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More Than Half the Homes in East Omaha Have Unsafe Lead Levels. That Doesn’t Mean the EPA Will Clean Them Up.

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Omaha resident Natalie Thorpe’s 3-year-old tested high for lead as a baby. Thorpe’s yard has enough lead to be risky but not enough to qualify for government cleanup. Rebecca S. Gratz for ProPublica Despite hundreds of millions of dollars spent on environmental cleanup, more than half the yards in a section of Omaha, Nebraska, that used to surround a lead smelter still have enough contamination to cause high blood-lead levels in kids, according to tests by the Flatwater Free Press and ProPublica. The findings were consistent across the city’s older urban core — in the historically Black neighborhoods north of downtown, the predominantly Hispanic areas to the south and the more white and affluent areas in midtown. However, homes closest to where a lead smelter and other downtown factories operated tended to have slightly higher concentrations than those farther out. As part of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund program, the federal government and the city of ...
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House Democrats Demand Answers From Trump’s VA on Vets Struggling to Access Mental Healthcare

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Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins received a letter signed by more than 60 lawmakers citing a recent ProPublica investigation that detailed how the agency has failed to provide veterans with adequate mental healthcare. Samuel Corum/Getty Images What Happened: More than 60 House Democrats are pressing Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins for answers about how the agency’s mental healthcare has been increasingly strained under President Donald Trump’s second administration. The lawmakers sent the secretary a letter last week asking questions about the state of VA care, citing a ProPublica investigation from this spring that revealed the agency’s mental health workforce has been plummeting and veterans have been left in the lurch . What They Said: The letter was spearheaded by Rep. Judy Chu, who is a psychologist and represents a district in Southern California. “Caring for our nation’s Veterans is a fundamental responsibility,...
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What Is the Trump Administration Doing With Foreign Aid Money?

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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...
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He’s Eligible for Up to $480,000 After Being Wrongly Imprisoned for 42 Years. The State Says No.

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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...
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Lead Contamination Is Still a Problem in Omaha. Why Is the City Cleaning Up Some Yards and Not Others?

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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...
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