by Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. Texas state legislators dropped efforts to spend millions of dollars to buy what experts call ineffective child identification kits weeks after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune reported that lawmakers were again trying to fund the program. This is the second consecutive budget cycle in which the Legislature considered purchasing the products, which promise to help find missing children, only to reverse course after the news organizations documented the lack of evidence that the kits work. ProPublica and the Tribune originally published their findings in a 2023 investigation that revealed the state had spent millions of dollars on child identification kits made by a Waco-based company called the National Child Identification Program, run by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire. He had a history of legal and business troubles, according to public records, and although less expensive alternatives were available to lawmakers, Hansmire used outdated and exaggerated statistics about missing children to help boost sales. He also managed to develop connections with powerful Texas legislators who supported his initiatives. In 2021, Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell authored a bill that created a Texas child safety program. The measure all but guaranteed any state funding would go to Hansmires business whenever lawmakers allotted money for child identification kits. That year, the state awarded his company about $5.7 million for the kits. Two years later, both the House and the Senate proposed spending millions more on the program. But when the final budget was published, about a month after the newsrooms investigation, legislators had pulled the funding. They declined to answer questions about why. Funding for the program appeared again in this years House budget. State Rep. Armando Martinez, a Democratic member of the lower chambers budget committee, suggested allotting $2 million to buy the kits for students in kindergarten through the second grade. The Senate, however, didnt include that funding in its version of the budget. The newsrooms published a story in early May about the proposed spending plan. The final version of the budget that lawmakers passed this week again had no designated funding for the identification kits. Campbell, Martinez and the leaders of the House and Senate budget committees did not respond to the newsrooms interview requests for this story or written questions about why the funding didnt make the final cut. Hansmire did not reply to an interview request this week. In a prior response, he told the newsrooms hed resolved his financial troubles and said that his companys kits have helped identify missing children, though he did not provide any concrete examples. Hansmire told reporters to reach out to any policeman, naming several departments specifically. The newsrooms contacted a number of them. Of the dozen Texas law enforcement agencies that responded to the queries, none could identify one case where the kits helped find a runaway or kidnapped child.Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant who previously oversaw the Louisiana Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, said legislators made the correct decision to eliminate the identification kits from the budget because there is no data proving they actually help improve kids safety. She remains disappointed that Texas lawmakers continue to give the program any attention and hopes they wont contemplate the funding in the future.Every dollar and every minute, every hour that you spend on a program like this, is a dollar and a minute and an hour that you cant spend on something that is more promising or more sound, said Pearson.

by Brandon Roberts, Vernal Coleman and Eric Umansky ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts MUNCHABLE. The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000. The DOGE AI tool flagged more than 2,000 contracts for munching. Its unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled the Trump administrations decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box. The VA uses contractors for many reasons, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans. VA officials have said theyve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of whats been canceled without success.We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide. ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it deeply problematic. Cary Coglianese, professor of law and of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the governmental use and regulation of artificial intelligence, said he was troubled by the use of these general-purpose large language models, or LLMs. I dont think off-the-shelf LLMs have a great deal of reliability for something as complex and involved as this, he said. Sahil Lavingia, the programmer enlisted by DOGE, which was then run by Elon Musk, acknowledged flaws in the code.I think that mistakes were made, said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. Im sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. Its like that Office episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.Though Lavingia has talked about his time at DOGE previously, this is the first time his work has been examined in detail and the first time hes publicly explained his process, down to specific lines of code.Lavingia has nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer and entrepreneur but no formal training in AI. He briefly worked at Pinterest before starting Gumroad, a small e-commerce company that nearly collapsed in 2015. I laid off 75% of my company including many of my best friends. It really sucked, he said. Lavingia kept the company afloat by replacing every manual process with an automated one, according to a post on his personal blog. Sahil Lavingia at his office in Brooklyn (Ben Sklar for ProPublica) Lavingia did not have much time to immerse himself in how the VA handles veterans care between starting on March 17 and writing the tool on the following day. Yet his experience with his own company aligned with the direction of the Trump administration, which has embraced the use of AI across government to streamline operations and save money.Lavingia said the quick timeline of Trumps February executive order, which gave agencies 30 days to complete a review of contracts and grants, was too short to do the job manually. Thats not possible you have 90,000 contracts, he said. Unless you write some code. But even then its not really possible.Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them.VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz lauded DOGEs work on vetting contracts in a statement to ProPublica. As far as we know, this sort of review has never been done before, but we are happy to set this commonsense precedent, he said.The VA is reviewing all of its 76,000 contracts to ensure each of them benefits veterans and is a good use of taxpayer money, he said. Decisions to cancel or reduce the size of contracts are made after multiple reviews by VA employees, including agency contracting experts and senior staff, he wrote. Kasperowicz said that the VA will not cancel contracts for work that provides services to veterans or that the agency cannot do itself without a contingency plan in place. He added that contracts that are wasteful, duplicative or involve services VA has the ability to perform itself will typically be terminated.Trump officials have said they are working toward a goal of cutting around 80,000 people from the VAs workforce of nearly 500,000. Most employees work in one of the VAs 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics. The VA has said it would avoid cutting contracts that directly impact care out of fear that it would cause harm to veterans. ProPublica recently reported that relatively small cuts at the agency have already been jeopardizing veterans care.The VA has not explained how it plans to simultaneously move services in-house, as Lavingias code suggested was the plan, while also slashing staff. Many inside the VA told ProPublica the process for reviewing contracts was so opaque they couldnt even see who made the ultimate decisions to kill specific contracts. Once the munching script had selected a list of contracts, Lavingia said he would pass it off to others who would decide what to cancel and what to keep. No contracts, he said, were terminated without human review. I just delivered the [list of contracts] to the VA employees, he said. I basically put munchable at the top and then the others below.VA staffers told ProPublica that when DOGE identified contracts to be canceled early this year before Lavingia was brought on employees sometimes were given little time to justify retaining the service. One recalled being given just a few hours. The staffers asked not to be named because they feared losing their jobs for talking to reporters. According to one internal email that predated Lavingias AI analysis, staff members had to respond in 255 characters or fewer just shy of the 280 character limit on Musks X social media platform. A VA email tells staffers that the justification of contracts targeted by DOGE must be limited to 255 characters. (Obtained by ProPublica) Once he started on DOGEs contract analysis, Lavingia said he was confronted with technological limitations. At least some of the errors produced by his code can be traced to using older versions of OpenAI models available through the VA models not capable of solving complex tasks, according to the experts consulted by ProPublica. Moreover, the tools underlying instructions were deeply flawed. Records show Lavingia programmed the AI system to make intricate judgments based on the first few pages of each contract about the first 2,500 words which contain only sparse summary information.AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this, said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. AI gives convincing looking answers that are frequently wrong. There needs to be humans whose job it is to do this work.Lavingias prompts did not include context about how the VA operates, what contracts are essential or which ones are required by federal law. This led AI to determine a core piece of the agencys own contract procurement system was munchable. At the core of Lavingias prompt is the direction to spare contracts involved in direct patient care. Then, evaluate if this contract is "munchable" based on these criteria:- Level 0: Direct patient care (e.g., bedside nurse) - NOT MUNCHABLE- Level 1: Necessary consultants that can't be insourced - NOT MUNCHABLE- Level 2+: Multiple layers removed from veterans care - MUNCHABLE- Contracts related to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) initiatives - MUNCHABLE- Services that could easily be replaced by in-house W2 employees - MUNCHABLE Such an approach, experts said, doesnt grapple with the reality that the work done by doctors and nurses to care for veterans in hospitals is only possible with significant support around them. Lavingias system also used AI to extract details like the contract number and total contract value. This led to avoidable errors, where AI returned the wrong dollar value when multiple were found in a contract. Experts said the correct information was readily available from public databases.Lavingia acknowledged that errors resulted from this approach but said those errors were later corrected by VA staff. In late March, Lavingia published a version of the munchable script on his GitHub account to invite others to use and improve it, he told ProPublica. It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script and anyone in the public could see that this is how the VA is thinking about cutting contracts.According to a post on his blog, this was done with the approval of Musk before he left DOGE. When he asked the room about improving DOGEs public perception, I asked if I could open-source the code Id been writing, Lavingia said. He said yes it aligned with DOGEs goal of maximum transparency.That openness may have eventually led to Lavingias dismissal. Lavingia confirmed he was terminated from DOGE after giving an interview to Fast Company magazine about his work with the department. A VA spokesperson declined to comment on Lavingias dismissal. VA officials have declined to say whether they will continue to use the munchable tool moving forward. But the administration may deploy AI to help the agency replace employees. Documents previously obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials proposed in March consolidating the benefits claims department by relying more on AI. And the governments contractors are paying attention. After Lavingia posted his code, he said he heard from people trying to understand how to keep the money flowing.I got a couple DMs from VA contractors who had questions when they saw this code, he said. They were trying to make sure that their contracts dont get cut. Or learn why they got cut.At the end of the day, humans are the ones terminating the contracts, but it is helpful for them to see how DOGE or Trump or the agency heads are thinking about what contracts they are going to munch. Transparency is a good thing. If you have any information about the misuse or abuse of AI within government agencies, Brandon Roberts is an investigative journalist on the news applications team and has a wealth of experience using and dissecting artificial intelligence. He can be reached on Signal @brandonrobertz.01 or by email brandon.roberts@propublica.org.If you have information about the VA that we should know about, contact reporter Vernal Coleman on Signal, vcoleman91.99, or via email, vernal.coleman@propublica.org, and Eric Umansky on Signal, Ericumansky.04, or via email, eric.umansky@propublica.org.

by Brandon Roberts and Vernal Coleman ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. When an AI script written by a Department of Government Efficiency employee came across a contract for internet service, it flagged it as cancelable. Not because it was waste, fraud or abuse the Department of Veterans Affairs needs internet connectivity after all but because the model was given unclear and conflicting instructions. Sahil Lavingia, who wrote the code, told it to cancel, or in his words munch, anything that wasnt directly supporting patient care. Unfortunately, neither Lavingia nor the model had the knowledge required to make such determinations. Sahil Lavingia at his office in Brooklyn (Ben Sklar for ProPublica) I think that mistakes were made, said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months, in an interview with ProPublica. Im sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made.It turns out, a lot of mistakes were made as DOGE and the VA rushed to implement President Donald Trumps February executive order mandating all of the VAs contracts be reviewed within 30 days.ProPublica obtained the code and prompts the instructions given to the AI model used to review the contracts and interviewed Lavingia and experts in both AI and government procurement. We are publishing an analysis of those prompts to help the public understand how this technology is being deployed in the federal government.The experts found numerous and troubling flaws: the code relied on older, general-purpose models not suited for the task; the model hallucinated contract amounts, deciding around 1,100 of the agreements were each worth $34 million when they were sometimes worth thousands; and the AI did not analyze the entire text of contracts. Most experts said that, in addition to the technical issues, using off-the-shelf AI models for the task with little context on how the VA works should have been a nonstarter. Lavingia, a software engineer enlisted by DOGE, acknowledged there were flaws in what he created and blamed, in part, a lack of time and proper tools. He also stressed that he knew his list of what he called MUNCHABLE contracts would be vetted by others before a final decision was made. Portions of the prompt are pasted below along with commentary from experts we interviewed. Lavingia published a complete version of it on his personal GitHub account.Problems with how the model was constructed can be detected from the very opening lines of code, where the DOGE employee instructs the model how to behave: You are an AI assistant that analyzes government contracts. Always provide comprehensive few-sentence descriptions that explain WHO the contract is with, WHAT specific services/products are provided, and WHO benefits from these services. Remember that contracts for EMR systems and healthcare IT infrastructure directly supporting patient care should be classified as NOT munchable. Contracts related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives or services that could be easily handled by in-house W2 employees should be classified as MUNCHABLE. Consider 'soft services' like healthcare technology management, data management, administrative consulting, portfolio management, case management, and product catalog management as MUNCHABLE. For contract modifications, mark the munchable status as 'N/A'. For IDIQ contracts, be more aggressive about termination unless they are for core medical services or benefits processing. This part of the prompt, known as a system prompt, is intended to shape the overall behavior of the large language model, or LLM, the technology behind AI bots like ChatGPT. In this case, it was used before both steps of the process: first, before Lavingia used it to obtain information like contract amounts; then, before determining if a contract should be canceled.Including information not related to the task at hand can confuse AI. At this point, its only being asked to gather information from the text of the contract. Everything related to munchable status, soft-services or DEI is irrelevant. Experts told ProPublica that trying to fix issues by adding more instructions can actually have the opposite effect especially if theyre irrelevant. Analyze the following contract text and extract the basic information below. If you can't find specific information, write "Not found".CONTRACT TEXT:{text[:10000]} # Using first 10000 chars to stay within token limits The models were only shown the first 10,000 characters from each document, or approximately 2,500 words. Experts were confused by this, noting that OpenAI models support inputs over 50 times that size. Lavingia said that he had to use an older AI model that the VA had already signed a contract for. Please extract the following information:1. Contract Number/PIID2. Parent Contract Number (if this is a child contract)3. Contract Description - IMPORTANT: Provide a DETAILED 1-2 sentence description that clearly explains what the contract is for. Include WHO the vendor is, WHAT specific products or services they provide, and WHO the end recipients or beneficiaries are. For example, instead of "Custom powered wheelchair", write "Contract with XYZ Medical Equipment Provider to supply custom-powered wheelchairs and related maintenance services to veteran patients at VA medical centers."4. Vendor Name5. Total Contract Value (in USD)6. FY 25 Value (in USD)7. Remaining Obligations (in USD)8. Contracting Officer Name9. Is this an IDIQ contract? (true/false)10. Is this a modification? (true/false) This portion of the prompt instructs the AI to extract the contract number and other key details of a contract, such as the total contract value.This was error-prone and not necessary, as accurate contract information can already be found in publicly available databases like USASpending. In some cases, this led to the AI system being given an outdated version of a contract, which led to it reporting a misleadingly large contract amount. In other cases, the model mistakenly pulled an irrelevant number from the page instead of the contract value. They are looking for information where its easy to get, rather than where its correct, said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. This is the lazy approach to gathering the information that they want. Its faster, but its less accurate.Lavingia acknowledged that this approach led to errors but said that those errors were later corrected by VA staff.Once the program extracted this information, it ran a second pass to determine if the contract was munchable. Based on the following contract information, determine if this contract is "munchable" based on these criteria:CONTRACT INFORMATION:{text[:10000]} # Using first 10000 chars to stay within token limits Again, only the first 10,000 characters were shown to the model. As a result, the munchable determination was based purely on the first few pages of the contract document. Then, evaluate if this contract is "munchable" based on these criteria:- If this is a contract modification, mark it as "N/A" for munchable status- If this is an IDIQ contract:* For medical devices/equipment: NOT MUNCHABLE* For recruiting/staffing: MUNCHABLE* For other services: Consider termination if not core medical/benefits- Level 0: Direct patient care (e.g., bedside nurse) - NOT MUNCHABLE- Level 1: Necessary consultants that can't be insourced - NOT MUNCHABLE The above prompt section is the first set of instructions telling the AI how to flag contracts. The prompt provides little explanation of what its looking for, failing to define what qualifies as core medical/benefits and lacking information about what a necessary consultant is.For the types of models the DOGE analysis used, including all the necessary information to make an accurate determination is critical. Cary Coglianese, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the governmental use of artificial intelligence, said that knowing which jobs could be done in-house calls for a very sophisticated understanding of medical care, of institutional management, of availability of human resources that the model does not have. - Contracts related to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI) initiatives - MUNCHABLE The prompt above tries to implement a fundamental policy of the Trump administration: killing all DEI programs. But the prompt fails to include a definition of what DEI is, leaving the model to decide.Despite the instruction to cancel DEI-related contracts, very few were flagged for this reason. Procurement experts noted that its very unlikely for information like this to be found in the first few pages of a contract. - Level 2+: Multiple layers removed from veterans care - MUNCHABLE- Services that could easily be replaced by in-house W2 employees - MUNCHABLE These two lines which experts say were poorly defined carried the most weight in the DOGE analysis. The response from the AI frequently cited these reasons as the justification for munchability. Nearly every justification included a form of the phrase direct patient care, and in a third of cases the model flagged contracts because it stated the services could be handled in-house.The poorly defined requirements led to several contracts for VA office internet services being flagged for cancellation. In one justification, the model had this to say:The contract provides data services for internet connectivity, which is an IT infrastructure service that is multiple layers removed from direct clinical patient care and could likely be performed in-house, making it classified as munchable. IMPORTANT EXCEPTIONS - These are NOT MUNCHABLE:- Third-party financial audits and compliance reviews- Medical equipment audits and certifications (e.g., MRI, CT scan, nuclear medicine equipment)- Nuclear physics and radiation safety audits for medical equipment- Medical device safety and compliance audits- Healthcare facility accreditation reviews- Clinical trial audits and monitoring- Medical billing and coding compliance audits- Healthcare fraud and abuse investigations- Medical records privacy and security audits- Healthcare quality assurance reviews- Community Living Center (CLC) surveys and inspections- State Veterans Home surveys and inspections- Long-term care facility quality surveys- Nursing home resident safety and care quality reviews- Assisted living facility compliance surveys- Veteran housing quality and safety inspections- Residential care facility accreditation reviews Despite these instructions, AI flagged many audit- and compliance-related contracts as munchable, labeling them as soft services. In one case, the model even acknowledged the importance of compliance while flagging a contract for cancellation, stating: Although essential to ensuring accurate medical records and billing, these services are an administrative support function (a soft service) rather than direct patient care. Key considerations:- Direct patient care involves: physical examinations, medical procedures, medication administration- Distinguish between medical/clinical and psychosocial support Shobita Parthasarathy, professor of public policy and director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at University of Michigan, told ProPublica that this piece of the prompt was notable in that it instructs the model to distinguish between the two types of services without instructing the model what to save and what to kill. The emphasis on direct patient care is reflected in how often the AI cited it in its recommendations, even when the model did not have any information about a contract. In one instance where it labeled every field not found, it still decided the contract was munchable. It gave this reason: Without evidence that it involves essential medical procedures or direct clinical support, and assuming the contract is for administrative or related support services, it meets the criteria for being classified as munchable.In reality, this contract was for the preventative maintenance of important safety devices known as ceiling lifts at VA medical centers, including three sites in Maryland. The contract itself stated:Ceiling Lifts are used by employees to reposition patients during their care. They are critical safety devices for employees and patients, and must be maintained and inspected appropriately. Specific services that should be classified as MUNCHABLE (these are "soft services" or consulting-type services):- Healthcare technology management (HTM) services- Data Commons Software as a Service (SaaS)- Administrative management and consulting services- Data management and analytics services- Product catalog or listing management- Planning and transition support services- Portfolio management services- Operational management review- Technology guides and alerts services- Case management administrative services- Case abstracts, casefinding, follow-up services- Enterprise-level portfolio management- Support for specific initiatives (like PACT Act)- Administrative updates to product information- Research data management platforms or repositories- Drug/pharmaceutical lifecycle management and pricing analysis- Backup Contracting Officer's Representatives (CORs) or administrative oversight roles- Modernization and renovation extensions not directly tied to patient care- DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) initiatives- Climate & Sustainability programs- Consulting & Research Services- Non-Performing/Non-Essential Contracts- Recruitment Services This portion of the prompt attempts to define soft services. It uses many highly specific examples but also throws in vague categories without definitions like non-performing/non-essential contracts.Experts said that in order for a model to properly determine this, it would need to be given information about the essential activities and whats required to support them. Important clarifications based on past analysis errors:2. Lifecycle management of drugs/pharmaceuticals IS MUNCHABLE (different from direct supply)3. Backup administrative roles (like alternate CORs) ARE MUNCHABLE as they create duplicative work4. Contract extensions for renovations/modernization ARE MUNCHABLE unless directly tied to patient care This section of the prompt was the result of analysis by Lavingia and other DOGE staff, Lavingia explained. This is probably from a session where I ran a prior version of the script that most likely a DOGE person was like, Its not being aggressive enough. I dont know why it starts with a 2. I guess I disagreed with one of them, and so we only put 2, 3 and 4 here.Notably, our review found that the only clarifications related to past errors were related to scenarios where the model wasnt flagging enough contracts for cancellation. Direct patient care that is NOT MUNCHABLE includes:- Conducting physical examinations- Administering medications and treatments- Performing medical procedures and interventions- Monitoring and assessing patient responses- Supply of actual medical products (pharmaceuticals, medical equipment)- Maintenance of critical medical equipment- Custom medical devices (wheelchairs, prosthetics)- Essential therapeutic services with proven efficacy For maintenance contracts, consider whether pricing appears reasonable. If maintenance costs seem excessive, flag them as potentially over-priced despite being necessary. This section of the prompt provides the most detail about what constitutes direct patient care. While it does cover many aspects of care, it still leaves a lot of ambiguity and forces the model to make its own judgements about what constitutes proven efficacy and critical medical equipment.In addition to the limited information given on what constitutes direct patient care, there is no information about how to determine if a price is reasonable, especially since the LLM only sees the first few pages of the document. The models lack knowledge about whats normal for government contracts.I just do not understand how it would be possible. This is hard for a human to figure out, Jaquith said about whether AI could accurately determine if a contract was reasonably priced. I dont see any way that an LLM could know this without a lot of really specialized training. Services that can be easily insourced (MUNCHABLE):- Video production and multimedia services- Customer support/call centers- PowerPoint/presentation creation- Recruiting and outreach services- Public affairs and communications- Administrative support- Basic IT support (non-specialized)- Content creation and writing- Training services (non-specialized)- Event planning and coordination This section explicitly lists which tasks could be easily insourced by VA staff, and more than 500 different contracts were flagged as munchable for this reason. A larger issue with all of this is there seems to be an assumption here that contracts are almost inherently wasteful, Coglianese said when shown this section of the prompt. Other services, like the kinds that are here, are cheaper to contract for. In fact, these are exactly the sorts of things that we would not want to treat as munchable. He went on to explain that insourcing some of these tasks could also siphon human sources away from direct primary patient care.In an interview, Lavingia acknowledged some of these jobs might be better handled externally. We dont want to cut the ones that would make the VA less efficient or cause us to hire a bunch of people in-house, Lavingia explained. Which currently they cant do because theres a hiring freeze.The VA is standing behind its use of AI to examine contracts, calling it a commonsense precedent. And documents obtained by ProPublica suggest the VA is looking at additional ways AI can be deployed. A March email from a top VA official to DOGE stated:Today, VA receives over 2 million disability claims per year, and the average time for a decision is 130 days. We believe that key technical improvements (including AI and other automation), combined with Veteran-first process/culture changes pushed from our Secretarys office could dramatically improve this. A small existing pilot in this space has resulted in 3% of recent claims being processed in less than 30 days. Our mission is to figure out how to grow from 3% to 30% and then upwards such that only the most complex claims take more than a few days. If you have any information about the misuse or abuse of AI within government agencies, reach out to us via our Signal or SecureDrop channels. If youd like to talk to someone specific, Brandon Roberts is an investigative journalist on the news applications team and has a wealth of experience using and dissecting artificial intelligence. He can be reached on Signal @brandonrobertz.01 or by email brandon.roberts@propublica.org.

by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. This article is co-published with The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan local newsroom that informs and engages with Texans. Sign up for The Brief Weekly to get up to speed on their essential coverage of Texas issues. In a half-empty committee room in late April, one of Texas most powerful Republican state senators pitched legislation that would make it harder for immigrants in the country illegally to get jobs. Her bill would require all employers in the state to use a free federal computer system, known as E-Verify, that quickly confirms whether someone has authorization to work in the United States. Sen. Lois Kolkhorst of Brenham ticked off a handful of Republican-led states that mandate the program for all private companies and listed others that require it for most over a certain size. Yet Texas, which prides itself on being the nations toughest on illegal immigration, instructs only state agencies and sexually oriented businesses to use it. E-Verify is the most functional and cost-effective method the state of Texas can implement to stem the flow of illegal immigration, or those that are here not legally, to ensure that U.S. citizens and those able to work in the state of Texas are the ones who get the Texas jobs, Kolkhorst told fellow senators, reminding them that the Business and Commerce Committee passed her nearly identical bill two years ago. (That proposal never made it to the Senate floor.)No one spoke against the new legislation. Only one committee member, a Democrat, questioned it, asking if supporters would also favor an immigrant guest worker program. A handful of labor representatives called the bill a bipartisan priority, testifying that too many employers cut corners by hiring workers illegally at lower wages. The bill went on to sail through the committee and the Senate. But then, like dozens of E-Verify bills over the last decade, the legislation died. Texas top Republican leaders have built a political brand on the states hard-line stance against illegal immigration, pouring billions of dollars into Gov. Greg Abbotts state border security initiative, including funding construction of a border wall and deploying state police to arrest migrants on a newly created offense for trespassing. This session, lawmakers voted to require most sheriffs offices to cooperate with federal immigration agents. Yet again and again the states conservative Legislature has refused to take what some Republicans call the single most crucial step to preventing immigrants from coming and staying here illegally: mandating E-Verify to make it more difficult for them to work. Since 2013, GOP lawmakers in Texas have introduced more than 40 E-Verify bills. Most tried to require the program for government entities and their contractors, but about a dozen attempted to expand the system to private employers in some capacity. With few exceptions, like mandating E-Verify for certain state contractors, Republican legislators declined to pass the overwhelming majority of those proposals. This session, lawmakers filed about half a dozen bills attempting to require private companies to use the program. Kolkhorsts legislation was the only one to make it out of either legislative chamber but eventually died because the state House did not take it up. Given Texas leaders rhetoric on the border, it is a glaring omission not to more broadly require E-Verify as other GOP-led states have done, said Lynden Melmed, former chief counsel under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that oversees E-Verify. At least nine majority Republican states including Arizona, Georgia, Florida and South Carolina require that most, if not all, private companies use the system. Abbott has frequently positioned Texas as harsher on immigration than each of them. Still, that a private mandate made it further this session than ever before may illustrate the growing conflict in Texas between the pro-business side of the states GOP and Republicans who want to look tougher on immigration, said Melmed, who was a former special counsel on the issue to U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas. The resistance to E-Verify isnt just about Texas Republicans reluctance to regulate business, Melmed said. Its about how such a system could impact the states labor supply and economy. An estimated 1.3 million Texas workers, more than 8% of the states work force, are here illegally, according to a 2023 analysis of U.S. census data by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington, D.C. About a quarter of all construction workers in Texas lack legal status, for example, and the industry faces a critical labor shortage as a need for housing booms. Likewise, the states understaffed agricultural, restaurant and elder care sectors rely on workers here illegally.If you got serious about applying [E-Verify], you would create even worse problems with labor shortages, said Bill Hammond, a GOP former state lawmaker who once led the Texas Association of Business. Do you want to go to a restaurant and use paper plates because no one will wash dishes?Texas political leaders know this, Hammond said, but they dont want to publicly acknowledge it.A spokesperson for Abbott refused to say whether the governor supports mandating the program for private companies. However, when running for governor more than a decade ago, Abbott acknowledged that businesses had complained about instituting the system. At the time, he touted federal statistics that E-Verify was 99.5% accurate. State agencies, he said, could serve as a model before legislators imposed it on companies. A spokesperson for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who as a senator unsuccessfully pushed legislation to hold employers accountable for hiring immigrants here illegally, did not return requests for comment, nor did a spokesperson for Speaker Dustin Burrows explain why the House refused to take up E-Verify. Kolkhorst declined repeated interview requests on her legislation.State Sen. Charles Schwertner, a Georgetown Republican who authored the first E-Verify bill that the Texas Legislature approved, said in an interview that his 2015 legislation did not go as far as he would have liked. He said that he agreed with Kolkhorts private-company mandate.We need to enforce our immigration laws, both at the border and the interior of Texas, and E-Verify is an important component, Schwertner said. Some GOP lawmakers who pushed the issue this session faced deafening silence from many colleagues and impacted industries, said state Rep. Carl Tepper, a Lubbock Republican who filed two E-Verify bills.Lawmakers and industry groups have a misguided fear about losing a portion of their workforce who are here illegally and whom they feel dependent on, he said. Although immigration enforcement is overseen by Congress, Tepper said that the state should do what it can to prevent such workers from coming to Texas by making it more difficult to hire them.Even one of the states most influential conservative think tanks has supported more incremental E-Verify legislation, such as extending the state mandate to local governments. Doing so would be an easier win than requiring it for businesses, said Selene Rodriguez, a campaign director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation. Still, she said that the organization generally supports a broader mandate and is disappointed that Kolkhorsts legislation failed.E-Verify has been tricky for her group, Rodriguez acknowledged, because lawmakers have done so little over the years that it has had to prioritize what is attainable.Given the Trump agenda, that he won so widely, we thought maybe thered be more appetite to advance it, Rodriguez said. But that wasnt the case.She blamed behind-the scenes lobbying from powerful industry groups, particularly in agriculture and construction, as well as lawmakers who worry how supporting the proposal would influence reelection prospects.A dozen prominent state industry groups declined to comment to ProPublica and The Texas Tribune on their stances relating to E-Verify.E-Verify supporters admit the system is not a panacea. The computer program can confirm only whether identification documents are valid, not whether they actually belong to the prospective employee, and as a result a black market for such documents has surged. Employers, too, can game the system by contracting out work to smaller companies, which in many states are exempt from E-Verify mandates. Even when states adopt these, most lack strong enforcement. Texas legislators have never tasked an agency with ensuring all employers comply. South Carolina, which has among the toughest enforcement, randomly audits businesses to see if they are using E-Verify, said Madeline Zavodny, a University of North Florida economics professor who studied the program for a 2017 Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas report. But South Carolina does not check whether companies actually hired immigrants here illegally, said Alex Nowrasteh, vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Some states have carve-outs for small companies or certain employers that often rely on undocumented labor. North Carolina, for example, exempts temporary seasonal workers. Immigrants here illegally contribute billions to the economy, said Tara Watson, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank. Much of the rhetoric over the issue is using immigration as a wedge issue to rile up the base of voters who are concerned about cultural change, but at the same time not wanting to disrupt the economy too much.Expanding E-Verify, she said, is not really in anybodys interest.

by Steve Suo 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. The question was a simple one: Had Nike, the athletic apparel brand dogged by sweatshop allegations more than two decades ago, truly become a beacon of environmental stewardship and fair labor practices, as it claimed?As editor for ProPublicas Northwest team and a longtime Oregonian, I was as eager to know the answer as the Portland-based reporter who posed the question, Rob Davis.Nike is woven into Oregons fabric. Its one of the Portland areas largest employers and one of the states few Fortune 500 companies. Nikes headquarters in the Portland suburbs is a 400-acre complex of buildings, running paths and sports fields where fashion design and athleticism meet. At the University of Oregon, alma mater of Nike co-founder Phil Knight, buildings across the campus bear his name or the names of his relatives.The trouble was that the answer to Davis question primarily lay across the Pacific Ocean. Although ProPublica is undaunted by stories that take time and, yes, money see recent reporting by reporters Josh Kaplan and Brett Murphy from Gambia, for example Davis first needed to prove to editors that an overseas trip would bring us a story that broke new ground. One of our most important decisions early on was to partner with reporter Matthew Kish and his editors at The Oregonian/OregonLive, where Davis and I worked previously. Kish has covered Nike for more than a decade and knows the company as well as perhaps any reporter in the country.Kish and Davis started reviewing public reports that Nike had put out over the past two decades and every news article they could find about the companys efforts in the realm of social responsibility. Davis spoke by phone with labor advocates around the globe. He even found a few factory workers in Asia willing to talk in late-night (for them) video calls about their working conditions.The nut that Davis and Kish couldnt crack was Nike itself. The reporters told Nikes public relations team about their interest. Might Nike staffers share what they were finding in factory audits or how they were ensuring compliance with Nikes code of conduct? The PR people at various points provided some background information, including excerpts of past corporate reports, but the company chose not to make anyone available for on-the-record interviews at that stage. (I also asked Nike last week to weigh in on the companys interactions with Kish and Davis or about the stories theyve written for this series; a Nike spokesperson declined to comment to me on the record.)With layoffs hitting Nike last year, Kish and Davis had an opening to talk with insiders about one particular aspect of the companys social responsibility efforts. Pursuing a tip, the two worked with research reporter Alex Mierjeski to compile a list of employees who had worked in sustainability roles. The reporters started knocking on virtual doors: about 100 of them. They established that Nikes reorganization had taken a heavy toll on the workforce whose efforts included reducing the companys carbon footprint.This time, Nike responded by granting an interview with its chief sustainability officer, the only interview the company has given for this project to date during more than a year of reporting. It lasted 17 minutes. She said the company remained committed to sustainability and described its strategy as embedding the work throughout the company.We published stories laying out the departures and one other development that seemed to go against Nikes declared intent to help the planet: increasing emissions from its private jets. Yet something remained missing from our reporting. The former sustainability workers spoke English. Many were based in Oregon. They had online presences. Understanding working conditions in Nikes factories called for gaining a closer vantage point on the companys far-flung foreign supply chain.Davis zeroed in on one specific claim from Nike. The company has said that the factories for which it has data pay their workers, on average, 1.9 times the local minimum wage. It provided no breakdown of factories included in the calculation, and it wasnt clear how widely pay might vary from the average. So Davis started requesting paystubs for workers across the globe. We hoped that even scattered data would help us test Nikes math.Paystubs trickled in. A handful of workers from a factory in Central America. More from Indonesia. A smattering from Cambodia.Then, a breakthrough. Davis received an Excel spreadsheet in English and Khmer, the language most widely spoken in Cambodia. It was a payroll ledger for Y&W Garment, which made baby clothing for Nike from 2022 to 2023. Davis could see every employees job title, age, hiring date, gender and pay amounts. This was one factory in a supply chain made up of hundreds, 3,720 workers out of more than 1.1 million that Nikes suppliers employ globally. But it was a uniquely comprehensive window. Quick calculations showed that only a tiny share of Y&Ws workforce just 1% made 1.9 times the minimum wage, the amount that Nike said was typical. While Nike says contract factory workers for whom it has data earn 1.9 times their local minimum wage, a Y&W Garment factory payroll ledger shows many workers earning a base pay of $204 a month, Cambodias minimum wage last year. Even including bonuses and incentives, more than three-quarters of the factorys employees earned close to the minimum wage. (Obtained by ProPublica. Highlights and redactions by ProPublica.) Davis connected with a bilingual freelance journalist in Phnom Penh, Keat Soriththeavy, who tracked down some of the workers named in the payroll ledger. Now we had factory sources on the ground. We had someone to help Davis translate what they had to say. And we had our spreadsheet. I told Davis to book a ticket for January.On a Sunday morning, less than a day after his plane landed in Cambodias capital, Davis met a group of workers on their only day off. After introductions through our hired translator, Davis pulled an iPad out of his travel bag and passed it around, asking whether the details of the digital payroll ledger were accurate.One by one, each worker studied the entry by their name. Correct? Davis asked. Pause for translation.Yes.Around the table they went: Correct. Yes. Correct. While Davis interviewed a garment worker in her home outside Phnom Penh, her neighbor, Phan Oem, came by. She had worked at Y&W Garment since 2012, the year it opened, and was happy to answer questions. She said she worked as many as 76 hours per week and sometimes was forced to work overtime. (Rob Davis/ProPublica) Davis spent the rest of his 12-day visit traveling by tuk-tuk a tiny three-wheeled taxi named for its puttering engine to meet workers in small villages around Phnom Penh. Cambodian garment workers are typically on the clock at least six days a week, leaving limited free time to spend with family or a visiting journalist. Yet with Keats help, Davis managed to talk with a total of 14, some willing to be identified by name. They told him the money they made in a 48-hour work week wasnt enough to live on and that they needed overtime to make ends meet. First image: Davis while stopped for lunch along a highway outside Phnom Penh. Second image: Davis business card sits inside a tuk-tuk. (First image: Keat Soriththeavy. Second image: Rob Davis/ProPublica) When workers began telling Davis that people fainted in the hot factory and needed to be treated at its clinic, he messaged me to gauge my reaction. I asked: Could he find a doctor who treated them? Very quickly, Davis got a phone number for a clinic staffer willing to talk. The medical worker helped us quantify the scale of the problem, telling Davis as many as 15 people a month became too weak to work in the hot months of May and June. (As used in Cambodia, the term fainted can describe becoming too weak to work.)ProPublica photojournalist Sarahbeth Maney followed on Davis trail a month later. She documented, with intimate portraiture, the home life of people from a factory where base pay started at about $1 per hour. Sar Kunthea, who packaged clothing at Y&W Garment, said she commonly worked two Sundays a month on top of her regular hours but still had to borrow money from friends a few times a year to stay afloat. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica) Nike did not answer detailed questions from Davis about wages or faintings, instead issuing a written statement. The company said it is committed to ethical and responsible manufacturing and that it expects suppliers to continue making progress on fair compensation for a regular work week.Representatives of Y&W Garment and its Hong Kong parent, Wing Luen Knitting Factory Ltd., did not respond to Davis emails, text messages or phone calls. Haddad Brands, which Y&W workers told Davis served as an intermediary for Nike at the Phnom Penh facility, didnt respond to emails asking about conditions there.As Davis was drafting his story, President Donald Trumps plan to raise tariffs on goods manufactured overseas sent Nikes stock prices tumbling. One declared goal was to reverse the economic forces that drove Nike and others to make their products in places like Cambodia and not the U.S. It seemed, honestly, like Nikes track record in the region might be losing relevance. But experts told Davis and Kish, our reporting partner at The Oregonian, quite the opposite. Rather than bring jobs home, brands might simply squeeze their foreign suppliers for greater productivity. It made the issues that drove Davis from the beginning as pressing as they have ever been. Had Nike lived up to its promises in Southeast Asia? At one Cambodian factory, Davis tenacity brought us a simple answer: No. Street vendors sell goods in front of the former Y&W Garment factory in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. (Sarahbeth Maney/ProPublica)

by Hannah Allam ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. Onward and upward! he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the governments main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.Fugates appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate an unknown in their field and were stunned to see a photo of a college kid with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history. Fugates profile picture on LinkedIn (Via Fugates LinkedIn page) Typically, people familiar with CP3 say, a candidate that green wouldnt have gotten an interview for a junior position, much less be hired to run operations. According to LinkedIn, the bulk of Fugates leadership experience comes from having served as secretary general of a Model United Nations club.Maybe hes a wunderkind. Maybe hes Doogie Howser and has everything at 21 years old, or whatever he is, to lead the office. But thats not likely the case, said one counterterrorism researcher who has worked with CP3 officials for years. It sounds like putting the intern in charge.In the past seven weeks, at least five high-profile targeted attacks have unfolded across the U.S., including a car bombing in California and the gunning down of two Israeli Embassy aides in Washington. Against this backdrop, current and former national security officials say, the Trump administrations decision to shift counterterrorism resources to immigration and leave the violence-prevention portfolio to inexperienced appointees is reckless.Were entering very dangerous territory, one longtime U.S. counterterrorism official said. The fate of CP3 is one example of the fallout from deep cuts that have eliminated public health and violence-prevention initiatives across federal agencies.The once-bustling office of around 80 employees now has fewer than 20, former staffers say. Grant work stops, then restarts. One senior civil servant was reassigned to the Federal Emergency Management Agency via an email that arrived late on a Saturday.The offices mission has changed overnight, with a pivot away from focusing on domestic extremism, especially far-right movements. The terrorism category that framed the agencys work for years was abruptly expanded to include drug cartels, part of what DHS staffers call an overarching message that border security is the only mission that matters. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has largely left terrorism prevention to the states.ProPublica sent DHS a detailed list of questions about Fugates position, his lack of national security experience and the future of the departments prevention work. A senior agency official replied with a statement saying only that Fugates CP3 duties were added to his role as an aide in an Immigration & Border Security office.Due to his success, he has been temporarily given additional leadership responsibilities in the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships office, the official wrote in an email. This is a credit to his work ethic and success on the job.ProPublica sought an interview with Fugate through DHS and the White House, but there was no response.The Trump administration rejects claims of a retreat from terrorism prevention, noting partnerships with law enforcement agencies and swift investigations of recent attacks. The notion that this single office is responsible for preventing terrorism is not only incorrect, its ignorant, spokesperson Abigail Jackson wrote in an email.Through intermediaries, ProPublica sought to speak with CP3 employees but received no reply. Talking is risky; tales abound of Homeland Security personnel undergoing lie-detector tests in leak investigations, as Secretary Kristi Noem pledged in March.Accounts of Fugates arrival and the dismantling of CP3 come from current and former Homeland Security personnel, grant recipients and terrorism-prevention advocates who work closely with the office and have at times been confidants for distraught staffers. All spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisal from the Trump administration.In these circles, two main theories have emerged to explain Fugates unusual ascent. One is that the Trump administration rewarded a Gen Z campaign worker with a resume-boosting title that comes with little real power because the office is in shambles.The other is that the White House installed Fugate to oversee a pivot away from traditional counterterrorism lanes and to steer resources toward MAGA-friendly sheriffs and border security projects before eventually shuttering operations. In this scenario, Fugate was described as a minder and a babysitter.DHS did not address a ProPublica question about this characterization. Rising MAGA StarThe CP3 homepage boasts about the offices experts in disciplines including emergency management, counterterrorism, public health and social work.Fugate brings a different qualification prized by the White House: loyalty to the president.On Instagram, Fugate traced his political awakening to nine years ago, when as a 13-year-old in a generation deprived of hope, opportunity, and happiness, I saw in one man the capacity for real and lasting change: Donald Trump.Fugate is a self-described Trumplican who interned for state lawmakers in Austin before graduating magna cum laude a year ago with a degree in politics and law from the University of Texas at San Antonio. Instagram photos and other public information from the past year chronicle his lightning-fast rise in Trump world.Starting in May 2024, photos show a newly graduated Fugate at a Texas GOP gathering launching his first campaign, a bid for a delegate spot at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. He handed out gummy candy and a flier with a photo of him in a tuxedo at Trumps Mar-a-Lago estate. Fugate won an alternate slot.The next month, he was in Florida celebrating Trumps 78th birthday with the Club 47 fan group in West Palm Beach. I truly wish I could say more about what Im doing, but more to come soon! he wrote in a caption, with a smiley emoji in sunglasses.Posts in the run-up to the election show Fugate spending several weeks in Washington, a time he called surreal and invigorating. In July, he attended the Republican convention, sporting the Texas delegations signature cowboy hat in photos with MAGA luminaries such as former Cabinet Secretary Ben Carson and then-Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.). Fugate at the Republican National Convention (Via Fugates Instagram account) By late summer, Fugate was posting from the campaign trail as part of Trumps advance team, pictured at one stop standing behind the candidate in a crowd of young supporters. When Trump won the election, Fugate marked the moment with an emotional post about believing in him from the very start, even to the scorn and contempt of my peers.Working alongside a dedicated, driven group of folks, we faced every challenge head-on and, together, celebrated a victorious outcome, Fugate wrote on Instagram.In February, the White House appointed Fugate as a special assistant assigned to an immigration office at Homeland Security. He assumed leadership of CP3 last month to fill a vacancy left by previous Director Bill Braniff, an Army veteran with more than two decades of national security experience who resigned in March when the administration began cutting his staff.In his final weeks as director, Braniff had publicly defended the offices achievements, noting the dispersal of nearly $90 million since 2020 to help communities combat extremist violence. According to the offices 2024 report to Congress, in recent years CP3 grant money was used in more than 1,100 efforts to identify violent extremism at the community level and interrupt the radicalization process.CP3 is the inheritor of the primary and founding mission of DHS to prevent terrorism, Braniff wrote on LinkedIn when he announced his resignation.In conversations with colleagues, CP3 staffers have expressed shock at how little Fugate knows about the basics of his role and likened meetings with him to career counseling. DHS did not address questions about his level of experience.One grant recipient called Fugates appointment an insult to Braniff and a setback in the move toward evidence-based approaches to terrorism prevention, a field still reckoning with post-9/11 work that was unscientific and stigmatizing to Muslims.They really started to shift the conversation and shift the public thinking. It was starting to get to the root of the problem, the grantee said. Now thats all gone.Critics of Fugates appointment stress that their anger isnt directed at an aspiring politico enjoying a whirlwind entry to Washington. The problem, they say, is the administrations seemingly cavalier treatment of an office that was funding work on urgent national security concerns.The big story here is the undermining of democratic institutions, a former Homeland Security official said. Whos going to volunteer to be the next civil servant if they think their supervisor is an apparatchik? Season of AttacksSpring brought a burst of extremist violence, a trend analysts fear could extend into the summer given inflamed political tensions and the disarray of federal agencies tasked with monitoring threats.In April, an arson attack targeted Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat, who blamed the breach on security failures. Four days later, a mass shooter stormed onto the Florida State University campus, killing two and wounding six others. The alleged attacker had espoused white supremacist views and used Hitler as a profile picture for a gaming account.Attacks continued in May with the apparent car bombing of a fertility clinic in California. The suspected assailant, the only fatality, left a screed detailing violent beliefs against life and procreation. A few days later, on May 21, a gunman allegedly radicalized by the war in Gaza killed two Israeli Embassy aides outside a Jewish museum in Washington.June opened with a firebombing attack in Colorado that wounded 12, including a Holocaust survivor, at a gathering calling for the release of Israeli hostages. The suspects charges include a federal hate crime.If attacks continue at that pace, warn current and former national security officials, cracks will begin to appear in the nations pared-down counterterrorism sector.If you cut the staff and there are major attacks that lead to a reconsideration, you cant scale up staff once theyre fired, said the U.S. counterterrorism official, who opposes the administrations shift away from prevention.Contradictory signals are coming out of Homeland Security about the future of CP3 work, especially the grant program. Staffers have told partners in the advocacy world that Fugate plans to roll out another funding cycle soon. The CP3 website still touts the program as the only federal grant solely dedicated to helping local communities develop and strengthen their capabilities against terrorism and targeted violence.But Homeland Securitys budget proposal to Congress for the next fiscal year suggests a bleaker future. The department recommended eliminating the threat-prevention grant program, explaining that it does not align with DHS priorities.The former Homeland Security official said the decision means that the department founded to prevent terrorism in the United States no longer prioritizes preventing terrorism in the United States. Kirsten Berg contributed research.

by J. David McSwane ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. In February 2020, President Donald Trumps first education secretary issued a memo to employees emphasizing the departments policy to ensure that diversity, inclusiveness, and respect are integral parts of our day-to-day management and work.Diversity and inclusion are the cornerstone of high organizational performance, Betsy DeVos continued, adding that all people were welcome in the Department of Education. The memo ended with a call for employees to actively embrace principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI.As part of that push, Quay Crowner was among the top education officials who enrolled in the diversity change agent program. Crowner thought little of it at the time. She had over two decades filled director-level human resources roles at several federal agencies, including the IRS and Government Accountability Office, and shed participated in seminars on leadership and workplace discrimination. But five years later, as Trump entered office a second time, his administrations tune on DEI had changed. Crowner was abruptly placed on leave under Trumps executive order to dismantle DEI programs across the federal government. As a longtime manager familiar with federal hiring and firing policies, Crowner, 55, believed she knew what it looked like to be unfairly targeted. Her current job as the director of outreach, impact and engagement at the Education Department was not connected to diversity initiatives. She said the only part of her responsibilities that could have been considered DEI was that her team guided students whod had trouble navigating financial assistance applications; while most people who seek federal student aid are from disadvantaged backgrounds, her office was a resource for any and all and had no diversity mandate. She was not involved with hiring and retention efforts.More troubling, she said, was that she was the only person on her team who had been let go, and her bosses refused to answer her questions about her dismissal. When she and colleagues from different departments began comparing notes, they found they had one thing in common. They had all attended the training encouraged under DeVos. They also noticed something else: Most of them were Black women.We are still just in utter shock that the public service we took an oath to complete has fallen apart, said Crowner, whose bills related to an injury and health issues are likely to mount as she loses her federal health care coverage.We never imagined that this would be something that would happen to us.Her experience is part of a largely untold story unfolding as Trump dismantles civil rights and inclusion programs across government: Many of those being forced out, like Crowner, are Black women who spent decades building a career of government service, only to see those careers shattered in a sudden purge.ProPublica interviewed Crowner and two other career civil servants, all Black women, who are among the hundreds of fired federal employees represented in a legal action brought against the Trump administration. Filed in March with the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board by legal teams including the Washington branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the case contends the administration violated the First Amendment rights of employees by targeting them for holding views perceived as contrary to the Trump 2.0 doctrine.What has received less attention is the suits claim that the administration also violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. They claim the DEI purge disproportionately affected those who arent white men.Hard numbers documenting the demographics of those forced out by Trump are hard to attain. The Trump administration has provided little information on those being fired, and a revolving door of firings and reinstatements in some departments makes capturing formal figures even more challenging.But a broad assessment of Trumps firings by ProPublica and other media shows the agencies with the most diverse staffs are often the hardest hit. Before the firings, the Education Departments staff was majority nonwhite, with Black women making up about 28% of workers, the most recent federal data shows. According to a New York Times tracker of the firings, that department has seen a reduction of about 46% of its staff. The staff of the U.S. Agency for International Development was majority women and nearly 40% racial and ethnic minorities before Trump all but eliminated it.Meanwhile, at the Department of Justice, where white personnel make up two-thirds of the workforce, most of it men, staff has been cut just 1%, according to the most recently available federal data and the Times tracker. The Department of Energy, more than 70% white, saw a reduction of about 13%.Lawyers representing federal employees whose careers and families have been uprooted cite anecdotal evidence of disparate impact, a key ingredient in many successful civil rights claims.We have observed approximately 90% of the workers targeted for terminations due to a perceived association with diversity, equity and inclusion efforts are women or nonbinary, said Kelly Dermody, one of the plaintiffs attorneys, who have asked an administrative law judge to approve class-action status for the fired employees.Nearly 80% of potential case plaintiffs are nonwhite, she said; most of that cohort are Black women.A spokesperson for the White House declined to comment. The Education Department did not respond to a request for comment.Since reentering office, Trump has made clear his feelings about diversity programs, referring to them in an executive order as Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing.Disparate Impact?Ronicsa Chambers graduated from Florida A&M University, a historically black college, in 1990. Afterward, she got an MBA from Johns Hopkins University and landed a finance job with U.S. Airways, where she fell in love with aviation.In 2005, she left the private sector to work in finance for the Federal Aviation Administration. She worked her way up the chain and, by 2019, helped create a program to address a lack of diversity in the agency by gaining the interest of graduates from historically black colleges and universities, or HBCUs.In 2022, Chambers was named Air Traffic Manager of the Year. I didnt even know that non-air traffic controllers could get that award, and I was so proud, she said. As titles in government do, hers changed in December 2024 as her teams mission expanded to help FAA employees with issues such as providing accommodations so people with disabilities could do their jobs.Then this January, she felt as though shed been hit in the face with a brick. She was told on a video conference call that her FAA career was over. Though her work had involved DEI in the past, it was no longer in her title or her job description, and she said no one had asked her what her job entailed before she was removed.She said she began moving through stages of grief but keeps coming back to anger because her team members five Black women and one white man with a disability were told they would be reassigned. She says they never were.As far as we know, were the only ones still on administrative leave, she said, referring to those removed as part of Trumps DEI executive order. Ronicsa Chambers said she was told she and her team members would be reassigned after being let go from their jobs at the Federal Aviation Administration. They never were. (Schaun Champion for ProPublica) Its unclear if the FAA, whose workforce was largely spared due to recent airline safety concerns, has fired or even fired and rehired people in departments outside of Chambers team. A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.The FAA has long been criticized for its lack of diversity. According to the most recent federal data, the agency was composed of 57% white men compared with 4.4% Black women.Scott Michelman, an ACLU of DC attorney working on the complaint against the Trump administration, said Chambers case underscores how mass firings aimed at people who had even a peripheral connection to a DEI program, past or present, harms the American people.It takes dedicated, experienced, award-winning civil servants out of their job, their expertise, the place where we as the public want them and need them so that our government works for us, he said. This is a lose-lose.Key to their case is the argument that minority workers were disparately impacted, a long-held civil rights theory at which Trump has taken direct aim. In April, Trump issued an executive order to broadly eliminate that doctrine from civil rights enforcement, one of many steps hes taken to reverse the traditional role of the federal government in protecting individuals from issues such as housing and employment discrimination.For instance, the Trump administration gutted the Department of Educations Office for Civil Rights, which was tasked with ensuring equal treatment for students regardless of gender and race, and instead focused that office at targeting transgender athletes and their schools.Lawyers and former employees say focusing on people who may have had some DEI training or job duties would cause greater harm to nonwhite employees. And historically, the federal government has been a prominent force in upward mobility.For a segment of Black America, the federal government has been crucial to stepping up, said Marcus Casey, an economist and associate professor at the University of Illinois Chicago. The opening of federal work following the Civil Rights Movement provided an alternative to manual labor, teaching or ministerial work in the form of white-collar jobs and skills training that many took into private sector jobs.Today, Black people make up about 18.6% of the federal workforce, larger than their percentage in the overall U.S. workforce, 12.8%, according to the Pew Research Center.So, you think about HBCU graduates, like Howard University, a lot of these people tell us the same story: This is where I started. This is where I got my first internship, Casey said.Upward MobilitySherrell Pyatts family story is quintessentially American.Her great-grandfather served in the Vietnam War and, on his return, took a job in the U.S. Postal Service, a key employer in the story of upward mobility for middle-class Black families. His granddaughter, Pyatts mother, also found a career at the Postal Service. So, even though she would attain more education than the previous three generations, it seemed fitting that eventually Pyatt would find herself at the Postal Service.Pyatt grew up in the Bronx, New York Citys poorest borough, but tested well enough to attend a private school. She became the first of her family to get a degree, from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she worked to pay tuition. She got a masters degree and worked at a nonprofit before landing a job in 2014 with the Postal Service, shaping policy as a government relations specialist.While at USPS, she coordinated with Customs and Border Protection to stop drug shipments through the mail. That experience, as well as her fluency in Spanish, led her to a similar role at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While there, she was involved in immigrant removal operations as part of Trumps first-term zero tolerance clampdown on border crossings. She next transferred to CBP, where she helped investigate deaths of migrants in federal custody and rampant racism in a Facebook group of Border Patrol agents.During the COVID-19 pandemic, both of her parents fell ill, and she moved to an Atlanta suburb to care for them. To make the move work, she transitioned to a job at the Federal Emergency Management Agency, where she worked as a supply chain analyst, ensuring that equipment such as medical masks made their way to U.S. hospitals. In early 2024, she moved yet again, to the Department of Homeland Securitys Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, which investigates allegations of rights abuses lodged by both immigrants and U.S. citizens. Sherrell Pyatt had more than a decades worth of experience working for the federal government before her dismissal. (Rita Harper for ProPublica) My team was almost exclusively African Americans, and I think its just because of the experience of Black people in this country, Pyatt said. We seem to be more likely to go into those types of roles one, because we have experience, and two, because of the passion to make a difference.In March, the Trump administration fired nearly all 150 employees in that office, including Pyatt. A DHS spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment about her firing.I think it was an easy target to get rid of people of color and people who fight for people of color, Pyatt said. Its absolutely a way to attack people of color, people who are differently abled, people who dont agree with what this administration is.Pyatts sudden loss of a career wrought instant consequences for her family. She was the primary breadwinner, but now her husband, who works for the Postal Service, provides the only income. They worry they wont be able to make the mortgage payments on their home for the long run. Their three daughters, all middle school age, may no longer be able to attend their private Christian school or play softball.Career federal employees like Pyatt are supposed to be able to petition for a transfer or receive preference in hiring at other agencies. Despite having worked for the federal government for more than a decade, at five agencies, including four Homeland Security posts, Pyatt says shes faced nothing but silence.So its little things like that that this administration is doing that makes it really feel like theyre targeting people like me, people who love the country, come from a family that has served the country for generations, did what we were supposed to do, Pyatt said through tears. And it just doesnt matter.

by Matt Krupnick for ProPublica ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. The Trump administration has proposed cutting funding for tribal colleges and universities by nearly 90%, a move that would likely shut down most or all of the institutions created to serve students disadvantaged by the nations historic mistreatment of Indigenous communities.The proposal is included in the budget request from the Department of the Interior to Congress, which was released publicly on Monday. The document mentions only the two federally controlled tribal colleges Haskell Indian Nations University and Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute but notes the request for postsecondary programs will drop from more than $182 million this year to just over $22 million for 2026.If Congress supports the administrations proposal, it would devastate the nations 37 tribal colleges and universities, said Ahniwake Rose, president and CEO of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium, which represents the colleges in Washington, D.C.The numbers that are being proposed would close the tribal colleges, Rose told ProPublica. They would not be able to sustain.ProPublica found last year that Congress was underfunding tribal colleges by a quarter-billion dollars per year. The Bureau of Indian Education, tasked with requesting funding for the institutions, had never asked lawmakers to fully fund the institutions at the levels called for in the law, ProPublica found.But rather than remedy the problem, the Trump administrations budget would devastate the colleges, tribal education leaders said. The Bureau of Indian Education, which administers federal funding for tribal colleges, and the Department of the Interior, the bureaus parent agency, declined to answer questions.Rose said she and other college leaders had not been warned of the proposed cuts nor consulted during the budgeting process. Federal officials had not reached out to the colleges by the end of the day Monday.The proposal comes as the Trump administration has outlined a host of funding cuts related to the federal governments trust and treaty obligations to tribes. The Coalition for Tribal Sovereignty said last month that the administrations proposed discretionary spending for the benefit of Native Americans would fall to its lowest point in more than 15 years, which it viewed as an effort to permanently impact trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations.Congress passed legislation in 1978 committing to fund the tribal college system and promising inflation-adjusted appropriations based on the number of students enrolled in federally recognized tribes. But those appropriations have consistently lagged far behind inflation. The colleges have managed, despite the meager funds, to preserve Indigenous languages, conduct high-level research and train local residents in nursing, meat processing and other professions and trades. But with virtually no money available for infrastructure or construction, the schools have been forced to navigate broken water pipes, sewage leaks, crumbling roofs and other problems that have compounded the financial shortcomings.Tribal college leaders said they were stunned by the proposed cuts to their already insufficient funding and had more questions than answers. Im shivering in my boots, said Manoj Patil, president of Little Priest Tribal College in Nebraska. This would basically be a knife in the chest. Its a dagger, and I dont know how we can survive these types of cuts.Congress will have the final say on the budget, noted Rep. Teresa Leger Fernndez, the ranking Democrat on the House Subcommittee on Indian and Insular Affairs, whose New Mexico district includes three tribal colleges. Tribal colleges are lifelines in Indian Country, Leger Fernndez said in a statement. They provide higher education rooted in language, culture and community. These cuts would rob Native students of opportunity and violate our trust responsibilities. Other members of the House and Senate Indian Affairs committees did not immediately respond to questions from ProPublica. The White House also did not respond to a request for more information.Mondays budget release was the latest in a string of bad financial news for tribal colleges since President Donald Trump began his second term. The administration suspended Department of Agriculture grants that funded scholarships and research, and tribal college presidents spent the past week trying to fend off deep cuts to the Pell Grant program for low-income students. The vast majority of tribal college students rely on Pell funding to attend school.Tribal colleges contend their funding is protected by treaties and the federal trust responsibility, a legal obligation requiring the United States to protect Indigenous education, resources, rights and assets. And they note that the institutions are economic engines in some of North Americas poorest areas, providing jobs, training and social services in often remote locations.It doesnt make sense for them to (approve the cuts) when theyre relying on us to train the workforce, said Dawn Frank, president of Oglala Lakota College in South Dakota. Were really relying on our senators and representatives to live up to their treaty and trust obligation.But others noted they have spent years meeting with federal representatives to emphasize the importance of tribal colleges to their communities and have been disappointed by the chronic underfunding.It is a bit disheartening to feel like our voice is not being heard, said Chris Caldwell, president of College of Menominee Nation in Wisconsin. They dont hear our message.

by Alec MacGillis ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as theyre published. Its a tough time for the rank-and-file tech worker or computer science graduate looking for a job. The Silicon Valley giants have laid off tens of thousands in the past couple years. The longstanding threat of offshoring persists, while the new threat of AI looms.There is seemingly one reason for hope, which you wont find in popular hiring websites like Indeed.com or ZipRecruiter. Its exclusively in the help-wanted classifieds in printed newspapers. Every Sunday, metropolitan newspapers across the country are full of listings for tech jobs, with posted salaries sometimes exceeding $150,000. If youve got tech skills, it seems, employers are crying out for you, week after week.One day this spring, I decided to test this premise. I set out with the classified pages from the most recent Sunday edition of The Washington Post, which were laden with tech job offerings in the suburbs of Northern Virginia and Montgomery County, Maryland.First, I drove to the address given for one of the employers, Sapphire Software Solutions, whose ad said it was looking for someone to gather and analyze data and business requirements to facilitate various scrum ceremonies for multiple business systems and processes. I arrived at an office building in Ashburn, Virginia, near Dulles International Airport. But the receptionist in the appointed suite looked confused when I asked for Sapphire.This is virtual office, she said, in a heavy Eastern European accent. We have many kinds of virtual offices. She gestured at a long filing-cabinet drawer that was open behind her, full of folders. You must mail to them.From there, I drove 2 miles to another company advertising for help, Optimum Systems, whose address turned out to be an office park full of dental practices. But the office door said nothing about Optimum, instead carrying a sign for an accountant and a different tech firm. It was dark and empty.And from there, I drove 6 miles to a company called Softrams, which was advertising for a Full Stack Developer. I walked into an office in a building that also housed a driving school. The reception area was empty. I called hello, and a woman appeared. I told her I was a reporter wanting to learn more about the listing. She was surprised and asked if she could read the ad in my hand. Ill check with the team and get back to you, she said.A few days later, after similarly mysterious visits to other offices, I reached the woman, Praveena Divi, on the phone. This ad is for a PERM filing, she said. A filing for a green card.To anybody familiar with the PERM system, those words meant the ad was not really intended to find applicants. I had entered one of the most overlooked yet consequential corners of the United States immigration system: the process by which employers sponsor tech workers with temporary H-1B visas as a first step to getting them the green card that entitles them to permanent residency in the U.S. It is a process that nearly everyone involved admits is nonsensical, highly vulnerable to abuse, as well as a contributor to inequities among domestic and foreign tech workers. Yet the system has endured for decades, largely out of public view. There is occasional debate over the roughly 120,000 workers from overseas who are awarded H-1B visas every year for temporary high-skilled employment. Last December, a tiff erupted between billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, on the one side, and MAGA champions including Steve Bannon, over the formers claims that H-1B workers are needed because the homegrown tech workforce is inadequate. But almost as quickly as it started, the spat vanished from the news.There is even less attention given to what happens with these foreign workers three quarters of whom are now from India when many decide they want to stay beyond the six-year maximum allowed for an H-1B recipient (a three-year term can be renewed once). To qualify for a green card, workers must get their employers to sponsor them via the Permanent Labor Certification process, aka PERM. And to do that, employers must demonstrate that they made a sincere effort to find someone else a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to do the job instead.Whats striking about this requirement is that, as a result of choices made by legislators 35 years ago, the effort to find a citizen is not expected at the front end, when employers are considering hiring workers from abroad. At that point, employers simply enter the lottery for H-1Bs, and if they get one, they can use it.Only once a company has employed someone for five or six years and become committed to helping that person stay in the country permanently must the company show that it is trying to find someone else. Its no surprise that the efforts at this point can be less than sincere.This is where the newspaper ads come in. Under U.S. Department of Labor rules dating back to the era before the worldwide web, employers must post the job for which PERM certification is being sought for 30 days with a state workforce agency and in two successive Sunday newspapers in the jobs location.This makes for a highly ironic juxtaposition: pages of print ads paid for by tech employers, many of them the same Silicon Valley giants that have helped eviscerate newspaper classifieds and drive down print newspaper circulation to the point that it can be hard even to find a place to buy a paper in many communities.These columns of ads that are not really looking for applicants underscore the challenges facing American tech workers and the striking disparities in the current immigration landscape. While restaurants, meatpackers and countless other businesses now risk having workers targeted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, tech employers have largely escaped Trump administration scrutiny for their use of foreign labor. Among the companies sponsoring many H-1B employees for green cards every year are ones aligned with President Donald Trump, such as Oracle, Palantir and Musks Tesla.But the PERM system also takes a toll on its supposed beneficiaries, the temporary employees seeking permanent residency. Even after their PERM applications are approved, they must typically wait more than 10 years before getting a green card, a long wait even by the standards of the U.S. immigration system. In the interim, it can be hard for them to leave their sponsoring employers, which exposes them to overwork at jobs that often pay less than what their American counterparts receive.Whichever way you look at it, said Ronil Hira, a Howard University political science professor and research associate at the Economic Policy institute, the PERM process is crying out for reform. As he put it, Everyone in the industry knows its a joke. Divi, the manager at Softrams, was quite forthcoming about how PERM works at the 450-person company, whose largest client is the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services and which was bought last year by another company, Tria. She told me that Softrams had 69 employees on H-1B visas, had never hired another applicant during the PERM process and had received zero applicants from the latest ads.I had a much harder time getting through to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn, whose website states that its a leading provider of IT staffing solutions and services since 2011 and that it also has offices in the Northern California town of Dublin, plus Hyderabad, India. The companys phone directory offers options for, among others, recruiting and immigration. When I chose the latter, I reached a man who sounded surprised by the call and said, Give me some time. I never heard back from him, so I called back days later and pushed the option for recruiting. This time, the person who answered hung up on me. Finally, I picked the option for human resources and reached a woman who told me to send an email. I did, and never heard back.Fortunately, one can learn a lot about the PERM process from Department of Labor records, which list all of the roughly 90,000 PERM applications submitted every year. The 2024 list shows Sapphire with 51 applications a striking number for a company that gives its size as 252 employees. The jobs include computer systems analysts offered $96,158, software developers offered $100,240 and web developers offered $128,731. All of the applications were approved by the government, as is true of virtually all applications under the PERM process. The federal listings dont list the names of the employees whom the companies are sponsoring for PERM certification, but they do show their nationalities and where they received their degrees. All but one of Sapphires 51 were from India; their degrees came from a mix of American institutions (among them the University of South Florida and University of Michigan-Flint) and Indian ones (among them Visvesvaraya Technological University and Periyar University.)All of the Sapphire applications were advertised in The Washington Post. And all list the same immigration attorney, Soo Park in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I called and asked her about the companys applications. Sapphire, she said, is just one of the companies I do. I inquired about the PERM process, and she demurred, telling me to ask AI instead.I encountered similar resistance and intrigue when I made the rounds in a different metro area with a burgeoning tech sector: Columbus, Ohio. Here also, several of the job listings in The Columbus Dispatch led to empty or abandoned offices or to buildings that were mail-drops for dozens of companies.When I sought out Vizion Technologies, which had listed three jobs, I found a single-story office park in Dublin, a suburb of Columbus. Vizions office, adjacent to that of a cleaning company, was empty, save for a Keurig machine and some magazines. I called the companys number and asked the man who answered about the listings. This is a PERM ad, he said freely. But, he said, he would consider other applicants. Had any come across the transom? I asked. No, he said. But you never know.After an unilluminating visit to another company, I headed to EDI-Matrix, which had advertised for software programmers. At the companys small office, I met John Sheppard, a manager. He said the owner, Shafiullah Syed, was for the time being in India, where a quarter of the companys 40 employees were based, and where 20 of the Ohio-based staff was from. The company, founded in 2008, provides tech support for state government and private-sector clients.Were the ads in the Dispatch for PERM applicants? I asked. Probably, Sheppard said. Our owner is a big believer in trying to find ways to help people. The story of how the PERM system the full name is Program Electronic Review Management came to be is a decadeslong tale of, depending on your perspective, misguided assumptions or self-interested machinations. Since the middle of the 20th century, temporary guest-worker programs had been on a separate track from employment-based permanent residency programs. It was difficult for guest workers to apply for permanent residency, a process that had long required employers to prove that they couldnt find an American worker for the role.But those separate tracks converged with the 1990 Immigration Act. Bruce Morrison, who helped draft the law as a Connecticut Democrat serving as chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Citizenship, told me that the laws goal was to constrict the use of temporary labor from abroad. Previously, employers had been able to hire unlimited numbers of temporary skilled workers under vague language about distinguished merit and ability. The 1990 law created a new H-1B category that required a bachelors degree, established a cap of 65,000 visas per year and set a minimum wage level. Still, it spared employers from having to prove they couldnt find U.S. workers for the job in question, on the logic that these were just temps filling a short-term role.The hope, Morrison said, was to encourage employers to bring in skilled workers via the permanent residency pathway, on the theory that immigrants with green cards would, by being on stronger footing, be less likely to undercut wages for Americans than guest workers did.Things worked out much differently. The law passed on the cusp of the Internet era as the job market was pushing toward shorter-term employment, especially in the tech world. A rapidly growing middle class in Asia was producing millions of tech workers eager to work in the U.S., especially English-speaking Indians.And, crucially, the law allowed H-1B holders to apply for permanent residency.Within just a few years, three-quarters of those applying for employer-based permanent residency were people who were already working for the employer in question, mostly on H-1Bs. Thus was created the backward situation of employers having to prove that they were looking for qualified applicants for a role that they had already filled with the person they were sponsoring. Their recruitment efforts were perfunctory at best and a sham at worst, wrote the Department of Labors office of inspector general in a scathing 1996 report. The report found that there had been more than 136,000 applicants for 18,011 PERM openings that it examined, but that only 104 people were hired via advertisements less than 1% and those hirings were almost accidental. (The companies kept the foreign workers they were sponsoring, but came across a tiny smattering of qualified Americans, whom they also hired.) The system is seriously flawed, the report stated. The programs are being manipulated and abused.In the years that followed, the demand for H-1B visas surged, due partly to the demand for Indian tech workers to assist with the Y2K threat and to the tech-bubble burst prompting companies to seek lower-wage workers. Under pressure from the tech industry, the government raised the cap for several years, as high as 195,000 visas annually, between 2001 and 2003.This exacerbated a bottleneck already in the making: Tens of thousands of H-1B holders, many from India, were now seeking permanent residency as their visas neared expiration, but under the law, no single nationality could receive more than 7% of the 140,000 employment-based green cards awarded in a given year. Workers who had been approved for permanent residency could remain on extended H-1Bs while they waited for their green card, but this was an unstable limbo that further swelled the ranks of H-1Bs.In 2005, the Department of Labor tried to address at least one part of the pipeline, the delays in approving employees for permanent residency. It introduced the new PERM process, which allowed employers simply to attest that the position in question was open to U.S. workers, that any who applied were rejected for job-related reasons and that the offered pay was at least the prevailing wage for that role. Employers also had to submit a report describing the recruitment steps taken and the number of U.S. applicants rejected. It was at this point that the print advertising requirement was clarified as two successive Sunday newspapers.It became quickly apparent how easy it was for employers to game the system. Many advertised completely different positions in the newspaper ads compared to their own websites. Some directed applicants to send resumes to the companys immigration lawyers rather than to human resources.A viral video captured the absurdity. At a 2007 panel discussion, an immigration lawyer, Lawrence Lebowitz, laid out the mission in startlingly candid terms: Our goal here of course is to meet the requirements, No. 1, but also do so as inexpensively as possible, keeping in mind our goal. And our goal is clearly not to find a qualified and interested U.S. worker. In a sense, that sounds funny, but its what were trying to do here. The video caused a flurry of outrage, yet the system has survived to this day, largely unchanged, protected by congressional dysfunction and the interests that are served by the status quo, the tech industry and the immigration law bar.Advocacy groups representing American tech workers have attacked the system repeatedly, challenging the notion that H-1Bs are bringing in the worlds best and brightest by pointing out that the program makes no attempt to identify exceptional talent beyond requiring a bachelors degree, relying instead on a lottery to award the visas. The real appeal of H-1Bs for employers, worker advocates say, is that they can pay their holders an average of 10% to 20% less, as several studies have found to be the case, which has helped suppress tech wages more broadly. Yet the advocacy groups have struggled to mobilize sustained opposition. There was talk during the Obama administration of reforming PERM, but it fizzled amid the failure of broader immigration reform during his second term.In 2020, the Department of Labors inspector general issued another critical report, calling attention to PERMs vulnerability to abuse. It noted that when the department did full audit reviews of applications, which it did for 16% of them, it wound up rejecting a fifth of them, far more than the mere 3% that were rejected during the standard review. That suggested that many faulty applications were slipping through. The PERM program relentlessly has employers not complying with the qualifying criteria, it concluded.As for the newspaper ad requirement, the report noted with understatement, Available data indicates newspapers are becoming a less effective means of notifying potential applicants in the U.S. about job opportunities. U.S. workers are likely to be unaware of these employment opportunities due to the obsolete methods required.Since that report, there have been two notable bids for accountability. In December 2020, the Department of Justice filed suit against Facebook, alleging that the company was discriminating against U.S. citizens by routinely reserving jobs for PERM applicants. In a settlement nearly a year later, Facebook, which had denied any discrimination, agreed to pay a civil penalty of $4.75 million, pay up to $9.5 million to eligible victims of the alleged discrimination and conduct more expansive recruitment for slots in PERM applications.In 2023, the DOJ announced a similar settlement with Apple, which also denied any discriminatory behavior but agreed to pay up to $25 million in back pay and civil penalties, conduct more expansive recruitment, train employees in anti-discrimination requirements and submit to DOJ monitoring for three years.And yet, the PERM process carries on, with its own ecosystem. One firm, Atlas Advertising, offers the specific service of advertising jobs intended for PERM applicants. Expertly place your immigration ads in leading newspapers, ensuring compliance and targeted reach for PERM certification, Atlas urges potential customers. I searched in vain for defenders of the process major tech lobby groups either declined to comment or didnt return my calls. Theresa Cardinal Brown has lobbied on immigration policy for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and American Immigration Lawyers Association, but she, too, was critical of PERM. Even if you are trying to sponsor someone who is already on the job, you have to act as if you arent, she said. Increasingly, this jury-rigged system isnt working for anyone.Among those now decrying the system the most sharply is Morrison, the former Democratic congressman who helped write the 1990 law. In 2017, he told 60 Minutes that H-1B has been hijacked as the main highway to bring people from abroad and displace Americans.Morrison, who is now a lobbyist, was even more outspoken when I talked with him. He noted the H-1B caps have grown in recent years. The 65,000 cap laid out in 1990 no longer includes the thousands renewed every year, and there are an additional 20,000 visas for people with graduate degrees and 35,000-odd exemptions for universities, nonprofits and research organizations. This adds up to about 120,000 new H-1Bs per year. Meanwhile, the per-country cap for employer-based green cards last year was 11,200. The backlog of workers and family members awaiting green cards, mostly Indians, has swelled to more than 1 million, creating a vast army of what Morrison and others call indentured workers who are at the mercy of their employers.Its fair to say that no American has ever gotten a job due to the certification system, Morrison said. It doesnt do what it should do. One day, after many more hang-ups on calls to Sapphire Software Solutions, the company with the mail-drop in Ashburn and 51 PERM applications on last years Department of Labor list, I finally reached one of their managers, Phani Reddy Gottimukkala. I asked him whether the company had gotten any responses to its recent ads in The Washington Post. That will be taken care of by the immigration department, he said. More broadly, he said the PERM process was working well for the company. Everything is fine because we have very strong attorneys working for us. Doris Burke contributed research.

by Paige Pfleger, WPLN/Nashville Public Radio This article was produced by WPLN/Nashville Public Radio, a 2023 ProPublica Local Reporting Network partner. Sign up for Dispatches to get our stories in your inbox every week. Richard L. Bean, the longtime superintendent of the East Tennessee juvenile detention center that bears his name, abruptly announced Friday that he will be stepping down. His decision to retire came the day after the Knox County mayor said he had lost confidence in Beans leadership. Bean, 84, has been superintendent of the juvenile detention center since 1972. A 2023 investigation from WPLN and ProPublica found the facility was using solitary confinement more than other detention centers in the state. Sometimes the children were locked up alone for hours or days at a time. That kind of confinement was also used as punishment, in violation of state law. At the time, Bean broadly defended the practices at the facility, saying he wished he had more punitive abilities and that people who pushed back didnt understand what was necessary.After the story ran, the head of the detention centers governing board told local TV station WBIR that he thought the Bean center was the best facility in the state of Tennessee.Renewed scrutiny on the detention center began last week when Bean dismissed two employees, including the facilitys only nurse. The nurses termination was first reported by Knox News, and the mayor described her dismissal as retaliation because she had reported to state investigators significant issues with medical care at the facility, which she said went unchecked and unaddressed by Bean.On Wednesday, Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs and juvenile court Judge Tim Irwin wrote a letter to Bean demanding he reinstate both employees. Irwin is a nonvoting member of the centers governing board of trustees but selects one of its three voting members. These dismissals may well lead to lawsuits against you and the county, the letter reads, which could cost the taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars.The following day, Jacobs wrote a letter to the governor calling for immediate state intervention and detailing issues with medication in the facility going missing, errors with medication reporting and even medication going to the wrong detainees. In a public video statement, Jacobs said he had no confidence that these issues will be addressed with the centers current leadership or the governing board that oversees the Bean juvenile detention center. He called for the Knox County Sheriffs Office to take over operation of the center but said he has limited power to intervene. By Friday, Bean announced that he would leave his post as superintendent in two months after he gets the facility shipshape, according to a press release. He did not respond to requests for comment but said in the press release that his last day will be Aug. 1.During WPLN and ProPublicas investigation of the Bean center, documents revealed that state officials repeatedly had put the Bean center on corrective action plans and had documented its improper use of seclusion yet continued to approve the centers license to operate without the facility changing its ways.What we do is treat everybody like theyre in here for murder, Bean told WPLN during a 2023 visit to the facility. You dont have a problem if you do that. Most of the children in the Bean center are not in for murder and instead are awaiting court dates after being charged with a crime.When asked if he was worried he might get in trouble for the way he was running the facility, Bean said, If I got in trouble for it, I believe I could talk to whoever got me in trouble and get out of it.