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President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon’s cloud computing systems. The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department’s computer systems for nearly a decade — a practice that left some of the country’s most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary. U.S.-based supervisors, known as “digital escorts,” were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called ...

A few months ago, Oregon’s green energy outlook was bleak. The state Legislature and Gov. Tina Kotek had repeatedly failed to address a huge obstacle that has held back wind and solar projects in the Northwest for years: aging electrical lines too jammed up to handle more renewable power. A series of articles by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica identified barriers in the federal and state bureaucracies that delayed improvements to the beef up the grid. The failure to complete upgrades is the main reason Oregon, like its fellow progressive state and neighbor Washington, has lagged most of the nation in the growth of clean energy despite an internal mandate to go green. Bills to tackle the transmission problem continued to languish and die in the Oregon Legislature as recently as this spring. But there has been a groundswell of urgency since the stories were published. Kotek, a Democrat, has now issued two executive orders mandating that state agencies speed up renewable e...

When President Donald Trump returned to the White House in January, ProPublica’s reporters set out to cover how his second administration would reshape the government and the country. Our reporters detailed what happened when the Department of Government Efficiency , initially led by Elon Musk, slashed federal agencies, including the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Social Security Administration . We wrote about the people caught up in the administration’s immigration crackdown, including the more than 170 U.S. citizens who had been detained by immigration agents. We profiled key figures in the administration, including the 22-year-old picked to lead terrorism prevention and the man who has been described as Trump’s shadow president .  Our newsroom also focused beyond the White House. Ginger Thompson wrote a five-part series, with research by Doris Burke, that told the story of American health care through the only hospital in Albany, Georgia . Ellis Simani a...

The nation’s largest organization for medical examiners has issued a warning about a controversial, centuries-old forensic test that has contributed to cases in which pregnant women have been charged with murder. The premise behind the lung float test is simple: If a baby was born alive and then died, air from its first breaths would cause its lungs to float in a jar with water. If the baby was stillborn, the lack of air in the lungs would cause them to sink. But the many critics of the test have long labeled it junk science and drawn parallels between the test and witch trials, where women were deemed witches based on whether they floated or sank. The National Association of Medical Examiners addressed the lung float test as part of a larger position paper released in October on investigating perinatal deaths, including stillbirths. A panel of 11 experts said the test has “known pitfalls” and is of “questionable value” and “without clearly defined error rates.”  “Those who use...

This summer, my colleagues were reporting out a story about the Department of Education’s “final mission,” its effort to undermine public education even as the Trump administration worked feverishly to close the agency. As we do with all stories, the reporters reached out to those who would be featured in the article for comment. And so began a journey that showed both the emphasis we place on giving the subjects of our stories an opportunity to comment, as well as the aggressively unhelpful pushback we’ve faced this year as we’ve sought information and responses to questions. Megan O’Matz, a reporter based in Wisconsin on ProPublica’s Midwest team, first asked the department’s press office for an interview in mid-August. At the same time, we emailed top administration officials who were making crucial decisions within the agency, including Lindsey Burke, deputy chief of staff for policy and programs, and Meg Kilgannon, director of strategic partnerships.  In response to the ou...

Marcy McDannel slid a photograph across the steel jailhouse table to the convicted killer and watched his face for a reaction.  Samuel Atchak, 27 at the time, was serving 115 years for an unusual killing. One August morning in 2014, a young woman was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her body displayed nude on the tundra at the center of the coastal Alaska village of Chevak and her clothes placed nearby. Atchak pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and attempted sexual assault in Roxanne Smart’s death. McDannel was interested in the death of a second young woman, less than nine months later, in another Alaska coastal community that neighbors Chevak. Eunice Whitman too was found stabbed in the throat and chest, her clothes placed nearby and her body displayed nude on the tundra in a well-trafficked area of Bethel. No one had been convicted in her death. “If you don’t want to see it,” McDannel said gently, “I won’t show it to you,” according to a recording she made.  A...