoenix.

The initial costs are ​“definitely higher … but it can actually be really fast as a project,” Lepley said. ​“By the next year, you can have really cheap electricity, and that gives [irrigation districts] stability over the 30-year life of the project.”

For its part, the Gila River Indian Community is building solar-canal projects as part of its broader mission to ​“generate enough renewable energy to completely offset the electrical use by the irrigation district,” said DeJong. He noted the district pays about $3 million a year for the 27 million kilowatt-hours of electricity it needs to pump, move, and store water.

The community built its first solar-canal project over the Casa Blanca Canal with a nearly $5.7 million grant provided by the Inflation Reduction Act — part of a $25 million provision that supplied funding for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to design, study, and deploy projects that put panels over waterways. Irrigation districts in California, Oregon, and Utah received the remaining funds to develop their own installations.

The Trump administration is unlikely to support future programs, given its focus on gutting clean energy incentives, but a handful of projects are already moving forward without such grants.

DeJong said that construction is 90 percent complete on the tribal community’s second solar-canal project, a nearly 0.9-megawatt array built in partnership with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which is slated to go online later this year. The community is self-funding a similar-sized project over the Santan Canal and is developing a floating solar array on one of its reservoirs, with both systems set to be up and running by early 2026. All told, the installations will provide 4 megawatts in local clean energy generation, he said.

“We have become really familiar with the economics of building these [canal] projects,” said Lepley, whose firm also worked on the Gila River Indian Community’s second and third solar-canal systems. ​“We have a pretty good playbook of how to continue these projects going forward, even without any grant funding from the federal government.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline California’s first solar-covered canal is now fully online on Sep 13, 2025.

by Eli Hager

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They did none of these things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leland Dudek, former acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration, at home this summer after leaving the government. “I’m growing out my hair and dropping weight,” he said. “It helps when you live in a federal community where you’re hated.” (Rosen Morton for ProPublica)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dudek, whose bookshelves are pictured, has long immersed himself in everything from the decline of the British Empire to the long-running bureaucratic inefficiencies of the Social Security Administration. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

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

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

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

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

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

Akash Bobba (via Gitlab profile)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cole Killian (via McGill Artificial Intelligence Society 2021-2022 Team Page)

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

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

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

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

The Social Security Administration building where DOGE initially operated. As hostility mounted toward the outsiders, Dudek — who was receiving death threats himself — moved the DOGE team to a more secluded area of the campus and assigned armed security to protect them. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scott Coulter (via LinkedIn profile)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Panicked Social Security beneficiaries flocked to Social Security field offices, like this one in Baltimore, as the agency’s policies on making claims by phone repeatedly zigzagged this spring. (Rosem Morton for ProPublica)

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

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

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

Dudek said Katie Miller, who was DOGE’s spokesperson early on, would call to chastise him about anything the press reported that had caught the administration off guard. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)

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

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

“How dare you,” Miller said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frank Bisignano, in the oval office with President Donald Trump, was confirmed as commissioner of the Social Security Administration in May. He has presented a calmer public face than Dudek while embracing DOGE’s philosophy. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post/Getty Images)

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

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

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

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

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

Alex Mierjeski contributed research.

In the fall of 1925, agronomist Trofim Lysenko arrived on the dusty plains of what is now Azerbaijan, hoping to keep cows from starving to death over the winter. The young scientist, who learned to read as a teenager during the Russian Revolution, dismissed the rapidly advancing field of genetics. He believed nature could be bent to human will.

Lysenko denounced the idea that genes pass traits down as a “degradation of bourgeois culture,” and couldn’t understand why cows bred to produce more milk did so simply because they had “advantaged ancestors.” He attempted to “educate” crops by soaking them in freezing water, thinking that could force them to sprout in winter, and insisted that orange trees would grow in Siberia if exposed to the right stimuli.

Such ideas catapulted Lysenko to the head of Soviet agriculture under Stalin. In the midst of the famine his catastrophic policies helped create, Lysenko banned fertilizers and demanded farmers sow seeds close together, believing that plants of the same species wouldn’t compete. 

Lysenko’s pseudoscientific ideas outraged his peers. Nikolai Vavilov, a Russian botanist who founded the world’s first seed bank, openly challenged his rejection of genetics. Lysenko denounced him, and the secret police arrested him in 1940. Vavilov, who had worked to prevent famines, starved to death in jail three years later.

This kind of scientific misinformation and the consequences it can bring now sound eerily familiar to U.S. climate experts like Shaina Sadai. She has been stunned by how quickly politics have overshadowed science since President Trump took office. The most recent government climate report, which the Department of Energy released last month, for instance, so drastically misrepresented the studies it cited that the researchers whose work it drew from publicly decried it. “I’m just really having a hard time with the barrage of apocalypses every day,” she said.

Sadai spent the last several years working international court cases, including a climate case law students from the South Pacific brought to the International Court of Justice. Over 130 countries signed on, and many outlined the existential threats they face from extreme heat, flooding, and other weather phenomena. Some, like Palau — which could see large portions of its land vanish beneath rising seas this century — argued that failing to curb emissions violates human rights under international treaties. Meanwhile, the United States urged the court not to overreach. This galled Sadai, who advised several of the countries supporting Vanuatu’s case, including Sierra Leone and Namibia. “I want so desperately for my country to be on the right side of things,” she said. Instead, Judge Yuji Iwasawa delivered the court’s decision that countries must act on climate change the same day the U.S. moved to weaken one of its primary tools to do just that. 

The timing underscored a growing global divide: As the world moves toward greater climate accountability, the United States is pulling back, once again exiting the Paris agreement and undercutting decades of environmental regulations. This retreat comes amid a broader weakening of democratic norms, said Timothy Frye, a professor of post-Soviet politics at Columbia University. When power becomes heavily concentrated, protections begin to fray, something seen with recent revisions to the Endangered Species Act or key provisions of the Clean Water Act. “The U.S. democratic erosion is happening much faster, and along a much wider array of fronts, than a lot of the more recent cases,” like Turkey or Venezuela, he said. 

One hallmark of this backsliding is how seemingly small changes can accumulate into a system that becomes far more autocratic. The piecemeal approach often borrows the most authoritarian elements from otherwise democratic governments, though each policy may appear initially defensible — a form of governance political scholar Kim Scheppele coined “the Frankenstate.” The Trump administration, for example, has declared an “energy emergency” which allows federal agencies to bypass environmental reviews and fast-track fossil fuel projects. The move is now facing a lawsuit from 15 states, who claim the emergency is fake.

This patchwork strategy makes it easier for politically connected companies to sidestep or shape laws to serve their interests. After soliciting $1 billion in campaign funding from oil and gas companies, for example, Trump has signed $18 billion in tax incentives for the industry and granted at least $6 billion in tax breaks. “The lack of constraints on the executive allow politically connected companies to either get around existing laws or to write laws in such a way that they’re toothless,” Frye said. 

Autocratic leaders, he explained, like to build their economies around natural resources because they are easier to control than service or technology industries. Oil and gas firms, for instance, tend to be less transparent and less mobile, making them more susceptible to political pressure. At the same time, Frye noted, the economic clout of natural resource companies often turns into a political advantage.

One of Trump’s biggest donors this year was billionaire Kelcy Warren and his pipeline company Energy Transfer — the firm that sparked mass protests at Standing Rock. In 2025, it contributed $25 million to MAGA Inc., the super-PAC backing Trump. Soon after, the president lifted a pause on liquefied natural gas exports, clearing the way for an Energy Transfer project in Louisiana. The company is also now suing the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration, challenging how the agency enforces its rules; a victory could give major Trump donors greater control over how their industries are regulated.

The pattern of placing industry-friendly figures in key roles extends to Lee Zeldin, who leads the Environmental Protection Agency. He also has longstanding ties to the fossil fuel business. Over the years, Zeldin received around $300,000 in campaign contributions from oil and gas companies, and before joining the agency he was a top executive at the America First Policy Institute, a group co-founded and funded by fracking billionaire Tim Dunn. Under Zeldin, the EPA has enacted sweeping changes: In March, it announced its intention to roll back dozens of rules, including limits on power plant emissions, coal ash disposal, and wetland protections, in what Zeldin called “the largest deregulatory announcement in U.S. history.”

Zeldin’s latest target is the EPA’s landmark endangerment finding, a legal basis for regulating greenhouse gases. He claimed repealing it would “end $1 trillion or more in hidden taxes on American businesses and families.” The Clean Air Act clearly says such costs can’t be considered in the process. To do so, the agency would have to reject established climate science and overturn a 2007 Supreme Court case that required the EPA to make decisions based on scientific evidence.

Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who led the EPA under President George W. Bush, said Zeldin’s approach undermines the agency’s mission. “There’s more leniency for industry now,” she said. “This administration is doing nothing to improve the environment. What they’re doing is improving the bottom line of a lot of corporations.”

This is happening across the federal government, where institutions once trusted to provide objective oversight and data are being reshaped to serve the president’s goals. A nonprofit tracking alterations to environmental regulations on federal websites has recorded 879 revisions, many involving omissions and erasures. The Energy Department, for instance, has taken previous national climate assessments offline and suggested that it would rewrite them. This makes the United States a global outlier: Even in Russia, said political scientist Thane Gustafson, there’s less politicization of climate science, where “the climate change narrative is accepted, all the way from Putin on down.” 

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Much like during Lysenko’s era, when Soviet policies dismissed scientific integrity, political scientists like Frye now worry that American federal institutions are drifting from their foundational principles. There’s a gnawing feeling that the systems meant to protect us are rotting. What once felt stable begins to feel staged. This kind of dissonance has a name: hypernormalization. Coined by anthropologist Alexei Yurchak after studying post-Soviet Russia, it conveys the feeling that governing bodies have been stripped of real power. “That describes the EPA at the moment,” said Whitman.

The old standards of government have been swiftly gutted. Trump officials fired advisory panels that interpret science, overturned longstanding environmental regulations, dispensed with public comment periods, and centralized authority. What’s taking shape now is a shift not just in who holds power, but how that power is wielded. 

The White House has a unique authority to manage and share facts. This ability to shape public perception operates largely beyond the reach of the law — as became clear when Trump abruptly fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics just hours after a disappointing jobs report, or when he planned to close the observatory that monitors carbon dioxide levels at Mauna Loa, one of the world’s most important sites for tracking climate change. 

Losing belief in government is perilous: It makes disengaging feel like the only choice. “In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world, the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true,” Hannah Arendt wrote in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” 

As what’s real and what’s purported to be real grows increasingly blurred, controlling the narrative can become more powerful than governing. The White House is taking this principle literally: After Paramount paid President Trump millions to settle his lawsuit against 60 Minutes, the administration approved its merger on the condition CBS install a “truth-arbiter” to monitor its coverage. Anna Gomez, the lone FCC commissioner appointed by a Democrat, objected, saying, “no government — regardless of party — gets to decide what is true, who gets heard, or which voices are silenced.” Similar mechanisms of control are being applied to the flow of federal dollars, with political appointees now deciding which research and science projects move forward.

Perhaps the most eerie part of living through the last six months is how these kinds of disquieting developments continue to unfold beneath a veneer of normalcy. While he’s deeply concerned about the country’s future, Frye said that, on a daily basis, competitive autocracies can look quite normal. Though he’s better placed than most to recognize the warning signs, he still has classes to teach, deadlines to meet. “Life goes on,” he said. Looming threats become banal, both impossible to ignore and somehow routine. “It’s usually not the case that there’s one point in time when you can point and say, ‘Ah, this is when we became an autocracy,’” he said. 

Sadai, like many, is finding the discord hard to overcome. She’s unemployed and struggling to find a new academic job, thanks to federal budget cuts. She tries to find refuge in taking breaks to spend time in the New England woods that remind her of what she’s trying to protect. But when she returns, her phone lights up with notifications about people being abducted off the streets by masked government agents, or reports of coal-fired power plants receiving exemptions from air regulations. “It’s become so much harder to put everything aside for a few minutes and not have just a barrage of intrusive thoughts.”

“I just have to sit there, and break down, and then pull myself together,” she said. Though it often feels inadequate, she’s spending her days working through publication reviews and job applications, clinging to the hope that her life’s work might still contribute to climate policy, even as her elected leaders turn away.

Naming the collapse is the first step toward resistance. The question is whether we can see the failure clearly enough to imagine what comes next. “I don’t know what else to do but keep trying,” Sadai said.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The Trump administration’s assault on science feels eerily Soviet on Aug 15, 2025.

by Molly Redden

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

Two weeks into President Donald Trump’s second presidency, and just days after he pardoned hundreds of Capitol rioters, officials Trump had placed in charge of the Justice Department made a sweeping demand. They wanted the names of the thousands of FBI employees who had played a role in investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Fearing mass firings, or worse, retaliation by the people they helped prosecute, a group of agents scrambled to enlist a legal team who could stop the administration in court. Norm Eisen, a prominent ethics lawyer now leading dozens of lawsuits against the Trump administration, agreed within hours to represent the agents pro bono, along with Mark Zaid, a veteran whistleblower attorney. For more firepower, the two approached the giant Chicago-based law firm Winston & Strawn, which has a history of providing free representation to people and organizations that squared off against Trump’s first administration.

But Winston declined to represent the FBI agents, three people with knowledge of the matter said. It was one of several cases Winston turned down in quick succession, they added, that would have pitted the firm against an openly retributive president.

Some of the country’s largest law firms have declined to represent clients challenging the Trump administration, more than a dozen attorneys and nonprofit leaders told ProPublica, while others have sought to avoid any clients that Trump might perceive as his enemies. That includes both clients willing to pay the firms’ steep rates, and those who receive free representation. Big Law firms are also refusing to take on legal work involving environmental protections, LGBTQ+ rights and police accountability or to represent elected Democrats and federal workers purged in Trump’s war on the “deep state.” Advocacy groups say this is beginning to hamper their efforts to challenge the Trump administration.

Their fears intensified after Trump signed a battery of executive orders aimed at punishing top firms over old associations with his adversaries. But as the Winston episode shows, Big Law began to back away from some clients almost the minute he returned to power. The country’s top firms remain deeply wary, even though the president has lost all four initial court challenges to those executive orders.

“The President’s Policy is working as designed,” said a lawsuit the American Bar Association filed against the administration in June. “Even as federal judges have ruled over and over that the Law Firm Orders are plainly unconstitutional, law firms that once proudly contributed thousands of hours of pro bono work to a host of causes — including causes championed by the ABA — have withdrawn from such work because it is disfavored by the Administration.”

The bar association itself has struggled to find representation, the lawsuit said. One unnamed firm, which has represented the association since the 1980s in lawsuits related to ABA’s accreditation of law schools, “is no longer willing to represent the ABA in any litigation against or potentially adverse to the Administration and its policies.” Sidley Austin, the sixth-ranked corporate firm by revenue in the world, has represented the ABA in at least five lawsuits over its accreditation practices since 1989.

The ABA and Susman Godfrey, which is representing the association in its lawsuit against the administration, declined to comment. Winston, Sidley and the White House did not respond to questions sent in writing.

Trump’s grievances with Big Law stem partly from its role in blocking his first-term agenda. In his executive order targeting Jenner & Block, a firm with close ties to the Democratic Party that fought Trump on transgender rights and immigration, he assailed the firm for allegedly “abus[ing] its pro bono practice to engage in activities that undermine justice.” Another firm, WilmerHale, was where former Special Counsel Robert Mueller worked before and after leading the Russian interference investigation.

The executive orders barred attorneys working for the firms from entering federal buildings where they represent clients, terminated the firms’ government contracts, revoked partners’ security clearances and required government contractors to disclose if they work with the targeted firms. Perkins Coie, one of Trump’s first targets, began to lose business “within hours,” its suit said. The judge who halted the executive order against WilmerHale wrote that the firm “faces crippling losses and its very survival is at stake.”

“I just think that the law firms have to behave themselves,” Trump said at a press conference in late March.

Nine corporate law firms behaved themselves in the form of reaching public settlements with Trump. The deals require them to provide $940 million in total of pro bono support for Trump-approved causes. There has been no public indication of the White House calling on them to perform specific work, and Trump has not released any new executive orders against firms since April.

Yet organizations that challenge the government are still feeling the chill.

“There’s been a real, noticeable shift,” said Lauren Bonds, the executive director of the National Police Accountability Project, a national nonprofit that brings lawsuits over alleged police abuse and was a frequent pro bono client of Big Law.

In November, as soon as Trump won reelection, a top firm that was helping NPAP develop a lawsuit against a city’s police force abruptly stopped attending all planning calls, Bonds said. Later, the firm became one of the nine that struck a deal with Trump, after which the firm half-heartedly told Bonds, she said, that it would reconsider the case in the future. Bonds declined to identify the firm.

Activist nonprofits have long relied on free representation because they typically lack the resources to mount major lawsuits on their own. Civil rights cases in particular are complex undertakings usually lasting years. Many call for hundreds of hours spent deposing witnesses and performing research, as well as upfront costs of tens of thousands of dollars. Big Law, with its deep ranks of attorneys and paying clients to subsidize their volunteer work, is in a unique position to help. In exchange, the work burnishes the firm’s reputation and serves as a draw for idealistic young associates.

“I know that [cases] have been shot down that in Trump Administration 1, firms would crawl over each other to get our name at the top of the case so that we could get the New York Times headline,” said a Big Law partner whose firm has not been one of Trump’s targets. “That’s the environment. What’s become radioactive has grown from a very small number of things to anything this administration and Trump might notice and get angry about.”

Jill Collen Jefferson, the president and founder of Julian, a small nonprofit that investigates civil rights violations, has felt the chill too.

Three years ago, Julian partnered with the elite law firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, the country’s No. 1 corporate firm most years by per-partner revenue, to bring lawsuits against the town of Lexington, Mississippi, and its police force for racial discrimination.

“It wasn’t hard at all to get help,” she recalled. George Floyd’s death had raised public support for police accountability, and the details Julian was exposing in Lexington were especially grim. The police chief was secretly recorded promising to cover for a fellow officer if he killed someone “in cold blood.” A DOJ investigation released in 2024 found Lexington police operated in “a system where officers can relentlessly violate the law.” (The town’s board fired the chief, Sam Dobbins, over the recording. In a court filing, Dobbins said he was not guilty of “any actionable conduct” and denied Julian’s characterization of the recording, asserting that “the recording speaks for itself.” Julian’s litigation is still ongoing.)

Since January, when Trump began gutting police accountability measures, Jefferson’s efforts to recruit pro bono help have yielded almost no commitments. The official explanation many firms offer is that they lack the capacity to help, she said, though lawyers at those firms have privately told her that was false. Wachtell did not respond to a request for comment.

Jefferson now doubts Julian’s ability to bring a police abuse lawsuit it had planned to file before the statute of limitations expires this month.

“It’s been a nightmare,” she said. “People don’t want to stand up, and because of that, people are suffering.”

NPAP ultimately joined forces with another civil rights organization to salvage the case after its co-counsel disappeared from planning calls last November. But the suit will be “less robust” without the firepower of a major law firm, Bonds said. And NPAP’s capacity to file future suits is in question. Civil rights attorneys in NPAP’s network have developed novel legal theories for challenging arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement under state constitutions, but they lack enough outside partnerships.

“There are cases that aren’t being brought at a time when civil rights abuses are maybe at the highest they’ve been in modern times,” Bonds said.

Big Law was often in the vanguard of fighting Trump’s first administration. After he signed the 2017 travel ban affecting several predominantly Muslim countries, partners from Kirkland & Ellis and Davis Polk rushed alongside hundreds of other lawyers to international airports to help travelers stuck in limbo. Kirkland teamed up with the LGBTQ+ legal advocacy organization Lambda Legal to challenge Trump’s transgender military ban.

Now, Davis Polk is among the many firms that are avoiding pro bono immigration cases, The New York Times reported. Kirkland, by some measures the top moneymaker in Big Law, entered a deal with Trump to provide $125 million in pro bono work, and the firm is notably absent from Lambda’s nearly identical challenge to Trump’s reinstated ban on transgender military service members. Kirkland and Davis Polk did not respond to requests for comment.

Winston & Strawn’s annual pro bono reports show how its focus — or at least, its language — has changed. The firm’s 2023 impact report highlighted its advocacy on behalf of a transgender competitive marathoner. “I am also pleased to report that Winston dedicated 30% of our pro bono hours to racial justice and equity matters in 2023,” nearly double its share in 2020, wrote Angela Smedley, the pro bono committee chair. The 2024 report, published after Trump’s reelection, contained zero mentions of “equity” and spotlighted attorneys who helped small nonprofits navigate “complex mergers and business challenges.”

Eisen and Zaid, the lawyers representing the FBI agents, themselves became the target of a presidential memorandum in March that revoked their access to classified material. Both have aggravated Trump for years. Zaid represented a whistleblower who helped bring about Trump’s first impeachment.

Zaid sued to restore his security clearance in May, in a case that is ongoing. His lawyer, Abbe Lowell, is a high-profile defense attorney who left Winston this spring in order to form his own firm. Lowell said his goal is to represent those “unlawfully and inappropriately targeted.” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who won a fraud judgment against Trump and is now a target of his DOJ, was one of his first clients.

“The Administration’s attempt at retribution against Mark for doing his job — representing whistleblowers without regard to politics — is as illegal as its similar efforts against law firms that have been enjoined in every case,” Lowell wrote in an email to ProPublica.

Good-government groups and small and mid-sized law firms have stepped into the breach, helping to file hundreds of lawsuits against the Trump administration. And the four firms that sued Trump over his executive orders are devoting thousands of pro bono hours to others challenging the administration. Perkins Coie, for example, has replaced Kirkland as Lambda Legal’s partner in challenging Trump’s transgender military ban.

But until they build up the capacity to fully replace Big Law, Bonds said, some of the administration’s legally dubious actions will go unchallenged.

“There’s a financial resources piece that we’re really missing when we can’t engage a firm,” Bonds said. “Even if there’s a big case and we feel really confident about it, we’ll just have to pass on it.”

by Rob Davis

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.

This is how misinformation gets accepted as fact.

A year after Oregon endures its most destructive fire season on record in 2020, state lawmakers order a map estimating the wildfire risk for every property in the state. It’s the kind of rating now available on real estate sites like Zillow. The state wants to use the results to decide where it will apply forthcoming codes for fire-resistant construction and protections around homes.

Around the same time, insurance companies start dropping Oregon homeowners’ policies and raising premiums to limit future losses, much as they have done in other disaster-prone states. Insurers have their own sophisticated risk maps to guide them, but some brokers instead tell homeowners the blame lies with the map the state produced. The belief gets treated as fact both on social media and in mainstream news — even though insurers and regulators say it’s not true.

The anger quickly spreads. Not only is Oregon’s map seen as at fault for higher insurance premiums, one conservative talk radio host calls it an attempt to “depopulate rural areas.” People in an anti-map Facebook group start musing about “Agenda 21,” a conspiracy theory implicating the United Nations in an effort to force people into cities so they can be more easily controlled.

By the time the state pulls back the map and starts over, the myths about it have gained so much momentum there’s no stopping them. Oregon’s hotter, drier climate isn’t the problem; the map is.

Christine Drazan, the Oregon House Republican leader, joins more than a dozen other Republicans in February 2025 behind a sign that says “REPEAL THE WILDFIRE HAZARD MAP.” She calls the state’s map “faulty, defective, harmful” and says it, along with related fire-safe building and landscaping rules that are in the works, is “a heavy-handed bureaucratic takeover” that’s kept rural residents from insuring or selling homes.

“This map is destroying their property values,” she says.

In the end, what’s most remarkable about the campaign against Oregon’s wildfire map isn’t that misinformation found an audience.

It’s that it worked.

A melted sign hangs from a fence in Lyons, Oregon, in 2020. (Nathan Howard/Getty Images)

Chris Dunn, a wildfire risk scientist at Oregon State University and a former wildland firefighter, thought Oregon had a chance to be a national model for adapting to wildfire risks when he was asked to make the statewide map in 2021.

Oregon adopted a unique set of land use laws in the late 1960s and 1970s that helped curb urban sprawl. A coalition of farmers and conservationists formulated the legislation to preserve farmland and keep cities compact. To Dunn, protecting homes seemed within reach because the state had maintained agricultural buffers around cities, helping to serve as firebreaks.

At the time, Zillow hadn’t yet come out with risk ratings. By building its own map, Oregon could use local input and make adjustments as it went along.

The map results would help Oregon decide where to require a tool proven to save homes from wind-driven wildfires: “defensible space.” Owners would have to prune trees up and away from their houses; they would need to keep their roofs clear of leaves, needles and other dead vegetation. The idea was to deny wind-borne embers fuel that can burn down dwellings — a problem fresh on lawmakers’ minds after Oregon’s devastating 2020 fire season destroyed more than 2,000 homes.

Dunn knew public communication would be important. Before the map was released, a private property rights group had warned its members in a letter that the map and its rules were worrisome. Gov. Kate Brown’s wildfire council, advising state leaders about the map’s rollout, knew about the letter and the potential for pushback, according to emails Dunn provided to ProPublica.

Dunn said he was clear with Brown’s wildfire director, Doug Grafe, and others on the council that the map needed a significant, coordinated and effective communications campaign starting months before its release. Dunn said all the state developed was a one-page document on the roles of each government agency.

(Brown and Grafe did not respond to ProPublica’s questions. Grafe told Oregon Public Broadcasting in 2022 that “we are committed to ensuring people understand what they can do to increase the likelihood their homes and properties will survive wildfires.”)

Without state outreach, many homeowners learned their homes were in “extreme risk” zones from a July 2022 letter in the mail. It gave them 60 days to appeal the designation or face complying with new building and defensible-space codes the state was developing.

The wildfire hazard map and online user interface, created by Chris Dunn, a wildfire scientist at Oregon State University, shows high hazard areas in orange and those with moderate hazards in purple. (Screenshot by ProPublica of the Oregon Statewide Wildfire Hazard Map)

Dunn could see that an uproar was building around his work. One community meeting where he was scheduled to present was canceled after state officials received threats of violence.

On Facebook, more than 6,000 people joined a private group, ODF Wildfire Risk Map Support, a base of opposition. ODF stands for the Oregon Department of Forestry, the state agency overseeing the map’s creation.

One member warned that state officials would snoop around their rural properties to tell owners what to do.

“Guys this is a agenda 21,” said the member, referencing the conspiracy theory promoted in part by former Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck.

Along with 31 thumbs-ups, eight angry faces and several other emojis, the post got 24 comments.

• This insane bill out of Salem is crazy! Every designation was decided by an algorithm by politicians in Salem who don't a clue about our property, our house, our lifestyles! If you think it’s not their agenda to destroy rural property owners, think again. (10 likes)
• The UN Sustainable Development Goals are driving this push to eliminate rural living. Look into ICLEI and see how the UN infiltrates state and local governments and influences policy and legislation. https://iclei.org (6 likes)
• I learned about this when I first became involved in conservative politics. Back when globalist-backed Agenda 21 and now Agenda 2030 were still thought of as conspiracy theories. (6 likes, 1 sad reaction)

These Facebook comments have been excerpted to preserve anonymity.

Oregon can’t stop firestorms with regulations, conservative talk show host Bill Meyer told listeners, “unless you just get people off the land, and people wonder if that’s what the intent of all of this is ultimately.” Invoking a phrase associated with the Agenda 21 conspiracy, Meyer said rural residents would wind up having to move into “stack-and-pack” housing in Oregon’s cities. (Meyer did not respond to ProPublica’s emails.)

State officials’ lack of communication with the public “led to really significant challenges,” Dunn told ProPublica. “We don’t know if we could have well-communicated and sort of avoided those conspiracy theories and misinformation. But it was just so propagated in the media that it just took over.”

Jeff Golden, the Democratic state senator who helped draft the bill creating the map, said rural residents were understandably upset. The impacts of climate change were abstract to many people, Golden said, until they started getting those letters — at the same time insurance companies were dumping them.

“It’s a really hard adjustment,” said Golden, chairperson of the Senate’s Natural Resources and Wildfire Committee. “This is a very big chicken coming home to roost.”

Misinformation stoked people’s anger. “It makes a conversation that would have been difficult at best almost impossible,” Golden said.

State officials withdrew the map just over a month after its 2022 release, saying that while they had met the legislative deadline for delivering it, “there wasn’t enough time to allow for the type of local outreach and engagement that people wanted, needed and deserved.”

Oregon state Sen. Jeff Golden helped draft the bill creating the wildfire risk map. (Jenny Kane/AP Photo)

After homeowners blamed the newly released risk map for insurance cancellations and premium increases, Oregon’s insurance regulator formally asked insurers: Did you use the state risk map?

Companies filed statements, required by law to be answered truthfully, saying they had not. Oregon’s then-insurance commissioner, Andrew Stolfi, announced the industry’s response publicly at the time.

“Insurance companies have been using their own risk maps and other robust risk management tools to assess wildfire risk for years in making rating and underwriting decisions,” Stolfi said in a news release.

Stolfi told consumers to submit any documentation they received from insurance companies showing that the state’s map had been used to influence underwriting or rating decisions. Jason Horton, a spokesperson for Oregon’s insurance regulator, told ProPublica the agency has not substantiated any complaints.

For good measure, lawmakers in 2023 passed a bill explicitly banning insurers from using the map to set rates.

But as Dunn reworked the map, the cloud of misinformation continued to swirl on social media.

After Zillow and other real estate sites began posting wildfire risk ratings on properties nationwide last year, participants in the anti-map Facebook group alleged the state was behind it.

“Who would decide to move out here after seeing that?” one asked.

Zillow uses data from the research firm First Street, a Zillow spokesperson told ProPublica. A First Street spokesperson also said the group doesn’t use Oregon’s map.

Andrew DeVigal, a University of Oregon journalism professor who has studied news ecosystems around the state, said places where news outlets have shrunk or closed down have grown particularly reliant on such Facebook groups. These community watercoolers help confirm participants’ biases. “You surround yourself with people who think like you, so you’re in your space,” he said.

A ProPublica reporter identified himself to the group’s participants, asking in June for evidence that they’d been harmed by the state’s map. None provided definitive proof. Some acknowledged that they couldn’t demonstrate that the map had affected them but said they suspected it lowered their homes’ values or their insurability.

Among the respondents was Chris Dalton, who lives in La Pine, south of Bend. Dalton described spending about $2,000 trimming trees and another $500 putting down gravel to create defensible space.

However, Dalton said, the house’s location had been designated as being at moderate risk. That means it was not subject to the state’s defensible-space requirements. And even if Dalton’s property had been designated as high enough risk to be governed by the new regulations, they had not been finalized at that point and were not being enforced.

“I guess you could say we used common sense to get ahead of future problems,” Dalton said.

The Darlene Fire burned more than 3,000 acres around La Pine, Oregon, in June 2024. (Deschutes County Sheriff’s Office)

Watch video ➜

Oregon officials decided to give the map another try last year.

They re-released it, this time doing more outreach. Following California’s lead and aiming to make the map less confusing, Oregon also changed its nomenclature. Properties weren’t in risk classes, they were in hazard zones. The highest rating was no longer “extreme,” it was “high.” Dunn, the Oregon State scientist, said he thought the map had survived the effort to kill it.

But the backlash continued. Of the 106,000 properties found to face the highest hazard, more than 6,000 landowners filed appeals. At least one county appealed the designation on behalf of every high-hazard property in its borders — more than 20,000 of them.

In January, a new Oregon legislative session kicked off and wildfire preparedness was once again a top priority for the body’s Democratic leadership. Gov. Tina Kotek ordered a pause on decisions about homeowners’ appeals until the session ended, giving lawmakers a chance to decide what to do with the map.

Drazan, the House minority leader, led fellow Republicans in opposition.

She told ProPublica she “can’t know for sure” that the map caused homeowners to lose insurance or have trouble selling, as she’d asserted at February’s news conference. “I am reflecting what we were told,” she said.

Regardless, she said, the mandates on protecting properties went too far. “We’re not looking for the state to be the president of our homeowner’s association and tell us what color our paint can be,” Drazan said.

Even Golden, who’d helped shepherd the original bill mandating a map, began to waver.

Golden described conversations with homeowners who struggled to understand why work they’d done to protect their properties from fires didn’t lower their state risk rating. He said the map couldn’t account for the specific characteristics of each property, ultimately making it clear to him that it couldn’t work.

“I got tired of trying to convince people that the model was smarter than they were,” Golden said.

Dunn told ProPublica that the map was not intended to reflect all the changing conditions at a particular property, only the hazards that the surrounding topography, climate, weather and vegetation create. It wasn’t about whether homeowners had cleared defensible space — just whether they should. The work they do makes their individual homes less vulnerable, he said, but it doesn’t eliminate the broader threats around them.

Neighbors walk through their destroyed neighborhood in Phoenix, Oregon, in 2020. Hundreds of homes in the area were destroyed. (Mason Trinca for The Washington Post via Getty Images) Fire retardant coats a playground in a neighborhood largely destroyed by a wildfire in Talent, Oregon, in 2020. Climate change has increased the risk of wildfires in the state. (David Ryder/Getty Images)

By April, the map was on its way out.

The state Senate voted unanimously, Golden included, to repeal the state’s defensible-space and home-hardening requirements as well as the map that showed where they would apply.

Ahead of a 50-1 vote in the House to kill the map, familiar claims got repeated — including from a legislative leader’s office.

Virgle Osborne, the House Republican whip, lamented in a May press release: “These wildfire maps have cost people property values, insurance increases, and many heartaches.”

Osborne told ProPublica he stood behind his comment even though he had no evidence for it. Osborne said he believed Oregon’s maps helped insurance companies justify rate increases and policy cancellations.

“I can’t give you, you know, here’s the perfect example of somebody that, you know, did it, but no insurance company is that foolish,” Osborne said. “They’re not going to write a statement that would put them in jeopardy. But common sense is going to tell you, when the state is on your side, the insurance companies are going to bail out. And they have.”

With or without a map, former California insurance commissioner Dave Jones said, Oregon lawmakers could require insurers to provide incentives for homeowners to protect their properties. Colorado, for instance, ordered insurers this year to account for risk-reduction efforts in models used to decide who can obtain insurance and at what price.

Jones nonetheless called Oregon’s decision to kill the wildfire map “very unfortunate.”

“One of the biggest public health and safety challenges states are facing are climate-driven, severe-weather-related events,” Jones said. “Not giving people useful information to make decisions on that, to me, is not a path to public health and safety.”

During the June vote in the Oregon House, the lone person who voted to preserve Oregon’s wildfire map and its associated mandates was Dacia Grayber, a Democrat from the Portland area who’s a longtime firefighter and worked a brush rig during the 2020 wildfires.

She told ProPublica that by training, the first things she looks for while defending homes in wildland fires are the types of hazards the state intended to target: firewood under the deck, cedar shake siding, flammable juniper bushes growing close to homes.

Grayber said she was disturbed by the sentiment in the Capitol as the repeal vote neared. The decision to kill the map and eliminate home-hardening requirements, she said, had become a “feel-good, bipartisan vote.”

“We are walking away from a very clear decision to build safer, more resilient communities,” Grayber said.

The tragedy of it, she said, is “that it was 100% based in misinformation.”

Kotek, Oregon’s Democratic governor, signed the repeal on July 24.

Oregon Rep. Dacia Grayber is the sole legislator who voted to keep the wildfire hazard map alive. (Jenny Kane/AP Photo)

For 25 years, a group of the country’s top experts has been fastidiously tracking the ways that climate change threatens every part of the United States. Their findings informed the National Climate Assessments, a series of congressionally mandated reports released every four years that translated the science into accessible warnings for policymakers and the public. But that work came to a halt this spring when the Trump administration abruptly dismissed all 400 experts working on the next edition. Then, on June 30, all of the past reports vanished too, along with the federal website they lived on.

A lot of information about the changing climate has disappeared under President Donald Trump’s second term, but the erasure of the National Climate Assessments is “by far the biggest loss we’ve seen,” said Gretchen Gehrke, who monitors federal websites with the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative. The National Climate Assessments were one of the most approachable resources that broke down how climate change will affect the places people care about, she said. The reports were also used by a wide swath of stakeholders — policymakers, farmers, businesses — to guide their decisions about the future. While the reports have been archived elsewhere, they’re no longer as easy to access. And it’s unclear what, if anything, will happen to the report that was planned for 2027 or 2028, which already existed in draft form.

So why did the reports survive Trump’s first term, but not his second? You could view their disappearance in a few different ways, experts said — as a flex of executive power, an escalation in the culture war over climate change, or a strategic attempt to erase the scientific foundation for climate policy. “If you suppress information and data, then you don’t have the evidence you need to be able to create regulations, strengthen regulations, and even to combat the repeal of regulations,” Gehrke said. 

This isn’t climate denial in the traditional sense. The days of loudly debating the science have mostly given way to something quieter and more insidious: a campaign to withhold the raw information itself. “I don’t know if we’re living in climate denial anymore,” said Leah Aronowsky, a science historian at Columbia Climate School. “We have this new front of denial by erasure.”

By cutting funding for research and withholding crucial data, the Trump administration is making it harder to know exactly how the planet is changing. In April, the administration pulled nearly $4 million in funding from a Princeton program to improve computer models predicting changes in the oceans and atmosphere, claiming the work created “climate anxiety” among young people. That same month, the Environmental Protection Agency failed to submit its annual report to the United Nations detailing the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. In May, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ended its 45-year tradition of tracking billion-dollar weather disasters. Trump also hopes to shut down the Mauna Loa laboratory in Hawaiʻi, which has measured the steady rise in atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide since the 1950s — the first data to definitively show humans were changing the climate. 

“This kind of wholesale suppression of an entire field of federally sponsored research, to my knowledge, is historically unprecedented,” Aronowsky said.

In a response to a request for comment, a NASA spokesperson said that it has “no legal obligations to host globalchange.gov’s data,” referring to the site that hosted the National Climate Assessments, adding that the U.S. Global Change Research Program had already “met its statutory requirements by presenting its reports to Congress.” The EPA directed Grist to a webpage containing past greenhouse gas emissions reports, as well as a version of what was supposed to be this year’s report obtained by the Environmental Defense Fund. However, the agency confirmed that the latest data has not been officially released. The White House declined to comment, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration did not respond.

Last year, a leaked training video from Project 2025 — the policy roadmap organized by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank — showed a former Trump official declaring that political appointees would have to “eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.” The strategy appears to be designed to boost the fossil fuel industry at a time when clean energy has become competitive and the reality of climate change harder to dismiss, as floods, fires, and heat waves have become perceptibly worse. “We will drill, baby, drill,” Trump said in his inauguration speech in January.

The administration hasn’t exactly been subtle about its endgame. Lee Zeldin, the head of the EPA, doesn’t deny the reality of climate change (he calls himself a “climate realist”), but he’s zealously dismantled environmental programs and has recommended that the White House strike down the “endangerment finding,” the bedrock of U.S. climate policy. It comes from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling on the Clean Air Act that required the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases as pollutants since they endanger public health. If the administration can convince the courts that climate change isn’t a health consideration, it could end that regulatory obligation. 

“If you’re removing information about climate change, its reality, and its impact on people, then I think it’s a lot easier to make the case that it’s not an environmental health issue,” Gehrke said.

There’s a word for the idea that ignorance can serve political ends: agnotology (from the Greek “agnosis,” or “not knowing”), the study of how knowledge is deliberately obscured. What Trump is doing to information about climate change fits squarely in that tradition, according to Aronowsky: “If you remove it, then in a certain sense, it no longer exists, and therefore, there’s nothing to even debate, right?”

Climate denial first took off in the 1990s, when the oil and gas companies and industry-friendly think tanks started sowing doubt about climate science. Over the decades, as the evidence became rock-solid, those who opposed reducing the use of fossil fuels gradually shifted from outright denying the facts to attacking solutions like wind and solar power. What the Trump administration is doing now marks a radical break from this long-term trend, said John Cook, a climate misinformation researcher at The University of Melbourne in Australia. “This is a 180, not just a turn, but diving into something we’ve never even seen before,” he said. On the other hand, Cook said, the administration is taking a classic climate denial tactic — painting scientists as “alarmists” or conspirators who can’t be trusted — and turning it into government policy.

Half a year in, the second Trump administration’s treatment of climate information hasn’t yet reached the “eradication” levels that Project 2025 aspired to, at least on government websites. The EPA’s climate change website, for instance, is still up and running, even though all references to the phenomenon were erased on the agency’s home page. Most of the website deletions so far have served to isolate climate change as an issue, erasing its relationship to topics such as health and infrastructure, Gehrke said. Up until the National Climate Assessments disappeared, she would have said that “climate erasure” was an inappropriate characterization of what’s happening. “But now, I’m really not so sure,” she said.

Rachel Cleetus, the senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that the administration’s actions actually go beyond erasure. “They’re literally trying to change the basis on which a lot of policymaking is advanced — the science basis, the legal basis, and the economic basis,” she said. Her biggest concern isn’t just what facts have been removed, but what political propaganda might replace them. “That’s more dangerous, because it really leaves people in this twilight zone, where what’s real, and what’s important, and what is going to affect their daily lives is just being obfuscated.”

This story was updated on 7/14/25 to include a response from NASA received after the time of publication.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Why the federal government is making climate data disappear on Jul 14, 2025.

Camp Mystic, the private summer camp that now symbolizes the deadly Central Texas floods, sat on a tract of land known to be at high risk for a devastating flood.

Nearly 1.3 million Texas homes are similarly situated in parts of the state susceptible to dangerous floodwaters, according to a state estimate. A quarter of the state’s land carries some degree of severe flood risk, leaving an estimated 5 million Texans in possible jeopardy.

Yet, local governments — especially counties — have limited policy tools to regulate building in areas most prone to flooding. The state’s explosive growth, a yearning for inexpensive land, and a state far behind in planning for extreme weather compound the problem, experts said.

While cities can largely decide what is built within their limits, counties have no jurisdiction to implement comprehensive zoning rules that could limit people from living close to the water’s edge.

Camp Mystic and many of the other camps along the Guadalupe River in Kerr County, where the disaster’s wreckage has been concentrated, were far outside city limits and any regulatory authority of the Kerrville City Council.

Some guardrails exist when it comes to building on flood plains. For property owners in flood-prone areas to tap federal flood insurance, localities have to enact minimum building standards set by the federal government. And counties can use a limited supply of federal dollars to relocate residents out of flood zones. However, those programs have had mixed success. Other programs to fortify infrastructure are tied to federally required hazard mitigation plans, which most rural counties in Texas do not have on file.

Keeping people out of the state’s major flood zones altogether is unrealistic if not impossible, experts in flood plain management and infrastructure said.

For one, it’s human nature to want to be near water — whether it’s to live or vacation there.

“Everybody is drawn to water,” said Christopher Steubing, who heads the Texas Floodplain Management Association. “It becomes challenging when you’re telling people what they can and cannot do with their property. It’s a delicate balance, especially in Texas.”

Families have flocked to Texas from more expensive parts of the country in search of a lower cost of living, moving to places more vulnerable to severe weather events like flooding and wildfires intensified by climate change, research shows.

The state’s population has mushroomed over the last decade, spurring a building frenzy in cities and unincorporated areas alike. The state’s total population has grown by more than 7 percent since 2020. Meanwhile, the Hill Country, which includes Kerr County, has grown by about 9 percent.

Kerr County has seen relatively little population growth in the last few years, said Lloyd Potter, the state’s demographer. But other parts of the Hill Country, including neighboring Gillespie County, have seen relatively steady population growth.

“It is a desirable area for retirees,” Potter said. “It’s beautiful, and it’s reasonably close to urbanized areas, so I think that (growth is) likely to continue.”

Some people don’t have a choice but to live in flood-prone areas, where land is typically cheaper. Often, cities and towns only allow cheaper housing like mobile and manufactured homes to go in places that carry a higher risk of flooding, said Andrew Rumbach, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute who studies climate risk. When a weather disaster destroys a mobile home park, often it gets rebuilt right where it was, Rumbach said.

“The only place you can build it is right back in the flood plain,” Rumbach said.

Determining what can be built on flood plains is largely left to local officials, who may feel uneasy about limiting what property owners do with their land — especially in a state like Texas, known for prioritizing personal liberty — for fear that doing so will harm the local economy or lead to retribution against them at the ballot box, experts said. Often, the aim is not to stop people from building there altogether, but to create standards that make doing so less risky. Even when places adopt new rules, development that predates those rules is often grandfathered in.

How strictly local officials regulate development in flood plains comes down to political will, said Robert Paterson, an associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture.

“Fundamentally, disasters are a human choice,” said Paterson, who specializes in land use and environmental planning. “We can choose to develop in relation to high risk, or we can choose not to. We can stay out of harm’s way.”

Texas adopted its first statewide flood plan last year. As more people move outside of the state’s major urban areas, cities, towns and counties have increasingly adopted flood plain management rules for the first time or enacted stricter ones, Steubing said.

“You have counties that are catching up and adopting standards, but the growth can happen a lot faster than we can get ordinances adopted,” Steubing said.

Even so, localities aren’t tackling development in flood zones quickly enough to keep up with the pace of massive weather disasters, Rumbach said, and states can’t afford to wait for every city and county to adopt stricter standards. State lawmakers, currently weighing what measures to take in the flooding’s aftermath, should consider ways to give cities and counties better tools to manage flood plain development, he said.

“States are the right level of government to do this because they’re close enough to their communities to understand what is needed in different parts of the state and to have regulations that make sense,” Rumbach said. “But they’re far enough away from local governments that we can’t have this race to the bottom where some places are just the Wild West, and they’re able to build whatever they want while others are trying to be responsible stewards of safety and lower property damage.”

There is evidence that some Texas cities are taking flood plain management seriously. Most parts of Texas saw relatively little development on flood plains during the first two decades of this century, according to a study published last year by climate researchers at the University of Miami and other institutions. But parts of the Hill Country like Kerr, Bandera, Burnet and Llano counties saw more flood plain development than other parts of the state, researchers found.

As the Hill Country population grows, people are increasingly finding themselves in harm’s way, said Avantika Gori, an assistant professor of civil and environmental at Rice University and flood expert. Local and state officials can make different decisions on how to develop around flood plains, she said.

“We can’t prevent extreme rainfall from happening, but we can choose where to develop, where to live, where to put ourselves,” Gori said.

Hill Country, particularly the areas farther from the Interstate 35 corridor, is less developed. There could be a temptation to build more as part of the recovery.

Following the 2015 Wimberley flood, developers pressured regulators to allow for more building in the flood plain as the area’s population continued to grow, said Robert Mace, executive director and chief water policy officer of the Meadows Center for Water and the Environment at Texas State University.

“My advice is, a river is beautiful, but as we’ve all seen, it can be a raging, horrific beast, and it needs to be treated with respect,” Mace said. “Part of that respect comes from making careful decisions about where we build.”

A confluence of factors lead to structures being built on the flood plain, said Jim Blackburn, a professor of environmental law in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rice University.

Lax regulations with loopholes that allow existing structures to remain on flood plains, out-of-date flood maps that do not show the true risks posed to residents and economic incentives for developers to build on seemingly attractive land near the water all encourage the development to continue, Blackburn said.

“I get it,” Blackburn said. “People want to be by the river. It’s private property, and we don’t like to tell people what to do with their private property, but there comes a point where we have to say we’ve had enough.”

The federal regulation of development on flood plains is largely done through the National Flood Insurance Program, which subsidizes flood insurance in exchange for implementing flood plain management standards. Under federal law, buildings on a flood plain must be elevated above the anticipated water level during a 100-year storm, or a storm with a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. Local governments must implement the program and map flood plains. Local officials may impose additional building restrictions for building in these areas, such as the requirement in Houston that all new structures be elevated two feet above the 500-year flood elevation.

Kerrville last updated its rules overseeing flood plain development in 2011, according to the city’s website. A city spokesperson did not immediately return a request for comment.

Texas historically has been unfriendly to federal environmental regulation, which is viewed as excessive red tape that gets in the way of economic progress, Blackburn said.

That has led to the state being decades behind the curve in reacting to more frequent and intense rainstorms fueled by a warming climate. As temperatures on average go up, more water on the Earth’s surface is evaporated into the atmosphere, and the warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture. That extra moisture in the atmosphere creates more intense and frequent storms, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

Additional development can also leave flood maps even further out of date as more impermeable surfaces replace natural flood-fighting vegetation, Sharif said.

A 2018 study authored by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineering professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and other UTSA researchers found that the 2015 Wimberley flood was worsened by new construction removing natural barriers to flooding, although natural causes were the primary drivers of the flood.

Experts said that the flooding in the less-developed Kerr County was likely not worsened in a significant way by development. Sharif did encourage the state to fund a study similar to the one he conducted on the Wimberley flood to allow regulators and residents to better understand how exactly Friday’s flood occurred.

Sharif also argued in favor of further investments in “impact-based forecasting.” That area of study combines regular forecasting with on-the-ground information about what the impact of that forecast will be and who is in harm’s way to provide clearer warnings to residents, or, in Sharif’s words, “What do 7 inches of rain mean for me as a person staying in a camp near the river?”

Many of the flood plain maps throughout the state are out of date, given the reality of more frequent and intense storms and continuing development, Blackburn said, and local officials face political pressures not to restrict new development with tougher building codes.

In 2011, the city of Clear Lake installed, then removed signs warning that a hurricane storm surge could reach as high as 20 feet in the city after concerns were raised that the signs were impacting property values.

“I think that tells us a lot,” Blackburn said. “We’re more worried about home sales than the safety of the people buying the homes.”

— Alejandra Martinez contributed. Graphics by Carla Astudillo.

Disclosure: Institute for Economic Development – UTSA, Rice University, University of Texas at Austin and University of Texas at San Antonio have been financial supporters of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline ‘Disasters are a human choice’: Texas counties have little power to stop building in flood-prone areas on Jul 12, 2025.

by Tony Schick, Oregon Public Broadcasting

This article was produced for ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network in partnership with Oregon Public Broadcasting. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week.

Less than two years ago, the administration of President Joe Biden announced what tribal leaders hailed as an unprecedented commitment to the Native tribes whose ways of life had been devastated by federal dam-building along the Columbia River in the Pacific Northwest.

The deal, which took two years to negotiate, halted decades of lawsuits over the harm federal dams had caused to the salmon that had sustained those tribes culturally and economically for thousands of years. To enable the removal of four hydroelectric dams considered especially harmful to salmon, the government promised to invest billions of dollars in alternative energy sources to be created by the tribes.

It was a remarkable step following repeated failures by the government to uphold the tribal fishing rights it swore in treaties to preserve.

The agreement is now just another of those broken promises.

President Donald Trump signed a memorandum on Thursday pulling the federal government out of the deal. Trump’s decision halted a government-wide initiative to restore abundant salmon runs in the Columbia and Snake rivers and signaled an end to the government’s willingness to consider removing dams that blocked their free flow.

Thursday’s move drew immediate condemnation from tribes and from environmental groups that have fought to protect salmon.

“The Administration’s decision to terminate these commitments echoes the federal government’s historic pattern of broken promises to tribes,” Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chair Gerald Lewis said in a statement. “This termination will severely disrupt vital fisheries restoration efforts, eliminate certainty for hydro operations, and likely result in increased energy costs and regional instability.”

The government’s commitment to tribes, however, had been unraveling since almost when the deal was inked.

Key provisions were already languishing under Biden. After Trump won the presidency, his administration spiked most of the studies called for in the agreement, held up millions of dollars in funding and cut most of the staff working to implement salmon recovery. Biden’s promise to seriously consider the removal of dams gained little traction before it was replaced by what Trump’s energy secretary, Chris Wright, called “passionate support” for keeping them in place.

The chair of the White House task force to implement the agreement quit in April because of what he saw as Trump’s efforts to eliminate nearly everything he was working on.

“Federal agencies who were on the hook to do the work were being destroyed through untargeted, inefficient and costly purges of federal employees,” Nik Blosser, the former Columbia River Task Force chair, told ProPublica and OPB. “When I left, most things were on hold or paused — even signed contracts were on hold, which is a disgrace.”

Trump’s White House announcement called the Biden administration’s commitments “onerous” and said the president “continues to deliver on his promise to end the previous administration’s misplaced priorities and protect the livelihoods of the American people.”

“President Trump is committed to unleashing American energy dominance, reversing all executive actions that impose undue burdens on energy production and use,” the announcement read.

But the decision could also have some unintended consequences, experts say.

Trump signed an executive order in April to “restore American seafood competitiveness” but in revoking the Columbia River agreement has canceled millions of dollars to support the programs that seed the ocean with fish to catch. He signed a separate executive order on his first day in office to “unleash American energy dominance” but has now reversed a commitment, made under the Biden salmon deal, to build new sources of domestic energy. This week’s action has sent federal agencies back to court, where judges have repeatedly shackled power production at hydroelectric dams because of its impact on the endangered fish.

“It’s tempting to comment at length on the absurdity of the President’s order, including the fact that what he says he wants — stability for power generation — is in fact put more at risk by this action,” Blosser wrote in a post on LinkedIn. “Instead, I’ll look for inspiration to the mighty salmon, who don’t stop swimming upstream when they get to a waterfall.”

Back to Court

Before they began negotiating the Columbia River Basin agreement in 2021, federal agencies had been losing in court over the hydropower system for more than 20 years. Judge after judge ordered the federal government to use less water for making electricity and instead let more of the river spill through the dams’ floodgates so that fish could more safely ride the current past them.

The accord with states and tribes guaranteed up to a decade without those lawsuits. Trump canceled that.

The Bonneville Power Administration, which sells the hydroelectricity from federal dams, had more at stake than the rest of the agencies in the deal. When the government signed it, Bonneville Administrator John Hairston said it provided “operational certainty and reliability while avoiding costly, unpredictable litigation in support of our mission to provide a reliable, affordable power supply to the Pacific Northwest.”

In its most recent annual report, Bonneville credited the agreement for giving it the flexibility to increase hydropower production during times of high electricity demand, which helped stem the losses in an otherwise difficult financial year.

A major component of the agreement was the acknowledgment of the region’s dependence on hydropower and the need to build new sources of energy before removing the dams. It offered no guarantee of dam removal.

The Biden White House had pledged to help tribes develop enough renewable energy sources to replace the output of four dams on the Snake River, which salmon advocates have long wanted to remove. The administration also planned an analysis of how to meet the region’s energy needs without sacrificing salmon.

The Biden administration never followed through. Even tribally backed energy projects that were already in progress ran into bureaucratic quagmires. When Trump took office and slashed thousands of jobs from the Department of Energy, the commitment for new energy sources died too.

Proponents of Columbia River dams, including the publicly owned utilities that buy federal hydroelectricity, criticized the Biden administration for leaving them out of the negotiations that led to the agreement.

“I want to thank the President (Trump) for his decisive action to protect our dams,” Rep. Dan Newhouse, a Republican from Central Washington, said in a statement on Thursday. He said the Biden administration and “extreme environmental activists” would have threatened the reliability of the power grid and raised energy prices with dam removal.

Even critics of the Biden deal, however, acknowledge they do not want the issue to return to court, where judges’ orders have driven up electricity rates. When Bonneville can’t generate as much hydropower to sell, but still has to pay for hatcheries and habitat fixes for salmon, it has to charge utilities more for its electricity.

“I’m hoping that we avoid dam operations by injunction, because that doesn’t help anybody in the region,” said Scott Simms, executive director of the Public Power Council, a nonprofit representing utilities that purchase federal hydropower.

Earthjustice attorney Amanda Goodin, who represents the environmental advocates who signed the agreement, said the Trump administration’s actions would force a return to courts.

“The agreement formed the basis for the stay of litigation,” Goodin said, “so without the agreement there is no longer any basis for a stay.”

More Fish Will Die

The White House said that Trump’s revoking of the Columbia River deal shows that he “continues to prioritize our Nation’s energy infrastructure and use of natural resources to lower the cost of living for all Americans over speculative climate change concerns.”

Shannon Wheeler, chair of the Nez Perce Tribe, said the damage on the Columbia River is anything but speculative.

“This action tries to hide from the truth,” Wheeler said in a statement. “The Nez Perce Tribe holds a duty to speak the truth for the salmon, and the truth is that extinction of salmon populations is happening now.”

Wild salmon populations on the Columbia and its largest tributary, the Snake River, have been so sparse for decades that commercial, recreational and tribal subsistence fishing are only possible because of fish hatcheries, which raise millions of baby salmon in pens and release them into the wild when they’re old enough to swim to the ocean.

In some years, an estimated half of all the Chinook salmon commercial fishermen catch in Southeast Alaska are from Columbia River hatcheries, making them critical for “restoring American seafood competitiveness” as Trump aimed to do.

But some Columbia River hatcheries are nearly a century old. Others have been so badly underfunded that equipment failures have killed thousands of baby fish.

As ProPublica and OPB previously reported, the number of hatchery salmon surviving to adulthood is now so low that hatcheries have struggled to collect enough fish for breeding, putting future fishing seasons in jeopardy.

The Biden administration promised roughly $500 million to improve hatcheries across the Northwest. His administration never delivered it, and Trump halted all the funds before eventually canceling them with this week’s order.

Mary Lou Soscia, former Columbia River coordinator at the Environmental Protection Agency, said the administration’s dismantling of salmon recovery programs amounts to “cutting off your nose to spite your face.”

“We’re losing decades of accomplishments,” said Soscia, who spent more than 30 years at the agency.

“When the fish managers aren’t there to make real time river decisions, more fish will die,” she said. “Or the watershed restoration work will take a lot longer to happen because you won’t have funding and more fish will die.”

More than 16,000 chemicals are used to produce plastics — and some are silently killing us.

Particularly worrisome is di-2-ethylhexylphthalate, or DEHP, a chemical used to soften plastic products. Colorless and nearly odorless, DEHP is found in everything from shower curtains and shoes to medical tubing and has long been linked to health harms like cancer. 

New research indicates the class of chemicals is also causing deaths due to heart disease, particularly in developing countries. According to a peer-reviewed study published last week in The Lancet eBioMedicine, nearly 350,000 people died in 2018 from exposure to DEHP. The research represents the first global survey of cardiovascular mortality from the chemicals and attributes DEHP exposure from plastics to more than 13 percent of all deaths from heart disease among adults aged 55 to 64.

One of the researchers’ most striking findings was a strong geographic disparity in DEHP exposure and related mortality rates. Residents of the Middle East and South Asia, for example, are exposed to up to six times more DEHP than their European counterparts. A greater share of these regions’ cardiovascular deaths was also attributable to the chemicals. Researchers found that in 2018, 10 percent of heart disease-related deaths in the United States and 8 percent in Europe were attributable to DEHP exposure. That figure was as high as 17 percent in the Middle East and South Asia and more than 13 percent in East Asia and the Pacific.

DEHP and other phthalates contribute to cardiovascular mortality in part because they are endocrine disrupters, meaning they interfere with the body’s hormones in ways that can increase the risk of obesity and diabetes. Phthalates also contribute to inflammation, another risk factor for heart disease, and they coexist with micro- and nanoplastics, which were shown in a groundbreaking study last year to increase people’s risk of a heart attack, stroke, or “death from any cause.” 

DEHP-laden plastics are like “a wrecking ball” on human tissues, said Leonardo Trasande, a professor of pediatrics at NYU Langone Health and one of the study’s authors. He said policymakers should do more to reduce the use of DEHP in plastic materials, potentially including restrictions on the use of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, the type of plastic in which DEHP is most commonly found. Some typical products made of PVC include pipes, upholstery, and children’s toys, as well as — in some parts of the world — food packaging. Overuse of these products has contributed to widespread DEHP contamination in air, soil, and water.

The study suggests the geographical disparities may be attributable to regional differences in plastic production, chemical regulations, and “underdeveloped waste management sectors.” India, for example, is experiencing a surge in the manufacturing and use of plastic products, including PVC products, and it only recently began to restrict DEHP in food packaging. 

Many poorer countries also import plastic waste from abroad, creating another potential route for exposure. Countries including Malaysia, India, and Vietnam have received millions of tons of plastic waste from North America and Europe since 2021 — sometimes illegally, according to analyses of global trade data from the nonprofit Basel Action Network. In 2021, the U.S. alone exported 1.2 billion pounds of plastic waste to developing countries. Much of this plastic may be burned or dumped into unregulated landfills, where it can release chemicals such as DEHP.

The paper builds on a rapidly growing body of evidence that the manufacturing, use, and disposal of plastic creates an outsize burden for the developing world. In 2023, an analysis from the nonprofit World Wide Fund for Nature found that the life-cycle costs of plastics are at least eight times higher for low- and middle-income countries than they are for high-income ones.

To reach their conclusions, Trasande and his team of researchers modeled phthalates’ contribution to cardiovascular mortality using a survey of phthalate concentrations in urine samples combined with causes of death 10 years later reported in the U.S. National Death Index. Then they looked at the total number of heart disease-related deaths in particular countries and regions and determined what fraction wouldn’t have happened if it hadn’t been for DEHP.

Tracey Woodruff, a professor of reproductive sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, who was not involved in the new analysis, said the research was “consistent with what other studies have found” regarding health risks from phthalates. Last year, a study of one-third of the global population found that bisphenol A, or BPA — used in hard, clear plastic products like food storage containers — contributed to 5.4 million cases of heart disease and 346,000 strokes in 2015. The same study found that polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs — used as a flame retardant in electronics and some textiles — caused the loss of 11.7 million IQ points.

DEHP is inconsistently regulated globally. The European Union restricts DEHP, along with several other phthalates, to no more than 0.1 percent by weight in children’s toys and clothing, and strictly limits its use in food-contact materials and cosmetics. China has similar restrictions, and Japan has banned DEHP from food packaging and children’s products since 2003. India passed legislation in 2022 limiting the amount of DEHP that’s allowed to leach from food packaging.

The U.S. restricts DEHP in children’s toys and some food packaging but not in cosmetics. In 2022, the Food and Drug Administration denied a petition from 11 public health and environmental groups to ban DEHP and seven other phthalates in food-contact materials outright. 

“There’s no evidence for a threshold at which phthalate exposures are safe,” Trasande emphasized.

Trasande said his research could influence ongoing negotiations for the United Nations’ global plastics treaty, set to resume this August. The treaty’s mandate is to “end plastic pollution,” but delegates have increasingly turned their attention to hazardous chemicals in plastic products. Many scientists want the treaty to include lists of plastic types and plastic-related chemicals that must be limited or phased out. Both PVC and phthalates are top contenders for such lists.

Woodruff said research like Trasande’s should also drive home the need to limit overall plastic production, not just the chemicals used in plastics. “That there are important health benefits from capping the amount of plastic production,” she said. “Lowering our exposure to these chemicals in plastics is going to be a critical part of reversing the trend of chronic disease in the U.S.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline This commonly used plastic chemical caused 350,000 heart disease-related deaths in 1 year on May 6, 2025.

If you believe we are somehow still living in the same US that conducted elections in November 2024, you are living in a dream. That America is gone. The one we are in now is not run by someone acting like a dictator—or, as Rachel Maddow claimed, “too incompetent” to be a dictator—but is, without a doubt, the real deal. by Charles Mudede

If you believe we are somehow still living in the same US that conducted elections in November 2024, you are living in a dream. That America is gone. The one we are in now is not run by someone acting like a dictator—or, as Rachel Maddow claimed, “too incompetent” to be a dictator—but is, without a doubt, the real deal. This fact alone explains why the recent “very strong letter” Senator Chuck Schumer sent to Trump was such a howler. Schumer, too, must be dreaming or, worse, has decided to pretend as if he is sleepwalking. Tyrants don’t read letters. And what you will not find in the 100 days Trump has been in the White House is a single indication that he is running the country with any consideration or fear of the public. Voters are no longer a part of his political picture. One man owns this country. This is a dictator. 

Evidence? Well, he himself said to The Atlantic: “I run the country and the world.” And if you do not believe his words, which are brazenly anti-democratic, I will give two clear examples: one that’s material (force) and the other mental (fear). The first example: After refusing an order from the Supreme Court to return Kilmar Ábrego García from a mega prison that’s in El Salvador and, like the Cybertruck, is straight out of an ’80s dystopian film, Trump then arrested Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan for allegedly helping an immigrate evade ICE detention, claiming: no one is above the law. Logically, this implies: no one is above Trump—he is the law. All other citizens, no matter what their rank, cannot disobey him.  

The second example: When the self-described “world’s coolest dictator,” El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, visited the White House on April 14, he was told by Trump that American citizens would soon be sent to his mega prison. Now, it doesn’t matter if Trump was joking or not. What matters is he put this into the minds of Americans: You have seen the prison, you have seen what the guards do to prisoners there, you have not seen a single person leave that nightmare. This, my fellow American, could be you. A key (if not the main tool) in a dictator’s box is fear, which functions much in the same way as Foucault’s famous panopticon prison: a space enclosed in such a way that an inmate doesn’t know if they are being watched by a guard or not and so they must, out of fear alone, watch themselves at all times. Trump’s threat has this function. It says: Better watch yourself or else.    

I’m by no means the only one who recognizes the kind of power that’s now occupying the White House. Indeed, some writers have gone so far as to write about how and why the present dictatorship will end. “Tyrants are for toppling,” writes Simon Tisdall of The Guardian, “Their downfall is a saving grace.” 

However, some dictators grow so old they no longer have the power to cling to power. This is exactly what happened to the late Robert Mugabe. After ruling Zimbabwe for a thousand (magical realist) years (40 in real years), he was finally toppled at age 93, and died rather peacefully at the age of 95.  Because Trump’s dictatorship started so late in his life (78), the US, if worse comes to worst, has time on its side. Nature will bring his reign to an end. Zimbabwe’s first dictator (it’s now experiencing its second, Emmerson “The Crocodile” Mnangagwa), began at the age of 56.

Tyrants come in different flavors. Mugabe, for example—who, like Trump, heavily relied on rural support (city people hated him)—was actually a member of the African intelligentsia. He was well read, had the wit of a professor, and spoke English with a command that puts the monolingual Trump in the shade. Other dictators (Idi Amin and Kim Jong-il) are as thick as two planks. Some (the Shah of Iran) are royal in manner and appearance. And so it’s not the character or intelligence of the dictator that counts, but the culture from which they emerge. 

In the case of the US, Trump is only a concentration of what was already well established in his society: the relentless repression of voting rights, institutional racism, systemic misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, an anti-science attitude, and bogus economic reasoning (trickle-down theory, efficient market hypothesis, methodological individualism in the form of the rational actor paradigm). What is, in fact, lacking in Trump’s dictatorship is anything that’s original or drawn from outside of the structure of American history. He is, by all accounts, as American as apple pie.

And I think this is what Americans have to face in the coming years. Even if Trump doesn’t run for a third term and make himself the ruler for what remains of his life,  nothing will really change if the composition of our society isn’t transformed. You will not find a better time to think in this way than right now. 

How can we, once and for all, bring an end to Trumpism? The first step in unseating a dictator is recognizing they are one. The next step is refusing to be ruled by one.

Throughout the Yangtze River Delta, a region in southern China famed for its widespread rice production, farmers grow belts of slender green stalks. Before they reach several feet tall and turn golden brown, the grassy plants soak in muddy, waterlogged fields for months. Along the rows of submerged plants, levees store and distribute a steady supply of water that farmers source from nearby canals.

This traditional practice of flooding paddies to raise the notoriously thirsty crop is almost as old as the ancient grain’s domestication. Thousands of years later, the agricultural method continues to predominate in rice cultivation practices from the low-lying fields of Arkansas to the sprawling terraces of Vietnam. 

As the planet heats up, this popular process of growing rice is becoming increasingly more dangerous for the millions of people worldwide that eat the grain regularly, according to research published Wednesday in the journal Lancet Planetary Health. After drinking water, the researchers say, rice is the world’s second largest dietary source of inorganic arsenic, and climate change appears to be increasing the amount of the highly toxic chemical that is in it. If nothing is done to transform how most of the world’s rice is produced, regulate how much of it people consume, or mitigate warming, the authors conclude that communities with rice-heavy diets could begin confronting increased risks of cancer and disease as soon as 2050. 

“Our results are very scary,” said Donming Wang, the ecological doctorate student at the Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences who led the paper. “It’s a disaster … and a wake-up call.” 

Back in 2014, Wang and an international team of climate, plant, and public health scientists started working together on a research project that would end up taking them close to a decade to complete. Wading through rice paddies across the Yangtze Delta, they sought to find out just how projected temperatures and levels of atmospheric CO2 in 2050 would interact with the arsenic in the soil and the rice crops planted there. They knew, from past research, that the carcinogen was a problem in rice crops, but wanted to find out how much more of an issue it might be in a warming world. The team didn’t look at just any rice, but some of the grain varieties most produced and consumed worldwide.

Although there are an estimated 40,000 types of rice on the planet, they tend to be grouped into three categories based on length of the grain. Short-grain rice, or the sticky kind often used in sushi; long-grain, which includes aromatic types like basmati and jasmine; and medium-grain, or rice that tends to be served as a main dish. Of these, the short-to-medium japonica and long-grain indica are the two major subspecies of cultivated rice eaten across Asia. Wang’s study modelled the growth of 28 varieties of japonica, indica, and hybrid rice strains central to cuisine for seven of the continent’s top rice consuming and producing countries: Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Myanmar, Philippines, and Vietnam. India, Vietnam, and China are among the group of eight nations that lead the rest of the world in rice exports. 

After nearly a decade of observing and analyzing the growth of the plants, the researchers discovered that the combination of higher temperatures and CO2 encourages root growth, increasing the ability of rice plants to uptake arsenic from the soil. They believe this is because climate-related changes in soil chemistry that favor arsenic can be more easily absorbed into the grain. Carbon-dioxide enriched crops were found to capture more atmospheric carbon and pump some of that into the soil, stimulating microbes that are making arsenic.

The more root growth, the more carbon in the soil, which can be a source of food for soil bacteria that multiply under warming temperatures. When soil in a rice paddy is waterlogged, oxygen gets depleted, causing the soil bacteria to rely further on arsenic to generate energy. The end result is more arsenic building up in the rice paddy, and more roots to take it up to the developing grain.

These arsenic-accumulating effects linked to increased root growth and carbon capture is a paradoxical surprise to Corey Lesk, a Dartmouth College postdoctoral climate and crop researcher unaffiliated with the paper. The paradox, said Lesk, is that both of these outcomes have been talked about as potential benefits to rice yields under climate change. “More roots could make the rice more drought-resistant, and cheaper carbon can boost yields generally,” he said. “But the extra arsenic accumulation could make it hard to realize health benefits from that yield boost.” 

Arsenic comes in many different forms. Notoriously toxic, inorganic arsenic — compounds of the element that don’t contain carbon — is what the World Health Organization classifies as a “confirmed carcinogen” and “the most significant chemical contaminant in drinking water globally.” Such forms of arsenic are typically more toxic to humans because they are less stable than their organic counterparts and may allow arsenic to interact with molecules that ramp up exposure. Chronic exposure has been linked to lung, bladder, and skin cancers, as well as heart disease, diabetes, adverse pregnancy, neurodevelopmental issues, and weakened immune systems, among other health impacts.

Scientists and public-health specialists have known for years that the presence of arsenic in food is a mounting threat, but dietary exposure has long been considered much less of a risk in comparison to contaminated groundwater. So policy measures to mitigate the risk have been slow going. The few existing standards that have been enacted by the European Union and China, for example, are considered inconsistent and largely unenforced. No country has formally established regulations for organic arsenic exposure in foods. (In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration has established an action level of 100 parts per billion of inorganic arsenic in infant rice cereal, but that recommendation for manufacturers isn’t an enforceable regulation on arsenic in rice or any other food.)

Wang hopes to see this change. The levels of inorganic arsenic commonly found in rice today fall within China’s recommended standards, for example, but her paper shows that lifetime bladder and lung cancer incidences are likely to increase “proportionally” to exposure by 2050. Under a “worst case” climate scenario, where global temperatures rise above 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) and are coupled with CO2 levels that increase another 200 parts per million, the levels of inorganic arsenic in the rice varieties studied are projected to surge by a whopping 44 percent. That means that more than half the rice samples would exceed China’s current proposed limit, which limits 200 parts per billion for inorganic arsenic in paddy rice, with an estimated 13.4 million cancers linked to rice-based arsenic exposure.

Because these health risks are in part calculated based on body weight, infants and young children will face the biggest health burdens. Babies, in particular, may end up facing outsize risks through the consumption of rice cereals, according to the researchers. 

“You’re talking about a crop staple that feeds billions of people, and when you consider that more carbon dioxide and warmer temperatures can significantly influence the amount of arsenic in that staple, the amount of health consequences related to that are, for lack of a better word, enormous,” said study coauthor Lewis Ziska, a plant biologist researching climate change and public health at Columbia University. 

But everyone should not suddenly stop eating rice as a result, he added. Though the team found the amount of inorganic arsenic in rice is higher than a lot of other plants, it’s still quite low overall. The key variable is how much rice a person eats. If you are among the bulk of the world that consumes rice multiple times a week, this looming health burden could apply to you, but if you do so more sporadically, Ziska says, the inorganic arsenic you may end up exposed to won’t be “a big deal.” 

In that way, the study’s projections may also deepen existing global and social inequities, as a big reason rice has long reigned as one of the planet’s most devoured grains is because it’s also among the most affordable.

Beyond mitigating global greenhouse gas emissions — what Ziska calls “waving my rainbows, unicorns, and sprinkles wand” — adaptation efforts to avoid a future with toxic rice include rice paddy farmers planting earlier in the season to avoid seeds developing under warmer temperatures, better soil management, and plant breeding to minimize rice’s propensity to accumulate so much arsenic. 

Water-saving irrigation techniques such as alternate wetting and drying, where paddy fields are first flooded and then allowed to dry in a cycle, could also be used to reduce these increasing health risks and the grain’s enormous methane footprint. On a global scale, rice production accounts for roughly 8 percent of all methane emissions from human activity — flooded paddy fields are ideal conditions for methane-emitting bacteria. 

“This is an area that I know is not sexy, that doesn’t have the same vibe as the end of the world, rising sea levels, category 10 storms,” said Ziska. “But I will tell you quite honestly that it will have the greatest effect in terms of humanity, because we all eat.”

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline The ‘king of poisons’ is building up in rice on Apr 17, 2025.

by Alec MacGillis

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

More children ages 1 to 4 die of drowning than any other cause of death. Nearly a quarter of adults received mental health treatment in 2023, an increase of 3.4 million from the prior year. The number of migrants from Mexico and northern Central American countries stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol was surpassed in 2022 by the number of migrants from other nations.

We know these things because the federal government collects, organizes and shares the data behind them. Every year, year after year, workers in agencies that many of us have never heard of have been amassing the statistics that undergird decision-making at all levels of government and inform the judgments of business leaders, school administrators and medical providers nationwide.

The survival of that data is now in doubt, as a result of the Department of Government Efficiency’s comprehensive assault on the federal bureaucracy.

Reaction to those cuts has focused understandably on the hundreds of thousands of civil servants who have lost their jobs or are on the verge of doing so and the harm that millions of people could suffer as a result of the shuttering of aid programs. Overlooked amid the turmoil is the fact that many of DOGE’s cuts have been targeted at a very specific aspect of the federal government: its collection and sharing of data. In agency after agency, the government is losing its capacity to measure how American society is functioning, making it much harder for elected officials or others to gauge the nature and scale of the problems we are facing and the effectiveness of solutions being deployed against them.

The data collection efforts that have been shut down or are at risk of being curtailed are staggering in their breadth. In some cases, datasets from past years now sit orphaned, their caretakers banished and their future uncertain; in others, past data has vanished for the time being, and it’s unclear if and when it will reappear. Here are just a few examples:

The Department of Health and Human Services, now led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid off the 17-person team in charge of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which for more than five decades has tracked trends in substance abuse and mental health disorders. The department’s Administration for Children and Families is weeks behind on the annual update of the Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, the nationwide database of child welfare cases, after layoffs effectively wiped out the team that compiles that information. And the department has placed on leave the team that oversees the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System, a collection of survey responses from women before and after giving birth that has become a crucial tool in trying to address the country’s disconcertingly high rate of maternal mortality.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has eviscerated divisions that oversee the WISQARS database on accidental deaths and injuries — everything from fatal shootings to poisonings to car accidents — and the team that maintains AtlasPlus, an interactive tool for tracking HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.

The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to stop requiring oil refineries, power plants and other industrial facilities to measure and report their greenhouse gas emissions, as they have done since 2010, making it difficult to know whether any of the policies meant to slow climate change and reduce disaster are effective. The EPA has also taken down EJScreen, a mapping tool on its website that allowed people to see how much industrial pollution occurs in their community and how that compares with other places or previous years.

The Office of Homeland Security Statistics has yet to update its monthly tallies on deportations and other indices of immigration enforcement, making it difficult to judge President Donald Trump’s triumphant claims of a crackdown; the last available numbers are from November 2024, in the final months of President Joe Biden’s tenure. (“While we have submitted reports and data files for clearance, the reporting and data file posting are delayed while they are under the new administration’s review,” Jim Scheye, director of operations and reporting in the statistics unit, told ProPublica.)

And, in a particularly concrete example of ceasing to measure, deep cutbacks at the National Weather Service are forcing it to reduce weather balloon launches, which gather a vast repository of second-by-second data on everything from temperature to humidity to atmospheric pressure in order to improve forecasting.

Looked at one way, the war on measurement has an obvious potential motivation: making it harder for critics to gauge fallout resulting from Trump administration layoffs, deregulation or other shifts in policy. In some cases, the data now being jettisoned is geared around concepts or presumptions that the administration fundamentally rejects: EJScreen, for instance, stands for “environmental justice” — the effort to ensure that communities don’t suffer disproportionately from pollution and other environmental harms. (An EPA spokesperson said the agency is “working to diligently implement President Trump’s executive orders, including the ‘Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.’” The spokesperson added: “The EPA will continue to uphold its mission to protect human health and the environment” in Trump’s second term.) The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment.

Laura Lindberg, a Rutgers public health professor, lamented the threatened pregnancy-risk data at the annual conference of the Population Association of America in Washington last week. In an interview, she said the administration’s cancellation of data collection efforts reminded her of recent actions at the state level, such as Florida’s withdrawal in 2022 from the CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey after the state passed its law discouraging classroom discussion of sexual orientation. (The state’s education secretary said the survey was “inflammatory” and “sexualized.”) Discontinuing the survey made it harder to discern whether the law had adverse mental health effects among Florida teens. “States have taken on policies that would harm people and then are saying, ‘We don’t want to collect data about the impact of the policies,’” Lindbergsaid. “Burying your head in the sand is not going to be a way to keep the country healthy.” (HHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

Making the halt on data gathering more confounding, though, is the fact that, in some areas, the information at risk of being lost has been buttressing some of the administration’s own claims. For instance, Trump and Vice President JD Vance have repeatedly cited, as an argument for tougher border enforcement, the past decade’s surge in fentanyl addiction — a trend that has been definitively captured by the national drug use survey that is now imperiled. That survey’s mental health components have also undergirded research on the threat being posed to the nation’s young people by smartphones and social media, which many conservatives have taken up as a cudgel against Big Tech.

Or take education. The administration and its conservative allies have been able to argue that Democratic-led states kept schools closed too long during the pandemic because there was nationwide data — the National Assessment of Educational Progress, aka the Nation’s Report Card — that showed greater drops in student achievement in districts that stayed closed longer. But now NAEP is likely to be reduced in scope as part of crippling layoffs at the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics, which has been slashed from nearly 100 employees to only three, casting into doubt the future not only of NAEP but also of a wide array of long-running longitudinal evaluations and the department’s detailed tallies of nationwide K-12 and higher education enrollment. The department did not respond to a request for comment but released a statement on Thursday saying the next round of NAEP assessments would still be held next year.

Dan Goldhaber, an education researcher at the University of Washington, cast the self- defeating nature of the administration’s war on educational assessment in blunt terms: “The irony here is that if you look at some of the statements around the Department of Education, it’s, ‘We’ve invested X billion in the department and yet achievement has fallen off a cliff.’ But the only reason we know that is because of the NAEP data collection effort!”

Shelly Burns, a mathematical statistician who worked at NCES for about 35 years before her entire team was laid off in March, made a similar point about falling student achievement. “How does the country know that? They know it because we collected it. And we didn’t spin it. We didn’t say, ‘Biden is president, so let’s make it look good,’” she said. “Their new idea about how to make education great again — how will you know if it worked if you don’t have independent data collection?”

“Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” Stephen Colbert liked to quip, and there have been plenty of liberal commentators who have, over the years, taken that drollery at face value, suggesting that the numbers all point one way in the nation’s political debates. In fact, in plenty of areas, they don’t.

It’s worth noting that Project 2025’s lengthy blueprint for the Trump administration makes no explicit recommendation to undo the government’s data-collection efforts. The blueprint is chock full of references to data-based decision-making, and in some areas, such as immigration enforcement, it urges the next administration to collect and share more data than its predecessors had.

But when an administration is making such a concerted effort to stifle assessments of government and society at large, it is hard not to conclude that it lacks confidence in the efficacy of its current national overhaul. As one dataset after another falls by the wayside, the nation’s policymakers are losing their ability to make evidence-based decisions, and the public is losing the ability to hold them accountable for their results. Even if a future administration seeks to resurrect some of the curtailed efforts, the 2025-29 hiatus will make trends harder to identify and understand.

Who knows if the country will be able to rebuild that measurement capacity in the future. For now, the loss is incalculable.

Jesse Coburn, Eli Hager, Abrahm Lustgarten, Mark Olalde, Jennifer Smith Richards and Lisa Song contributed reporting.

For Peter Hasegawa, it all started with the heat dome. The labor organizer remembers the 2021 extreme heat event that killed more than 400 people in the state of Washington. That disaster woke up residents and union members to how deadly climate change can be. Although Seattle had passed climate action legislation in 2019, it became clear to Hasegawa and the union members he represented that even though the city was preparing to wean itself off fossil fuels, it was still ill-prepared to deal with the impacts of a warming planet.

This led Hasegawa last fall to South Seattle College, the setting for MLK Labor’s community assembly on extreme weather and worker rights. One October evening, a lecture hall filled with union workers, including teachers, firefighters, home health care workers, postal workers, and more, ready to try out the Community Assembly model. Community Assemblies are participatory spaces where people come together to learn, deliberate, and make collective decisions on programs and policies that influence the actions of government and community action. Hasegawa watched closely as the assembly unfolded.

After years of making policy for communities of color, workers, and other communities on the frontlines of climate change, lawmakers and city officials are now shifting towards making policies with constituents — particularly those who historically have been harmed by local policy. In Seattle, these Community Assemblies are part of a pilot program in partnership with the City of Seattle — one of the latest efforts in a larger trend of more inclusive governance around climate change. In that room, 50 union members came together for three assembly sessions over three weeks to test a new tool for co-governance.

Assemblies have been implemented across the U.S. and around the world, including in Hawai’i after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; in Jackson, Miss., to bring community-based perspectives into the city’s contracting process; and in the Bronx, N.Y., to advocate for stronger policies on housing, economic inequality, and health. While not government-funded or directly initiated with officials, these assemblies create opportunities for deeper collaboration between communities and policymakers. 

“This is a model that has always existed — the assembly, a deep form of engagement — and it exists across the globe in different variations, demonstrating how structured public participation can inform policies and decisions that directly impact people’s lives,” said Faduma Fido, Lab Leader with Seattle partner organization People’s Economy Lab. 

One thing that distinguishes Washington’s Community Assemblies is that they’re funded by government entities. MLK Labor’s assembly, along with an assembly led by the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, were funded by the City of Seattle Office of Sustainability and Environment in partnership with Seattle’s Green New Deal Oversight Board. The oversight board will use recommendations from community assemblies to inform Seattle’s Climate Action Plan update and future climate policies and priorities. With all of this in mind, it was important for the sustainability office and the oversight board to wisely choose the organizations that would lead these community assemblies. The Green New Deal legislation funded this program with $100,000 set aside to invest in participatory decision-making. 

Choosing MLK Labor and the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle came after lengthy research, according to Elise Rasmussen, Climate and Environmental Justice Associate at Seattle’s sustainability office. Most importantly, both organizations prioritized communities disproportionately affected by climate change.

For MLK Labor’s Community Assembly, this included individual union members who had voiced past concerns about climate change and workers in roles that would put them in the path of extreme weather events. For the Urban League’s, which was focused on community resilience in the face of climate change, participants were chosen for their connection and lived experience to climate change and equity. This group included 25 members from Indigenous communities, as well as other communities of color, immigrants, unhoused people, elders, and youth who were engaged in efforts to fight climate change locally. 

In the South Seattle College lecture hall, Hasegawa saw the type of camaraderie common in unions, but this time solidarity formed around facing climate change. “People found that they were not alone in having to deal with extreme weather,” he said, “and [workers were] not being given the tools or the protections from their managers to do what they needed to do.” Firefighters talked about having to work in extreme heat, home health care workers described elderly and vulnerable patients struggling without air conditioning, and teachers detailed sweaty days in classrooms, burst pipes, and mold. 

The point, according to Fido, is to ensure that no one gets left behind in Seattle’s climate planning. Community Assemblies are a way for frontline community members to share their experiences and expertise, discuss issues and collaborate on solutions, and make their voices heard through policy recommendations. And community assemblies are gaining traction throughout the state. The Washington State Department of Social and Health Services is also funding a series of Community Assembly pilots. 

Longtime organizer Rosalinda Guillen had advocated for the model locally, after working with numerous farmworker organizations and advocates from Washington State to South America. She was a community organizer with the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition, helping organize the first farmworker union in the state’s history. “Every state agency needs to replace their community engagement plan with the community assembly model,” Guillen said on a 2023 panel. 

Another goal of Community Assemblies is to support Black, Brown, Indigenous, and low-income communities to participate more fully in the process of policymaking. “We’re working with frontline communities to be able to build and sustain a civic muscle where they are active participants in the conversation of better policies, better investments, and more targeted programming,” said Fido. 

For Camille Gipaya, the process has already had immediate, visible effects. Gipaya is a community outreach organizer at the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle. While the issues their assembly addressed were broad — food and water, land use, pollution, and redlining — she says that bringing people together has very literally changed how they show up. “We [went] to Olympia [to] talk to legislators, and we had individuals that we met at the Community Assembly that were there who were not interested in talking to politicians beforehand, but [then] they felt empowered to be more engaged,” she said. 

Using this model is important to Gipaya, because it prioritizes the communal lived experiences of people who will be most affected by climate change. Instead of trying other methods to determine the best way forward, this initiative simply asks people to determine the best path themselves. “When looking at policy, it has to be more than just data and numbers,” she said. “Oftentimes, having seen [how policy has worked] in the past, we really have to connect with community members. We cannot afford to be disconnected with frontline communities.”

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This story was produced in partnership with Communities of Opportunity, a growing partnership that believes every community can be a healthy, thriving community. Communities of Opportunity is a unique community-private foundation-government partnership that invests in the power of communities in King County, Washington.

This story was originally published by Grist with the headline Looking to create effective climate change policy? Ask the community. on Apr 15, 2025.