by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Mica Rosenberg, ProPublica

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.

It started with a call. A man identifying himself as a federal immigration agent contacted a Venezuelan father in San Antonio, interrogating him about his teenage son. The agent said officials planned to visit the family’s apartment to assess the boy’s living conditions.

Later that day, federal agents descended on his complex and covered the door’s peephole with black tape, the father recalled. Agents repeatedly yelled the father’s and son’s names, demanded they open the door and waited hours before leaving, according to the family. Terrified, the father, 37, texted an immigration attorney, who warned that the visit could be a pretext for deportation. The agents returned the next two days, causing the father such alarm that he skipped work at a mechanic shop. His son stayed home from school.

Department of Homeland Security agents have carried out dozens of such visits across the country in recent months as part of a systematic search for children who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border by themselves, and the sponsors who care for them while they pursue their immigration cases. The Office of Refugee Resettlement, which is responsible for the children’s care and for screening their sponsors, has assisted in the checks.

The agency’s welfare mission appears to be undergoing a stark transformation as President Donald Trump seeks to ramp up deportation numbers in his second term, a dozen current and former government officials told ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. They say that one of the clearest indications of that shift is the scale of the checks that immigration agents are conducting using information provided by the resettlement agency to target sponsors and children for deportation.

Trump officials maintain that the administration is ensuring children are not abused or trafficked. But current and former agency employees, immigration lawyers and child advocates say the resettlement agency is drifting from its humanitarian mandate. Just last week, the Trump administration fired the agency’s ombudsman, who had been hired by Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration to act as its first watchdog.

“Congress set up a system to protect migrant children, in part by giving them to an agency that isn’t part of immigration enforcement,” said Scott Shuchart, a former official with Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump’s first term and later under Biden. The Trump administration, Shuchart said, is “trying to use that protective arrangement as a bludgeon to hurt the kids and the adults who are willing to step forward to take care of them.”

Republicans have called out ORR in the past, pointing to instances of children working in dangerous jobs as examples of the agency’s lax oversight. Lawyers, advocates and agency officials say cases of abuse are rare and should be rooted out. They argue that the administration’s recent changes are immigration enforcement tools that could make children and their sponsors more susceptible to harmful living and working conditions because they fear deportation.

Project 2025, a right-wing blueprint to reshape the federal government, called for moving the resettlement agency under the Department of Homeland Security, which includes ICE, arguing that keeping the agencies separate has led to more unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally. Although Trump publicly distanced himself from the overall plan during his reelection campaign, many of his actions have aligned with its proposals.

During Trump’s first term, he required ORR to share some information about the children and their sponsors, who are usually relatives. That led to the arrests of at least 170 sponsors in the country illegally and spurred pushback from lawmakers and advocates who said the agency shouldn’t be used to aid deportation. Immediately after starting his second term in January, Trump issued an executive order calling for more information sharing between the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the resettlement agency, and Homeland Security. Now, current and former employees of the resettlement agency say that some immigration enforcement officials have been given unfettered access to its databases, which contain sensitive and detailed case information.

Data sharing for “the sole purpose of immigration enforcement imperils the privacy and security” of children and their sponsors, Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, wrote in a February letter to the Trump administration. In a March response to Wyden, Andrew Gradison, an acting assistant secretary at HHS, said the resettlement agency is complying with the president’s executive order and sharing information with other federal agencies to ensure immigrant children are safe. Wyden told the news organizations that he plans to continue pressing for answers. On Tuesday, he sent another letter to the administration, stating that he is “increasingly concerned” that ORR is sharing private information “beyond the scope” of what is allowed and “exposing already vulnerable children to further risks.”

Two advocacy groups filed a federal lawsuit last week in Washington, arguing that the Trump administration unlawfully reversed key provisions of a 2024 Biden rule. Those provisions had barred ORR from using immigration status to deny sponsors the ability to care for children. They also had previously prohibited the agency from sharing sponsor information for the purpose of immigration enforcement. Undoing the provisions has led to the prolonged detention of children because sponsors are afraid or can’t claim them because they are unable to meet requirements, the lawsuit alleges. The government has not responded to the lawsuit in court.

In conjunction with those changes, Trump tapped an ICE official to lead ORR for the first time. That official was fired two months into her job because she failed to implement the administration’s changes “fast enough,” her successor for the position, Angie Salazar, an ICE veteran, said in a March 6 recording obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune.

“Some of these policy changes took too long. Three weeks is too long,” Salazar told staff without providing specifics. Salazar said that she would ramp up an effort to check on immigrant children and strengthen screenings of their sponsors.

She told staff that, in nearly two weeks, ICE investigators had visited 1,500 residences of unaccompanied minors. Agents had uncovered a handful of instances of what she said were cases of sex and labor trafficking. Salazar did not provide details but said identifying even one case of abuse is significant.

“Those are my marching orders,” Salazar told staffers. “While I will never do something outside the law for anybody or anything, and while we are operating within the law, we will expect all of you to do so and be supportive of that.”

Salazar said she expected an increase in the number of children taken from their sponsors and placed back into federal custody, which in the past has been rare.

Boxes packed with clothing and household goods in the Venezuelan family’s San Antonio home. The family started keeping many of their belongings boxed up and ready to ship out of fear of deportation. (Chris Lee for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune)

Since Salazar took charge, ORR has instituted a raft of strict vetting rules for sponsors of immigrant children that the agency argues are needed to ensure sponsors are properly screened. Those include no longer accepting foreign passports or IDs as forms of identification unless people have legal authorization to be in the U.S. The resettlement agency also expanded DNA checks of relatives and increased income requirements, including making sponsors submit recent pay stubs or tax returns. (The IRS recently announced that it would share tax information with ICE to facilitate deportations.)

ORR said in a statement that it could not respond to ongoing litigation and did not answer detailed questions about Salazar’s comments or about the reasoning for some of the new requirements. Its policies are intended to ensure safe placement of unaccompanied minors, and the agency is “not a law enforcement or immigration enforcement entity,” the statement read.

Andrew Nixon, an HHS spokesperson, also declined to comment on pending lawsuits. But he criticized how the agency within his department was run under Biden, saying it failed to protect unaccompanied children after they were released to sponsors while turning “a blind eye to serious risks.” Jen Smyers, a former ORR deputy director, disputed those claims, saying the Biden administration made strides to address longstanding concerns that included creating a unit to combat sponsor fraud and improving data systems to better track kids.

Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS assistant secretary, did not respond to detailed questions but said in a statement that her agency shares the goal of ensuring that unaccompanied minors are safe. She did not answer questions about the Venezuelan family in San Antonio. She also declined to provide the number of homes the agents have visited across the country or say whether they found cases of abuse or detained anyone for the purpose of deportation.

An April email obtained by ProPublica and the Tribune shows for the first time the scale of the operation in the Houston area alone, which over the past decade has resettled the largest number of unaccompanied immigrant children in the country. In the email, an ICE official informed the Harris County Sheriff’s Office that the agency planned to visit more than 3,600 addresses associated with such minors. The sheriff’s office did not assist in the checks, a spokesperson said.

An internal ICE memo obtained last month through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Immigration Project, a Washington-based advocacy group, instructed agents to find unaccompanied children and their sponsors. The document laid out a series of factors that federal agents should prioritize when seeking out children, including those who have not attended court hearings, may have gang ties or have pending deportation orders. The memo detailed crimes, such as smuggling, for which sponsors could be charged.

In the case of the San Antonio family, the father has temporary protected status, a U.S. permit for certain people facing danger at home that allows him to live and work here legally. The news organizations could not find a criminal record for him in the U.S. His son is still awaiting an immigration court hearing since crossing the U.S.-Mexico border alone a year ago. The father stated in his U.S. asylum application that he left Venezuela after receiving death threats for protesting against President Nicolás Maduro’s government. The father, who declined to be identified because he fears ICE enforcement, said in an interview that his son later fled for the same reason.

Meanwhile, the avenues for families, like that of the Venezuelan man and his son, to raise concerns about ORR’s conduct are shrinking. The Trump administration reduced staff at the agency’s ombudsman’s office. Mary Giovagnoli, who led the office, was terminated last week. An HHS official said the agency does not comment on personnel matters, but in a letter to Giovagnoli, the agency stated that her employment “does not advance the public interest.” Giovagnoli said the cuts curtail the office’s ability to act as a watchdog to ensure the resettlement agency is meeting its congressionally established mission.

“There’s no effective oversight,” she said. “There is this encroachment on ORR’s independence, and I think this close relationship with ICE makes everyone afraid that there’s going to come a point in time where you don’t know where one agency stops and the next begins.”

Doris Burke contributed research.

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

Last summer, as political debate swirled over the future of Georgia’s experiment with Medicaid work requirements, Gov. Brian Kemp held a press conference to unveil a three-minute testimonial video featuring a mechanic who works on classic cars.

Luke Seaborn, a 54-year-old from rural Jefferson, became the de facto face of Georgia Pathways to Coverage, Kemp’s insurance program for impoverished Georgians. In a soft Southern drawl, Seaborn explained how having insurance had improved his life in the year that he had been enrolled: “Pathways is a great program that offers health insurance to low-income professionals like myself.”

Kemp lauds Pathways as an innovative way to decrease the state’s high rate of uninsured adults while reining in government spending, holding the program up as an example to other Republican-led states eager to institute Medicaid work requirements.

But in the nine months since Seaborn’s video testimonial was released, his opinion of Pathways has plummeted. His benefits have been canceled — twice, he said, due to bureaucratic red tape.

“I used to think of Pathways as a blessing,” Seaborn recently told The Current and ProPublica. “Now, I’m done with it.”

Rather than an enduring symbol of success, Seaborn’s experience illustrates why the program struggles to gain traction even as the state spends millions of dollars to burnish Pathways’ brand. The Current and ProPublica previously reported that many of the approximately 250,000 low-income adults potentially eligible for the health insurance program struggle to enroll or maintain coverage.

The politics of Pathways were not on Seaborn’s mind when he received a phone call last summer from an insurance executive who handles Pathways clients. One of the first Georgians to enroll in the program in 2023, Seaborn had written a letter thanking his insurance provider for covering a procedure for his back pain. The executive from Amerigroup Community Care wanted to know: Would he take part in a promotional video for Pathways?

Seaborn, a supporter of the governor, said yes without hesitation. Soon afterward, Kemp’s press secretary, Garrison Douglas, arrived at his auto repair shop, located a few miles from the governor’s hometown, and spent hours filming in the garage filled with vintage Ford and Chevy trucks and handpainted gas station signs.

A trained chemical engineer, Seaborn had quit his corporate job to embrace his dream of repairing classic cars. But the realities of being a small business owner made that path difficult, Seaborn said, especially when it came to shouldering the cost of health insurance for himself and his son. Pathways eased the way, he said.

Seaborn said he was surprised when the governor called him out by name weeks later at the press conference during which his testimonial video was released. He wasn’t expecting to be the singular face of Pathways.

By November, though, Seaborn encountered some of the problems that other Georgians say have soured their opinion on Pathways. Seaborn said he had logged his work hours into the online system once a month as required. But his benefits were canceled after he failed to complete a new form that he said the state had added without adequate warning. Seaborn said the form asked for the same information he had been submitting every month, just in a different format. The state’s Medicaid agency did not respond to questions about Seaborn’s experience or the new form.

He said he called the same insurance executive who had asked him to take part in the testimonial. She told him she would be lunching with one of Kemp’s aides that day and promised to help, he recalled. Within 24 hours, Seaborn said, his benefits were restored, and a representative from Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, which administers federal benefits programs, called to apologize.

Douglas said the governor’s office “had no involvement in Mr. Seaborn’s case.” The insurance company did not respond to requests for comment.

Pathways enrollees must submit paperwork every month proving they had completed the requirements necessary for coverage: 80 hours of work, study or volunteering. But the state says it is not verifying the information on a monthly basis — only during enrollment and upon annual renewal.

Seaborn said that after his coverage was restored, his insurance company told him he would no longer have to file his work hours monthly; the next time he would need to submit such documentation would be during his annual reenrollment. Nevertheless, Seaborn said he signed up for text and email notifications from the Pathways program so that he wouldn’t be caught off guard if requirements changed again.

Even so, technical glitches and more red tape caused him to lose his coverage once more, he said. He stopped receiving texts from the Pathways program in February. When he logged in to the digital platform in early March to make sure everything was in order, a notice informed him that his benefits would be terminated on April 1. The reason: he had missed filing an annual income statement. He said the surprise requirement had popped up on the digital platform even though his coverage was not up for renewal.

“My head exploded,” he said. “I didn’t get a text or an email. I did what I was supposed to, but that wasn’t good enough.”

Seaborn said he went ahead and filed the information, although it was late. He tried to call his insurance provider again for an explanation — and help. He reached out to the Division of Family and Children Services as well. This time, however, he said no one called him back.

In April, Seaborn paid out of pocket for his and his son’s prescription medications, an extra $40 that he said is difficult for him to afford.

Ellen Brown, a spokesperson for Georgia’s Division of Family and Children Services, would not say why Seaborn’s benefits were terminated.

“We are sorry to hear this happened and are looking into how we can better serve our customers and resolve communication gaps in the future,” Brown said in a written statement Friday. “Every Georgian that seeks our services is important, and we take these matters very seriously.”

Meanwhile, Seaborn received a phone call that day from the same Division of Family and Children Services representative who had apologized to him after he was kicked off Pathways last fall. He said she told him she would make sure he got his coverage back. The representative did not respond to a request for comment from The Current and ProPublica.

On Monday evening, Seaborn received a text message to alert him to a notification in the Pathways digital platform. He logged on: A notice confirmed that he had been reenrolled, a change of fortune that he credited to The Current and ProPublica’s questions to state officials about his predicament because he had already given up on contacting people for help.

“I am so frustrated with this whole journey,” Seaborn said. “I’m grateful for coverage. But what I don’t understand is them leaving me like a mushroom in the dark and feeding me nothing, no information, for more than a month.”

by Margaret Coker, The Current

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

When the state of Georgia handed Deloitte Consulting a $10.7 million marketing contract last July to promote the nation’s only Medicaid work requirement program, the initiative was in need of serious PR.

At the time, a year after the program’s rollout, less than 2% of those eligible for Georgia Pathways to Coverage had enrolled, well short of state targets.

To get the word out, the state turned again to the firm that it had relied on to build and manage the program. About 60% of the marketing contract went toward creating and placing ads about Pathways on television and radio, including during NFL games and morning talk shows.

Much of the remainder of the seven-month contract would go toward two efforts: $250,000 per month for Deloitte-trained teams to hand out brochures and Pathways-branded merchandise at community events and $300,000 a month for Deloitte to produce reports about its own performance.

When Deloitte’s publicity campaign ended in February, enrollment in Pathways remained less than 3% of the approximately 250,000 Georgians who are potentially eligible.

The marketing contract is part of a larger suite of services that Georgia has commissioned from Deloitte for its Medicaid experiment. Deloitte has made at least $51 million as of Dec. 31 to manage Pathways, including creating and maintaining its problematic software platform, as The Current and ProPublica previously reported. It is also earning at least $3 million more to oversee the state’s relationship with federal regulators, including its application to extend the experiment beyond its expiration this fall.

Deloitte’s outsize — and unusual — role in promoting the program it has built has allowed the firm to keep pulling in payments despite Pathways’ struggles. And there is virtually no public accounting of how well it is increasing enrollment, a key goal of the policy experiment.

An excerpt of Deloitte’s marketing contract shows its $300,000 per month expenditure on reports on its own performance, $250,000 per month for community outreach and $10.7 million total budget. (Obtained by The Current and ProPublica. Highlighted by ProPublica.)

The marketing contract, obtained through a public records request, allows Deloitte to charge the state nearly half a million dollars for a final report on its publicity campaign, which was due to be submitted in February. When The Current and ProPublica requested the monthly and final performance reports, the state said they needed to be “reviewed” first and demanded $900 for that work. The news outlets did not pay because previous responses to public records requests for Deloitte’s Pathways contracts were heavily redacted, with the general counsel’s office at the Department of Community Health citing “confidential/trade secret.” The agency did not charge for those records.

The state recently approved another $10 million to Deloitte, Fiona Roberts, spokesperson for the Department of Community Health, Georgia’s Medicaid agency that oversees Pathways, said in response to questions about the effectiveness of Deloitte’s marketing efforts. The new marketing contract, which runs until November, includes more community meetings and a text message campaign by Salesforce Marketing Cloud rolling out in May to potentially eligible Georgians, Roberts said.

“In 20 years of researching these kinds of programs, I can’t think of another instance like this” in which a state has selected a for-profit company to both manage and market a federal benefit program, said Joan Alker, executive director for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Children and Families, where researchers have concluded that Medicaid work requirements prevent people from accessing health insurance.

Deloitte has designed and managed Medicaid and other benefit programs for many states, including Georgia, making the firm one of the nation’s experts in government health policy. But Alker said that when states want to educate and enroll residents in federal safety net programs, they typically select local nonprofits that have established relationships with low-income communities. Georgia’s arrangement with Deloitte raises questions, she said, about “whether the state is more committed to spending money on consultants or poor people.”

Deloitte, which has been in charge of the Pathways communications strategy for the past three years, declined to answer questions about its Georgia Pathways work, referring requests for information to the Department of Community Health. A contract signed in 2023 worth approximately $7 million stipulates that Deloitte would “develop first draft of response to media inquiries” on behalf of the Department of Community Health, but that responses “will be submitted by DCH and not Deloitte.” Deloitte’s duties also include drafting talking points for media interviews, including for the governor.

Roberts declined repeated requests for an interview with agency officials. When asked about Deloitte’s marketing and outreach work and whether the firm has met the state’s goals, she described the effort as a “robust, comprehensive awareness and outreach campaign throughout the state” that has generated 1.6 million visitors to the Pathways website since the campaign’s August 2024 launch.

“The state has invested heavily in marketing and outreach to reach Georgians potentially eligible for Pathways,” Roberts said in a written statement.

In 20 years of researching these kinds of programs, I can’t think of another instance like this.

—Joan Alker, executive director for Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy Center for Children and Families

Gov. Brian Kemp has described Pathways as an innovative alternative to expanding Medicaid, something 40 other states have done. By contrast, Georgia’s program covers only the poorest individuals who can prove they are working, studying or volunteering at least 80 hours a month. Congressional Republicans are pointing to similar work requirements as a model in their budget negotiations.

In early 2024, less than a year after Pathways’ launch, however, Georgia legislators — including some of Kemp’s Republican allies — considered ending the experiment and instead expanding Medicaid without any work requirements. Georgia’s uninsured rate was 11.4%, or 1.2 million people, compared to the national average of 8% in 2023, the latest data available, according to KFF, a nonprofit focused on national health issues. State data showed that Pathways enrollment was well under the first-year target of 25,000 published in Georgia’s agreement with the federal government. As of April 25, approximately 7,400 Georgians were enrolled, according to the Department of Community Health.

An independent evaluation team commissioned by the state recommended ways to boost enrollment in a December 2024 report. The evaluators, Public Consulting Group, highlighted North Carolina’s strategy of allowing residents from rural communities and communities of color to help create outreach campaigns for its expanded Medicaid program in 2023. North Carolina Medicaid officials told The Current and ProPublica that they designed their outreach efforts to maximize participation in the new program, with a two-year target of enrolling 600,000 people. They achieved that goal within one year.

Georgia and Deloitte, however, took a different tack. The $10.7 million marketing contract does not lay out specific enrollment goals as a way of measuring the success of Deloitte’s efforts. The purpose of Pathways “is not and has never been to enroll as many Georgians as possible,” according to the state’s application to the federal government to continue the experiment.

The contract budgeted $247,000 to create up to four testimonial videos featuring satisfied Pathways clients; only one can be found on the state Medicaid agency’s YouTube channel, where it has received approximately 350 views since it was posted in January. The state did not respond when asked how many testimonials Deloitte produced.

Few people stopped by the Georgia Pathways booth at the Washington County Health Fair in Sandersville, Georgia, in March. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

Meanwhile, another part of Deloitte’s marketing strategy has also failed to catch wind: Deloitte had sent public relations teams to dozens of community events including farmers markets, a school Christmas pageant and a catfish festival to plug Pathways and encourage applications.

In March, one such team drove two hours from Atlanta to a health fair in Central Georgia’s rural Washington County. At the Pathways booth, the Deloitte team barely looked up from their phones for three hours. Residents largely bypassed the team to chat with locals staffing other kiosks where they could receive diapers, information on subsidized in-home nursing care and blood pressure screenings. Of those who stopped at the Pathways booth, only a handful asked about enrollment.

Other public events were tied to the state’s pursuit of federal permission to extend the Pathways program beyond September, when its original five-year mandate expires. Georgia is once again paying Deloitte to ensure that happens.

The monthslong process, managed by Deloitte, requires opportunities for public comment. A summary of these comments must be submitted with the application, which Deloitte is drafting. Health advocacy organizations say public outreach for this effort, especially to Black Georgians, has been superficial at best.

The only notice for two virtual public meetings appeared on a Department of Community Health web page that was not linked from the agency’s homepage. During both virtual events, health care advocates criticized the program’s inequitable access, but state officials did not engage with the speakers.

A third event — an in-person meeting in the rural 10,000-person town of Cordele — was added later and posted on the same website just one week before it was scheduled to occur. Only about a dozen people, some traveling for more than 80 miles, showed up to the noon meeting on St. Patrick’s Day.

Georgians traveled up to 80 miles to speak at a public meeting about Pathways held by the Georgia Department of Community Health in Cordele in March. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica) The town of Cordele has a population of around 10,000 people. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

The low attendance reflected the meeting’s out-of-the-way location and holiday timing, not a lack of public interest, said attendee Sherrell Byrd, executive director of Sowega Rising, a community advocacy group based in the majority Black town of Albany.

Inside the one-story cinder block building, three state health officials sat along a table at the front of the largely vacant room. One by one, attendees rose to the microphone to complain of technical glitches in the Pathways enrollment process, the lack of customer service and the generational health care inequalities faced by Black Georgians.

Tanisha Corporal, who lives approximately 140 miles away in Atlanta, was the only person to participate virtually. She told the Department of Community Health officials that she had submitted a Pathways application three times over the Deloitte-built digital portal only to have her file disappear. The licensed clinical social worker whose nonprofit job ended in January 2024 said state agencies offered her little enrollment support.

Grant Thomas, deputy commissioner for the Georgia Department of Community Health, sits in the back of the room during a public meeting on the Georgia Pathways program in Cordele. (Nicole Craine for ProPublica)

The state health officials did not respond to any of the speakers during the meeting. Grant Thomas, Kemp’s former health policy advisor and deputy director of the state Medicaid agency, sat in the back of the room and did not interact with the attendees. Thomas declined to speak on the record.

“There is a lot of disdain for real-life problems of Georgians who look like us,” Byrd said.

Robin Kemp of The Current contributed reporting.

by Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

Electric companies in Oregon and Washington are hurtling toward deadlines to stop using power generated by coal, gas and other fuels that contribute to global warming. Yet the states are nowhere near achieving their goals, and the dramatic consequences are already being felt.

During a winter storm in January 2024, for example, the Northwest barely had enough power to meet demand as homeowners cranked up electric heaters and energy prices surged to more than $1,000 per megawatt-hour, or 18 times higher than the usual price. Power lines were so congested that owners of the transmission network made an extra $100 million selling access to the highest bidder.

Multiple utilities were operating in states of emergency during the storm, preparing for rotating power outages.

The storm “highlighted a tipping point and demonstrated how close the region is to a resource adequacy crisis,” the Western Power Pool, a regionwide organization of utilities, wrote in its assessment of the event.

Price spikes like this are one reason customers of major utilities in Oregon are paying 50% more on their power bills than they were in 2019. The number of utility customers disconnected last year for failure to pay soared to 70,000, the highest number on record.

Forecasters predict periods of extreme weather in the Northwest will only bring more trouble in the future: the threat of rolling blackouts within the decade if the region’s current energy trends continue.

Wind, solar and other renewables are the only forms of power that can be added to solve the problem, thanks to Oregon’s and Washington’s green energy mandates. Yet better transmission lines are needed to carry new energy sources in the windy and sunny eastern parts of the region to big cities west of the Cascade Mountain Range.

Experts say adding transmission lines in corridors that currently lack them would also enable utilities to keep power flowing when ice storms or wildfires threaten other parts of the grid.

The biggest owner of these transmission lines, the federal Bonneville Power Administration, has been slow to spend on upgrades — and slow to approve new green projects until upgrades are made.

Bonneville’s parent agency, the Energy Department, declined to make officials available for an interview, but Bonneville answered written questions.

“The potential for blackouts in the Pacific Northwest is incredibly low,” the agency said. “Grid planners and operators will continue to ensure reliability.”

Washington and Oregon lawmakers failed to address the Bonneville bottleneck when they approved clean energy mandates in 2019 and 2021, as ProPublica and OPB reported recently.

Oregon Rep. Ken Helm, a Portland-area Democrat who was a sponsor of the 2021 legislation, said the failure to prioritize transmission lines wasn’t the only flaw with the legislation. He said the bill failed to provide accountability, having no penalties for when a utility did not reach certain deadlines for acquiring either solar or wind energy. Helm said now, House Bill 2021 is “dead letter law.”

“Senators and representatives like me, we cannot continue to believe our own PR, that we have been successful in promoting a renewable electricity future,” said Helm, a member of the House Committee on Climate, Energy and Environment. “We are not heading in that direction, and we’re going to have to take action to change that or nothing will happen.”

Some lawmakers tried to play catch-up this year. Legislators in each state drew up plans for state transmission authorities that could finance improvements independent of utilities and Bonneville. Those efforts failed.

“Oregon desperately needs to take some leadership here,” said Nicole Hughes, executive director of the group Renewable Northwest, which advocates for weaning the region off of fossil fuels.

The Northwest’s situation is only expected to get worse. The region’s electrical demand is forecast to double over the next 20 years, in large part because data centers, rewarded with tax breaks in both Oregon and Washington, are driving an increase in power use the region hasn’t experienced since the early 1980s.

Abandoning Oregon’s and Washington’s renewable energy laws wouldn’t help, Oregon’s Citizens’ Utility Board says, because new fossil fuel power plants would cost ratepayers more than wind or solar. Those plants would still have to contend with transmission lines that have no room for their power.

The region’s utilities, meanwhile, say they’d like to add 29,000 megawatts of generating capacity over the next 10 years — an unprecedented addition that would be roughly equivalent to all the electricity that the Northwest currently consumes at any given time. The projects on their to-do list are powered entirely by renewable energy.

Yet the utilities added only a little over half the power to their systems that they planned for last year. In fact, of the 469 projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid in the past decade, the only one to win the agency’s approval was in 2022. Growth in green energy in 2024 came from projects that began seeking a connection to Bonneville’s grid prior to 2015 or that connected to smaller transmission networks owned by private utilities.

If the utilities continue to fall as short of their goals as they did in 2024, then projections from the Western Electricity Coordinating Council suggest residents will spend the equivalent of nearly a month annually under the threat of brownouts — the inability to power all the circuits in a household — or blackouts.

“In the next few years, we may start having to make some tough choices about the availability of electricity,” Hughes said.

Hughes has spent 20 years in the renewables industry.

For now, she said, her family decided to buy a gas generator for times when their house loses power.

by Becca Savransky, Idaho Statesman

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

Time and again, the U.S. Department of Education has been the last resort for parents who say the state of Idaho has failed to educate their children. The federal agency in 2023 ordered Idaho to stop blocking some students with learning disabilities, like dyslexia, from special education. That same year, it flagged that the state’s own reviews of districts and charters obscured the fact that just 20% were fully complying with the federal disability law. Last year, it told the state it must end long delays in services for infants and toddlers with disabilities, which could include speech or physical therapy.

Now President Donald Trump has pledged to dismantle the department.

Idaho’s superintendent of public instruction Debbie Critchfield has celebrated the proposal. She insisted that the move would not change the requirement that states provide special education to students who need it. That would take an act of Congress.

But parents and advocates for students with disabilities say they are worried that no one will effectively ensure schools follow special education law.

“Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families,” said Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs, who retired last year after decades at the department.

Former federal Education Department employees who worked on special education monitoring said oversight measures would likely be hampered by the layoffs, which included attorneys who worked with the special education office to provide state monitoring reports.

Gregg Corr, a former division director with that office, said that without the group of attorneys who were focused on enforcing special education law, it will be “really difficult for staff to finalize and issue these reports to states.” He added there may also be a reluctance to take on more complicated issues without running them by attorneys.

“What might have been, you know, inconsistent with the legal requirements six months ago may be fine now — it just depends on how it’s interpreted,” Wexler said.

Before Federal Law, Millions Denied Services

For parents who have been fighting for services for years, the federal oversight has been critical.

After Ashley Brittain, an attorney and mom to children with dyslexia, moved to Idaho in 2021, she realized a key problem: Idaho’s criteria for qualifying students with specific learning disabilities such as dyslexia or dysgraphia was so narrow it disqualified some eligible students from receiving services, she said.

Historically, when left to their own devices, states don’t necessarily do the right thing for kids with disabilities and their families.

—Larry Wexler, a former division director at the federal Office of Special Education Programs

Together with Robin Zikmund, the founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho who has a son with dyslexia and dysgraphia, Brittain has spent years trying to get the state to acknowledge the disability and provide services to dozens of kids who needed help.

“We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students,” Zikmund previously told the Idaho Statesman and ProPublica. “And it was like, ‘What is going on?’”

Brittain called state officials and told them they were breaking the law. State officials disagreed. No one took action, she said. In 2022, she wrote to the Office of Special Education Programs. In the letter she sent to the federal department, she said the Idaho Department of Education, under former superintendent Sherri Ybarra, was “refusing to entertain any conversations” about changing the way it determined which students were eligible for special education. Ybarra could not be reached for comment.

Before Congress passed what is now known as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975 and created the U.S. Department of Education as an agency under the Cabinet about five years later, Brittain would have been on her own.

At the time, nearly 1.8 million students with disabilities weren’t being served by the public schools, according to estimates. Some states had laws prohibiting students with certain disabilities from attending public schools, according to the federal government’s own history.

The law granted students with disabilities access to a “free appropriate public education” — fitting the individual needs of the student — and gave money to states to fulfill the promise. Now, the law also guarantees infants and toddlers with disabilities access to early interventions, such as physical or speech therapy.

The U.S. Department of Education has since been responsible for making sure states follow the law, providing reviews of state performance, distributing money and offering technical assistance to help states improve learning outcomes for students in special education.

The department conducts an annual review of each state, and a more intensive one that’s supposed to be completed roughly every five years. The annual reviews look at discipline numbers, graduation rates and test scores to identify problems and help states to fix them. A five-year review includes a visit to the state and a look at state policies, student data and annual reports. When states need to take corrective action, the federal special education office monitors that they are making the changes.

Idaho is one of about a dozen states currently being monitored, according to the most recent updates on the federal agency’s website.

We’re at the table time and time again, at the eligibility table, where school teams wouldn’t qualify our dyslexic students. And it was like, ‘What is going on?’

—Robin Zikmund, founder of Decoding Dyslexia Idaho

Parent complaints can also trigger a review, as was the case with Brittain in Idaho. After Brittain alleged that the state was wrongfully keeping kids with dyslexia and other disabilities from special education, she waited over a year before she got an answer from the Office of Special Education Programs: She was right. Idaho, it turned out, accepted a lower percentage of students with specific learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, into special education compared to other states — about half the national average, according to the most recent data reported to the U.S. Department of Education from the 2022-2023 school year.

By then, Idaho had a new state superintendent of public instruction, Critchfield, for whom Brittain campaigned. The Office of Special Education Programs told Critchfield in 2023 that the state needed to demonstrate its policies complied with federal law or update them.

In response, the Idaho Department of Education has updated its special education manual, which has since been approved by the Legislature. It has also directed school districts to review every student found ineligible for special education since 2023 to determine if they needed to be reevaluated.

Parents in Idaho celebrated the victory, which could make it easier for some kids to qualify in a state that has one of the lowest percentages of students who receive special education. But they acknowledged the fix wasn’t perfect and left out students who may have been found ineligible for special education before the federal office identified the problem. The state isn’t tracking the number of students who have since qualified due to the change.

Nicole Fuller, a policy manager at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, said a case like this, in which some students are being missed, “truly underscores the need for federal oversight, and, of course, holding states accountable for accurately identifying disabilities.”

Federal oversight isn’t perfect. By the time Idaho addressed Brittain’s complaint, the state had been out of compliance since at least 2015. States that fall out of compliance can be at risk of losing federal funding, although that penalty does not appear to have been used in decades.

The federal government has never fulfilled its promise to fund 40% of each state’s special education costs, but Idaho relied on federal funding for about 18% — around $60 million — of its special education budget during the 2022-2023 school year, state officials said. The rest is made up by the state or by local school districts through referendums. A recent report by an independent Idaho state office estimated special education was underfunded by more than $80 million in 2023.

But U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon, appointed by Trump in March, has said that closing the department wouldn’t mean “cutting off funds from those who depend on them” but would eliminate the “bureaucracy” and regulations associated with them.

Critchfield, Idaho’s superintendent, said on Idaho-based The Ranch Podcast that teachers involved in special education spend a lot of time filling out paperwork instead of “focusing on how to help that child be successful.” The changes are about “removing the bureaucracy.”

But Critchfield acknowledged that cuts at the federal level could pose challenges if states have to take on more of an oversight role.

“As much as I am a champion of states doing that, the reality is there would be implications for Idaho and our department,” she said in a statement to the Statesman and ProPublica. The state is looking at what it can do to prepare and “where gaps would exist” should more responsibilities fall to the states.

Zikmund, the advocate who praised Critchfield for being responsive to parents and having an “open-door policy,” said that parents could be better off after the changes with good leadership at the state level, but without it, they could face a “train wreck.”

One test will come in June, when the Office of Special Education Programs is expected to release reports telling states how they performed in their annual reviews. The layoffs and restructuring under Trump are making some advocates question if the federal government will truly hold states to account.

by Anjeanette Damon and Mollie Simon

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

Ronald Carver was skeptical when his investment adviser first tried to sell him on an “ugly houses” investment opportunity eight years ago. But once the Texas retiree heard the details, it seemed like a no-lose situation.

Carver would lend money to Charles Carrier, owner of Dallas-based C&C Residential Properties, a high-producing franchise in the HomeVestors of America house-flipping chain known for its ubiquitous “We Buy Ugly Houses” advertisements. The business would then use the dollars to purchase properties in which Carver would receive an ownership stake securing his investment and an annual return of 9%, paid in monthly installments.

“Worst case, I would end up with a property worth more than what the loan was,” Carver said of the pitch.

Carver started with a $115,000 loan in 2017. And sure enough, the interest payments arrived each month.

He had worked three decades at a nuclear power plant, and retired without a pension and before he could collect Social Security. He and his wife lived off the investment income.

The deal seemed so good, Carver talked his elderly father into investing, starting with $50,000. As the monthly checks arrived as promised, both men increased their investments. By 2024, Carver estimates they had about $700,000 invested with Carrier.

Then, last fall, the checks stopped. The money Carver and his father had invested was gone.

Carrier is accused of orchestrating a yearslong Ponzi scheme, bilking tens of millions of dollars from scores of investors, according to multiple lawsuits and interviews with people who said they lost money. The financial wreckage is strewn across Texas, having swept up both wealthy investors and older people with modest incomes who dug into retirement savings on the advice of the same investment advisor used by Carver.

As early as 2020, Carrier had begun taking out multiple loans on individual properties — some of which he never owned. In cases reviewed by ProPublica, as many as five notes were recorded against a single property, far exceeding the property’s value. Carrier also failed to properly record many deeds that were supposed to secure the loans, accumulating more debt than he could ever repay while investors remained unaware they had no collateral for their investments.

“It’s incalculable the amount of damage this guy did,” said one investor who lost about $1 million and asked not to be named to avoid embarrassment and not to interfere with a criminal investigation into Carrier’s scheme. “He’s ruined some lives.”

Carrier, who declined an interview request, said in a brief phone conversation that he’s not trying to avoid responsibility for the harm he caused. “When this thing finally stopped, it was completely driven by me saying ‘enough’ and going to the people and saying, ‘Here’s the mess I’ve created,’” he said. “This is a mess created by me.”

Investors also blame HomeVestors. For nearly two decades, Carrier used the company’s carefully cultivated brand as the “largest homebuyer in the United States” to gain investors’ trust. They accuse HomeVestors of failing to provide oversight that could have prevented the fraud, despite claiming to hold its franchises accountable for best business practices. In its answers to their lawsuits, HomeVestors has denied responsibility for Carrier’s actions, claiming its franchises are independently operated, despite earning hundreds of thousands of dollars from Carrier’s business.

HomeVestors revoked Carrier’s franchise on Oct. 24, about the time interest payments stopped arriving in investors’ accounts. The company said it had received a tip on its ethics hotline — created in 2023, after ProPublica detailed predatory buying practices by multiple franchises. When confronted by HomeVestors, Carrier admitted that “he and his business had entered into debts that they could not pay,” a HomeVestors spokesperson said. The company reported him to the FBI. In May, HomeVestors filed suit against Carrier for trademark infringement and for not indemnifying it against these lawsuits.

“We take all allegations of misconduct incredibly seriously as demonstrated by our decisive action,” the spokesperson said. “It is truly disheartening for us that anyone who lent Mr. Carrier money was misled or harmed by his alleged fraudulent activity.”

Now, Carrier is under investigation by the Department of Justice, according to a recording of an April call between the lead prosecutor and potential victims. (The FBI and DOJ declined to comment.) A judge in one of the many lawsuits against Carrier has deemed allegations of fraudulent loans to be true because Carrier never answered the complaint. And the investors are in a race with one another to recoup even a small amount of what they lost, by either waiting for the DOJ to pay restitution, suing Carrier or trying to foreclose on properties still left in his portfolio.

Just months after learning they had lost all of their investments, and before any restitution could be paid, Carver’s father died.

Five notes for a property on Glen Forest Lane in Dallas given to investors between 2019 and 2023. Two of the notes were not recorded until 2024. (Obtained, collaged and highlighted by ProPublica) A Top-Performing Franchise

In 2005, Carrier opened a HomeVestors franchise in Dallas, where HomeVestors is headquartered. In the early days, records show, he relied on a handful of institutional lenders to finance his house purchases. Soon, the Wharton School of Business MBA who had come to house-flipping following a career at Pepsi and a food service equipment company, started cultivating his wealthy friends for loans.

Carrier didn’t fit any stereotype of a glad-handing huckster with a bad loan to sell. Those who knew him describe him as a serious person, “cordial but very direct.” He always had files in front of him, constantly focusing on his business. It made him seem trustworthy, one investor said.

At HomeVestors, he was held up as a model franchise operator. C&C Residential Properties routinely made the top volume and top closer lists and was even named franchise of the year. Carrier led training sessions at company conferences and described his business as “the largest and most successful HomeVestors franchise in the United States” — a claim that remained on the website for Carrier’s business through early May.

“Chas Carrier, for maybe 15 years, was one of the golden boys at HomeVestors,” said Ben Ahern, who over two decades worked for a HomeVestors franchise and later owned one before leaving the company in 2021. “Internally, it was like, ‘Do whatever Chas Carrier’s doing.’”

It isn’t unusual for HomeVestors franchises to rely on private investors to finance their house-flipping. Banks aren’t typically interested in house-flipping loans, which are often short-term and riskier than a standard mortgage. Because of that risk, investors who lend to house-flippers earn a substantially higher return.

To further minimize their risk and ensure they had a legitimate ownership stake in the house, savvy investors would verify the transaction with an independent title company to research whether there were other liens against the property and then record the deed with the county recorder. But many of Carrier’s investors, after years of consistent payments led them to trust him, let Carrier handle recording the deeds and did not confirm that he’d done so.

As Carrier grew his business, he began relying more on individual investors. ProPublica identified through public records at least 124 people who have lent money to Carrier since 2009. Not all of them have lost money.

Carrier’s search for new investors was aided by Robert Welborn, an investment adviser in Granbury, Texas, southwest of Dallas. Welborn had built a network of clients in Granbury, a city of about 12,000 people on the Brazos River, through church, friendships and referrals. Many of his clients were older and had modest nest eggs, which Welborn said were “well diversified.” He said he built a relationship with Carrier in 2012, after researching his background for about two months. That Carrier was a successful franchisee lent him credibility, Welborn said.

“I never imagined the No. 1 franchisee with a fast-growing franchise company, HomeVestors,” would defraud investors, he said.

At the time, Welborn also solicited new investors with invitations to steak dinners where they would hear his pitch. An investment in Carrier’s business, according to Welborn’s sales material, which also featured the HomeVestors caveman mascot, Ug, was both lucrative and secure. “Your investment is protected,” the sales material assured potential clients.

For loans he sent Carrier’s way, Welborn earned a 2% commission, he said. Welborn had at least two dozen clients who invested with Carrier, most of whom had multiple loans to him, according to a public records search. He would not comment on how many of his clients invested with Carrier.

Many investors were happy for years — in some cases, more than a decade. The interest payments came in like clockwork. A lot of Welborns’ clients relied on the payments for retirement income.

“I was real tickled with it,” said Tom Walls, 85, who said he lost $50,000 of his retirement savings by investing with Carrier.

Some investors noticed small problems — a payment that arrived a few days late or an error on the paperwork to secure the loan. But Carrier always fixed the problems promptly, investors said.

“When you have this 10-year continuous, pleasant and mutually beneficial relationship, you build up a great deal of trust,” said John Moses, who estimates he lost more than $1 million to Carrier.

Looking back, the investors who spoke with ProPublica said they wished they had taken those warning signs more seriously.

(Max Erwin for ProPublica) “He Just Pencil Whipped Those Deeds”

By fall 2024, Carrier’s payments to his lenders stopped. That’s when the house of cards fell.

Carrier had spent that summer scrambling for money. Not only did Carrier have to make loan payments to scores of investors, but he also needed to keep up with the HomeVestors franchise fees and advertising payments. The company requires its franchises to make regular reports on sales and to open their books for audits, to provide financial statements when requested, and to report all assets and liabilities. Any of those reports could have called into question Carrier’s ability to stay solvent. But, according to former franchise owners and employees, HomeVestors’ audits of its franchises are mostly geared toward ensuring they’re paying all their franchise fees, which are based on sales.

Before Carrier’s tangle of fraudulent loans collapsed and was exposed in court, there were signs of trouble.

In 2016, Carrier was fined by the Texas Real Estate Commission for managing properties without a license. The HomeVestors franchise agreement requires owners to follow all laws and regulations, particularly real estate regulations. In 2020, two title insurance companies issued special alerts on Carrier’s business, advising their title officers not to enter into transactions with him without further legal and underwriting review. Carrier hasn’t paid taxes on some of his properties since early 2023, according to court and public records, another violation of his franchise agreement. Despite the apparent violations, HomeVestors didn’t terminate Carrier’s franchise agreement.

“I don’t really think they do have much in place to prevent something like this,” Ahern, the former HomeVestors franchise owner, said of the company. “HomeVestors at the time didn’t seem to have an internal system policing how franchises finance buying properties.”

A HomeVestors spokesperson said the company focuses on its franchise customers’ experiences selling their homes and does not “dictate” how franchises raise capital. “The more than 950 franchises of HomeVestors are independent businesses with a wide variety of finance options available to them,” the spokesperson said.

Last spring, Carrier began borrowing against his future receipts in exchange for cash advances with exorbitant fees and annualized interest rates that he later claimed ranged as high as 600%. Between May and October, he did this at least seven times, racking up more than $1.2 million in debt beyond what he owed his investors, exhibits included with court filings show. By fall, he owed more than $75,000 in payments a week, according to the original terms. Seven companies filed suit over the cash-advance agreements, accusing him of default. Carrier has denied the allegations of default and has countersued four of the companies, claiming he was charged unreasonably high interest rates.

The lending scheme appears to have fallen in a gray area for state and federal securities regulations. It’s unclear whether the promissory notes Carrier issued to investors meet the definition of a security, two experts told ProPublica.

In October, Carrier’s investors began to confront him about the missing payments, including Jeff Daly and Steve Needham, two of Carrier’s largest investors who had been lending him money for years. Carrier came clean to Daly, admitting he had been running a lending scheme for “several” years, according to a lawsuit Daly and Needham filed. He told Needham he had taken out multiple loans on individual properties without disclosing them to the investors, according to the lawsuit. The two men claimed in their lawsuit, which resulted in default judgments against Carrier, that combined they had lost $13.5 million to Carrier.

The investor who spoke to ProPublica and asked not to be named said in an interview that Carrier broke down in tears when confronted about losing more than $1 million of the investor’s money. Carrier admitted the loans paid for his operating expenses, not for buying and refurbishing houses, the investor said.

“He just pencil whipped those deeds at the end,” the investor said, explaining that Carrier drew up documents but didn’t record them. Because the deeds were never recorded, the investor had no lien on the properties and therefore no collateral. Some deeds were for houses that Carrier didn’t own or never bought, the investor said. “It was a complete fabrication.”

Welborn’s clients, who typically invested much smaller amounts with Carrier, also learned of the house-flipper’s collapse in the fall, when their payments stopped. Carver said that Welborn called him a couple of days after the October payment was due and said, “Hey, I’m sorry to tell you this, but Chas has called me and admitted to fraud.”

Carver said he got in the car and drove to Welborn’s office, where he learned the nightmarish truth that all the money Carrier had taken was gone.

“A Life-Changing Hit”

Investors are deploying a variety of strategies to get their money back — some of which pit bigger investors against smaller ones and early investors against more recent ones. Those who acted quickly are recovering some money through foreclosures and lawsuit settlements. Although Carrier is denying allegations in lawsuits brought by the cash-advance companies, he’s not fighting individual investors who are suing him. Three of their lawsuits have resulted in judgments against Carrier, and he has so far not defended himself against the others.

Welborn said he’s doing his best to help his clients recover their money by providing the necessary paperwork, connecting them with buyers for the houses used as collateral and researching lien histories on the homes. When he first learned of the scheme, Welborn tried to convince his clients to sign on with his lawyer to sue Carrier. The lawyer, Anthony Cuesta, hoped a court would seize Carrier’s assets to help recover the investors’ lost funds. But he quickly learned there were too many investors and not enough equity in the properties to fund the litigation. Now, many of Welborn’s clients are waiting for the FBI and DOJ to act, while wealthier investors are foreclosing on properties and making them ineligible to be used for restitution. Welborn said some of his clients have been paid restitution through a DOJ-appointed real estate agent’s sale of Carrier’s properties, but he declined to provide details.

Carver isn’t optimistic: “We are not going to get a dime.”

At least one investor went after Welborn individually. According to a Securities and Exchange Commission disclosure, the claim was settled for $130,000. In his response to the SEC disclosure, Welborn denied breaching fiduciary duty to the client and said he “resolved the claim to avoid controversy.” Welborn told ProPublica that $120,000 of the settlement came from the sale of the house used as collateral for the family’s loan and he paid $10,000 for their attorney fees.

Welborn said he’s “devastated” by the loss of his clients’ money. “But every day I drag myself to work with God’s help and spend most of my day helping lenders with their own personal restitution battles,” he said.

Some investors said they will have to go back to work after having retired or are scrambling to find some way to replace their lost income.

Carver wishes he had paid more attention to red flags, like paperwork errors. But the monthly checks were so reliable, he didn’t listen to his gut. Or his wife.

“Every time I added money, my wife would say, ‘Don’t do it,’” Carver said. “My mother, too. She would push on my dad not to add any more. But he liked getting the monthly check.”

Carver’s dad, Larry, believed it was the best performing investment he had ever made. When the money disappeared, Carver went to work trying to recoup some of it. Maybe he could write it off on his taxes, he thought. He wanted to get at least something back for his dad. But Larry was in ill health, and in February, he died.

“My dad passed thinking he lost all of his money to this guy,” Carver said, adding he hopes Carrier “goes to jail for a very long time.”

The investor who asked not to be named said the loss was “a life-changing hit.” He had retired at 53, after sticking it out in a job he hated until his stock options vested. When he finally quit, he put the money into Carrier’s business and lived off of the monthly payments. He may have to go back to work.

“He was an arrogant son of a bitch,” the investor said. “It was gone before he told anyone there was a problem. That’s the unforgivable piece. He squandered it all away. And he had to get backed into a corner before he admitted it was all gone.”

Byard Duncan contributed reporting.

by Tony Schick and Monica Samayoa, Oregon Public Broadcasting

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

On Feb. 17, Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek released a video assuring Oregonians that Donald Trump would not derail the progressive state’s efforts to combat climate change.

As promised during his presidential campaign, Trump had issued executive orders during his first week in office aimed at halting new sources of wind power and freezing Biden-era funding for renewable energy.

Oregon, Kotek said, had been “leading the way for years on courageous state policies to fight climate change.” Along with neighboring Washington state, Oregon has set an ambitious mandate for electric utilities to be carbon neutral within the next two decades.

“It’s going to take all of us working together finding innovative solutions, no matter the obstacles, to confront the climate crisis,” the governor said, “and we are not turning back.”

But the reality is not nearly as inspiring as Kotek made it sound. For all their progressive claims, Oregon and Washington trail nearly all other states in adding new sources of renewable energy. Iowa, a Republican-led state with roughly the same population and usable volume of wind as Oregon, has built enough wind farms to generate three times as much wind power.

What’s held the Northwest back is a bottleneck Oregon and Washington leaders paid little attention to when they set out to go 100% green, an investigation by ProPublica and Oregon Public Broadcasting found: The region lacks the wiring to deliver new sources of renewable energy to people’s homes, and little has been done to change that.

Northwest leaders left it to a federal agency known as the Bonneville Power Administration to arrange badly needed upgrades to an electrical grid that’s nearly a century old in places.

Bonneville, under a setup that is unique to the Northwest, owns most of the power lines needed to carry green power from the region’s sunny and windy high desert to its major population centers. Bonneville has no state or local representation within its federally appointed bureaucracy and, by statute, operates as a self-funded business.

The agency decides which energy projects can hook up based on whether its infrastructure can handle the extra load, and it decides how quickly that infrastructure gets expanded. Its glacial pace has delayed wind and solar projects under Democratic and Republican presidents alike.

Of the 469 large renewable projects that applied to connect to Bonneville’s grid since 2015, only one has reached approval. Those are longer odds than in any other region of the country, the news organizations found. No major grid operator is as stingy as Bonneville in its approach to financing new transmission lines and substations needed to grow the power supply, according to industry groups that represent power producers.

Efforts to bypass Bonneville didn’t start until this year, when Oregon and Washington legislators considered bills to create their own state bonding authorities for upgrading the region’s high-voltage network.

Both bills died.

Washington and Oregon Trail the Nation in Renewable Growth

Changes in states’ average annual production of power from wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal between the decades of 2005-2014 and 2015-2024

(Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration)

The grid’s severe constraints are hindering the Northwest at a time when it desperately needs more electricity. Oregon and Washington lawmakers lured power-guzzling data centers with tax breaks in recent years, and the industry has helped drive electricity demand sky high.

Having failed to add enough green-energy sources or any new gas-fired power, the Northwest buys electricity from elsewhere, at high prices, during extreme weather. Rates paid by customers of major Oregon utilities are now 50% higher than five years ago. The worsening energy shortage threatens millions of residents with continual rate hikes and sporadic power outages — not to mention dashing the Northwest’s hopes of drastically reducing its contribution to climate change.

“The people who, technically speaking, are in charge of our transmission system are dropping the ball,” said Oregon state Rep. Mark Gamba, a Democrat who sponsored this year’s failed legislation aimed at creating a state grid improvement authority. “We are absolutely looking at rolling blackouts, and we are absolutely looking at not hitting any of our climate targets when it comes to energy production.”

Kotek declined an interview request. Kotek spokesperson Anca Matica said in a statement that the governor is “open to innovative ideas to increase transmission capacity” and labeled it key to achieving the state’s energy goals. She offered no direct response to questions about Oregon’s lack of progress in boosting renewables.

While Washington and Oregon generate a lot of hydro power, their numbers have trended down over the last decade …

Hydroelectric generation by state

… and they’ve added new sources of renewables, such as wind and solar, much more slowly than other states.

Renewable energy net generation by state, excluding hydro

(Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration)

Reuven Carlyle, the former state senator who crafted Washington’s 2019 decarbonization bill, said he was “deeply cognizant” of the region’s transmission challenges at the time but that plans to address the problem “simply slipped.”

“It’s certainly nothing to be proud of that it didn’t get resolved,” said Carlyle, who founded a consulting firm for climate-focused investments after leaving the Legislature. “And it’s embarrassing that Oregon and Washington, which are such good-looking states, simply can’t practically build anything in terms of energy.”

In the final months of the Biden administration, Bonneville announced a plan to do some grid upgrades, and agency Administrator John Hairston has said the self-funded federal agency is investing in transmission as much as it can without taking on too much debt.

Bonneville responded to written questions from OPB and ProPublica by citing recent improvements to its process for connecting energy projects and noting that it’s not the only player responsible for growing the grid. The agency added that it “remains committed to its critical mission of supporting the region with affordable, reliable and secure power.”

But Bonneville’s latest plans for the grid are in jeopardy. In addition to suspending all new federal wind permits, the Trump White House has added Bonneville to the long list of agencies cutting federal jobs. Three Bonneville employees, requesting anonymity for fear of retribution, said the cuts will make building out the transmission system even harder.

With four years of Joe Biden’s climate activism in the rearview mirror, the Pacific Northwest appears to have blown its best chance to realize its ambitions for renewable power.

Projects in Limbo

David Brown is a case study in the long and agonizing path to breaking ground on a Northwest solar farm.

The Portland energy developer has been in the renewables business since 2003, and his firm, Obsidian Renewables, has a plan to put a vast array of solar panels on a piece of southern Oregon high desert that’s the size of 3,000 football fields. Brown said it’s expected to produce enough energy for about 110,000 homes.

Obsidian will handle everything from acquiring the land to getting permits approved, then look to sell the solar farm to an investor or utility once it’s ready for construction.

But any power plant, whether fueled by coal, wind or sunshine, has to be wired into the electrical grid: a system of transmission lines and transformers that pools electricity and channels it to customers. While power lines crisscross the nation, power mainly gets used within the region that generates it.

As in most parts of the Northwest, the nearest transmission lines Brown could plug into belong to Bonneville. He asked the agency for permission to connect his solar farm to its system in 2020. He doesn’t expect approval until at least 2028.

“I don’t know a single place in Oregon or Washington where I can connect a new solar project and get transmission. Not one,” he said.

One part of the holdup is that Bonneville needs to finish studying what kind of substation it will need to safely let a big new power source into the grid.

Brown’s 400-megawatt solar farm has been through three such “interconnection” studies so far. The first time, Bonneville estimated Brown’s business would need to pay $23 million to build a substation, which Bonneville would own. The second study bumped the price to $70 million. By the third, Brown said, it was $212 million. He said the agency blamed supply chain and labor issues, in part, for the near-tripling in cost over four years.

David Brown’s company, Obsidian Renewables, has proposed to build one of the state’s largest solar farms but has been waiting for five years for Bonneville Power Administration’s approval. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

There are hundreds of projects like Brown’s: more than 200,000 megawatts worth of renewable energy awaiting Bonneville’s signoff, or enough to power the Northwest nearly 10 times over. One proposed wind farm has been in Bonneville’s queue for more than 16 years.

Among projects 20 megawatts or bigger that were proposed in the past decade, the only one that made it through Bonneville’s waitlist was an add-on to an existing Portland General Electric wind farm that didn’t require any major transmission upgrades. It won approval in 2022.

The Northwest is not the only region with a backlog of projects waiting to plug in. Grid operators across the country have navigated a deluge of new wind, solar and mass-storage battery requests in recent years. Many applicants proved to be merely testing the waters, with nearly 3 in 4 ultimately pulling their plans, according to Joseph Rand, an energy researcher at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

But other regions managed to sort out problems better than the Northwest, OPB and ProPublica found.

The news organizations used data from Bonneville and from a national database compiled by researchers at the Berkeley Lab to analyze how many large renewable energy projects waiting for grid connections made it to the finish line.

The data showed that for large projects proposed since 2015, Bonneville’s one approval translates to a success rate of 0.2%, the lowest rate of any region. By contrast, about 10% of new applications for major projects in the Midwest and 28% in Texas made it through.

Bonneville has said one reason for the slow progress is that its waitlist is jammed up with too many “speculative” projects — more dream than financial reality. (There’s no evidence that Bonneville has it worse, though; data shows that the share of developers who back out after seeking Bonneville’s approval, 76%, is close to the national average.)

Renewable advocates and energy developers say Bonneville struggles to hire and retain people to process connection requests because the agency pays less than the private sector. In January, Washington U.S. Reps. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez, a Democrat, and Dan Newhouse, a Republican, introduced a bill to make Bonneville’s compensation more competitive, but it hasn’t moved since.

To speed things up, Bonneville has halted new requests for grid connections and changed its approach to reviewing applications. Where specialists used to review proposals one at a time, in the order received, they now plan to prioritize projects that are closest to ready. The agency said the new approach will increase the number of projects that get connected while cutting processing time in half, from an expected 15 years.

Bonneville said in a statement that it is “confident the interconnection reforms we adopted” will prove “sufficient to meet our customers’ needs.”

The changes have not yet helped Brown, who has been awaiting Bonneville’s approval to start work in southern Oregon since 2020. For now, the planned solar project remains in limbo.

“It’s gonna take me years and a couple million dollars to get land use approval,” Brown said, “and why do I want to get land use approval if I don’t know whether or not I have transmission?”

“There’s No Room for Your Project”

The predicament Brown and dozens of other wind and solar developers face is a product of the Northwest’s unusual history with electric power.

Oregon and Washington were blessed with powerful rivers fed by abundant snow and rainfall. Beginning in the New Deal era, the federal government built dozens of hydroelectric dams and a sprawling transmission system to electrify the rural West. The region’s energy supply was cheaper and emitted less carbon than the rest of the nation’s. Bonneville was at the helm.

Even today, hydropower supplies almost 35% of Oregon’s electricity and more than 50% of Washington’s, according to the most recent data available.

But hydroelectric dams are a finite and increasingly shaky power source. Output from existing dams dips whenever droughts sap water from the Columbia River basin. New dams are a nonstarter because dams have decimated the region’s salmon populations.

That leaves wind, solar and battery storage as the most promising places for the Northwest to turn as it approaches self-imposed deadlines to fully wean utilities off electricity that comes from oil, coal or gas.

Bonneville has now become a barrier to accommodating the new power sources, six green energy developers told OPB and ProPublica.

An agency that erected more than 4,800 miles of high-voltage transmission lines from 1960 to 1990 built fewer than 500 miles from 1990 to 2020. In the past five years, it built 1.

Bonneville has the ability to borrow money, at low interest rates, for projects that would enable the grid to carry more power. Congress pushed the agency to do so in 2021, more than doubling Bonneville’s debt limit specifically to finance transmission upgrades.

The chairs of the Oregon and Washington public utility commissions, in a joint 2022 letter, urged Bonneville to spend the money: “The region needs BPA to be a leader in delivering a transmission system that serves the entire region.”

Bonneville, however, has been reluctant to take on debt. It is still paying off billions of dollars in bonds from failed nuclear plants in the 1970s. As recently as 2019, the agency’s finances were so poor that some economists expected it to become insolvent.

Bonneville’s transmission planners, for their part, have told OPB and ProPublica in previous interviews that they want to avoid building expensive transmission lines that no one ends up using.

“We can’t speculate and build a transmission line to nowhere,” Jeff Cook, the agency’s vice president for transmission planning, said in May 2024.

First image: Contractors repair a transformer box in Portland, Oregon. Second image: Solar panels on the Wheatridge farm, the only project Bonneville approved out of the hundreds that applied for a grid connection in the past decade. (Kristyna Wentz-Graff/Oregon Public Broadcasting)

When Bonneville announced in the fall it would tap some of its expanded debt limit to help pay for $5 billion in transmission upgrades over a decade, renewable energy advocates characterized the work as long overdue maintenance that wouldn’t provide the expansion the grid needs.

Most of the work Bonneville announced was “the equivalent of fixing potholes, installing some new round-abouts, doing some repaving,” Spencer Gray, executive director of the Northwest & Intermountain Power Producers Coalition, said in an email.

A further frustration for wind and solar developers that is unique to Bonneville: The grid operator makes them absorb an outsize share of the cost for projects that help the transmission network accommodate their electricity — and it requires a big deposit up front. That’s true even if the new power lines benefit a wide network and will be around for many generations of customers.

“Lately, the answer to these individual developers has been, ‘There’s no room for your project. If you want to put this project on our system, it’s going to cost you this many millions of dollars to help us upgrade the system,’” said Sarah Edmonds, president of a coalition of utilities known as the Western Power Pool.

The approach, Edmonds said, has had “a chilling effect on the ability of developers to get their projects online.”

Michelle Manary, Bonneville’s vice president of transmission marketing and sales, said requiring up-front deposits keeps existing ratepayers from getting stuck with the tab if a developer backs out and that Bonneville has begun work on a transmission upgrade. She said other regions have more control over who pays these costs because their entire distribution networks are under one operator. Bonneville’s transmission lines are more like highways, from which electric utilities serve as exit ramps that deliver power the last mile to Northwest neighborhoods.

Manary denied that Bonneville’s current way of allocating costs has stifled green energy projects. But she acknowledged the agency needs to reevaluate its policy amid the flood of applications for new projects, and she said that process is underway.

“Texas Is Kicking Our Ass”

The rest of the nation has taken a different approach to bringing green power online — with better outcomes.

In most parts of the country, each grid has a central, independent operator, known as a regional transmission organization, typically run by a board that represents customers, electric utilities and other groups. Bonneville recently rejected joining a California-based energy market that advocates described as the Northwest’s best bet at accelerating the adoption of renewables.

In Texas, which runs its own grid, large renewable projects applying to connect in the past decade took a median of 19 months to get the green light, or nearly two years less than the one project Bonneville approved in that time frame. California and the Midwest were also faster than Bonneville.

Texas doesn’t require project-by-project grid upgrades the way other grid operators do. It essentially tells developers it will connect their project, and then it figures out how to balance the added electricity after the fact.

Texas and other regional grid operators spend billions more than Bonneville on transmission upgrades annually, and they spread the costs across a wider swath of customers than Bonneville does. (Bonneville says the federal agency differs so much from regional operators that they’re not a fair comparison group.)

Texas brought more energy online in the past two years than any other power region. That’s helped the oil and gas powerhouse become the country’s biggest producer of wind and solar energy. Last year alone it added more than enough renewable energy to power the entire Northwest.

“Texas is kicking our ass,” said Gamba, the Oregon state representative.

Oil well pumps and wind turbines in Lamesa, Texas, in February (Julio Cortez/AP)

Northwest lawmakers were told that they’d need to find effective ways of confronting their region’s aging transmission system if they wished to phase out coal and natural gas.

As Washington lawmakers debated a mandate for renewable power in 2019, Nicholas Garcia of the Washington Public Utility Districts Association testified that replacing coal plants with wind and solar would require “more transmission, significantly more transmission.”

In 2021, when Oregon lawmakers debated their own mandate for carbon-free energy, Republicans also raised concerns that the state’s transmission lines were maxed out. It became one more GOP argument against the bill, in addition to saying more should be done to ensure green energy projects were built in Oregon.

Numerous reports — from the Oregon and U.S. departments of energy, for example — supported the assertion that heftier transmission lines were needed.

Bonneville would be key to meeting that need, with one utilities lobbyist calling Bonneville’s grid “the backbone for decarbonization” in testimony to Oregon lawmakers.

But Oregon state Rep. Pam Marsh, who led the 2021 effort, said in a recent interview she was focused on getting utilities to cut their carbon emissions and that green energy advocates weren’t demanding transmission improvements at the time.

“I was not thinking personally about the role that Bonneville might play in this,” said Marsh, a Democrat representing southern Oregon.

Washington’s Legislature took some action on the need for better transmission: It required the state to study the issue. The resulting 2022 report concluded that the grid was indeed inadequate but led to little in the way of solutions. Instead, lawmakers decided to require utilities to plan out transmission needs 20 years ahead rather than 10, and they created a statewide environmental review in hopes of streamlining the state’s approval process for transmission. It did nothing about impediments posed by Bonneville.

The Legislature was “a little complacent” about relying on Bonneville to upgrade the grid, said Sen. Sharon Shewmake, a freshman lawmaker in 2019 when Washington enacted its energy mandate.

Shewmake and Gamba both introduced legislation this year following states like Colorado, New Mexico, North Dakota and Wyoming in creating independent authorities to finance transmission infrastructure. Gamba said he led an 80-person group of interested parties through 18 months of drafting. Democratic Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson labeled Shewmake’s bill a priority.

The legislation didn’t make it through either state’s Democrat-controlled legislatures, however.

Brown, the energy developer who’s been awaiting Bonneville’s solar approval since 2020, said the future of the Northwest’s energy dreams looks dim.

“We don’t have a prayer of meeting our heralded, flag-waving renewable energy goals,” he said. “The dialogue will be to blame Trump; it won’t be to blame ourselves for poor planning and extremely low expectations.”

Ellis Simani assisted with data analysis.

by Christopher Bing and Avi Asher-Schapiro

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

The ranking member of the House Oversight Committee is launching an investigation into whether the General Services Administration has given preferential treatment to a technology startup competing for a lucrative government contract. The startup is backed by some of President Donald Trump’s most influential Silicon Valley allies.

The committee’s action follows reporting by ProPublica last month that revealed the GSA was eyeing New York-based payments company Ramp to remake a massive, $700 billion federal credit card program known as SmartPay. Our reporting showed that senior GSA officials met with Ramp executives at least four times before publicly opening up a SmartPay contract opportunity.

Ethics experts flagged the early meetings as unusual and potentially problematic. Insiders at the GSA told ProPublica that, internally, Ramp was seen as the clear favorite for an initial $25 million pilot contract, which could act as an introduction to larger SmartPay work. The contract for the pilot program hasn’t been awarded yet.

A letter sent Friday to the GSA by Rep. Gerald Connolly, D-Va., and reviewed by ProPublica says Democrats on the committee want information about the GSA’s dealings with “Ramp, a company with zero federal contracting experience that is backed by prominent Trump supporters, Trump family connections, and allies of Elon Musk.”

Connolly’s letter demands an array of GSA documents, including “all communications between any GSA official, contractor or subcontractor and any representative of Ramp.”

Ramp did not respond to a request for comment about the investigation.

The GSA did not respond to questions Friday. Asked about Ramp for a previous article, a GSA spokesperson told ProPublica that the agency “refutes any suggestion of unfair or preferential contracting practices” and that the “credit card reform initiative has been well known to the public in an effort to address waste, fraud, and abuse.”

SmartPay, which provides Visa and Mastercard charge cards to government employees, enables the federal workforce to purchase office supplies and equipment, book travel and pay for gas. The cards typically are used for purchases up to $10,000.

Sources within the GSA say Trump appointees at the agency, including acting Administrator Stephen Ehikian and Commissioner Josh Gruenbaum, the nation’s top procurement officer, came into their roles saying SmartPay and other government payment programs were rife with fraud or waste.

Yet both GOP and Democratic budget experts call this view inaccurate, saying SmartPay has implemented effective safeguards and monitoring tools.

SmartPay has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars in fees for the financial institutions that currently operate it, U.S. Bank and Citibank. The GSA will decide by year’s end whether to extend SmartPay with the current contract or to remake the program more fundamentally.

Ramp’s investors include some of Silicon Valley’s most powerful figures, such as Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist who provided crucial early support to Trump and spent millions on Vice President JD Vance’s Ohio Senate run. Other major backers include Keith Rabois of Khosla Ventures, who sits on Ramp’s board; Thrive Capital, founded by Joshua Kushner, the brother of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; and 8VC, a firm run by Musk and Trump allies.

In late April, as the GSA received a flurry of business pitches on the SmartPay pilot program, Ramp’s CEO, Eric Glyman, and Rabois appeared at a high-profile conference in Washington that brings together tech entrepreneurs, lawmakers and other senior government officials.

During a livestreamed panel titled “First Principles for a Smarter, Leaner Government,” the pair touted Ramp as a transformational solution for government payments. Later, during an interview, Rabois pointed to the fact that SmartPay issues more charge cards than there are total government employees as evidence of fraud.

But SmartPay experts say this betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how the program works. Employees are issued separate cards for different types of purchases and often hold multiple cards at once.

Rabois did not respond to questions from ProPublica on Friday. In his response for an earlier story, Rabois said he had “no involvement in any government-related initiatives for the company.”

In the oversight committee’s letter to the GSA, Connolly writes that “the Trump Administration’s false claims about the SmartPay program may be an attempt to discredit the program to provide a new, Trump-affiliated contractor with a lucrative contract.”

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.

Two years ago, Texas lawmakers quietly cut millions of dollars in funding for kits intended to help track down missing kids, after ProPublica and The Texas Tribune revealed there was no evidence they had aided law enforcement in finding lost children.

The company that made the kits had used outdated and exaggerated statistics on missing children to bolster their sales and charged for the materials when similar products were available for less or for free.

Now, some Texas legislators are again pushing to spend millions more in taxpayer dollars to purchase such kits, slipping the funding into a 1,000-page budget proposal.

Although the proposal does not designate which company would supply them, a 2021 bill introduced by Republican state Sen. Donna Campbell all but guarantees Texas will contract with the same vendor, the National Child Identification Program. Back then, Campbell made clear that her intent was to enshrine into law a long-standing partnership between the state and NCIDP that goes back more than two decades. Her legislation, signed into law that June, also specified that whenever the state allocated funding for such materials, the Texas Education Agency must purchase identification kits that are “inkless,” a technology that NCIDP has patented.

The Waco-based company is led by former NFL player Kenny Hansmire, who ProPublica and the Tribune found had a history of failed businesses and financial troubles, including millions of dollars in federal tax liens and a ban from conducting certain finance-related business in Connecticut due to his role in an alleged scheme to defraud investors.

Hansmire cultivated relationships with powerful Texas legislators who went on to support his initiatives. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, who oversees the Senate, championed Campbell’s legislation funding the kits and later told the news organizations that the state should prioritize anything that can speed up the return of a missing child. Campbell told lawmakers in a hearing that the bipartisan measure, which was brought to her by Hansmire and Patrick, was important to “protect our children.”

Patrick, Campbell and Hansmire did not respond to interview requests for this story. Hansmire previously told the newsrooms that his debts and other financial issues had been resolved. He also defended his company’s kits, saying they have helped find multiple missing children, and instructed reporters to ask “any policeman” about the kits’ usefulness. However, none of the dozen Texas law enforcement agencies that the news organizations reached — including three that Hansmire specifically named — could recall any examples.

Stacey Pearson, a child safety consultant and former Louisiana State Police sergeant who oversaw that state’s Clearinghouse for Missing and Exploited Children, said she has never seen any cases demonstrating that these kits work, including in the last two years since lawmakers discontinued the funding.

“I don’t understand why we’re going back to this,” said Pearson, who spoke with the newsrooms recently and for their previous investigation. “It wasn’t a good idea in 2023 and it’s not a good idea now.”

Despite the lack of evidence, Pearson said companies like NCIDP are able to profit off the kits by marketing them as part of a larger child safety program, a strategy that makes opposing lawmakers look as if they are against protecting children. Texas allocated nearly $6 million for the kits between 2021 and 2023.

Lawmakers did not explain their reasoning when they decided to stop paying for the kits in 2023. Republican state Sen. Joan Huffman, who chairs the high chamber’s Finance Committee, told the newsrooms at the time that both the House and the Senate had agreed to remove the funding “after review and consideration.”

During this year’s budgeting process, Democratic state Rep. Armando Martinez proposed adding $2 million to the House’s budget to provide kits to families with children in kindergarten through second grade.

Martinez did not respond to an interview request.

State Rep. Greg Bonnen, who chairs the House Appropriations Committee, did not respond to interview requests or written questions.

Bonnen was among the 33 lawmakers who voted against Campbell’s bill that established the child identification kit funding four years ago. The newsrooms attempted to reach a handful of those legislators, but none responded.

Huffman and the Senate have so far chosen not to restore the program’s funding. Huffman declined the newsrooms’ interview requests.

“The entire budget process is ongoing,” she wrote in an emailed statement. “No final decisions have been made on most issues.”

Legislators from the two chambers will continue hashing out the differences between their budget proposals in a joint committee that operates behind closed doors. There’s no guarantee that the funding will make it into the final budget, which lawmakers must pass before the legislative session ends in early June.

Pearson cautioned legislators to question whether the kits are the best use of state funding, given the absence of documented success.

“My advice would be for lawmakers to ask themselves, ‘If this was your personal money and not the taxpayers’, would you spend it on this program?’” Pearson said. “And the answer is going to be no.”

by David Armstrong

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

In the U.S., the price of Revlimid, a brand-name cancer drug, has been increasing for two decades. It now sells for nearly $1,000 a pill. In Europe, the price has been consistently lower — in some countries by two-thirds.

I started reporting on Revlimid after I was prescribed the drug following a diagnosis of multiple myeloma, an incurable blood cancer. Stunned by the high price, I found that the drugmaker, Celgene, had used Revlimid as its own personal piggy bank for more than a decade, raising the price in the U.S. whenever it saw fit.

Even with lower prices in Europe, Celgene still made a profit there, a former executive told Congress. That added to the more than $21 billion in net earnings the company made after Revlimid was introduced in 2005.

Of course, Revlimid isn’t the only drug with a price disparity. Americans pay more in general for prescription drugs than people in other wealthy countries. And costs keep going up, saddling patients with crippling debt or forcing them to choose between filling prescriptions or buying groceries. So why do we pay so much more? And is anything being done about it?

In most other wealthy countries, governments set a single price for a drug that is usually based on analysis of the therapeutic benefit of the medicine and what other countries pay. In the U.S., drug companies determine what to charge for their products with few restraints. Insurance companies can refuse to cover a drug to try to negotiate a lower price, but for some diseases like cancer, that poses a risk of public backlash. Cancer is a “very politically charged disease,” said Dr. Aaron Kesselheim, a Harvard Medical School professor who studies drug pricing and regulation. Some states also mandate that insurers cover certain cancer drugs.

Pharmaceutical companies have consistently argued that American drug prices reflect the cost of research and development. Americans may pay more, but they also benefit from having first-line access to cutting-edge treatments. (Celgene has since been acquired by Bristol Myers Squibb, which says its price for Revlimid, which it increased in the U.S. last year by 7%, “reflects the continued clinical benefit Revlimid brings to patients, along with other economic factors.”)

Dr. Hagop Kantarjian, a leukemia specialist at MD Anderson Cancer Center who studies drug pricing, said that pharmaceutical companies often overstate the cost of developing drugs and that many drug discoveries originate in hospital and academic labs funded through government grants. Funding from the U.S. National Institutes of Health contributed to all but two of the 356 drugs approved by the Food and Drug Administration from 2010 to 2019, according to a Bentley University study. Companies also don’t spend all their profits on innovation: The 14 largest drug companies in the world spent more on stock buybacks and dividend payments to investors than on research and development, according to a 2021 analysis by the U.S. House Oversight Committee.

One possible solution to bring down costs: tie American prices to what drugmakers charge in other wealthy countries. The Congressional Budget Office found last year that this would have the biggest impact on reducing costs of seven proposals it studied. It’s an idea with bipartisan support.

Sens. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., and Peter Welch, D-Vt., introduced a bill this week that would penalize pharmaceutical companies that sell their drugs at higher prices than the average of the prices in Canada, France, Germany, Japan, Italy and the United Kingdom. Companies that sell above the average would face civil penalties equal to 10 times the difference between the U.S. list price and the average price in those other countries.

President Donald Trump has advocated for similar actions. During his first term, he issued an executive order directing the Medicare program to employ a “most favored nation” approach in paying for drugs. The administration later developed a rule directing Medicare to select the lowest price from a basket of similar countries and make that the maximum amount the agency would pay for 50 drugs administered by doctors. A court blocked the rule from being implemented in the last days of the first administration.

Now, according to reports this week, the administration is pushing plans to tie Medicaid and Medicare prices to lower prices charged in other countries.

Linking U.S. prices to those in other countries is opposed by industry groups who say it would leave decisions on medications to the government rather than doctors and patients.

“Government price setting in any form is bad for American patients,” said Alex Schriver, a spokesperson for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, an industry group. He said efforts should be focused on fixing “the flaws in the U.S. system,” including money that flows to intermediaries such as pharmacy benefit managers.

Some critics also warn so-called international reference pricing can be gamed and allows foreign governments to essentially set the value of medicines sold in the U.S.

The Trump administration is expected to announce drug pricing plans as early as next week, according to a report. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.