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Do You Know About U.S. Military Spending? Help ProPublica Understand Where the Money Goes.

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Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source images: Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Francine D. Martin, Army National Guard photo by Sgt. 1st Class Brandon Nelson, Stuart Lutz/Gado/Getty Images, Jake Warga/Corbis via Getty Images, Mondadori Portfolio via Getty Images, Getty, U.S. Treasury via Wikimedia Commons. ProPublica is examining U.S. military budgeting, spending and contracting, and we’re asking for your help. We’ve spent years talking to people who’ve worked in the defense industry , the Pentagon and the armed services , so we know that these topics are critically important. Every day, Pentagon contracting officers, defense industry workers, congressional staffers and others make decisions that affect the most expensive military in the world, with great consequences for the safety of soldiers and for the country at large. Yet it’s well documented that, even when those involved have good intentions, many Pentagon projects end up mired in delays , cost ov...
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Measles Used to Be in Our Rearview Mirror. Now Cases Are Reaching Record Highs.

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Hospitals set up special testing sites to prevent measles patients from spreading the disease in waiting rooms. The virus can linger in the air for up to two hours after an infected person leaves. Jan Sonnenmair/Getty Images The U.S. recently reached a grim milestone: As of July 23, more measles cases have been reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention than in any year since 1991. It took less than seven months to blow past the three-decade high recorded last year. This potentially deadly disease is easily prevented. Shots are widely available and, in many cases, free. Still, since the beginning of last year, more than 4,850 people here have been infected, and three have died. Among them were two unvaccinated girls in West Texas whose deaths made national headlines. It may feel like the continuous stream of cases is just the way things are now. But it is dangerous to shrug off the resurgence of measles. In a story I reported earlier this year, I showed w...
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At “Quasi-Public” Private Schools, 100% of Students Get Tuition Vouchers. There’s Almost No Accountability.

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Atlas Preparatory Academy, a private school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Every student relies on taxpayer dollars from one of the state’s four voucher programs to pay all or part of their tuition. Caleb Alvarado for ProPublica At some point, my reporting colleagues and I began referring to them as the “100% schools.” We were following the money that flows from states’ public coffers into private schools through vouchers when we noticed a subset of educational facilities where tax dollars cover all or a big part of the tuition for every student. In essence, these were schools that were funded like public schools but didn’t operate with the same oversight or transparency. Our reporting found that these types of private schools exist throughout the country and that in Wisconsin — where I’m based — there were 39 that fell into that category during the most recent school year. Together, they were educating 7,923 children and taking in roughly $87 million from vouchers offered...
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How Trump’s Unprecedented Effort to Prosecute Noncitizen Voters Fell Apart

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Illustration by Matt Rota for ProPublica. Animation by Henrike Lendowski for ProPublica. It was late March when Joe Teirab, the second-in-command at Minnesota’s U.S. attorney’s office, received an urgent email from Washington. The federal government was scrambling to find criminal cases to back up President Donald Trump’s claims that illegal voting by noncitizens was tipping the scales in American elections. Agents from Homeland Security Investigations, a massive federal law enforcement agency, had been dispatched to work leads across the country, including hundreds in Minnesota. Teirab was already under pressure. In an earlier missive, Nick Davis, a high-ranking Justice Department appointee helping to lead the election fraud crusade, had reminded him the cases were so high priority that Teirab and his staff couldn’t decline to move forward on them without express approval from agency higher-ups. On March 24, Davis demanded a status report — wit...
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Wall Street’s Nonprofits Use Selective, Opaque Logic to Defund Charities

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Illustration by Shoshana Gordon/ProPublica. Source image: U.S. Treasury via Wikimedia Commons. When the Justice Department indicted the Southern Poverty Law Center in April on controversial fraud charges , the storied civil rights organization faced a major threat to its lifeblood — the flow of donor dollars. Not because it was convicted or because the Internal Revenue Service revoked its tax-exempt status. Not even because individual donors stopped writing checks. Instead, three Wall-Street-affiliated grantmaking giants each made a decision, one they refused to fully explain, to prevent donors from using their platforms to give to the embattled nonprofit. Vanguard Charitable, Fidelity Charitable and Charles Schwab’s DAFgiving360 sponsor donor-advised funds, offering account holders immediate tax deductions on contributions they can later recommend be granted to charities. Once niche, donor-advised fund sponsors controlled more than $327 billion in assets as ...
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