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In a 2025 meeting, U.S. President Donald Trump held up a printed article from American Thinker while accusing South Africa President Cyril Ramaphosa of state-sanctioned violence against white farmers in South Africa. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Since he returned to office, President Donald Trump’s administration has upended foreign aid. It’s labeled well-established, long-running programs as “ not aligned with American interests ” and slashed their budgets.  Still, the billions of taxpayer dollars Congress has allocated for foreign aid programs must be spent; lawmakers have insisted the government continue to fund humanitarian aid, global health and pro-democracy causes around the world. With most of the old programs now gone, however, we wanted to know: What is the Trump administration doing with that money now? Recently, we published our investigation that found one answer to that question in a little-known bureau of the State Department that has dramatically tr...

After Elvis Brooks spent 42 years in prison, a court threw out his conviction for murder. But he has struggled to get compensation from Louisiana for his wrongful conviction. Christiana Botic/Verite News and Catchlight Local/Report for America Elvis Brooks thought he had an airtight case when he applied for compensation from the state of Louisiana after he was wrongfully convicted in a fatal bar shooting that kept him in prison for more than four decades. The 69-year-old New Orleans native has never wavered in his claims of innocence, insisting since his 1977 arrest that the cops had the wrong guy. But it would take nearly 45 years and a prosecutor admitting he failed to turn over key fingerprint evidence before the courts threw out Brooks’ conviction. That decision made Brooks eligible for up to $480,000 under a program created by Louisiana lawmakers to pay those wrongfully convicted in a state with one of the highest rates of overturned guilty verdicts. But Louisian...

Camila Ortiz González, 7, holds her 8-month-old brother, Isaías, at home in Omaha, Nebraska, in June. Although the Environmental Protection Agency cleaned up their family’s yard in 2012, the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica tests found levels of lead that are higher than before the agency remediated it. The agency denied their mother’s request to resample the yard. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica In the last 10 months, residents in neighborhoods across Omaha, Nebraska, have contacted the city and federal government after tests by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica showed they had enough of the toxic metal in their yards for the dirt to be dug up and replaced under Environmental Protection Agency rules. But the responses they’ve received have been inconsistent. Three of them received new testing and were promised additional cleanup. Yet others were denied a new cleanup or told the news organizations they never heard back.  One resident said the city teste...

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott appointed a 21-person board to oversee water in a broad area surrounding the Nueces River, which runs through Corpus Christi, Texas. Brenda Bazán for ProPublica and The Texas Tribune Texas Gov. Greg Abbott responded with fury after Corpus Christi officials announced in March that this Gulf Coast region of more than 500,000 people could face unprecedented restrictions as its water supply dried up. The state had already committed over $750 million in low-interest loans to the city’s plans for a desalination plant, a project that would add 30 million gallons a day to the region’s water supply. But the project had gone nowhere. “You know what they did? They squandered it, and then they changed their plan and then they were indecisive about what to do,” Abbott said of city officials in a heated response to a reporter’s question at an unrelated March press conference. “What Corpus Christi leaders have to do is make a decision,” Abbott said. “We...