New York’s Suffolk County had a trash problem. Facing brimming landfills and public pressure, legislators took a first-in-the-nation step: They banned plastic bags. But what the county saw as part of the solution, the plastics industry took as a threat. “We had never seen lobbyists like this before,” said Steven Englebright, the chief sponsor of the […]
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Posted inPushing Plastic
America’s grungy ‘recycled’ plastic is creating wastelands in Asia
SELANGOR, Malaysia — Follow the stench and you will find them: flaming heaps of dirty plastic, gushing black smoke, bringing death to a place otherwise teeming with life. This story also appeared in PRI These are the coastal lowlands along Malaysia’s side of the Strait of Malacca. This is a mostly lush place, studded with […]
Posted inPushing Plastic
As the world grapples with plastic, the U.S. makes more of it — a lot more
MUSTANG ISLAND, Texas — Jace Tunnell shuffled forward near the water’s edge, head bent. He was hunting for something that shouldn’t be on this beach near Corpus Christi, and he kept finding it. Hidden in the sand — white, tan, nearly translucent — were tiny plastic pellets. This story also appeared in PRI These are […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
Two Center for Public Integrity projects win National Headliner Award honors
Two Center for Public Integrity reporting projects — one investigating Trump administration immigration policies, the other revealing how lobbyists systematically replicated favorable legislation across state houses — have been honored by the National Headliner Awards. “Immigration Decoded,” led by Public Integrity senior reporter Susan Ferriss with contributions from reporting fellows Madeline Buiano and Alex Ellerbeck, […]
Posted inGhosts of Polluters Past
Toxic churn: The legacy of long-gone industry pollutes U.S. cities
On a crisp, fall day in Santa Ana, California, Mary Acosta Rodriguez Martinez Garcia steps forward gingerly, leaning on her cane as she walks to the spot along the railroad tracks that intersect with Santa Ana Boulevard. This is where her grandfather’s house once stood, before it was swallowed whole by the expansion of the […]
Posted inHealth
It was the Rubber Capital of the World. The health consequences linger.
Forced to breathe at times through oxygen tubes, the Rev. Kevin Goode nonetheless counts his blessings. Although his lungs are scarred from asbestos exposure and he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, he’s in better condition than other former employees of rubber factories in Akron, Ohio. This story also appeared in Belt Magazine Goode, retired pastor […]
Posted inNewsletters
The mental health toll of wildfires, hurricanes and floods
Hi watchdogs, and welcome back to your favorite newsletter. This week, we published a nationwide, multi-newsroom collaboration investigating the government’s response to natural disasters (and with the pandemic on top of that, recovery isn’t going to be easy.) We also have an analysis on our “red zone” White House coronavirus documents, how people with disabilities […]
Posted inCoronavirus and Inequality
The government’s secret ventilator stockpile is nowhere near enough to fight the coronavirus
This article is published in partnership with HuffPost. Are you a health worker, medical provider, COVID-19 patient or federal employee on the front lines of the pandemic? Help our reporting by filling out this form. Only 16,600 ventilators. That’s the total number of breathing machines that sit in the Strategic National Stockpile, the government reserve meant […]
Posted inImmigration
Failing to bring back the dead
Warning: Graphic image below QUETZALTENANGO, Guatemala — Every week, Wendy Griselda DeLeon Morales goes to a cemetery in the hills of southern Guatemala and leaves flowers on the grave of a woman who may or may not be her mother. “Only God knows if that’s really her,” Morales says. The body, purportedly that of 41-year-old […]
Posted inGrowing Food, Sowing Trouble
We’re not fixing this environmental crisis. One ditch in Indiana could provide a solution.
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates betrayals of public trust. Sign up to receive our stories. This story also appeared in Grist and The World MENTONE, Indiana — If you want to clean up the largest pollution spill in the country, one unaltered by decades of work and billions of dollars, you […]
Posted inGrowing Food, Sowing Trouble
A common fertilizer can cause explosions. Uneven regulation puts people at risk.
This story was published in partnership with Grist and The World. This story also appeared in Grist and The World The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates betrayals of public trust. Sign up to receive our stories. WEST, Texas — The blast sent Robby Payne into a plastic tank of liquid cattle feed, knocking him […]
Posted inNational Security
The Center for Public Integrity’s top stories in national security this year
From Russian interference to drones with artificial intelligence, the role of technology and its evolution was prominent in our coverage of national security this year. In addition to the Pentagon’s preparation of a cyber attack in the event of Russian interference in the midterm election, the Center weighed in with analyses of Special Counsel Robert […]
Posted inCopy, Paste, Legislate
You elected them to write new laws. They’re letting corporations do it instead.
This story was published in partnership with USA TODAY and The Arizona Republic. This story also appeared in USA TODAY Each year, state lawmakers across the U.S. introduce thousands of bills dreamed up and written by corporations, industry groups and think tanks. Disguised as the work of lawmakers, these so-called “model” bills get copied in one state […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
Join us for a Twitter chat on the United States of Petroleum: The government’s secret alliance with Big Oil
The American Petroleum Institute was born in a ballroom at New York’s Biltmore Hotel at the end of World War I. Among its founding members were the same regulators entrusted to oversee the industry. Over the course of a century, API has embedded itself in the U.S. government. Decades ago, the institute embarked on a […]
Posted inFatal Flaws
‘The good, the bad and the ugly’ of state worker safety programs
Fifteen minutes before his shift was to end on November 8, 2017, Lariat Rope, a thickset man of 55, tumbled into a pit of scalding water at Sapa Extrusions North America in Phoenix, an aluminum-products plant where he’d worked for more than 25 years. It took rescuers three hours to retrieve his body from the […]
Posted inDemocracy
White, male and millennial: Hate groups tap bro culture to recruit members
This report is part of the “Hate in America“ project produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 initiative, a national investigative reporting project by top college journalism students and recent graduates from across the country and headquartered at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication at Arizona State University. PORTLAND, Oregon – Behind the anonymity […]
Posted inNational Security
Plutonium is missing, but the government says nothing
July 20, 2018: This story has been updated. This story was published in partnership with the Daily Beast, Austin-Statesman, My San Antonio, the Houston Chronicle and USA Today. Two security experts from the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory drove to San Antonio, Texas, in March 2017 with a sensitive mission: to retrieve dangerous nuclear […]
Posted inInside Public Integrity
Environment and labor: The top stories this year from the Center for Public Integrity
Who has been Big Oil’s secret ally? Who was cheated as federal contractors prospered? Those were the questions the Center’s environment and labor team probed this year as part of its continued focus on the ways that pollution, global warming and other aspects of the environment affect health and livelihoods, and how dangerous workplace conditions […]
Posted inImmigration
‘Shocked and humiliated’: Lawsuits accuse Customs, Border officers of invasive searches of minors, women
Tameika Lovell was retrieving baggage at New York City’s Kennedy Airport when two female U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers stopped her for a “random search.” It was Nov. 27, 2016, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and the school counselor from Long Island had just arrived from a short Jamaica vacation. Lovell, who is black, had […]
Posted inEnvironment
Most of the EPA’s pollution estimates are unreliable. So why is everyone still using them?
Engineer Jim Southerland was hired by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in 1971 to join the nascent war on air pollution. He came to relish the task, investigating orange clouds from an ammunition plant in Tennessee and taking air samples from strip mines in Wyoming. Among his proudest accomplishments: helping the agency develop a set […]
Posted inEnvironment
Industrial waste pollutes America’s drinking water
This report is part of a project on drinking water contamination in the United States produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 program. PHOENIX – In Ringwood, New Jersey, Ford Motor Co. dumped more than 35,000 tons of toxic paint sludge onto lands occupied for centuries by the Turtle Clan of the Ramapough Lenape tribe, poisoning groundwater […]
Posted inInequality
Trump country trade-off: Tariffs could trigger U.S. job losses
DALTON, GA. — Beneath the “Buy American” roadside signs here, a globalist heart beats in this mostly rural corner of Northwest Georgia. In the late 1980s, factories began eagerly hiring Mexican immigrants to help fuel a boom in the so-called Carpet Capital of the World. Automation and the 2008 recession went on to pare a […]
Posted inEnvironment
Crumbling pipes, tainted water plague black communities
This report is part of a project on drinking water contamination in the United States produced by the Carnegie-Knight News21 program. CAMPTI, La. – Deep in the winding mass of crumbling back streets in Campti, Leroy Hayes sets a glass of water from his faucet in a patch of sunlight on the railing of his […]
Posted inAccountability, The Panama Papers
Law firm’s files include dozens of companies and people blacklisted by U.S. authorities
Massive leak reveals offshore accounts of world leaders By International Consortium of Investigative Journalists April 3, 2016 One morning in mid-2014, before the summer sun had reached its peak, two elderly men in Aleppo, Syria, sat on plastic chairs, chatting quietly and drinking black coffee. From his perch outside his food stall, Sabri Wahid Asfur […]
Posted inDemocracy
For special interests, the real party is outside the convention
CLEVELAND — Even for veteran rocker Rick Springfield, whose chart toppers date to Ronald Reagan’s first term, Tuesday night’s crowd across the Cuyahoga River from the Republican National Convention must’ve seemed decidedly unconventional. Clusters of young men in standard-issue delegate garb — blue blazers, pleated khakis — milled about. Women shimmied to “Jessie’s Girl” in […]
Posted inEnvironmental Justice, Denied
Commentary: Why I missed the Flint story
I shouldn’t have missed the story of lead-contaminated water in Flint. Not because I’m an environmental reporter, but because my mom told me what was happening in my hometown, and I didn’t listen. I tell people’s stories for a living. Our team at the Center for Public Integrity spent most of 2015 looking for examples […]
Posted inDefense Spending, National Security, Up in Arms
You could buy an Australian island for what the Pentagon says it would cost to take inventory — of one item
The Pentagon dashed any hopes that it might soon be able to pass a simple audit, when it provided a surprisingly unhelpful response late last month to a simple question about how many widgets of a particular kind that it had in stock. Understanding the worrying significance of the Pentagon’s statement that it essentially had […]
Posted inEnvironment
Making a cancer cluster disappear
TEXAS CITY, Texas — It began with a headache; then came shaking of the hands. Leuvell Malone’s wife noticed unusual behavior. He struggled to button his shirt straight and crashed the car into the hot-water heater in the garage. Finally, a seizure landed the 55-year-old chemical worker in the hospital. About ‘Science for Sale’ Science […]
Posted inWorkers’ Rights
Report: cause for ‘alarm’ on possible work-related causes of breast cancer
A new summary of the science makes a strong case for occupational links to breast cancer and calls on Congress, regulators and researchers to pay more attention to chemical exposures and other risk factors. “Working Women and Breast Cancer: The State of the Evidence,” is the product of more than two years of work overseen […]
Posted inState Integrity 2015, State Integrity Investigation
States flunk at integrity
In 2013, the director of the Idaho Racing Commission told state lawmakers that controversial “instant racing” machines could help save the state’s dying betting industry. He did not tell them he was also registered as a lobbyist in Wyoming on behalf of a company that operates the machines there. That detail didn’t come to light […]
