Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project is a reversal for the federal government. Only last year, the Bureau of Land Management released its Record of Decision selecting “No Action” on Ambler Road, in cooperation with Alaska tribal councils, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and many others.

In the document, the impact on fish habitat, water and air quality, disruption of groundwater flow, hazardous materials from spills, and the negative impact on the Western Arctic caribou herd, which has been steadily declining since 2017, were all cited as reasons for denial. The Record of Decision also stated that the Ambler Road Project would forever alter the culture and traditional practices of Alaska Native communities, who have lived and thrived in the region for centuries.

Thanks to the BLM’s findings, the Biden administration denied the Ambler Road Project on June 28, 2024. The project resurfaced after the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority filed a direct appeal to Trump over his predecessor’s denial of transportation permits.

Trump’s decision to approve the Ambler Road Project comes months after his administration announced plans to rescind the 2001 Roadless Area Conservation Rule, opening 45 million acres of national forest land to logging and road construction. While the Ambler Road Project is not directly tied to the “roadless rule,” it’s one of a growing list of examples of the U.S. government prioritizing corporate interests over the natural world.

Ambler Road will begin at milepost 161 on the Dalton Highway, near the towns of Wiseman and Coldfoot, before crossing over 3,000 streams and multiple rivers. It will require up to 50 various bridge projects, as well as aid stations, airstrips, turnouts, and culverts, before ending at the proposed mining site near the town of Ambler.

On Monday, Trump sat in the Oval Office with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and Energy Secretary Chris Wright and made it clear that he was approving the project to stay ahead in what he considers an AI race against China.

“Ambler Mining District, at the end of [the 211-mile road] has some of the richest mining deposits in all of America,” Burgum said, while gesturing at a map of Alaska behind the Resolute desk. “These are minerals that are absolutely essential to defense, to industry. … Just take copper alone. This is one of the richest copper locations in the country.”

The haul at the end of the 211-mile road is presumed to be a copper deposit worth more than $7 billion. Copper has many uses, among them being the primary component to efficiently help power and cool the massive data centers that run AI applications. As a result, and as AI advances, copper is in massively high demand. According to the 2025 Global Critical Minerals Outlook, copper supplies will fall 30 percent short of the required demand by 2035.

“China controls 85 to 100 percent of all the mining and refining of all the top 20 critical minerals,” Burgum said. “And in this mine area up here, we got copper, lead, zinc, gold, silver, gallium, germanium — rich in all of the minerals that we need to win the AI arms race against China.”

Burgum said that the U.S. has “gotten out of the energy and mining area,” and that when Trump said, “Drill, baby, drill,” he also meant “Mine, baby, mine.”

Trump emphasized that the copper was needed to power AI data centers — but also immediately contradicted himself on whether it’s needed to surpass China, or rather to maintain what he described as America’s undisputed lead in AI.

“We get a road done, and with that, we unleash billions and billions of dollars in wealth,” Trump said to the press on Monday. “It’s pretty amazing when you think of it. And it’s wealth that we need if we’re going to be the number one country. We’re number one now with AI, you’ve probably read. We’re beating everybody with AI at levels that nobody ever thought even possible.”

But Trump said the U.S. currently lacks the power to support its tech companies, so he has greenlit them to “build their own power.”

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Immediately after taking office, Trump announced a $500 billion investment in artificial intelligence — led by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank — called the Stargate Project, aiming to create a nationwide network of AI data centers. The first opened in Abilene, Texas, in September, after which five more were immediately announced.

Also in September, Trump hosted a roundtable of AI giants to discuss AI innovation and investments into its future. Included in the guest list were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Each of whom, coincidentally, donated exactly $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund.

AI data centers significantly impact the environment due to their immense electricity consumption, high water usage, greenhouse gas emissions, and demand from local power grids.

But along with the AI craze, a modern copper rush has begun, and it’s moving quickly. What was originally proposed as a three to four-year timeline for the Ambler Road Project appears to have been significantly sped up. Burgum said that construction will begin next spring with “planning throughout the winter.”

“We’ll get it done in less than a year,” Trump added.

Following the announcement of the approval for the Ambler Road Project, Burgum stated that the Department of War and the U.S. government will take a 10 percent stake in Trilogy Metals, a Canadian mining company with claims in the area.

“America was a mining powerhouse for a long, long time, and our mining industry got squelched,” Burgum said. “Now we’re seeing it come back to life.”

In March 2025, Trump signed an executive order to take immediate measures to increase American mineral production. The order states: “It is imperative for our national security that the United States take immediate action to facilitate domestic mineral production to the maximum possible extent.”

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In April, the Trump administration fast-tracked a controversial transfer of ownership of Oak Flat, Arizona, from the U.S. Forest Service to Resolution Copper. The Apache Stronghold, who have sacred and ceremonial ties to the land, have been in lengthy legal battles to try to halt the transfer. Resolution Copper, a conglomerate owned by British and Australian mining companies, plans to blast a hole 2 miles wide and 1,000 feet deep, decimating the sacred Apache site to gain access to the deep copper reserve.

In August, a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge put a temporary injunction on the land transfer, and Trump released a scathing post on Truth Social in which he called the 9th Circuit “radical left” and the Apache Stronghold “anti-American.”

On October 6, the Supreme Court declined to hear the Apache Stronghold case.

The proposed destruction of public land — held sacred by Native Americans at Oak Flat and the Northwestern Arctic of Alaska — and numerous other sites, every year across America, in the name of progress, is merely one more example of a continued and very pointed genocide of Native American culture.

In response to Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project, environmental advocacy groups blasted the decision, saying it’s another example of Trump protecting business interests over the planet.

“As with every other shortsighted, self-serving decision by this administration, this move is silencing the people who will be impacted the most,” said Rep. Jared Huffman, D-Calif., ranking member of the House Natural Resources Committee. “Trump is sidestepping the views of Native Alaskans and short circuiting the federal government’s obligation to hear from them.”

“We build a road that’s over 200 miles long through a very beautiful area of the world,” Trump told reporters on Monday. “It’s incredible when you look at it. But a rough area from the standpoint of building.”

The post Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies appeared first on The Intercept.

When the White House unveiled its comprehensive report on how to “Make Our Children Healthy Again” in May, it slammed “corporate capture” of regulatory bodies and argued that companies responsible for making children less healthy wield undue influence in Washington. A subsequent strategy report, released last month, called to “protect public health from corporate influence.”

“It was one of the first times I saw the federal government actually call out corporate capture and how chemical companies influence regulation,” said Darya Minovi, a senior analyst for the Center for Science and Democracy.

But the Trump administration’s political marriage of unbridled crony capitalism and fringe health conspiracism is not without its contradictions.

While the “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, movement preaches a healthy utopia for the nation’s children free of real and imagined toxins, public health experts say the Trump administration has pursued an aggressive deregulation campaign that has opened the floodgates for toxic chemicals in our food, water, and air — while also defunding vital medical research and spreading dangerous medical misinformation. 

“There’s a lot of rhetoric about problems that they’re solving,” Minovi said. “But when I’m looking at the actual actions that the administration is taking, largely, these actions are not making any kids or families healthier.”

A glaring tension between the MAHA movement’s purported goals and the Trump administration’s aggressive deregulatory strategy is the issue of environmental toxins, particularly PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, found in many household items. 

These chemicals, which can disrupt liver, kidney, and thyroid functioning, are especially harmful to children. 

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The strategy report, drafted by the Make America Healthy commission led by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., laid out a series of recommendations to “end chronic childhood disease,” which included studying the cumulative effect of chemicals in the environment. But in May, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it was rolling back restrictions on the acceptable levels of these forever chemicals within drinking water, which were put in place during the Biden administration. And in the spring, the agency ended a grant to research children’s exposure to chemicals from soil and dust, according to the KFF Health News. 

“When it comes to actually taking action, we’re not really seeing policies that are getting ahead of corporate capture and holding the chemical industry responsible,” Minovi said. 

Over the coming months, the EPA has announced it will take 31 separate deregulatory actions, including loosening restrictions on power plants that emit air pollution and eliminating safeguards put in place during the Biden administration for petrochemical accidents. 

Alongside pursuing a deregulatory strategy that experts predict will introduce more chemicals into the air, water, and food supply, the administration has also moved aggressively to cut research, including on childhood diseases. 

For example, in August, the Trump administration announced it was cutting federal funding to a network researching pediatric brain cancer. 

White House spokesperson Kush Desai denied cutting cancer research funding, saying HHS canceled grants supporting “DEI and other ideological pet projects,” and that the money was reallocated.   

“President Trump made a pledge to Make America Healthy Again by restoring accountability, transparency, and Gold Standard Science in public health decision-making,” wrote Desai. “The President and White House maintain complete confidence in Secretary Kennedy and the rest of the HHS team to deliver on this pledge.”

The Department of Health and Human Services and the EPA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment. 

Food assistance and educational programs have also come under fire during the Trump administration. Earlier this year, Republicans enacted the most significant cut to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program in history. The program provided food assistance to roughly 1 in every 5 children in the United States, as well as nutrition education. 

“A lot of this movement is designed to benefit privileged people who have the resources to access certain healthier foods or a community with clean air,” said Minovi, as opposed to “everyday people who might actually depend on public policies to ensure they have healthy food, clean air, clean water in their community.”

The recommendations emerging from HHS and the MAHA movement about vaccines and autism are particularly troubling, said Jill Rosenthal, director of public health policy at the Center for American Progress. “It’s a matter of promoting a personal agenda that RFK has rather than following decades of good science,” she said.

Riddled throughout the MAHA strategy and separate report are concerns over vaccines and the vaccine schedule, which is used to determine the timing for childhood vaccinations. 

Both RFK Jr. and Trump have peddled pseudoscientific conclusions connecting autism to vaccination, suggesting that the vaccine schedule needs to change. During the press conference last week, Trump advised against vaccinating children for Hepatitis B until they’re 12 years old, which runs at odds with medical guidelines.

“They’re making it more difficult for children to get routine childhood vaccinations. We know that vaccination has saved millions of lives, and so any efforts that make it harder for children to access vaccines are really, really jeopardizing kids’ health,” said Rosenthal. “Instead of following the science and believing what evidence we already have, we’re just creating a lot of distrust and making it harder for people to keep their kids healthy.”

The recent recommendations that pregnant women avoid Tylenol also carry risk for pregnant people and their future children. 

“In the near term, I think that pregnant patients are going to be worried enough that they seek alternate forms of medication to treat their pain,” said Dr. Mariana Montes, a former pediatrician and obstetric anesthesiologist. “That’s extremely concerning, because there is nothing that’s been proven safe for pregnancy except for acetaminophen.”

Ibuprofen, the active ingredient in Advil, has been known to lower amniotic fluid — the liquid in utero that surrounds and protects the fetus — and can have negative effects on kidney and heart development, said Montes. 

“Patients might choose to take ibuprofen without knowing the effects, and then unknowingly actually harm a healthy pregnancy because they’re so worried about taking Tylenol,” she said.

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Left with fewer options they believe are safe, Rosenthal warns that pregnant people might forgo medication altogether, even when they have a fever. “If women avoid taking Tylenol, for instance, when they have a fever, it can increase the risk of birth defects,” she said. “So by scaring women away from taking needed medication, it can actually impact their health and the health of their developing babies.”

The stigma these types of pronouncements cause for people with autism is also a serious concern.

“It’s necessary to point out the ableist language in this whole autism debacle,” said Minovi. “Of course, it’s a condition that needs to be understood and studied, and obviously impacts families significantly, but the way in which the administration, particularly RFK, talks about it is dismissive and negative about people’s lived experiences.”

Republicans, who once denounced former First Lady Michelle Obama for attempting to make school lunches moderately healthier, now inhabit a coalition whose purported goals would have instantly launched “nanny state” accusations just a few years prior.

But the MAHA movement has been so successful despite its inherent contradictions, Rosenthal said, because there’s a “kernel of truth” to what it’s preaching. 

“For instance, ultra-processed food is not the first choice for how we want to take care of our bodies,” Rosenthal said, “but at the same time, is that the best way to use limited resources and protect or promote child health? Not when we have kids who don’t have enough to eat, right?”

Minovi said it’s understandable that people are drawn to this movement — which only heightens culpability for people like RFK Jr. and Trump. 

“These are families that are just trying to do right by their kids, and the concerns that folks are raising are valid,” said Minovi. “The behavior of the leaders in this movement is nothing short of predatory.”

The post MAHA Slams “Corporate Capture” by Food and Pharma Giants — While Trump Strips Regulations appeared first on The Intercept.

“There is no serious way to think about stopping the climate crisis under a fascist government,” Sunrise executive director Aru Shiney-Ajay told The Intercept. “The path to climate lies through getting rid of the authoritarian government we’re in.”

The move comes as President Donald Trump furiously dismantles the green energy initiatives that Sunrise fought to see enshrined in President Joe Biden’s 2022 Inflation Recovery Act. In a striking success for the climate group, the law contained parts of Sunrise’s top priority: the Green New Deal.

The group, now eight years old, has decided that it cannot continue to fight climate change without fighting Trump, Shiney-Ajay told The Intercept. Delegates from the nonprofit’s more than 100 local hubs voted by a wide margin last month to approve its expanded mission, Sunrise announced Thursday.

Sunrise is making the change public just a week after Trump sent a chilling message to activists who oppose him: In a memo, he directed cabinet officials to investigate nonprofits and their funders for supposed links to terrorism.

In the Crosshairs

While the Sunrise Movement has received no official word that it is under investigation, the group has ample reason to believe that it may be targeted.

The Justice Department has directed local prosecutors to investigate billionaire financier George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave $2 million to Sunrise between 2019 and 2023, according to a grant database. In doing so, the Justice Department cited the right-wing Capital Research Center, which recently published a report claiming that the Sunrise Movement supports “​​Antifa-associated anarchist terrorists.”

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That report is fashioned as a road map for Trump officials as they follow through on the crackdown he promised after the September 10 assassination of Charlie Kirk. The day he released his domestic terror memorandum, Trump called Soros a “likely candidate” for prosecution.

The Open Society Foundations and the Sunrise Movement both say they reject violence. The Capital Research Center report focuses on Sunrise’s support for a legal defense fund associated with Stop Cop City, a decentralized effort to halt the construction of an Atlanta police training facility inside a forest.

The prosecution’s case against dozens of Stop Cop City protesters collapsed last month when a judge dismissed most of the charges against them. While she stands by her group’s support of the bail fund, Shiney-Ajay said that it was limited in practice.

“When I look at that report, what I see is a desperate attempt to paint what is ultimately a large youth protest movement in negative terms, because they are really looking to villainize and crack down on protests,” Shiney-Ajay said. “That is a strategy with authoritarians.”

Work in Progress

Standing up to elected officials is nothing new for members of the Sunrise Movement — but for years, they focused more on embarrassing Democrats into action.

The group, which restricts membership to people under the age of 35, became famous for acts of political theater such as storming former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office in 2018 to pressure her on climate change. An appearance from then Rep.-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez helped catapult the New York Democrat to national prominence.

Sunrise’s decentralized structure has sometimes led to fractures between national and local leaders, but it remained a force in progressive politics after Biden’s election. The group’s relationship with the White House alternated between productive and contentious before its members soured on him over Israel’s war on Gaza. It was the first major environmental group to call on Biden to quit last year’s election.

Sunrise’s latest pivot, which 74 percent of delegates approved in a September 5 vote, is a work in progress.

The group has already organized a walkout of Washington, D.C., university students in response to Trump’s military crackdown. New projects could include responses from local chapters to deployments of the National Guard or Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents, municipal campaigns to support mayors standing up to Trump, and pushback against university administrators rolling over for the White House, Shiney-Ajay said. At the national level, the organization hopes to furnish anti-authoritarianism training to tens of thousands of people.

While one long-standing critique of Sunrise is that it has been distracted by “diffuse non-climate causes of the activist left,” in the words of a 2021 Politico article, Shiney-Ajay said she isn’t worried about mission creep.

“We are pretty clear that we are doing this so that we can get on track to win federal climate legislation. That has always been the mission of Sunrise,” she said. “The reason I joined Sunrise in the first place is because it felt like Sunrise was one of the very few organizations that was honest about the conditions of the world, and had a plan to meet the conditions of this world.”

The post Sunrise Movement, Founded to Fight Climate Change, Pivots to Fighting Trump appeared first on The Intercept.

In December, Dura joined the municipalities of Halhul and Hebron to sign a memorandum with the U.S. Agency for International Development to fund a $46 million program shoring up their local water systems.

It was a project of tremendous local import. The three neighboring communities are among the most water-deprived in the West Bank. They rely on irregular water supplies from Israel. When water does arrive, some 30-40 percent is lost in distribution, chiefly due to leaks and theft.

It’s this 30-40 percent that the project meant to fix. But in late February, a month after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it was terminated.

A State Department spokesperson said by email that it was “determined to not fit within the standards laid out by Sec. [Marco] Rubio for U.S. foreign assistance, which must make the United States stronger, safer, or more prosperous.”

Since taking office, Trump, with the help of Elon Musk, has eviscerated the U.S. foreign aid budget. In March, Rubio terminated 80 percent of USAID programs after a review by Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. The administration also said foreign aid would be shrunk and reconstituted under the State Department. On July 1, USAID formally dissolved.

The consequences of this retrenchment will land on Palestinian communities like Dura, which for decades have counted on the U.S. as the preeminent funder of water infrastructure in the Occupied Territories.

The water supply for Palestinians in the West Bank is already tight. 

While Israelis consume an average 200-300 liters per day, comparable to Americans, the West Bank average is 86 liters — an average that masks gigantic differences between the haves, in well-supplied areas, and the have-nots.

A number of critical water projects in Palestinian population centers have been abandoned because of USAID’s collapse.

In Jericho, USAID was funding work to connect thousands of homes to sewer lines for the first time. Not only is the work unfinished, but the municipality has also had to reach into its own pocket to repave the roads that American taxpayers paid to dig up.

In Tulkarem, where USAID was improving wastewater services for a community in desperate need of them, the sudden stop to work means sewage continues to build up in nearby lagoons, breeding mosquitoes.

Subhi Samhan, director of research and development at the Palestinian Water Authority, called the abrupt pullout “catastrophic.”

“There’s no other actor in the context right now to fill the gap,” said a humanitarian worker who works in the region but requested anonymity to avoid Israeli or American retaliation against their organization’s work. “There’s no Plan B on this.”

That’s evident in Dura, a hilly community of about 90,000 people on the outskirts of Hebron.

Unlike some places in the West Bank, Dura has no wells or reservoirs. Its primary water supply is a single 24-inch pipe. It’s operated by the Palestinian Water Authority, but the actual water comes from Mekorot, Israel’s national water company, according to Dura municipal officials. (They requested anonymity to speak freely.)

Since occupying the West Bank in 1967, Israel has also controlled the majority of its water resources. The Palestinian Liberation Organization signed agreements with Israel for rights to a fixed volume from the land’s main aquifer in the 1990s, but the Palestinian population in the West Bank has grown 75 percent since then, making this share increasingly inadequate.

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In much of the West Bank, Israeli authorities keep a tight grip on Palestinian efforts to build wells, reservoirs, pipelines, or any other infrastructure. Today, West Bankers buy 60 percent of their household water supplies from Israeli water companies, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

In Dura, the water in the pipe is neither reliable nor sufficient for local needs. The municipality stores what they get in tanks, then parcels it around the city on a rotating, published schedule. Residents often gripe to the municipality about the meager flows. “The reality is, our water supply is not enough for our needs,” a Dura official said.

The average Dura resident consumes about 45 liters per day, falling short of the 50-100 liters that’s sufficient, according to World Health Organization experts, to meet water needs most of the time. But when supplies are limited, people’s usage can drop as low as 26 liters per day.

The USAID project planned, among other things, to shore up the 228 kilometers of pipe that make up Dura’s water grid. It was hoped that by plugging leaks and reducing theft, the city could sell more water the legal way, strengthening its own finances. In principle, this would also spare Dura residents from buying triple-priced private water supplies — or just going without.

Water has long been a pillar of America’s policy in the Occupied Territories. From 1993 to 2023, the U.S. spent $7.6 billion in aid in the West Bank and Gaza, with about a third of that going to the category of economic growth and infrastructure — like water.

Dave Harden, a former mission director for USAID in the West Bank and Gaza, reckons the agency spent “probably hundreds of millions” on water and sanitation projects since the Oslo Agreements of the 1990s.

The U.S. was well aware that water was choking Palestinian development. A 2024 State Department report on the territories’ investment climate — since removed — listed water insecurity among the “most immediate impediment[s]” for the Palestinian economy.

As president, Joe Biden echoed the longtime U.S. foreign policy consensus when he argued that improving Palestinian living conditions could bolster support for the Palestinian Authority and improve chances for a sustainable two-state solution.

Some pro-Israel groups agreed. The Israel Policy Forum, a U.S. NGO, specifically named improving the parlous conditions of water access in the West Bank as one of 50 steps to facilitate a negotiated peace.

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In the West Bank and Gaza, USAID has paid for dozens of wells and hundreds of miles of pipelines. It’s built reservoirs, storage tanks, and sewage infrastructure. As of 2016, USAID claimed to have improved clean water access for 1 million Palestinians.

While many countries fund water infrastructure in the Palestinian territories, none match the financial heft of the U.S., said Samhan of the Palestinian Water Authority. “Most of the projects funded by USAID are major projects. Not all countries can organize these funds. USAID can do $60, $70, $100 million at once,” he said.

Yet despite decades of work by the U.S. and other donors, the scope of need remains astronomical.

Leaky water infrastructure is a common problem throughout the West Bank. The World Bank estimates that if the West Bank recovered all of its lost water, it would amount to boosting total supply by around 40 percent.

Asked what they plan to do now that the USAID money is gone, Dura officials took a laconic attitude, saying they hope to find a European funder.

What galls many Palestinians is the sense that while they scrounge for water, their Israeli neighbors have plenty.

Water shortages are reshaping the West Bank countryside. Water insecurity is among the compounding pressures forcing people to leave rural areas for crowded, miserable conditions in cities. 

Climate change is putting this inequity into sharper relief. Last winter, precipitation levels in much of the Holy Land were about half of their historical average.

Climate forecasts for the region anticipate soaring average temperatures, intensifying heatwaves, and nastier droughts. This will likely stress water supplies as more surface water gets cooked off into the air and aquifers are less fully replenished.

In February, Israeli President Isaac Herzog pointed to the weak winter rains and warned Israelis could experience “a summer of massive natural disasters.”

But on water, Israel is well prepared. It gets most of its drinking water from state-of-the-art desalination plants on the Mediterranean Sea. It recycles much of this water, after it flows through Israeli homes, into its ultra-efficient agricultural sector. Its water grid has one of the world’s lowest leakage rates.

Samer Kalbouneh, acting director general for projects and international relations at the Palestinian Environment Quality Authority, said one of the West Bank’s biggest climate-adaptation needs is interconnectivity: linking its water-rich areas with its water-poor ones.

A trained water engineer, he said a logical move would be for West Bank cities to process their own sewage, then send the reclaimed water to desperate farmers and ranchers in the Jordan Valley. (Today, Palestinian cities send sewage to Israel, which reclaims the water and charges the Palestinian Authority $30 million a year for the service.)

But in practice, Palestinian localities can’t build the infrastructure for this. Kalbouneh said, “You can’t even build a 1×1-meter outhouse in the Jordan Valley without it being demolished,” as this qualifies as Area C, a zone controlled by the Israeli military.

As for USAID, he said it tended to promote projects like the one in Dura, which asked Palestinian communities to work within the constraints of Israeli occupation — rather than releasing those constraints.

Asked why, he said, “The U.S. is managing the conflict, not ending it.”

The post USAID Cuts Help Push West Bank Into Extreme Water Shortages appeared first on The Intercept.

When it comes to who is funding their campaigns, though, there’s one source of cash that marks a striking difference between the candidates: Dominion Energy, the Fortune 500 utility company that has long thrown around huge sums to shape politics in Virginia.

In the attorney general primary this year, local prosecutor Shannon Taylor has accepted $800,000 in donations from Dominion, while former state delegate Jay Jones has not taken any from the company.

And that cash has made a difference: Jones had a significant fundraising lead this year — until Dominion began sending checks to Taylor.

The spending split shows how Dominion continues to shape Democratic politics in the state, six years after party leaders said they would refuse donations from the controversial electricity monopoly. In response to Dominion’s attorney general race donations, 14 current and former Democratic officials aligned with Jones wrote a letter this week calling out Taylor for what they said was a looming conflict of interest.

“The scale of these contributions appears to be unprecedented in Virginia Attorney General races,” the officials said. “This level of corporate influence over a candidate seeking the state’s highest law enforcement position undermines public confidence in the independence and integrity of the office.”

Hitting a theme of her long experience as a prosecutor, Taylor’s campaign said in a statement, “Shannon is the only Democrat who can be trusted to flip this seat and fight back against Donald Trump.”

In a statement, Jones’s campaign manager Rachel Rothman took a swipe at Taylor’s reliance on Dominion cash. She said, “Shannon Taylor is clearly aspiring to be Dominion’s in-house counsel.”

Power Player

Nobody in Virginia politics has a pocketbook quite like Dominion. The company is the leading campaign contributor this election cycle, according to the nonprofit Virginia Public Access Project. For years, it has showered candidates with what one observer called a “staggering” amount of cash.

Meanwhile, the company has faced complaints about its business.

Dominion has been accused of overcharging customers by $1.2 billion over a yearslong period, slowing efforts to develop rooftop solar energy, and threatening the climate with a since-canceled natural gas pipeline.

Dominion’s political vise grip allowed it to get away with it all, critics said.

In recent years, however, that grip has loosened. Responding to outrage from voters, the Democratic Party announced that it would no longer accept donations from Dominion — though individual candidates were not obliged to follow suit.

Some Democrats have continued to take money from the company, while others have aligned themselves with the Clean Virginia Fund, a political organization created by a wealthy Charlottesville investor named Michael Bills to combat Dominion’s influence in state politics.

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In 2018, then-attorney general Mark Herring, a Democrat, said he would stop taking money from Dominion. That did not stop the company from donating in 2021 to the Democratic Attorneys General Association, which spent on ads to support Herring when he was fighting a primary battle against Jones. The donation was not made public until after Jones had lost the race.

The intra-party split is playing out again in this year’s attorney general race.

Dominion, which partnered with environmental groups on an unsuccessful clean energy bill last year, defended its involvement in state politics in a prepared statement.

“Like most companies, we participate in the political process on behalf of our thousands of employees and millions of customers,” said Aaron Ruby, a company spokesperson. “They depend on us for reliable, affordable and increasingly clean energy. We contribute to candidates from both parties in support of common sense public policy.”

An Equalizer

The Virginia attorney general race is one of this year’s marquee contests. Because the state has a large contingent of federal workers affected by DOGE cuts and the office’s ability to challenge actions by the administration, the race viewed as a bellwether for how Trump’s second term is going over with voters.

Dominion has its own reasons for being interested. The attorney general’s office also plays an important role in utility regulation in the state. In 2022, Jason Miyares, a Republican and the current attorney general, tangled with Dominion Energy over whether a large offshore wind project did enough to protect ratepayers from potential cost overruns before reaching an agreement.

The massive donations to Taylor have helped her even out Jones’s fundraising advantage. Jones has won endorsements from centrist Democrats such as former Virginia governors Ralph Northam and Terry McAuliffe, as well as national figures like Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J. Along the way, Jones raised $2.7 million compared to Taylor’s $2.1 million. Jones’s major contributors include the Clean Virginia Fund, which has given his campaign nearly $579,000, according to disclosures.

Prolific campaign spending by Bills, the Clean Virginia Fund founder, has drawn criticisms of its own from observers who say it is drowning out small-dollar donors.

Earlier this month, Jones also received $1,000 from a Dominion Energy executive, complicating his allies’ criticism of Taylor. Jones’s campaign said they are refunding the money.

Both candidates have criticized Miyares for not doing enough to fight back against Trump, and both have promised to fight for abortion rights.

Jones has pointed to his experience fighting for consumer rights as a lawyer at the D.C. attorney general’s office and his legal fights with the administration of Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin over voting rights.

Taylor, the commonwealth attorney for Henrico County, has leaned heavily on her experience as a criminal prosecutor. In a statement responding to the letter from Democratic officials criticizing the Dominion donation, Taylor repeated her allegation that Jones lacks the experience to serve as the state’s top law enforcement official.

“Jay Jones has never prosecuted a case and spent less than 10 months in the DC AGs office,” the release said. “Shannon spent 30 years prosecuting thousands of cases to protect Virginia families and hold fraudsters accountable.”

Taylor also called out a few thousand dollars that Jones took from lobbyists associated with Dominion Energy between 2021 and 2024, and donations from the company itself in 2017 and 2018.

Rothman, Jones’s campaign manager, said, “Virginia needs an Attorney General who fights for Virginians first. That candidate is Jay Jones.”

Democrats are banking on outraged voters angry at Trump to hand them victories in key statewide races on the ballot this year, including governor and lieutenant governor.

Dominion could be the ultimate winner, regardless of whether Democrats are right. The company has also donated $175,000 to the campaign of Miyares, who rallied with Trump ahead of last year’s election. His campaign did not respond to a request for comment.

Update: June 16, 2025
This story has been updated to include total fundraising numbers posted online shortly after publication.

The post Virginia AG Hopeful Was Outraising His Rival — Then Dominion Energy Tipped the Scale appeared first on The Intercept.

Citing an FBI memo warning that activists trespassing on factory farms could spread a viral bird disease, the groups wrote a letter to Gov. Gavin Newsom to argue that their longtime antagonists were more than a nuisance. They were potentially terrorists threatening the entire food chain.

“The safety of our food supply has never been more critical, and we must work together to prevent these clear threats of domestic terrorism from being realized,” the groups wrote.

A coalition of transparency and animal rights groups on Monday released that letter, along with a cache of government documents, to highlight the tight links between law enforcement and agriculture industry groups.

Activists say those documents show an unseemly relationship between the FBI and Big Ag. The government–industry fearmongering has accelerated with the spread of bird flu enabled by the industry’s own practices, they say.

The executive director of Property of the People, the nonprofit that obtained the documents via public records requests, said in a statement that the documents paint a damning picture.

“Factory farms are a nightmare for animals and public health. Yet, big ag lobbyists and their FBI allies are colluding to conceal this cruelty and rampant disease by shifting blame to the very activists working to alert the public,” Ryan Shapiro said. “Transparency is not terrorism, and the FBI should not be taking marching orders from industry flacks.”

Industry groups did not respond to requests for comment. In a statement, the FBI defended its relationship with “members of the private sector.”

“Our goal is to protect our communities from unlawful activity while at the same time upholding the Constitution,” the agency said in an unsigned statement. “The FBI focuses on individuals who commit or intend to commit violence and activity that constitutes a federal crime or poses a threat to national security. The FBI can never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.”

A Federal Focus

The dozens of documents trace the industry’s relationship with law enforcement agencies over a period stretching from 2015, during James Comey’s tenure as FBI director, to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic and the more recent outbreak of bird flu, also known as avian influenza.

Animal rights activists have long said that federal law enforcement seems determined to put them in the same category as Al Qaeda. In the 2000s, a wave of arrests of environmental and animal rights activists — who sometimes took aggressive actions such as burning down slaughterhouses and timber mills — was dubbed “the Green Scare.”

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The law enforcement focus on animal rights groups continued well after Osama bin Laden’s death, news clippings and documents obtained by Property of the People show.

In 2015, a veterinarian with the FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate told a trade publication, Dairy Herd Management, that eco-terrorists were a looming threat.

“The domestic threat in some ways is more critical than international,” Stephen Goldsmith said. “Animal rights and environmental groups have committed more acts of terrorism than Al Qaeda.”

Four years later, emails obtained by Property of the People show, Goldsmith met with representatives of a leading farm trade group, the Animal Agriculture Alliance, at a government–industry conference.

The meeting happened in April 2019, and within weeks the AAA’s president was warning Goldsmith in an email about planned protests by “by the extremist group Direct Action Everywhere,” a Berkeley-based group that conducts “open rescues” of animals.

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Within months, the FBI was touting the threat from animal rights groups in stark terms in an official communication: the intelligence note partially produced by Goldsmith’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Directorate.

The August 2019 note written with the FBI Sacramento field office said activists were accelerating the spread of Virulent Newcastle disease, a contagious viral disease afflicting poultry and other birds.

The note claimed that activists were failing to follow proper biosafety protocols as they targeted different farms, and could spread the disease between farms on their clothes or other inanimate objects. While the note did not point to genetic testing or formal scientific analysis to back up this assertation, it said the FBI offices had “high confidence” in their assessment.

Activists have rejected the idea that they are not following safety protocols, pointing to protests where they have donned full-body disposable suits.

The most withering criticism of the FBI note may have come from another law enforcement agency, however. Four months after the FBI document came out, the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center rebutted the idea that activists were spreading disease.

Those activists, the Bay Area-based fusion center said in the note to local law enforcement, were nonviolent and posed a “diminishing threat to law enforcement.”

Citing the activists’ use of safety precautions and U.S. Department of Agriculture research, the fusion center said that “animal rights activists are probably not responsible” for any of the Virulent Newcastle disease outbreaks.

Links to Industry

Emails obtained by Property of the People suggest that the FBI regularly shared information with the Animal Agriculture Alliance, as both sought to spotlight the threat of animal rights activists. As new animal disease outbreaks occurred, the activists were regularly cast as potential vectors.

The nonprofit trade group, based in Washington, D.C., describes itself as an organization that defends farmers, ranchers, processors, and other businesses along the food supply chain from animal rights activists, on whom it regularly distributes monitoring reports to its members.

The industry’s concerns grew in 2020, as activists created a nationwide map of farms, dubbed Project Counterglow, that served as reference for locating protest sites.

The AAA’s president, Hannah Thompson-Weeman, sent out an email to industry leaders hours after the map was published.

“This is obviously extremely troubling for a lot of reasons. We are contacting our FBI and DHS contacts to raise our concerns but we welcome any additional input on anything that can be done,” she said.

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In multiple emails, Goldsmith, the FBI veterinarian, distributed to other FBI employees emails from the AAA warning about upcoming protests by the activist outfits, including Direct Action Everywhere.

Another email from a local government agency in California showed that the AAA sent out a “confidential” message to members in June 2023 asking them to track and report “animal rights activity.”

The trade group provided members with a direct FBI email address for reporting what it called ARVE: “animal rights violent extremists.”

The AAA was not the only industry group using the FBI as a resource. The March 2020 letter to Newsom casting activists as potential terrorists was penned by the leaders of the California Farm Bureau Federation and Milk Producers Council. Those groups did not respond to requests for comment.

As the bird flu outbreak ramped up in 2022 and beyond, the industry’s claims that animal rights activists could spread disease were echoed by government officials, emails obtained by Property of the People show.

The Fallout

Animal rights activists say the claims by law enforcement and industry groups that activists are spreading disease have had real-world consequences.

In California, college student Zoe Rosenberg faces up to 5-and-a-half years in prison for taking part in what movement members describe as an “open rescue” of four chickens from a Sonoma County farm.

Rosenberg, a member of Direct Action Everywhere, has been identified by name in monitoring reports from the Animal Agriculture Alliance. For the past year and a half, she has been on an ankle monitor and intense supervision after prosecutors alleged in a December 2023 court hearing that she was a “biosecurity risk” because of ongoing bird flu outbreaks.

Rosenberg said last week she was taken aback by the similar allegations contained in previously private emails between law enforcement and industry.

“Instead of taking responsibility for what they are doing, they are trying to blame us. Of course, it’s always a shocking thing when nonviolent activists are called terrorists or framed as terrorists,” she said. “It just all feels backwards.”

The post How the FBI and Big Ag Started Treating Animal Rights Activists as Bioterrorists appeared first on The Intercept.

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency had taken “significant actions” to protect public health and the environment while working “to Power the Great American Comeback.” The agency said it was also working to fulfill Trump’s promises to revitalize the auto industry, “restore the rule of law,” and give decision-making power back to the states.

The EPA, the bosses were claiming, was succeeding in its mission of protecting human health and the environment.

In practice, the agency has done the opposite, several EPA staffers told The Intercept.

Environmental advocates and experts have criticized the administration for an “all-out assault” on the environment. Now, EPA staffers are speaking out in the wake of staff cuts and the gutting of a spate of programs to remove lead from drinking water, support rural wastewater treatment, and address racial disparities in environmental pollution.

“The mission of the EPA has been shifted,” said Amelia Hertzberg, an environmental protection specialist at the EPA.

“Americans are going to be less healthy. And frankly the EPA is going to be less efficient,” Hertzberg said. “If you’re less efficient, you’re wasting money. It’s working at cross-purposes with their stated goals.”

An EPA spokesperson disputed staffers’ characterization of its efforts to cut staff and weaken programs.

“At EPA, we are doing our part to Power the Great American Comeback, and we are proud of our work to advance the agency’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment every day since January 20,” EPA spokesperson Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to The Intercept.

“Not Our Mission”

Under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA announced a set of new core priorities that includes making the U.S. the artificial intelligence capital of the world and revitalizing the auto industry.

Staffers are concerned that instead of making communities healthier, under Trump the agency is now focused on serving industry, said Ellie Hagen, an environmental scientist at the EPA’s Environmental Justice, Community Health, and Environmental Review division.

It’s not clear how the EPA is supposed to serve those goals, said Hagen said, whose job is being terminated in July and was speaking on behalf of her local union, American Federation of Government Employees Local 704.

“A lot of us are really confused about what our new mission is, when they’re coming out with these pillars of serving the auto industry and bringing back auto industry jobs,” Hagen said. “I don’t know how we fit into that.”

The EPA’s role is not to create jobs; it’s to regulate and protect people from pollution, she said.

“Our mission is not to promote AI or energy dominance,” she said. “That’s not our mission.”

Deep Cuts

The EPA has said it is aiming to cut the agency’s budget by 65 percent and bring staffing levels to Reagan-era levels. As part of Trump’s efforts to gut the federal workforce under the auspices of government efficiency, the Office of Personnel Management sent the first round of deferred resignation offers to federal employees in January. More than 540 EPA staffers took those deferred resignations, which were open until early February.

Nine more employees were subject to a reduction in force as of May 7, according to a statement to The Intercept from the EPA press office; 280 employees in diversity, equity, and inclusion and environmental justice programs were notified last month that they were part of staffing cuts.

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As of last week, more than 1,500 staffers applied for deferred resignation and a “voluntary early retirement” program.

The day the resignation offers were sent out, EPA staff also received notice of agency reforms including return to office and “enhanced standards of conduct,” including “loyalty.” The EPA reopened its deferred resignation program last month.

Last week, the agency said it is planning to dissolve the Office of Research and Development, which does life-saving research on toxicity and developing sampling protocols, and helped in emergencies after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio and the Covid-19 pandemic.

As a result, more than 1,500 scientists will have to compete for 300 jobs, Hagen said.

“It’s essentially like lobotomizing our agency. If we don’t have the brain — the research behind protecting the environment — we can’t do that effectively, and I think that’s exactly what they want,” she said. “They’re doing all this under the guise of efficiency, but what they really are doing is dismantling this agency from doing its job.”

The EPA announced in March that it was ending its Environmental Justice Program and the agency’s “DEI Arms.” A few weeks later, the day before Earth Day, Hagen received notice that her tenured position was being terminated and that she would be removed no later than July 31.

“They did it on the eve of Earth Day to send a message,” she said. “They’re showing that they don’t feel the environmental justice program staff are loyal to this administration. They think what we stand for is different than what this administration stands for. So they’re making an example out of us.”

The agency said the term “environmental justice” had been used to advance left-wing politics.

“As Administrator Zeldin has repeatedly stressed, ‘environmental justice’ has been used primarily as an excuse to fund left-wing activist groups instead of actually spending those dollars on directly remediating the specific environmental issues that need to be addressed,” the EPA press office said.

The staffing cuts and resignation offers have had their intended effect, Hagen said: to scare career federal employees and push them out of the agency.

“They’re creating such an intense culture of fear that I think they’re pushing a lot of people in that direction,” she said.

Fewer people took deferred resignations in the first round because there was confusion around what direction the EPA was headed in. But Hagen expects many more to take the next round after leaders made clear they were completely shifting the agency’s agenda.

“Based on the mood in the office and hearing from my colleagues, I never thought would leave the EPA,” she said, “I think a lot of people are going to take it just because of how scared and traumatized we all have been over the past 100 days.”

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Another EPA staffer who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their livelihood said they feared for their future after being placed on administrative leave in February for their work in the Environmental Justice Program.

“I’m a military spouse who worked to better protect all including those most vulnerable and least protected from harmful exposures to chemicals and pollution,” they said.

“Our family is having to relocate from our home and community we love. We’ve both served our country and now are afraid for both our livelihoods,” they said. “This is our story and what we’ve been living through. So many of our friends are in similar situations here and across the country.”

“Non-Political”?

Much of the administration’s attack on the EPA is tied up in the politicization of principles that historically had bipartisan support — like environmental justice, which staffers pointed out was until recently not viewed as a political project.

“Environmental justice is supposed to be non-political,” Hertzberg said. “It’s just about identifying the people most in danger of pollution so you can help them first.”

President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, first created the Environmental Justice Program in 1992.

“This is a program that has been standing for decades, has done life-saving work across both sides of the aisle, efficiently and effectively,” Hagen said.

The agency is now cutting other programs that have bipartisan support, she added.

“How can you say this program has bipartisan support or support from the administration when you’re intimidating people into taking this buyout?” she said. “I think a lot of EPA staff will be taking the second round of buyouts, and we have no idea how that’s going to gut these statutory — what they say is bipartisan — support programs.”

In their attacks on “DEI” and “wokeness” — for example, efforts to ensure civil liberties and equal protection under the law for communities that have historically faced institutional discrimination — Trump and his allies have distorted the concept of environmental justice into a political weapon, Hertzberg said.

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“Environmental justice communities are young children. They’re pregnant women, the elderly, those with medical conditions, those without access to proper services, which is often rural communities and those living closer to polluters,” Hertzberg said. “This is really supposed to be a non-political part of the EPA, and it’s castigated as though we all have this axe to grind and are suspect in some way.”

Staffers said the government is now leaving communities they’ve built relationships with over the years vulnerable to life-threatening pollution and health hazards.

“The people who are still in the office are feeling worried about their jobs and feeling frustrated and heartbroken about the communities that we’ve served who are not being served anymore,” Hertzberg said.

EPA staff are now put in the position of betraying communities they’ve tried to build trust in, she said.

“Now you just have to let them down,” she said. “It’s the heartbreak of watching these people who you promised you were going to help be let down again, to have your hands tied behind your back, and at the same time being accused of being poor stewards of taxpayer funds.”

The post “Intense Culture of Fear”: Behind the Scenes as Trump Destroys the EPA From Within appeared first on The Intercept.

Nestled deep in the woods of the Missouri Ozarks, Draeger was used to seeing an explosion of weeds and shrubs in the warm months at the home he’s shared with his wife, Brenda, for more than 30 years. He didn’t think much of using Roundup to keep them at bay.

Then he was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. According to a lawsuit filed by the Draegers in 2022, Jimmy had a chemotherapy port installed in his chest, developed neuropathy in his hands and feet, and lost control of his bowels, coordination, and sexual function. He became clinically depressed, vision-impaired, and unable to bathe without Brenda’s help.

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Monsanto, the agrochemical company behind Roundup, was to blame for Jimmy’s lymphoma, the Draegers contended. In November 2023, a jury agreed. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, was ordered to pay the Draegers and two other plaintiffs a combined $1.56 billion in damages. (A judge later cut the payout for punitive damages, reducing the total awards to $611 million.)

The Draegers’ case is one of more than 160,000 Roundup lawsuits filed against Monsanto or Bayer since 2015, when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate, a key ingredient in Roundup, as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Most of the lawsuits hinged on failure-to-warn claims: the allegation that Monsanto, and later Bayer, failed to adequately notify customers of glyphosate’s potential cancer risk. Bayer has paid roughly $11 billion to settle these claims while denying any wrongdoing.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a Bayer-backed rule that could significantly curtail the lawsuits.

Enter the EPA

Unlike the WHO, the EPA — which, headed by Trump appointee Lee Zeldin, has already announced massive regulatory rollbacks — does not consider glyphosate to be a likely human carcinogen.

“EPA’s cancer classification is consistent with most other international expert panels and regulatory authorities,” EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to The Intercept. “EPA does not agree with IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans.’”

Last August, 11 industry-friendly red states, led by Nebraska and Iowa, submitted a 436-page petition asking the agency to amend its labeling rules under the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, or FIFRA. The proposed rule change would explicitly prohibit states from labeling pesticides and herbicides with warnings about cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm if those notices contradict the EPA’s risk assessment.

The states made clear that their ultimate goal is to thwart future lawsuits against pesticide manufacturers. Their petition argued that recent court rulings have created a “gap in FIFRA’s regulatory framework” that the proposed rule change would plug.

In January, in a move initiated by the Biden administration, the EPA took a first step of accepting public comment on the rule-making petition, with a deadline of March 24 — though this step is exploratory and does not mean a new rule will be issued. Still, the EPA’s decision could have disastrous consequences if Donald Trump’s second administration is as friendly to the chemical industry as it was in his first.

“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s a reality that the industry itself generates much of the data, and they say it’s safe, and then EPA approves that determination.”

“If we’re not limited to the industry-created data set,” he said, “they see it as a larger threat to their ability to control the universe of science and data that go into the pesticide regulatory review process.”

Warning Labels

The EPA petition follows in the path of other efforts at both the state and federal level to shield Bayer from civil liability.

Last year, state legislatures in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri introduced bills that would make pesticide manufacturers immune to failure-to-warn lawsuits if their product labels match EPA assessments. And House Republicans introduced similar language in the discussion draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.

Though all the bills failed, allies of the chemical industry are expected to redouble their efforts this year. Advocates expect at least 21 states to introduce pesticide immunity legislation in 2025. The Florida Senate already has.

Bayer itself bankrolled the push, spending nearly $8.5 million to lobby the federal government in 2024, including to advocate for the “uniformity of pesticide labeling” under FIFRA.

FIFRA already prohibits the sale of “misbranded” pesticides, which includes requiring state health warnings to conform with EPA-approved labels.

“We are very pleased to see the EPA and several state Attorneys General take this step to reinforce that any state labeling requirements inconsistent with EPA’s own findings and conclusions regarding human health, such as a pesticide’s likelihood to cause cancer, constitute misbranding,” Bayer said in a statement to The Intercept. “It reinforces the urgent need for a solution to this issue created by the litigation industry.”

The raft of litigation over Roundup, however, has not always ended badly for Bayer. Federal appeals courts disagree on whether the FIFRA misbranding statute trumps state laws that may require manufacturers to go farther in adequately warning consumers about their products.

The 9th and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled in plaintiffs’ favor in recent years, finding that failure-to-warn claims against Bayer in state courts are consistent with FIFRA’s intent; the 3rd Circuit, meanwhile, found the opposite. The split could set the stage for a Supreme Court battle.

The EPA rule change proposed in the states’ petition aims to remedy the circuit split by explicitly classifying labels as “misbranded” if they include health warnings that exceed the EPA’s risk assessment.

The agency’s position on glyphosate has been mired in controversy for decades. In 1991, the EPA mysteriously changed its classification from “suggestive evidence” of glyphosate’s carcinogenic potential to “no evidence.”

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Since then, documents released in Roundup litigation have shown Monsanto cozying up to EPA regulators, ghostwriting scientific papers on glyphosate’s safety, and actively working to discredit journalists and WHO.

In 2015 — the same year the international body’s cancer bureau classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen — The Intercept reported that the EPA had overwhelmingly used Monsanto’s own research to conclude that glyphosate was not an endocrine disruptor.

In 2016, an internal EPA analysis noted an association between glyphosate exposure and an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in four epidemiological studies, The Intercept reported. The EPA analysis was never made public. Instead, the agency drew from industry-backed studies in 2016 to conclude that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

“The industry itself generates and pays for much of this data, so that is very different of course than peer-reviewed, hypothesis-based, independent science,” said Hartl, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “That creates an inherent tension and conflict of interest.”

“EPA’s long-standing practice is to seek input from a variety of stakeholders and use the best available science,” said Vaseliou, the EPA public affairs official. “EPA evaluates information from all kinds of sources — pesticide companies, other governments, academia, and the published scientific literature.”

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In 2020, during the periodic pesticide review process mandated by FIFRA, the EPA issued an interim decision to reregister glyphosate with a risk assessment that did not identify “any human health risks of concern.” But in June 2022, in a separate case from the FIFRA ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EPA’s assessment, noting the decision had been made without following the agency’s own cancer guidelines, and ordered the EPA to reevaluate its findings.

The new analysis is still forthcoming.

“In accordance with the court’s decision related to human health, EPA is currently updating its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate to better explain its findings and include the current relevant scientific information,” said Vaseliou. “EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same.”

Trump’s MAHA Promise

How the EPA decides to proceed with the glyphosate petition will in many ways be a canary in the coal mine for this administration’s approach to chemical regulation.

While Trump’s first term was marked by severe deference to industry, his recent rhetoric has promoted Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, agenda.

In a February executive order, the president pledged to eliminate “undue industry influence” and “establish a framework for transparency and ethics review in industry-funded projects” — the same reforms that advocates have long said would strengthen the EPA’s glyphosate review.

Kennedy is a longtime critic of the pesticide industry; in an October YouTube video, he railed against the country’s agriculture policy for “tilting the playing field in favor of more chemicals, more herbicides, more insecticides” and promised to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals that are already prohibited in other countries.” As a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading nonprofit environmental law group, he took Monsanto to task, helping secure a multimillion-dollar settlement in a Roundup cancer lawsuit in 2018.

There are indications, of course, that the MAHA promise is a smokescreen.

In 2017, Trump’s EPA rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to increased cancer risk. He appointed former American Chemistry Council executive Nancy Beck to oversee toxic chemical regulation. Beck is once again slated to take a senior EPA position; Lynn Dekleva, another ACC lobbyist who fought the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde, will now run the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

Vaseliou said, “Your questions regarding Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva are insulting and unfounded. This is yet another question based on false accusations that left propaganda also known as media take as gospel. President Trump made a fantastic choice in selecting Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva to work at EPA.”

On March 12, Zeldin, Trump’s EPA chief, announced the agency would begin rolling back 31 environmental regulations — “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” he said — including rules aimed at preventing disasters at hazardous chemical facilities and restricting the industrial pollution of mercury.

“It strikes me that there’s a very significant tension between what the president has promised relating to the overuse of pesticides in this country versus the other elements of his own administration that reflexively do what industry wants no matter what,” said Hartl. “He’s going to have to decide who he’s going to let down: whether it’s his own supporters that believe in his MAHA agenda or his industry benefactors.”

The post Trump EPA’s Next Move: Making It Harder to Sue for Getting Cancer from Roundup appeared first on The Intercept.

The Climate Justice Alliance, a nonprofit that organizes on climate issues in poor and Indigenous communities, was awarded a multimillion-dollar grant under former President Joe Biden’s climate infrastructure package. The Biden administration, however, later delayed that funding over the group’s support for Palestine, The Intercept reported. 

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Last month, the group received word that it would not receive the funding under President Donald Trump. 

The Environmental Protection Agency, which issues the grant, previously said it was continuing to evaluate the funding. On Thursday, however, Trump’s appointee to lead the Environmental Protection Agency posted a tweet that seemed to confirm what the nonprofit has been saying all along: The government canceled its grant in retaliation over its public statements on Palestine. 

“I just cancelled a $50 MILLION Biden-era environmental justice grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, which believes ‘climate justice travels through a Free Palestine,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a tweet on Thursday. (The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Climate Justice Alliance (CJA) (@cjaourpower)

CJA collaborates with close to 100 smaller groups, community networks, and other grassroots organizations that deal with climate issues in working-class rural and urban communities. Its direct work has little to do with Palestine, but it has connected its mission of climate justice to the effects of war in Palestine as a global climate issue. CJA also put out a statement calling for a ceasefire shortly after the October 7 attacks in 2023.

In a post to Instagram on Thursday featuring a screenshot of Zeldin’s tweet, CJA wrote that the Biden administration had left its fate in the unwelcoming hands of Trump. (Asked for comment, CJA referred The Intercept to its social media statement.) The group said the grant would have helped create sustainable jobs, provide resources for projects to protect public health and safety, and benefited taxpayers and working-class families. 

“The Administration continues its attacks on working class communities, rural and urban families with its announcement of the cancellation of the Climate Justice Alliance’s UNITE-EJ program grant,” CJA wrote, referring to the EPA grant.

“Unfortunately, the Biden administration failed to process these obligated funds intended to help communities facing disasters from climate change and left the decision in the hands of the Trump administration. Despite claims that this administration will protect clean water and clean air for the nation it has attacked basic protections for neglected communities from day one.”

Republican lawmakers and right-wing media have also targeted CJA, claiming it exhibited “anti-Republican sentiment” and wanted to “defund the police.” Republicans also slammed the group for supporting a Green New Deal. 

Trump is increasingly using political attacks as a policy tool, starting with his support for a “nonprofit killer bill” passed in the House last year. The bill would allow the Treasury secretary to strip nonprofit status from groups it designates as a “terrorist supporting organization.”

The post Trump’s EPA Kills Grant to Climate Nonprofit Over Its Support for Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

“That’s my old elementary school teacher, that’s the person that used to pick us up at the Boys and Girls Club, that’s my old friend from elementary school — everybody had lost their housing,” she said. Graves, who had moved to New York for work, began reposting their GoFundMe campaigns to feel closer to home.

Cierra Black, a Los Angeles resident and a friend of Graves, had been doing the same thing, feverishly reposting the waves of GoFundMe pages of Black families who had lost their homes in Altadena and Pasadena. They both knew the community’s history and what was at stake of being lost: a place where Black families had settled after leaving the Jim Crow South, and where Black Angelenos who were displaced from their South Los Angeles neighborhoods by freeway construction projects in the 1950s had bought homes. Despite redlining and racist real estate practices in Altadena, multiple generations of Black Angelenos called the neighborhood home.

The Eaton fire destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed at least 17 people, with at least 24 people reported missing. Many of the dead were Black elders from the community who had remained in their homes amid delays in evacuation orders. 

National news coverage in the early days of the fire, however, tended to focus on the Palisades fire, which burned on the other end of the county and had decimated a wealthy coastal neighborhood. Stories focused on celebrities who had lost their homes or dramatic images of mansions burning along the iconic Pacific Coast Highway. Graves and Black feared a similar dynamic would be play out in crowdfunding, with the Black families of Altadena going overlooked.

Black, who is a freelance journalist, began working with Leslie Vargas, her editor at AfroPunk, to compile the GoFundMe campaigns of Black families affected by the Eaton fire. They called the spreadsheet “Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory” and shared it on the AfroPunk Instagram account to its 1.1 million followers. Graves joined the effort, vetting submissions. As a part of a wellspring of mutual aid that sprung up across the region, the list spread widely across social media. And it started to have an impact. One of Graves’s childhood friends who added their campaign to the list saw their donations double within the same day. Within a week, the list has grown from a few dozen campaigns to more than 700 that have raised a total of more than $17 million.

Such effort is necessary to overcome negative perceptions and structural racism, the organizers said. “When it comes to relief, certain people are automatically deserving, and others you have to question if they’re deserving or not,” Black said. “That definitely applies to a lot of working-class Black people, or even Black people across the spectrum.” 

Her concerns of inequality within giving are especially true as charity has shifted toward GoFundMe.

Since its launch in 2010, GoFundMe has established itself as the prevailing way for individuals to fundraise online. Raising and distributing $30 billion since its founding, the privately held, for-profit site, which rakes in millions in revenue each year through donation fees and tips, has become the world’s biggest crowdfunding platform and the go-to way for Americans in crisis to give to one another.

The site allows individuals to craft their own calls for aid — whether it’s for spiraling health care costs, natural disasters, or other emergencies. It helps people raise funds in cases where government aid may fall short or is absent altogether. In the last several weeks, GoFundMe has raised more than $200 million in fire-related donations, according to the company. That sum nearly equals all disaster-related relief fundraised on the platform in 2024. Over the past five years, GoFundMe has also seen a 90 percent increase in disaster-related fundraising. 

The platform, however, is also rife with inequality. A growing body of research has shown that GoFundMe amplifies existing biases within aid and, in some cases, exacerbates them. Its fundraisers tend to favor wealthy and highly educated people, according to such studies.

Individuals who reach their fundraising goals are often those who need it the least. About 40 percent of all campaigns related to the pandemic didn’t raise any money at all. White campaigners tend to get more money than their counterparts who are Black or Hispanic.

Graves and Black hope their fundraising campaign can push back on racial disparities and also America’s neoliberal views on charity, which focus on the individual over the collective and trust the free market above all else.

“That’s why it’s important to center their humanity, center their stories,” Graves said. “It’s just been beautiful to see the amount of people contributing to this list.”

The Rich Get Richer on GoFundMe

After the Marshall fire ripped through Boulder County, Colorado, in December 2021 and January 2022, killing two people and destroying more than 1,000 homes, two researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder noticed something peculiar. Some of the GoFundMe campaigns from friends and acquaintances who had lost their homes took off, raising tens of thousands of dollars. Others struggled.

“This begged the question,” said Emily Gallagher, a professor of finance at CU Boulder’s Leeds School of Business. “Why are some people raising so much money and others so little?” 

Gallagher and fellow researcher Tony Cookson looked at the GoFundMe campaigns of nearly 500 people in Boulder County who had lost their homes to the fire and analyzed their credit information. People with household incomes of $120,000 or more raised 25 percent more money than those with household incomes below $78,000. People with bad credit or delinquent accounts raised less than those with good credit histories. 

Much of this inequality was driven by people’s social networks: Wealthier people tend to have wealthier friends. And wealthy people often had the benefit of friends starting and managing the GoFundMe campaigns for them. 

Cookson observed similar inequalities in the aftermath of the deadly fires in Maui in 2023. He and Gallagher said they are interested in collecting data in the Los Angeles fires, mostly due to the disparity between the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods. They both suspect a similar dynamic is already playing out.

While Altadena is not poor, with a median household income of around $123,000, according to census data, the Pacific Palisades is among the wealthiest ZIP codes in LA with a median household income at nearly $200,000. Even within Altadena, there is variance with income: A GoFundMe page shared by actor-singer Mandy Moore for her brother-in-law who lost their Altadena home in the Eaton fire kicked off an intense debate about who in society should be soliciting others for help.

“You can see the differences across neighborhoods pretty starkly in the California fires,” Cookson added. “And one of the things that dismays me, looking at headlines, is that you see people who are in some of the richer neighborhoods getting more attention to their locality, and I feel for more of the working-class areas.”

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For a platform built around help, GoFundMe can feel like a competition. 

Like other for-profit social media platforms, GoFundMe plays a central role shaping how users find information and the decisions they make, said Nora Kenworthy, a researcher with the University of Washington and author of “Crowded Out,” which looks at the consequences of crowdfunding around health care issues. 

“That becomes especially consequential with a platform like GoFundMe because people are literally making life-or-death decisions” about who to help and how much to give, Kenworthy said. “Those are really challenging decisions to put onto individuals, and oftentimes the kinds of inequities that all of us are part of get amplified in that space.”

In one study, an individual she surveyed refused to give to a GoFundMe campaign of a person who had severe need but was struggling to raise money. Instead, they donated to someone else who had a more polished page and had raised more money. The donor, she said, equated the struggling page to a product “not having any reviews on Amazon.”

“When we start to read people’s stories of need through the lenses on which we look at products on Amazon … that can cause a lot of unintentional harm,” Kenworthy said. 

Such harm also manifests along the lines of race. 

A 2020 study that Kenworthy helped lead showed that Black people are often underrepresented among the total number of those who make GoFundMe campaigns, especially Black women. Black women make up roughly 14 percent of the population but are behind only about 7 percent of all campaigns created by women. White women made up 84 percent of the campaigns, the study found.

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Another study of 800 viral GoFundMe campaigns that raised more than $100,000 for medical emergencies found a similar disparity. White people were beneficiaries in 80 percent of the fundraisers, while Black people made up only 3 percent of the viral campaigns. A mere 5 recipients were Black women. 

Kenworthy suspected that similar patterns might be playing out across LA-area GoFundMe campaigns, she also noticed there is a level of awareness of inequality in the ways people are helping each other in LA, crediting the vast network of mutual aid groups. Along with the Displaced Black Families list, organizers and POC communities have established lists for Latine, Filipino, and Asian and Pacific Islander families, as well as displaced people with disabilities.

Missing Campaigns

GoFundMe itself has made efforts to streamline fundraising amid the Los Angeles fires. Atop its homepage is a link to a curated list of campaigns for people who were affected by California’s recent wildfires, including those affected by Palisades and Eaton fires. 

An initial analysis by The Intercept looked at more than 1,300 LA County-based campaigns highlighted on GoFundMe’s curated California Wildfires relief list a week after the Eaton and Palisades fires began. Though the majority were fundraisers from the Altadena and Pasadena area, the analysis found that many campaigns for Black families were left out. Less than 40 percent of the fundraisers on the Displaced Black Families list were included in GoFundMe’s curated list. 

“That’s definitely a troubling number to be left out,” Kenworthy said, when presented with the findings.

“I think this is reflective of some important questions users have about platform practices related to moderation, verification, and visibility,” she said, “which we know on other platforms can be substantially racially biased.”

GoFundMe said that before campaigns are added to its curated California Wildfires page, each campaign goes through “a robust human review,” which includes vetting by a computer system along with individuals on its trust and safety team who then manually add each campaign to the list. Such a review process may account for some of the missing campaigns.

A subsequent analysis about a week later showed that GoFundMe had added some of the missing campaigns to its curated list. However, about half of the entries on the Displaced Black Families list remain absent from GoFundMe’s California Wildfires page.

GoFundMe’s delay in highlighting these campaigns can have negative effects toward their ability to raise money. Success on GoFundMe and charitable giving often depends on how early and quickly a campaign launches after a crisis. Outside of those initial hours or days, building momentum is difficult.

Among those missing from GoFundMe’s fires page was a campaign for the family of a former elementary school teacher and longtime Altadena resident who lost their home; an elderly woman known as Grandma Dorothy whose home of more than 50 years burned down; and a family that lost a home where four generations had been raised. The family, including children, rushed from the home that had been purchased by their grandparents in 1974 after they had been awakened by flames burning in their backyard at 2 a.m. Their campaign has raised only about a third of its goal.

When asked whether GoFundMe’s vetting process includes consideration of equity issues, the company said it does not collect demographic data on its users, including age and race. GoFundMe also said it is working with organizers of the displaced Black, Latine, and Asian and Pacific Islander families lists.

Who Will Rebuild?

One week after the Eaton fire started, Graves is still learning of new losses. She had recently received word that the Black-owned martial arts studio that she had trained at as a child had been gutted by flames. So too was an elementary school and library. The park where she attended summer camps was closed due to fire damage, and the many trails in Eaton Canyon will be off-limits for months, if not years. 

And with the fire under control, the challenge of rebuilding begins. In Altadena and north Pasadena, questions linger on whether its Black community will have the means to reconstruct all that was lost. 

After the Marshall fire in Colorado, Gallagher and Cookson found in their 2023 study that families who raised successful campaigns on GoFundMe were more likely to rebuild their homes. But a survey found that even though around 85 percent of residents said they planned to rebuild, that number shrunk to about 60 percent within two years as monetary hardships mounted. 

Graves and Black acknowledged the effort to rebuild Altadena will take years and will need more than just GoFundMe campaigns. Many of those who were displaced were elderly or disabled and may have less access to create something like a GoFundMe campaign, they pointed out.

Insurance reimbursements, FEMA assistance, and Small Business Administration loans will also prove vital for families looking to rebuild — although those government aid programs also carry their own issues of inequality. Black and Graves said they will continue their work in expanding the list for displaced families, and are focused on building out the infrastructure to distribute major donations, even beyond GoFundMe.

Even before the fires, Altadena’s Black population had begun to dwindle. In 2000, Black residents made up about one third of Altadenans, but by 2020, that number had been cut in half to about 16 percent in 2020, according to census data. Many locals, such as Graves, attribute such changes to gentrification and predatory developers. Yet there has been a resilient group that has refused to sell and has remained.

The Displaced Black Families list is one of the ways for the public to recognize the Black Altadena that is still there.

“It’s important to have a space where we can visibly see the amount of people that live in this area, all the people that have owned this land, who have owned their houses for generations,” Graves said. “So that we can really start to think about how we can contribute to these families now, but also think about what sort of systems can be created to really protect their land.” 

She wondered what sort of policies can be put in place to prevent gentrification and make the community more resistant to fires and other climate-driven disasters. 

“These are working-class Black people,” she said. “This was everything they had.”

The post Which LA Fire Victims Get Money on GoFundMe — and Who Gets Left Out? appeared first on The Intercept.

Patrick Lee, the deputy director public liaison for the inaugural committee, was a member of the board of the Ohio Clean Water Fund, an LLC formed in Ohio days after the train derailed in February 2023. Trump’s appearance in East Palestine after the disaster became a major talking point in his presidential campaign.

The Ohio Clean Water Fund claimed it was operating on behalf of the Second Harvest Food Bank of the Mahoning Valley, a group providing bottled water and other aid to those affected in East Palestine. The Ohio Clean Water Fund managed to raise over $141,000 in less than five weeks, according to a preliminary injunction and the terms of a June 2023 settlement with Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost. 

The partnership it touted, however, was not real, the attorney general’s office charged. After the food bank said publicly that there was no relationship between the two groups, the Ohio Clean Water Fund provided the Second Harvest Food Bank with a $10,000 check, keeping the remaining $131,000, according to the attorney general’s office. Yost later declared the Ohio Clean Water Fund to be a “phony charity” run by “scammers.” 

“The sham charity must turn over more than $131,000 in pocketed donations so the money truly does benefit East Palestine.”

A lawyer representing Lee said the settlement is not an admission of wrongdoing by Lee or the charity. “Mr. Lee vigorously disputes the allegations,” attorney Michael Columbo wrote in a letter threatening legal action against The Intercept.

Lee was not named as a defendant and did not answer questions about his role with Ohio Clean Water Fund, which, according to court documents, shared an address with Lee’s home in Alexandria, Virginia. The Intercept used business documents and public records to confirm Lee’s identity. 

In exchange for choosing to forgo claims against Lee and his group, Yost’s settlement barred Lee from certain charitable activities in Ohio and required him and the Ohio Clean Water Fund to pay a six-figure restitution. 

“Under a settlement reached with the Ohio Clean Water Fund, the sham charity must turn over more than $131,000 in pocketed donations so the money truly does benefit East Palestine residents,” Yost’s office said in a press release. “The food bank had not given OCWF permission to fundraise on its behalf, and Yost’s lawsuit revealed that the ‘charity’ had pocketed at least $131,000 of the donated funds, while sending only $10,000 to the food bank.”

In his letter to The Intercept, Columbo, of the Dhillon Law Group — helmed by Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s pick to run the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division — noted that Lee, the Ohio Clean Water Fund, and the Ohio attorney general settled to avoid lengthy and expensive litigation with no admission of wrongdoing. 

“The agreement speaks for itself,” Columbo wrote. “It appears that the Intercept will be misusing an agreement that settled allegations as evidence the allegations were true.” 

As part of a subsequent investigation into the Ohio Clean Water Fund’s finances, the attorney general’s office found that the group had raised nearly $150,000 and had paid a fundraiser to collect the sum through text message solicitations. 

As part of the settlement, Lee and the Ohio Clean Water Fund were jointly liable, leaving them responsible to pay over $116,000 in restitution, and another $15,000 in civil penalties. 

Lee is barred from forming an Ohio charitable trust and from soliciting donations on behalf of any charity in Ohio, according to the settlement. And he is not allowed to be a director, officer, contractor, or board member of any charitable organization in Ohio for the rest of his life. 

The settlement permits Lee to volunteer at an Ohio-based charity if his role does not involve donations or funds.

The East Palestine train derailment, which released hazardous materials and toxins in the surrounding community, became a political football in the 2024 presidential campaign. Trump’s team touted his appearance — and Joe Biden’s absence — at the disaster site. And Trump invited East Palestine Mayor Trent Conaway to speak at the Republican National Convention last summer. 

After his victory, Trump staffers hailed his handling of East Palestine as a crucial moment in the race. 

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“This was the moment that really set the campaign on a trajectory to victory,” incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung posted to X last month. “The ripples from that day do not get enough attention.” 

Lee has worked in national and state politics for years, including with the Republican National Committee. 

He was the field director for the Congressional Leadership Fund, a super PAC that was criticized for spreading misinformation. His consulting firm, LCM Strategies, contracted with the Georgia Republican Party last year. 

Since the June 2023 settlement, LCM Strategies has received payments from Ohio Republican state Reps. Justin Pizzulli and Adam Mathews. 

“I was not familiar with Patrick Lee, the Ohio Clean Water Fund, or the details of the alleged misuse of donations until receiving your email,” Pizzulli told The Intercept, noting that LCM had been hired as a subcontractor, rather than directly by his campaign. “These allegations are concerning, and I trust the Attorney General’s office is ensuring restitution and accountability.”

While FEC records indicate neither the Trump campaign nor the RNC directly hired Lee during the 2024 campaign season, prior reporting and sources confirm he was involved in logistics for the convention. 

Lee’s duties as deputy director of public liaison for Trump’s inaugural committee were not clear.

Lee was not the only political operative involved with the alleged “sham charity.” Ohio Clean Water Fund founder Mike Peppel worked for U.S. Rep. Mike Rulli, R-Ohio, before becoming involved with the East Palestine group. As part of a separate settlement with Yost in August, Peppel was also required to pay restitution and forgo certain charitable activities. The settlement notes that Peppel disputed the allegations and reached the deal to avoid costly litigation.

Earlier this month, The Vindicator reported that Rulli had rehired Peppel. Rulli’s campaign had also contracted with Lee’s group, LCM Strategies, in 2021 and 2022. 

“I have said from the beginning that we will continue to fight for the people of East Palestine, which is exactly what we did here,” Yost said in a statement after the second settlement. “These scammers preyed on generous donors to try to line their own pockets, but ultimately were stopped and shut down.”

The post Trump Inauguration Official’s “Phony Charity” Allegedly Pocketed East Palestine Train Disaster Funds appeared first on The Intercept.

As of January 8, the Palisades Fire is 0 percent contained. Two additional wildfires, the Hurst Fire and the Eaton Fire, are also currently at zero containment as they scorch greater Los Angeles County, burning thousands of acres, destroying over 1,100 structures, and killing at least five people. As hundreds of firefighters race to stop the spread, gusting Santa Ana winds and a landscape desiccated by a bone-dry winter — an anomaly linked to broader climate change trends — aren’t the only obstacles the LAFD is facing. 

In June, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an adopted $12.8 billion budget that cut the fire department’s funding by more than $17.5 million, or around 2 percent of the previous year’s budget of $837 million. It was the second-largest departmental operating cut to come out of the city’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, which shaved funding from the majority of city departments — but not the police. The Los Angeles Police Department received a funding bump of nearly $126 million.

The mayor’s initial budget proposal included a $23 million decrease for the fire department — a more drastic reduction than what the LA City Council finally approved. (The outdated $23 million figure circulated widely on social media after the wildfires this week.) The fire department operating budget is about a third of what the LAPD is allocated.

“What is currently happening and unfolding is what we have been warning about,” said Ricci Sergienko, a lawyer and organizer with People’s City Council LA. “The consistent defunding of other city programs in order to give the LAPD billions a year has consequences, and these elected officials do actually have blood on their hands. The city is unprepared to handle this fire, and Los Angeles shouldn’t be in that position.”

Other departments that received major cuts included the Bureau of Street Services, the Bureau of Sanitation, and General Services, for an overall budget decrease of nearly $250 million. Funds for rental support, homelessness services, and street lighting were also reduced. 

Only three city councilmembers — Hugo Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman, and Eunisses Hernandez — voted against the budget last May, noting in a press release that it allocated tens of millions of dollars to fund LAPD positions that would likely remain vacant. That’s because the LAPD has struggled to recruit officers in recent years, even as it continues to request and receive funding for those empty positions.

Since The Intercept and local news outlets reported that the fiscal-year LA fire budget declined by $17.6 million, elected officials have pushed back. LA City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield disputed the budget cuts, telling Politico that the fire department in fact received a $50 million increase in funding this year. The new funds he referenced appear to come from an agreement reached with the firefighters’ union in November for raises and benefits, but are not linked to increased staffing. Those funds have not yet been distributed, according to City Controller Kenneth Mejia. (Blumenfield’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley tells @NorahODonnell the department was "limited to a certain factor" after a recent $17.6 million budget cut. She had recently warned that cuts would hamper their ability to respond to large-scale emergencies and said the department "did… pic.twitter.com/wK989fEn3q

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) January 10, 2025

A spokesperson for Mejia said that the LAFD budget cuts last June included a reduction in sworn payroll, reduced funds for operating supplies, and the elimination of 58 positions. In December, weeks after the new union contract was signed, the Board of Fire Commissioners sent a report to Bass and the City Council outlining how the funding cuts in the budget had adversely impacted the department’s crucial services.

An LAPD spokesperson reached by The Intercept said that they could not respond to questions by the time of publication.

While it’s unclear that any amount of staffing could have fully contained the fires raging across Los Angeles this week, the call for help — and the firefighters traveling in to assist from across California and nearby states — show that any additional capacity in place before the fires sparked could have helped.

The controversial cuts were ostensibly made to help close the city’s budget deficit. Critics, however, have noted that defunding the fire department is a recipe for disaster as the climate crisis brings increasingly devastating fires to the drought-stricken region.

“The Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours,” wrote Fire Chief Kristin Crowley wrote in the December Board of Fire Commissioners report to city officials. “These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.”

The LAFD’s Fire Prevention Bureau, for instance, had six of its roles cut and its overtime hours reduced. Crowley wrote that the decrease in overtime hours created an “inability to complete required brush clearance inspections, which are crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.”

While most departments received cuts, LAPD’s budget continues to bloat, and Mejia has pointed to overspending on police liability claims as one major source of the city’s deficit. The city spent more than double its annual liability payouts budget in the first six months of this fiscal year, with the LAPD leading the spending at more than $100 million in legal settlements. Recent payouts include a $17.7 million settlement with the family of a mentally disabled man who was fatally shot by an off-duty officer inside a Costco, and a $11.8 million payout to a man who sustained a traumatic brain injury in a car accident when an LAPD detective ran a red light.

Diana Chang, Mejia’s communications director, highlighted two forces that are driving a rise in liability payouts, most of which are made from the city’s General Fund rather than department-specific appropriations. Departments are either “not held accountable for liabilities they give rise to,” Chang wrote, or they are “underfunded / understaffed and cannot keep up with the necessary demands and needs of the City.”

Sergienko, of People’s City Council LA, bristled at the use of taxpayer money to fund police abuse settlements. “We’re paying for state-sanctioned violence instead of having money to deal with the climate crisis,” he said. “We just give more money to the police, who then end up costing us more money, due to all of these settlements. It’s a never-ending loop.”

Looking ahead, the LAPD has already requested another increase for the 2025-26 fiscal year. In November, the LA Board of Police Commissioners approved a spending package that included a request for an additional $160.5 million from the city’s budget — an increase of more than 8 percent. Bass is currently reviewing the proposal; she’s expected to unveil the city’s next budget plan in late April.

Bass’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has publicly clashed with Mejia over his criticism of the city budget. Last spring, after Mejia called the deductions to public services “short-sighted,” Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl dismissed the remarks as “theatrical exaggeration and doomsday projections.” 

For many Angelenos, that doomsday is now here. The fires burning across the county are already the most destructive in modern LA history, forcing more than 80,000 evacuations with no signs of abating. Whole blocks in the Palisades are leveled. The Eaton fire is eating its way through Altadena, Pasadena and the surrounding communities, taking at least five lives so far.

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Los Angeles is no stranger to wildfires, but a January disaster is unusual. Studies show that climate change is contributing to longer, more destructive fire seasons. Still, in 2020, LA’s then-Mayor Eric Garcetti cut another $500,000 in funds set aside for a Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.

“The impact of this catastrophic event will be felt by our community well past today, but we hope that our City’s coordinated efforts will provide assistance to ensure the smoothest recovery possible,” Chang wrote in a statement. “As always, we support putting resources and meaningful investments toward saving lives through emergency preparedness, wildfire prevention, and serious climate action, and encourage the City’s decisionmakers to prioritize these resources and investments.”

Update: January 10, 2025
The headline of this story has been updated to specify how the city budget cuts affected the fire department. Additional material in the story describes new funds designated to the fire department from a general fund in November for raises and benefits, five months after LAFD’s operating budget was cut by $17.6 million.

The post LA Budgeted Money For Cop Jobs While Cutting Fire Department Positions. Now the City Is Burning. appeared first on The Intercept.

Staffers with the EPA and Department of Energy published an open letter Thursday demanding that the EPA end collaboration with Israel on energy and environmental partnerships.

The agency exchanges information with Israel and cooperates with Israel on workshops, research projects, and sharing research personnel. Projects include cleaning up and redeveloping contaminated military sites and sharing water reuse practices with U.S. officials. 

“We cannot uphold our oath to serve the public interest while remaining quiet about the devastating humanitarian crisis.”

“The ongoing genocide in Gaza has compelled us to speak truthfully on the hypocrisy of protecting human health and the environment within U.S. borders while our government continues to fund and facilitate the destruction of entire communities and ecosystems overseas,” says the letter, which was shared with The Intercept in advance of its public release. “We cannot uphold our oath to serve the public interest while remaining quiet about the devastating humanitarian crisis that continues to unfold before us.”

Time is also running out for the Biden administration to honor its $50 million grant to the Climate Justice Alliance, a nonprofit coalition that had its funding put on pause after it expressed support for Palestine. 

The letter demands that the EPA release the group’s federal funds. 

The EPA staffers’ letter comes several weeks after The Intercept reported that the agency had delayed paying out money, earmarked under an Inflation Reduction Act program, after right-wing politicians attacked the Climate Justice Alliance for its stance in favor of a ceasefire in Gaza. (The EPA did not respond to a request for comment.)  

The December 6 deadline to disburse the funds to the Climate Justice Alliance has passed. Now, the group is at risk of losing funding when President-elect Donald Trump takes office in January. 

“The funds to CJA are critical for building community resilience against climate change threats, particularly in severely capacity-constrained tribal, remote, and rural areas,” the EPA staffers wrote. “Taking away this funding would leave the people living in these communities vulnerable to potentially disastrous climate disturbances.”

Unfulfilled Climate Promises

Biden took office on one of the most progressive climate platforms in recent history, but has failed to deliver on several promised fast-track climate projects, while at the same time opening federal lands to leases for oil and gas extraction.

The Climate Justice Alliance supports 95 grassroots organizations in rural and urban areas, including groups led by Indigenous, minority, and poor white communities working on climate projects. The group’s work does not focus on Palestine, but it called for a ceasefire in Gaza last year and has publicly linked its work to climate justice issues in Palestine.

Fearing professional retaliation, the EPA and Department of Energy staffers published their letter anonymously on Medium under the banner Federal Environmental and Energy Workers for Justice in Palestine.

Progressives in Congress mounted their own efforts to get Biden to release the funds to the Climate Justice Alliance. 

On December 4, following The Intercept’s reporting, Sen. Ed Markey, D-Mass., and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, D-N.Y., and Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., sent a letter urging Biden to deliver key climate priorities and “swiftly disburse” Inflation Reduction Act money. 

Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., also contacted the EPA and pressured the agency to release the funding, according to a person with knowledge of the deliberations. 

“Prioritizing environmental justice is not selective,” one EPA staffer who worked on the letter told The Intercept. “The United States needs to advance it everywhere, including indigenous communities at home and abroad, which means demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine with an arms embargo to Israel and fulfilling its funding commitment to the Climate Justice Alliance here at home.”

The post EPA Staffers Demand Biden Release Climate Funds Withheld Over Gaza appeared first on The Intercept.

The Climate Justice Alliance, a national coalition of more than 100 community environmental groups, was one of 11 grant-making organizations designated for Environmental Protection Agency funding under President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. 

The Climate Justice Alliance is the only group of the 11 grantees that has engaged publicly on issues related to Palestine — and the only one that hasn’t received its funding.

“If we are not funded, it could set a larger civil society precedent for any future federal funding.”

Climate Justice Alliance Executive Director KD Chavez said the organization, which was recently attacked by right-wing politicians and media, has been targeted because of its anti-war stance.

Palestine is hardly a focus of the Climate Justice Alliance’s work, but past statements calling for a ceasefire in Gaza and denouncing apartheid in Palestine have come under a microscope amid a political climate that is increasingly hostile to any form of support for Palestinians.

“Since our founding, CJA has been really clear in our position opposing war, racism, and colonialism,” said Chavez. “For us, there is a direct tie to carbon emissions and militarism, and we stand behind our environmental and climate justice work, which is going to mean that we are anti-war at heart.” 

Delaying the grant payment, which was first reported by E&E News, could set a broader precedent to withhold funding from organizations working on social justice issues, Chavez said. House Republicans recently passed a bill known as H.R. 9495 that critics say would green-light devastating political attacks on nonprofits. 

“If we are not funded, it could set a larger civil society precedent for any future federal funding for any ambiguously progressive organization in the future,” Chavez said. “When we’re connecting the dots, seeing H.R. 9495 gain traction plus the potential of us not being obligated these funds could lead to dangerous precedent setting for civil society more broadly.” 

A spokesperson for the EPA said the agency was still evaluating the Climate Justice Alliance grant. “EPA continues to work through its rigorous process to obligate the funds under the Inflation Reduction Act, including the Thriving Communities Grantmakers program,” EPA Communications Director Nick Conger said in a statement to The Intercept. “EPA continues to review the grant for the Climate Justice Alliance.” 

Looming GOP Attack

The Biden administration announced the recipients of $600 million in grants under the program in December. The Climate Justice Alliance was one of three national grantees. Nine regional organizations were also selected. 

The Climate Justice Alliance said it met all administrative deadlines and expected to get notice of funds by September, the end of the standard 90-day waiting period for grant applicants. Grantees under the program have to have their funds obligated by December 6 in order to get the funds disbursed before the start of the Trump administration. 

The grant would support communities experiencing disproportionately heavy impacts of climate change by funding air- and water-quality sampling, cleanup projects, air quality monitoring, and building green infrastructure. 

If the EPA decided not to issue the grant, the effects would fall disproportionately on working people, Chavez said.

“This would be a political divestment from working class and marginalized communities,” Chavez said. “In its place, we would see the polluting of our public lands and neighborhoods by the fossil fuel industry.”

In a statement last year following the October 7 attacks, the Climate Justice Alliance called for a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and condemned “genocidal attacks by Israel on the civilian Palestinian population.” The alliance has also called on Congress to stop funding Israel’s military and denounced apartheid in Palestine as a climate justice issue resulting from the effects of war contaminating Palestine’s air, water, and soil. 

“This is about the GOP’s obsession with shutting down the EPA.”

“This is about the GOP’s obsession with shutting down the EPA,” Chavez said. “The attacks that we’re seeing on us are collateral damage in a war against regulations that protect everybody.” 

Republican lawmakers and right-wing media have targeted the Climate Justice Alliance in recent attacks. On Saturday, the Daily Caller published a story on the pending EPA grant that claimed that the Climate Justice Alliance shared protest material celebrating Hamas. 

The Daily Caller also said the Biden administration was weighing “awarding taxpayer dollars to [a] nonprofit that wants to defund the police.” Earlier this month, Republicans on the House Energy and Commerce Committee issued a report criticizing the EPA program and claiming that the Climate Justice Alliance had exhibited “anti-Republican sentiment.” 

President-elect Donald Trump and his administration are preparing to gut groups working on environmental and economic issues affecting working-class people, Chavez said. 

“We’re going to be facing a lot of rollbacks in these next two to four years,” they said. “And we want to make sure that our communities are at least resourced in being able to mitigate the harm.”

The post Biden Makes His Own Attack on Nonprofit Over Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

Inside, they found 27,000 chicks densely packed across the floor, like “just a sea of yellow,” recalled Sarah Weldon, one of the activists. “There were a lot of chicks that were already deceased, in various stages of decomposition,” she said. “Some were so deformed you couldn’t even tell they used to be baby chicks, just fluffs of feathers.”

Activists with Meat the Victims, a decentralized, global movement to abolish animal exploitation, later uploaded gruesome photos of injured and dead chicks to social media platforms. This is how, Weldon suspects, the police identified her and issued a warrant for her arrest, along with 14 other activists. She was charged with criminal trespassing, a Class B misdemeanor, and quickly turned herself into jail.

The local police weren’t the only ones paying attention. An FBI agent in Texas had been secretly monitoring the demonstration. His focus? Weapons of mass destruction. 

The FBI has been collaborating with the meat industry to gather information on animal rights activism, including Meat the Victims, under its directive to counter weapons of mass destruction, or WMD, according to agency records recently obtained by the nonprofit Animal Partisan through Freedom of Information Act litigation. The records also show that the bureau has explored charging activists who break into factory farms under federal criminal statutes that carry a possible sentence of up to life in prison — including for the “attempted use” of WMD — while urging meat producers to report encounters with activists to its WMD program.

Animal rights lawyers and advocates view this new frontier for WMD allegations as a pretense, a fictive way to legitimize the criminal prosecution of animal rights activists. 

The FBI declined to comment on these plans or clarify whether it is still actively considering charging activists under statutes for WMD. 

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“This kind of escalation in charging or threats of charges is textbook escalation by government actors against successful efforts by social movements that they disagree with or find subversive,” said Justin Marceau, a law professor who runs a legal clinic for animal activists at the University of Denver. “The very framing of civil disobedience against factory farms as terrorism is a form of government repression.”

The bureau has floated the idea of charging animal rights activists under a statute prohibiting biological weapons, a subtype of WMD, the records show. This may include toxins, viruses, and microorganisms used to deliberately spur death and disease. 

Marceau described this focus on agroterrorism as an effort to pin blame on activists for the rampant disease outbreaks on factory farms.

“It’s a transparent form of scapegoating and blame shifting” that avoids “talking about the disease risks that come from having animals intensively confined in these high stress conditions,” he said, referring to factory farms. “We know these are just petri dishes of disease and contamination.”

A Quiet Collaboration

The new records — two FBI memos and a presentation — reveal a burgeoning relationship between the meat industry and the FBI’s WMD Directive, charged with countering the most serious biological, chemical, radiological, and nuclear threats. Each of the FBI’s 56 field offices has a designated agent (a “weapons of mass destruction coordinator”) tasked with investigating suspected uses of WMD. 

Back in Texas in 2019, Holmes Foods, Texas’s largest privately owned chicken producer, tipped the feds off to Meat the Victims’ entry into a factory farm on January 26. The company purchases chickens from the poultry broiler the activists entered.

Just a day after the action, the chicken producer contacted the Dallas FBI outpost for “guidance on preparing for future incidents,” the records show. The following morning, the local WMD coordinator got on the phone with company executives and other local FBI agents to gather information about the incident. 

Holmes Foods’ executives told the FBI that “no damage or product loss was immediately identified” in the poultry barn. Yet Dallas’s WMD program documented the incident as part of its intelligence gathering on “animal rights environmental extremism,” which the FBI considers a form of domestic terrorism. This was collected “for situational awareness purposes,” the records show — a phrase that some claim law enforcement agents use as a cover to surveil activists exercising First Amendment rights. “What they call situational awareness is Orwellian speak for watching and intimidation,” Baher Azmy, a legal director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, previously told The Intercept. 

Holmes Foods declined to comment. 

This collaborative relationship between the FBI’s WMD outpost in Dallas and the meat industry continued into the following year. 

The Meat Institute (formerly North American Meat Institute), the largest trade association for poultry and livestock industries in the United States, invited a federal agent to its 2020 Animal Care and Handling Conference to “provide insight into agroterrorism and federal law enforcement’s approach to protecting the United States meat industry,” the records show. 

At the virtual conference, the agent for Dallas’s WMD program presented a slideshow, titled “Agroterrorism in the Meat/Livestock Industry,” before a crowd of over 80 attendees largely from the meat industry. The agent detailed the “emerging” WMD and domestic terrorism threats posed by animal rights activist groups — naming Meat the Victims as well as Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE — which often break minor criminal laws, such as prohibitions on trespassing, to bring attention to animal cruelty. 

The agent warned that these “minor criminal actions associated with animal rights activist extremism have a tendency to escalate toward substantial direct actions, to include the unintentional introduction of biological materials, toxic chemicals or other hazards into a herd and/or flock,” the records note. The agent also encouraged industry groups to report this type of civil disobedience to its WMD Directive or Joint Terrorism Task Forces, displaying a map of all the FBI’s field offices.

The agent then gave a glimpse into the legal strategy the FBI has been exploring, including potential charges under three federal criminal statutes that cover biological forms of WMD. One statute defines a WMD as “any weapon involving a biological agent, toxin, or vector” and specifies that the damage inflicted by a WMD can conclude the “deterioration of food.” Another statute relies on the same definition for a WMD, but criminalizes sharing information about how to make or use these unconventional weapons.

The agent also noted that the Meat the Victims activists in Texas were “charged with misdemeanor criminal trespass,” but also “emphasized the potential [domestic terrorism] and WMD food sector connections,” suggesting that this is the type of activism the bureau might target with criminal charges. 

Will Lowrey, the legal counsel for Animal Partisan, noted the stark contrast between the FBI’s apparent willingness to protect the meat industry and its attitude toward those concerned with protecting animals. “The activists are in a different position when it comes to the government than the meat industry, which can reach out to the most powerful law enforcement agency in the country and say, ‘We want you to talk to us and help us figure out how to defend against these people,’” he said. 

Bioterror Allegations

The FBI has tried to frame animal rights activists as biosecurity and infectious disease threats in at least one other known instance. In 2019, the FBI’s field office in San Francisco claimed that activists with DxE were breaking into poultry facilities and rescuing birds with “little to no regard for basic biosecurity measures” according to a memo first published by reporter Lee Fang. Citing a handful of journal articles, the FBI determined that this contributed to the spread of Newcastle disease, a highly contagious bird illness. 

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Zoe Rosenberg, an organizer with DxE, said that the group goes “above and beyond” the biosecurity protocols laid out by federal and state agencies. That includes wearing a biosecurity suit, gloves, hair net, and shoe covers while interacting with any farm animals. Upon exiting a facility, “all of that protective equipment is sealed and disposed of safely, just in case it is contaminated with any bacteria or virus from within the facility,” said Rosenberg. 

Even still, in Rosenberg’s ongoing prosecution for felony and misdemeanor charges stemming from an action last year, a local California prosecutor painted her as a bioterror threat.

Weldon, of Meat the Victims, said the Texas poultry farm she entered didn’t lock its gate or barn door, so “they’re obviously not too concerned about biohazards,” she said. 

The most serious risk, she added, would have likely remained hidden without the activists’ intervention. “Nobody is coming in there and cleaning up the dead bodies,” said Weldon, referring to the chicks. “If there’s disease, you know, disease is just going to spread rampant.”

The post The FBI’s Weapons of Mass Destruction Program Has a New Target: Animal Rights Activists appeared first on The Intercept.

Superior Farms processes between 15 and 20 percent of lambs killed for meat in the U.S. each year. Its vast Denver slaughterhouse, located for decades in the Globeville neighborhood — one of the poorest areas in the city, with over 90 percent Latino residents — advertises sustainable, locally sourced, halal-certified meat production and an employee-owned business model.

Now, though, animal rights advocates are trying to upend that carefully constructed image by releasing new disturbing footage, obtained surreptitiously on the slaughterhouse floor.

The investigators behind the exposé hope it will aid efforts to pass a ballot measure in next month’s election that would shutter the facility. Organizers with the grassroots group Pro-Animal Future managed to get the measure, which would ban slaughterhouses within city and county limits, on the city ballot.

Along with pointing to checkered labor and environmental records that have led to over $200,000 in fines for violations in the last decade, animal rights advocates want the revelations about the conditions at the slaughterhouse to encourage votes for the ballot initiative.

The slaughterhouse footage, captured in July and August by secret cameras snuck into the facility by anonymous members of the Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, network, was made public on Wednesday in a report by the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, or AALDP, at the University of Denver.

The videos may show a range of animal abuses, routine cruelties, and instances that legal experts with the AALDP say could violate animal cruelty and humane slaughter laws. (The DxE investigators work anonymously to avoid tangles with law enforcement for entering the slaughterhouse and filming without Superior Farms’ permission.)

Videos shared with The Intercept prior to the report’s public release show, among other scenes, lambs with their throats slit hanging upside down and thrashing on the slaughter line; one animal with an internal organ that has been torn inside-out and left dangling behind it as it heads to slaughter; injured lambs being led to slaughter; workers laughing, spanking animals, and engaging in simulated sex acts with nearby machinery as lambs are having their throats slit; and the apparent use of so-called Judas sheep — adult sheep kept alive at the facility and used to lead the young sheep to slaughter.

“In general, that’s what you can expect to see in a slaughterhouse,” said Eric Davis, a retired veterinarian at the University of California, Davis, School of Veterinary Medicine, who reviewed a video reel provided by the animal rights activists. “This one is on the edge of badness, but it’s not going to be that much better if it’s running well.”

If successful, the Denver ballot initiative, Ordinance 309, would end all these practices by prohibiting the construction or operation of slaughterhouses in the City and County of Denver.

“This election cycle, Denver has a rare opportunity to put an end to this practice on an industrial scale within our city.”

When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Superior Farms, Bob Mariano, questioned whether The Intercept had verified that the footage was from the Denver location on the dates claimed by DxE. The Intercept was able to verify the dates from the footage’s time stamp. The Animal Activist Legal Defense Project attested to the veracity of the location, and footage taken by the investigators outside the facility aligns with images on Google Maps. The Intercept shared still frames from the obtained footage with Superior Farms and asked the company to confirm whether it showed their Denver facility. At the time of publication, the company had declined to identify the facility.

“Every workday, over 1,000 baby sheep have their throats slit at Superior Farms,” one of the investigators from DxE, who did not give their name, said by email. “This election cycle, Denver has a rare opportunity to put an end to this practice on an industrial scale within our city.”

The Superior Farms slaughterhouse is the only one currently operating in Denver’s city limits, so would be the only plant affected by Ordinance 309’s passing. The decision could, however, have lasting and profound effects on the animal agriculture industry nationwide.

Kenny Rogers, a past president of the Colorado Livestock Association, which has teamed up with Superior and others to opposing the ballot measure, told Denver’s Westword weekly paper, “Essentially, that’s the jugular vein of the sheep industry here in the state.”

The Superior Farms spokesperson said the company opposed the ballot measure in a bid to save its employees’ livelihoods.

“The slaughterhouse ban on the ballot in Denver this November (Initiated Ordinance 309) unfairly targets a single employee-owned business and forces 160 employees out of a company they own,” said Mariano. “Banning a single Denver business won’t improve animal welfare, but it will have devastating consequences for our employee-owners and their families.”

Conditions for Animals

According to a memo from the AALDP, the video clips showing lambs that appear to raise their heads and thrash could be evidence that the animals are not fully unconscious.

Davis, the former UC-Davis veterinarian and former associate veterinarian with the school’s International Animal Welfare Training Institute, said it was difficult to ascertain from the video whether the animals are stunned prior to slaughter. Either way, he said, the thrashing from lambs after having their throats slit does not necessarily indicate consciousness — something that would violate standards for humane slaughter.

“I would expect fewer of them moving than are,” he said. “The fact that they’re moving does not allow me to prove that they’re conscious.”

In one case, where a lamb that appeared to have its throat cut lifted its head and opened its mouth, Davis said there were concerns about consciousness.

“That animal looks like it’s vocalizing,” Davis said. “Whatever was done to kill that animal, that animal is still alive, and probably conscious or partially so.”

“Whatever was done to kill that animal, that animal is still alive, and probably conscious or partially so.”

Guidelines produced by humane livestock treatment expert Temple Grandin for the American Meat Institute — whose successor group, the Meat Institute, is the largest donor to the campaign against the Denver initiative — say that the head and neck of a stunned animal can indicate insensibility.

“The legs may kick, but the head and neck must be loose and floppy like a rag,” Grandin — whom Mariano, the Superior Farms spokesperson, said consulted on upgrades at the Denver facility — writes in the guidelines. “A normal spasm may cause some neck flexing, generally to the side, but the neck should relax and the head should flop within about 20 seconds.”

In another clip, a lamb with a leg injury is seen being moved in a plastic sled and shoved into the slaughter line by workers. It then hobbles up the ramp to slaughter. Davis called the practices into question.

“If you get down to the way the sheep are handled, particularly with the fractured leg,” he said. “The personnel there are certainly rough with them, perhaps more so than they need to be.”

“Better” Jobs?

Animal rights advocates are hoping the facilities closure will set a precedent for other ballot measures around the country, while, owing to the scale of the Denver facility, also directly causing a dent in the animal agribusiness.

The ballot initiative found predictable opposition in the powerful animal agriculture industry. A committee opposing the measure has raised over $1 million from dozens of donors, including the American Sheep Industry Association, the National Pork Producers Council, and the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Superior Farms, headquartered in California, has donated over $160,000.

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Their message — the committee is called “Stop the Ban Protect Jobs” — has apparently found an audience. Local politicians and community members worried about job loss from the slaughterhouse’s potential closure have raised concerns that cannot be dismissed as mere vested business interests. If passed, the ban would see the loss of around 160 Superior Farms jobs as part of a 14-month closure schedule mandated by the measure.

One Colorado State University study claims there could be an overall loss of up to 2,700 jobs, after accounting for multiplier effects on the broader industry. The study authors acknowledged that their “working relationships with livestock producers, farmers, ranchers, and meat processors are significant, longstanding and valued” in their report’s preface, but added “we believe the conclusions of our analysis are independent, data-based and speak for themselves.” The study, however, has come in for criticism from animal rights advocates at Pro-Animal Future not only for industry ties, but also for its substance.

Meanwhile, the ballot measure itself acknowledges and seeks to counteract the potential job loss. Specific wording requires the city to prioritize residents whose employment is affected for workforce training or employment assistance programs, in part by drawing on the city’s $40 million Climate Protection Fund.

Mariano, the company spokesperson, questioned whether alternative forms of employment will work out. “What we know for sure is that 160 hard-working people will lose their jobs and the benefits their families rely on if the ban passes, and there are no guarantees at all, despite the claims of proponents, that these workers will be able to access any kind of program to help them get another job,” he said. “These workers like their jobs and have employee-ownership.”

In an agriculture trade publication, Council Member Darrell Watson, who represents Denver’s District 9 where Superior Farms is located, accused the ballot measure and its worker-related provision of “cynicism” for placing the burden of the plant’s 160 employees on the city.

Yet proponents of the measure say there is cynicism, too, in suggesting that industrialized meat production, with all its attendant harms, cannot be stopped because slaughterhouse jobs need to be preserved.

“Our vision isn’t about eliminating jobs; it’s about moving in the direction of better ones,” a spokesperson from Pro-Animal Future said by email. “Just as we transitioned from whale oil to electricity or from coal to renewable energy, we’re now recognizing the harms of industrial animal farming, and the need to evolve in a new direction. This type of transition never happens in isolation, but rather in the context of our broader economy where we also see a constant emergence of innovative sectors and new job opportunities.”

Employee Owners

Though opponents of Ordinance 309 have made the job losses a centerpiece of their campaign, the ballot measure’s proponents say it is not so clear that slaughterhouse jobs make for an ethical, community-minded workplace. Slaughter plant workers nationwide experience disproportionately high rates of serious mental health issues, including post-traumatic stress disorder. The jobs are also physically dangerous, with American slaughterhouse workers seeing an average of two amputations per week.

Superior Farms’ Denver facility itself has seen a handful of allegations about labor abuses. In the last decade, the plant has been fined $91,811, much of it an accumulation of small wage violations; some related to safety issues like missing stair railings; and one fine related to a failure to include hazardous chemicals in a regulatory form.  

There have also been other complaints. A Muslim employee at Superior Farms sued the company in 2021 alleging racial and religious discrimination after Black Muslim workers were, according to the suit, subject to racial slurs from co-workers and managers, and faced termination for refusing to fraudulently certify meat as halal. The former employee settled with the company on undisclosed terms in 2022. (“We strongly deny these allegations, and this case was settled and dismissed two years ago,” said Mariano, the Superior Farms spokesperson.)

Nonetheless, some Superior Farms employees are rallying to defend the plant and the industry.

“Superior Farms has opened doors not just for me, but for so many,” said Isabel Bautista, operations manager at the slaughterhouse, at a recent rally opposing the ballot measure. For Bautista, who has worked at the facility since 2000, the business is a family affair: her mother, brother, brother-in-law, and cousins have worked there at various points too.

“This job means financial security to me and my family,” Bautista told a trade publication, “but it’s also a job I love.”

“One in six of our staff have been with Superior for over ten years, and one in four have been here for more than five years,” said Mariano. “People who apply to work at the facility get the full tour so they can understand exactly what these jobs entail and see if they are comfortable doing this kind of work. The meat industry is not unique in facing challenges related to turnover.”

Long Odds

Ordinance 309 supporters face an uphill battle. Their opponents describe the ballot measure as an attack on local jobs, waged by outside special interest groups with dark money — allegations Pro-Animal Future reject as industry propaganda. The Denver Democratic Party announced its opposition to the initiative in late September. And several key unions like the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 have come out against 309 too.

It would be a familiar pattern. Immediate economic concerns tend to win out over the promise of a better future with sacrifices today. The impulse is understandable, especially in the absence of sufficient municipal, state, and federal infrastructure and support for the swift transition of every imperiled worker into more sustainable jobs.

For the animal rights activists, though, failure to pass the Ordinance 309 would perpetuate cruel practices and unsustainable meat production. One of the undercover investigators, a Denver-based activist with DxE who gave their first name but requested anonymity to avoid law enforcement, told me that there are possible legal routes to explore relating to animal cruelty law violations exposed in their footage. Failing to ensure that animals are fully unconscious on a slaughter line, for example, is a violation of humane slaughter and animal cruelty laws.

The animal rights advocates, however, are less concerned with the potential violations of rules of the state or religions than they are with the suffering of the animals, captured in hours and hours of footage. And they hope the same suffering moves public opinion to support the facility’s shuttering.

“Every time the realities of factory farming and slaughterhouses are exposed, people are shocked and horrified by what is happening,” said Chris Carraway, staff attorney at the Animal Activist Legal Defense Project, which represents the undercover investigators. “Then, the news cycle moves on. But the horrors continue. It is clear there is no way to make slitting throats humane. We need to do more than expose these practices — we need to start putting an end to them, once and for all.”

The undercover investigator interviewed by The Intercept described themself as “an optimist” about people’s ability to empathize with the animals in their videos.

“I have that fundamental faith that Americans and human beings will be able to see cruelty and understand it as cruelty,” they said. “But I think that people changing their actual behaviors in life, and the reasons why they are slow or resist doing so, is much more complicated.”

The post Secret Recordings Show Ugly Conditions Ahead of Denver’s Slaughterhouse Ban Referendum appeared first on The Intercept.

As Hurricane Helene unleashed a torrential downpour over Western North Carolina, Nick, whose story was relayed by a relative and who requested to go by his first name for fear of retribution, realized his single-occupancy cell in the state prison had begun to flood. Then he realized that his toilet no longer flushed.

“My husband told me this morning he’s going to have to go see a therapist because of the things that happened in there.”

For the next five days, more than 550 men incarcerated at Mountain View suffered in cells without lights or running water, according to conversations with the family members of four men serving sentences at the facility, as well as one currently incarcerated man. Until they were transferred to different facilities, the prisoners lost all contact with the outside world.

As nearby residents sought refuge from the storm, the men were stuck in prison — by definition, without the freedom to leave — in close quarters with their own excrement for nearly a week from September 27 until October 2.

“My husband told me this morning he’s going to have to go see a therapist because of the things that happened in there,” Bridget Gentry told The Intercept. “He said, ‘We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.’”

Family members told The Intercept that their loved ones were forced to defecate in plastic bags after their toilets filled up with feces, stowing the bags in their cells until the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction finally evacuated the facility on Wednesday evening.

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“There were some minor roof leaks during the storm, but no flooding. The buildings held up extremely well during the storm. Water and electrical utilities that serve the prisons and the communities around them were severely damaged,” said Keith Acree, the head of communications at NCDAC. “When it became apparent that power and water outages would be long-term, we made the decisions to relocate offenders.”

Acree said the generator at Mountain View provided electric power to “essential systems”: “Every single light fixture and outlet is not powered, but there is some lighting and power in every area.” 

He confirmed that incarcerated people went to the bathroom in plastic bags. “Some offenders did defecate in plastic bags,” he said. “That was a solution they devised on their own.”

Loved ones of men incarcerated at Mountain View claimed food rations were scarce, amounting to four crackers for breakfast, a cup of juice or milk, and two pieces of bread with peanut butter for lunch and dinner. Potable drinking water did not arrive for several days. (“The facilities did not run out of food or water,” said Acree, adding that three meals a day were provided along with bottled water and buckets for flushing toilets.)

On October 3, the NCDAC announced it had evacuated a total of more than 2,000 incarcerated people from five facilities in flood-ravaged Western North Carolina, relocating them further east. “All offenders are safe,” stated the press release.

“We had to stay in a six by nine foot cell with feces in the toilet and the room smelling bad,” said Sammy Harmon Jr., a man incarcerated at Mountain View. He told The Intercept he began to develop sores on his legs due to lack of sanitation. 

“I wasn’t doing too good,” he said, “going a week without a shower or water to use the toilet.” 

Family members of the men at Mountain View detailed a slow, confusing, and inequitable response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene. 

The NCDAC’s website says it began to relocate people from a minimum-security women’s prison in Swannanoa and a women’s substance abuse treatment center in Black Mountain on September 30. 

Meanwhile, just half a mile down the road from Mountain View, more than 800 men at Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution also faced flooding and water outages. They were relocated on October 1, a day before Mountain View. (Craggy Correctional Institution in Asheville was evacuated on October 2, after days of silence from the NCDAC, but did not suffer as dire conditions as the other prisons, according to family members of people incarcerated there.)

“Facilities were prioritized for transfer based on the level of storm impacts to each facility and the information we had about expected restoration of water and power,” said Acree, the state prison system spokesperson. “Avery Mitchell was prioritized above Mountain View due to the nature of its housing areas” — dormitory versus single-cell housing, respectively. “Staff felt that maintaining safety and security in a single cell environment could be maintained effectively for longer than in the open dorms.”

Wendy Floyd, whose fiancé is incarcerated at Avery-Mitchell, said the men lacked drinking water until a delivery arrived by helicopter on Sunday night. The water rations were paltry, Floyd said: “It was basically decide whether you want to drink the water or if you want to wash yourself.”

Avery-Mitchell’s generator kept the power on, but Floyd said that in the absence of running water, the men were also forced to defecate in plastic bags. 

“The conditions that residents in Western North Carolina are currently coping with are much more dire than what offenders in the two Spruce Pine prisons experienced,” Acree wrote. “The populations of the two Spruce Pine prisons are extremely fortunate to now be relocated and safe. That’s so much more than many others in western NC have right now.”

A Two-Prison Town

Spruce Pine, where Mountain View and Avery-Mitchell are located, is one of the many small Appalachian towns decimated by flooding from Hurricane Helene. The most deadly hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Katrina, Helene’s death toll has surpassed 200 and is expected to climb in coming weeks, as rescue crews strive to locate hundreds of missing people. 

In the wake of the devastation, dozens of major news reports have highlighted how the flooding of Spruce Pine could impact its quartz mines and disrupt the global microchip industry — but the town’s incarcerated population has gone entirely overlooked.

Family members described nearly a week of a harrowing communications blackout, as they scoured online groups, emailed the governor, and repeatedly called officials to determine whether their loved ones had survived the hurricane and its aftermath. The NCDAC began posting general updates on its website on September 29, though family members felt the communications were insufficient and vague.

Stephanie Luffman said she began leaving comments on NCDAC’s Facebook page, begging for an update on her partner’s whereabouts. 

“I feel like the NCDAC wasn’t going to do anything until I started raising hell,” she said. She considered paying someone in the area to take drone photos of Mountain View, just so she could know if it was still standing. 

“I tried calling everyone in the world,” said Melanie Walters, whose 26-year-old son is incarcerated at Mountain View. Walters said that when she finally managed to reach the voicemail of NCDAC Secretary Todd Ishee, it instructed callers to only leave messages regarding emergencies, not inquiries about missing prisoners. 

“How dare he — it is an emergency when I don’t know where my son is for a week,” Walters said. She eventually learned from Facebook that somebody in the area had seen buses leaving the prison and figured, “Oh thank God, it’s got to be my son.”

Loved ones of the incarcerated also noted their frustration surged when they saw NCDAC’s announcement that Avery-Mitchell had been evacuated first, without any updates addressing the status of Mountain View.

“Avery-Mitchell, you could literally throw a rock and hit it from Mountain View, they’re on the same street,” said Gentry. 

While Mountain View and Avery-Mitchell are both medium-security facilities, Mountain View requires prisoners to stay locked in single cells for up to 23 hours a day; Avery-Mitchell is dormitory-style.

“I just think they didn’t want to deal with the prisoners at Mountain View who were considered higher security risk,” said Luffman. 

“Mom, it was so bad. I can’t even tell you everything that happened. It was just so bad.”

In interviews with The Intercept, sources described several instances of prison guards at Mountain View retaliating against incarcerated people in the aftermath of the storm, including pepper spraying them for yelling and beating an older man for accumulating too many bags of feces. 

“Mom, it was so bad,” Walters recalled her son telling her. “I can’t even tell you everything that happened. It was just so bad. I never want to go back there again.” 

On September 25, one day before Hurricane Helene made landfall, the NCDAC announced that a man incarcerated at Mountain View had died of an apparent suicide. He had already served seven years and was scheduled for release in January 2028. 

“Inside there, you’re a number. You do not matter. You are treated worse than a rabid dog,” said Gentry. “What happened to him in there to make him think there was no other way? I fear that for my husband every day — that he’s just going to give up on coming home.”

The post Hurricane-Struck North Carolina Prisoners Were Locked in Cells With Their Own Feces for Nearly a Week appeared first on The Intercept.

All Sheila Mae Dobbins wants is an apology.

In 2014, an industrial facility producing wood pellets opened so close to her house in Gloster, Mississippi, that she could overhear conversations between managers and staffers as they worked and smell the fumes the plant pumped into the air.

Dobbins, a 59-year-old mother of two, relies on an oxygen tank to breathe, as do her sister and her brother-in-law, who also live in the town. Her husband Neal depended on an oxygen tank as well, but passed away in 2017, just as Dobbins was experiencing an acute health crisis that led to her diagnosis with heart disease and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or COPD. She tears up when discussing how her own hospitalization left her unable to care for her husband of 36 years before he died.

“I was on life support,” said Dobbins, who wore a tracheotomy tube with a speaking valve. “I couldn’t walk, couldn’t talk. And through all this, my husband was sick and I didn’t even know it.”

The company that owns the plant, the U.K.-based power giant Drax Group, originally claimed that the pellet mill would bring hundreds of millions of dollars of investments to the local economy and touted the possibility of growing renewable power within the state.

Instead, the plant employs only a handful of local workers, and its wood pellets are shipped abroad to be burned for electricity in Drax’s U.K. power station and other foreign power plants. Residents of Gloster, a small town 50 miles north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, claim that the mill has polluted their air and harmed their health. In 2020, the Mississippi mill was fined $2.5 million for exceeding the legal limits of harmful air pollutants, and Drax promised to install new pollution controls. It has since continued to breach emission limits and this month faced another six-figure penalty.    

Gloster is just one of seven pellet mills that Drax operates in the U.S., along with 10 in Canada, and the company is currently at work on new projects in Washington state and California. Land and Climate Review’s previous investigation into Drax’s Canadian mills uncovered 189 violations of environmental law, most of which related to air pollution. Drax’s two pellet mills in Louisiana have been fined millions for environmental law violations, and one entered dispute resolution discussions in March over further emissions breaches.      

This sprawling operation is built to pursue a noble goal: replacing the coal-fired electricity generation at the U.K.’s largest single power plant, the Drax facility in the north of England, with a renewable input in the form of wood pellets.

But a growing chorus of environmentalists and scientists are warning that the U.K. power plant is now more carbon-intensive burning wood than when the plant burned coal. The entire company, from power plant to pellet mills, is only profitable thanks to massive subsidies from the U.K. government — yet the company plans to open multiple new power plants in the U.S. in the coming years and is seeking federal subsidies to build its new projects.

The residents of Gloster, and other towns across the U.S. near Drax’s current and future facilities, are asking a simple question: Why is a company propped up by the British government for an unclear environmental gain polluting their air?

Drax denies any physical impact on Gloster residents, saying “an independent, third-party analysis commissioned by Drax found that our Gloster facility’s air toxics have no adverse effects on human health.” Questions remain, however, as Drax declined to provide the name of the consulting firm or any more details on their findings.

Another Gloster resident, Myrtis Woodard, has firsthand experience of the problem. “It was better before that mill came,” Woodard said. “We can’t come outside, the air is so bad. I’ve got two inhalers and the doctor tried to give me another one. I have asthma, COPD, and angina.”

Debra Butler, another Gloster resident, echoed Woodard. “My yard looks a mess,” she said. “I’m afraid to go outside because of my breathing problems. I was taking Albuterol once a day; now I take it three times a day in my inhaler. I come outside with a mask on. The air is so polluted you can smell everything, taste it.”

Other friends and family members shared similar stories of heart and respiratory conditions emerging in the years since the plant opened. Dobbins knew six people who were reliant on oxygen tanks living on her street before she moved away. Five of them are now dead.

The emissions from Drax’s pellet mill are not the only possible drivers of the heart conditions or breathing problems that Gloster residents described, and no direct link between the plant and the residents’ health has been established. Gloster has an overall poverty rate of 39 percent; the state of Mississippi ranks second to last in the U.S. for overall health and last for childhood respiratory disease.

Locals had hoped Drax could help revitalize the town’s economy. Instead, they described a town in decline.

“In my opinion, everything has gone down,” said Krystal Martin, who is leading community action for cleaner air. “Gloster is small, extremely rural, it has no public schools. The houses are in poor conditions, the buildings are old and dilapidated.”

“The grass don’t grow green like it used to,” she added. “The trees don’t bloom like they used to.”

Martin started organizing with community members under the banner “Greater Greener Gloster” in 2021, inspired by her mother Jane’s breathing difficulties.

“In 2016, I began to get sick, but I did not realize what was going on,” said Jane Martin. “In 2021, when the fine came out, we began to wonder if the air pollution had made me sick” over the years the plant had been operating.

Greater Greener Gloster has galvanized opposition to the mill in the town. Despite her dependence on “a 37-foot cord” for oxygen, Dobbins is determined to speak out on the health impacts of the mill “as long as there’s breath in my body.”

“I died three times, but God was not ready for me,” she said. “I am a walking testimony.”

Toxic Spikes in the Middle of the Night

A research team at Brown University, led by Erica Walker, has found that the air in Gloster contains dramatically higher levels of toxic chemicals compared to a nearby town — and that levels of pollutants spike in the middle of the night.

The study, which is currently undergoing peer review, compares Gloster with a demographically similar town in Mississippi, Mendenhall, which does not have a wood pellet mill. Walker stressed the need for larger sample sizes and more time to monitor trends, but her initial findings are that “air pollutant concentrations in Gloster are magnitudes higher, even after adjusting for meteorological conditions.” This is especially true for a category of pollutants known as volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, which can be released when drying or burning wood.

“VOCs are nasty stuff,” said Walker. “When you’re thinking about a child that’s exposed to that in utero, if it’s during a critical window, then we’re already talking about a compromised child from the beginning — and then it’s going to snowball over a period of time. VOCs have been shown to lead to short-term things like irritation to long-term things like cancer.”

Heat maps in the study show concentrated clouds of pollutants around the plant and a nearby residential area. A preprint of the research states that vulnerable populations are impacted by air pollution from wood pellet plants, and that proximity is a statistically significant factor for risk of respiratory disease in children.

“From the data that we got from Gloster in particular, we know that it’s an issue when people live next to these plants,” said Walker. “This is their short-term and long-term health profile. It has direct impacts.”

A Drax spokesperson said the company’s consultants “found that no pollutant from the facility exceeded the acceptable ambient concentration.”

An unexpected finding in Walker’s research is what she calls “opportunistic dumping.” Her data shows what she describes as “crazy spikes” of VOC emissions throughout the night. She said that although the daily averages of VOCs seen by the Environmental Protection Agency do not look dangerous, her data reveals a “structural issue” in regulatory monitoring being conducted on a daily basis, rather than hourly.

Residents remembered being more aware of pollution at night. Dobbins said, “At night sometimes I can’t rest, and I would have to get my husband up because I would like to sit outside. But when I went out there, I told him, ‘I’m going back in the house.’ The odor is just that bad.”

“And the smell of it, I didn’t know it. In my life, I smelled nothing like it, so I couldn’t really describe it. But it’s a funky scent. A foul, very foul odor,” Dobbins continued. “We can smell it the most at night. It’s like they didn’t want nobody to see them do it.”

Environmental attorney Patrick Anderson warned that it is possible the spikes are simply due to atmospheric conditions. “It could be that even if they’re emitting at a constant rate, when things cool down at night, the VOCs settle down into the community,” he said.

But he also suggested another possibility. “These facilities can bypass their emission controls. Sometimes there are reasons they absolutely need to do that to avoid something blowing up and people getting hurt.”

While working for the Environmental Integrity Project, Anderson went into litigation with another wood pellet company in Texas and “really got to examine their operating records.” He found that they were bypassing their emission controls multiple times a week, inundating the local community with smoke each time.

“They were not just doing it for emergencies — it was happening all of the time,” Anderson said. As with the findings in Gloster, “things were worse at night.”

In 2020, Louisiana state environmental regulators received a report from an anonymous source alleging that Drax facilities in that state had “literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting annually.”

The Gloster mill’s own reporting to the regulator shows that pollution controls were bypassed for over 500 hours in 2023 — although there is no indication that the mill breached regulations by doing so. Responding to a letter from campaigners this April, the company promised to start “curtailing operations at night.”

A Pattern of Pollution Across State Lines in the South

Since the start of 2024, the Gloster mill has been issued two letters outlining violations, including failure to provide inspectors with records and missing a deadline to conduct emissions testing by 43 days. But these are far from the company’s most egregious recent violations of environmental rules in the U.S.

In January, Louisiana regulators sent Drax a notice stating that the company had bypassed pollution controls on 381 instances between January 2022 and June 2023 at its two mills in the state. As a result, the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality is currently negotiating a fine with Drax. That agency issued a similar notice in 2022 for prior violations, and Drax agreed to settle for $1.6 million per mill.

The company is also under scrutiny for emitting unsafe levels of a category of pollutants that Anderson, the environmental lawyer, describes as “some of the most toxic and harmful pollutants that are addressed by the Clean Air Act.” Hazardous air pollutants emitted by wood pellet mills include carcinogenic substances such as formaldehyde and benzene, as well as acrolein, which “causes lung and throat, nose and eye irritation, even in very, very low quantities.”

In 2021, the Mississippi government began to mandate tests for these “hazardous air pollutants” at the Gloster mill. The testing revealed that the facility had exceeded limits for these chemicals in both 2022 and 2023. Limits for specific chemicals were also breached throughout the period: The limit on methanol was exceeded by over 80 percent between June 2021 and June 2022, for example. In September 2024, Drax was fined $225,000 for these breaches, among other violations.

In 2023, Anderson and his colleague wrote to Louisiana regulators about Drax’s plants in the state, saying, “Drax is once again failing to accurately document and report its emissions.” The Environmental Integrity Project attorneys argued that after the new emissions testing had taken place in Gloster in 2021, “Drax could have — and should have — reported to [Louisiana’s Department for Environmental Quality] that its Louisiana plants were almost certainly exceeding permit limits. … Instead, however, Drax continued to certify that its outdated and inaccurate [hazardous air pollutants] emissions data were accurate.”

Drax later conceded that the Louisiana mills were indeed breaching limits, by 59 percent at its LaSalle plant in Urania, and by 58 percent at its Morehouse mill in Bastrop. 

Drax said that following the new emissions testing, it worked with the state’s Department for Environmental Quality to align on testing and permit updates.

The Gloster mill has now negotiated a hazardous air pollutant penalty with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, but in Louisiana, similar enforcement action has not yet been taken. Anderson said such action is “plainly warranted.”

Authorities had been warned of suspect activity at Drax’s Louisiana mills before. In 2020, the state’s environmental department received an email from an anonymous source who claimed to work for the company.

The email made numerous allegations about Drax’s regulatory compliance, several of which inspectors subsequently confirmed: Waste was being handled improperly at the Morehouse mill, and being burned without a permit at LaSalle. Drax told Land and Climate Review that its history of burning industrial sludge “was an administrative error.”

The inspectors were unable to find evidence of some of the email’s most shocking claims, including that Drax had failed to report “literally hundreds of hours of uncontrolled venting” of harmful pollutants at each facility. “Many of these events would easily exceed the Reportable Quantity for Acrolein,” the email stated. Drax told Land and Climate Review that the acrolein claim was “unproven,” but did not comment on uncontrolled venting.

The email also included allegations that “no actions were taken” after management was told that pollution data was being manipulated, and that any mention of unreported pollution would “cause senior management to threaten termination.” Inspectors did not address claims about management behavior, and Drax denied the allegations, saying “our pattern and practice is to cooperate with local agencies charged with overseeing emissions.”

Dubious Carbon Accounting at British Bill–Payer Expense

Environmentalists and scientists warn that the pellet business is driving forest degradation, and that CO2 emissions from the U.K. power plant are actually more carbon-intensive than when it burned coal instead of wood. Drax, however, claims its pellet business is preventing forest fires and creating jobs, and that the pellets come from well managed forests, saying, “CO2 from the biogenic carbon cycle should be considered differently to the fossil CO2 released by the combustion of oil, gas, and coal.

“Whether the wood is used for bioenergy, or these trees naturally decompose, the same amount of CO2 is released into the atmosphere.”

Drax’s logic aligns with carbon accounting rules established in 1997, in a United Nations treaty known as the Kyoto Protocol. The treaty came into force in 2005 and significantly expanded the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. But buried within its pages, a relatively minor rule designed to prevent double-counting of emissions in different locations transformed the bioenergy industry.

The framework stated that emissions should be counted only in the country where trees are harvested, rather than in the place where they are burned. This effectively provided a carbon accounting loophole for countries that import wood to burn in power stations. In the U.K.’s case, even though Drax’s power station is the largest single source of CO2 in the country, its emissions are officially recorded as zero.

These rules are much criticized — even by some of the scientists who invented them — but still form the basis of U.K. policy. In 2021, 500 scientists wrote to the president of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, calling for the end of wood burning for energy.

“The burning of wood will increase warming for decades to centuries. That is true even when the wood replaces coal, oil or natural gas,” they wrote.

“To avoid these harms, governments must end subsidies and other incentives that today exist for the burning of wood whether from their forests or others. The European Union needs to stop treating the burning of biomass as carbon neutral in its renewable energy standards and in its emissions trading system.”

This mounting concern from experts has spilled over into U.K. politics, with parliamentarians becoming increasingly vocal about Drax’s heavily subsidized wood pellet business and the CO2 emissions from its U.K. power plant.

Politicians from all mainstream U.K. political parties have spoken critically about publicly funding Drax’s supply chain. Even two recent U.K. energy secretaries are skeptics: Kwasi Kwarteng, who was secretary from 2021 to 2022, was recorded admitting that Drax’s supply chain “is not sustainable” and “doesn’t make any sense,” while his successor Jacob Rees-Mogg went further, publicly describing Drax’s “ridiculous” carbon accounting as “barmy in-Wonderland stuff.”

Since the center-left Labour Party won the general election in July this year, both the U.K.’s new prime minister, Keir Starmer, and Energy Minister, Ed Miliband, have been suspiciously quiet on the matter, not mentioning biomass in key speeches about the energy sector.

Drax’s subsidies are set to run out in 2027, and deciding whether they should continue is a tricky issue for the U.K.’s new government. Renewal is likely to face backlash from Parliament, news media, and scientists. But Labour has set ambitious targets for clean energy, and politicians are already facing complaints from their constituents about new wind and solar farms. Meeting 2030 targets on paper, even if the scientific reality is more complicated, still offers political expediency that cleaner alternatives lack.

Drax has been clear that its backup plan is to expand operations in the U.S. and seek security in Inflation Reduction Act tax credits and state-level incentives, rather than relying on U.K. subsidies. In early 2023, Drax’s CEO Will Gardiner told the press that the company would “accelerate” its U.S. plans and make the U.K. “less of a priority” if they had not gotten guarantees on future subsidies by July 2024. Drax also told Land and Climate Review that it intends to create new bioenergy carbon capture and storage facilities and to concentrate on carbon removal technology.

The U.K. guarantees have not arrived, and if the three new U.S. pellet mills in development are anything to go by, Drax may be serious about U.S. expansion.

New Mill in the Pacific Northwest, New Problems

Since 2022, Drax Group has had its sights fixed on a new pellet mill, this time in the small northwestern city of Longview, nestled on the Columbia River in Washington state, some 50 miles north of Portland, Oregon.

A high-gloss webpage for the $250 million project says that the plant will use sawdust and shavings from local sawmills to make their pellets and support more than 300 jobs in the area. “We’re Nature Positive,” the promotional page reads, “and our work centers on conserving the environment in which people across Washington and Oregon live, work, and play.”

But positivity — nature or otherwise — has not been the primary local sentiment in response to the project. 

“People are extremely concerned about this because they know what communities are going through in the Southeast with the wood pellet industry, and they just don’t want those problems,” explained Ashley Bennett, an environmental attorney at Earthjustice.

Drax’s approach to the regulatory processes around the proposed mill has not alleviated these concerns. In its initial air permit application, Drax grossly underestimated the prospective emissions from the site, claiming the mill would emit just 0.53 tons per year of hazardous air pollutants. In subsequent correspondence with local pollution regulators, Drax revised this estimate to 48.9 tons per year.

Drax underestimating their emissions in official filings by a factor of almost 100 shocked experts. According to Anderson, the initial estimates were “absolutely not plausible. They were using emission factors and emissions estimates that didn’t apply to wood pellet plants. It’s mind-boggling that this could happen, that they would be off by two orders of magnitude.”

Given its intended size and the toxicity of its emissions, the plant should be subject to the EPA’s Maximum Achievable Control Technology, or MACT, standard in order to minimize levels of hazardous air pollutants.

But in both its initial air permit application and subsequent correspondence with regulators, Drax failed to state that the Longview pellet mill would be a major source of hazardous air pollutants, and so subject to MACT standards.

Anderson described this omission as “deeply, deeply concerning.” In its response, Drax said that it does not mislead on emissions and that its practice and policy is to cooperate with local agencies. In response to questions, Drax did not provide an explanation for how they had so drastically underestimated their emissions in their proposal, but denied that it was intended to mislead regulators.

Forty-year Longview resident Diane Dick said, “There is a concern about Drax” from locals, including in regard to “the community’s health, environmental health, and the health of forest resources.”

Dick called state regulators herself in March after she awoke one day to find that a large white dome had been installed overnight, at the industrial site below her house.

Her call led to an investigation, followed by a clear finding by the local air agency that Drax had not only begun construction without legal authorization, but they were also installing equipment that was not included in the permit application or draft air permit. Dick’s dome sighting kicked off a chain of events that landed Drax with a $34,000 fine — and this was not even Drax’s first violation on the site. Late in 2023, the company also twice breached rules around water quality in the Columbia River. 

Following the investigation, Drax was instructed to stop construction, and the permitting process was halted.

Drax’s initial claim that the mill’s raw material would be sourced from sawdust and shavings, rather than freshly logged timber — repeated both on the project website and its initial environmental impact report — has also fallen apart.

In the year since the initial environmental checklist was submitted, it has emerged that the project will require logging. Drax’s Director of Environment Wayne Kooy admitted as much in emails to regulators this year, saying it was an “oversight” that the original proposal stated the mill would only use “residual” wood. Drax’s website still says an “independent third-party consultant” confirmed that “surplus of residual sawdust and shavings is available within a 60-mile radius.”

Based on the initial proposal, Cowlitz County awarded the project a determination of nonsignificance status, meaning that it would not have to undergo a more rigorous environmental impact assessment. Cowlitz County officials have since acknowledged, in public records obtained by Earthjustice, that Drax’s new plans to use commercial wood rather than waste would place the project “way outside of” the original proposition.

“Drax seems to chronically and consistently underrepresent what its impact is going to be,” said Brenna Bell, forest climate manager at the environmental justice organization 350PDX. “I don’t think they’re making themselves very welcome.”

When asked about these concerns, a Drax spokesperson said that the company works closely with regulators to establish best environmental practices, invested $180 million on improving the plants, and donated to local communities. She denied that Drax persistently misleads regarding pollution and environmental impacts.

Big Biomass Is Coming to Rural California

As progress stalls in Washington, Drax is eyeing other developments 1000 miles down the West Coast.

In February, Drax signed onto a self-described “forest resiliency initiative,” intended to mitigate wildfire risk, that proposes to build two pellet mills in rural portions of California, one in Tuolumne County east of Modesto and another in Lassen County in the state’s far northeast.

The plan was put together by the Rural County Representatives of California, an association of local governments in rural parts of the state, and developed via a newly created public agency called Golden State Natural Resources. Drax is not yet legally committed to the project but has signed a nonbinding agreement that discusses financing and investment.

The California project presents itself as a desperately needed wildfire mitigation measure, declaring that “by transforming excess and unmarketable biomass and fire fuels into higher-value wood products, Golden State Natural Resources will create jobs, stimulate rural economies, and begin the process of mitigating dangerous wildfire conditions.” But Drax’s involvement has raised alarm bells for local activists, who worry that the projects will bring the same problems plaguing communities in the Southeast and Washington state to California.

Rita Vaughan Frost, forest advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said Drax’s involvement “wipes away the sheen of this being truly for wildfire mitigation or economic development. We can see it for what it really is, which is a profit-driven measure.”

Drax said that it was untrue to suggest that the scheme was purely profit driven, rather than intended for economic development or wildfire mitigation.

Patrick Blacklock, the CEO of the Rural County Representatives of California, confirmed, however, that profitability is a key objective. When asked why pellet mills were chosen over less controversial methods of wildfire mitigation, the Yolo County administrator said that “candidly, part of the reason is we wanted to find a commercially viable pathway.” He added that Wade Crowfoot, California’s secretary of natural resources, had stressed the importance of commercial viability “at a recent meeting” with Blacklock.

Blacklock said he is aware of Drax’s history of noncompliance with environmental regulations in the Southeast, but claimed the California plants will be “different.”

“I think it comes back to this being community-led and public agency-led. That’s not how public agencies operate,” he said. “We operate to the letter of the law. We operate to the commitments that are made on environmental review.”

But Craig Ferguson, senior vice president of the Rural County Representatives of California, appeared to contradict this point in a meeting that Blacklock also attended, warning that the project is unlikely to remain in total control of the public agency.

“If we’re going to build facilities, we’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, and we’re going to have to expect that those people putting the money up are going to expect some kind of control,” Ferguson said in May.

Nick Joslin, a program manager at the Mount Shasta Bioregional Ecology Center, located in the sourcing radius of the Lassen site, has questioned the claims that the new project would bring good jobs to the area.

Both mill sites are in parts of the state that once had strong lumber industries, and Joslin confirmed that locals he has spoken with seemed happy to have any mill back in the area for employment purposes. But Joslin believes that the pellet plants would be different than the industries that supported communities in the past: “Inside these industrial facilities, there aren’t that many jobs … and the jobs would be maintenance work in extremely hazardous conditions.”

Rural County Representatives of California also publicly opposed legislation in 2022 that would have set a minimum wage standard for forestry jobs.

“Ultimately they want people to be able to work in forest jobs again, but not to pay them well. That was a little shocking for everybody to see,” said Joslin.

Since 2021, Golden State Natural Resources has spent $150,000 lobbying the California government, some of which relates to workers’ wages. In 2023, after its parent group publicly opposed the bill that would set a “prevailing wage” pay floor for workers on “fuels reduction projects” — a category the proposed mills would fall under — Golden State Natural Resources spent $45,000 lobbying on the bill.

The agency’s own board members have even expressed concern over overblown promises of employment. “We’re promising to put local people to work. And the only local people we are going to be putting to work is the guy cleaning up the trailer park after the workers all leave,” Humboldt County Supervisor Bohn told the board in May.

Local activists are currently awaiting the release of the project’s draft environmental impact review, slated for September after multiple delays.

In the meantime, Vaughan Frost and other opponents of the project are focusing their efforts on persuading state and county officials not to “waste our money on projects that are boondoggles, as the risk of wildfires only becomes more urgent every single year.”

“When I’m talking to policymakers, I put it this way: ‘Supporting Golden State Natural Resources is like jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire,’” said Vaughan Frost.

The Push for More Power

A 2023 report found that without subsidies for generating green electricity — totaling 548 million pounds ($719 million) from U.K. bill-payers in 2023 — the entire Drax Group of 72 companies, including all the pellet mills, would operate at a loss.

So like any sensible profit-seeking endeavor, Drax is looking to diversify its income stream — by building a new series of pellet-burning plants in the U.S. that would rely on the same suspect carbon math to get subsidies from the U.S. government. If Drax wants its new U.S. mills to usher in new profits and growth, the facilities need to be a prelude to new power plants.

The long-continuing uncertainty around its U.K. subsidies only increases the pressure. The company failed to make the shortlist for a major new subsidy in 2023, and last month it coughed up 25 million pounds ($33 million) for regulatory breaches after misreporting data about wood pellet imports to the U.K. energy regulator Ofgem. Drax denied that the outcome of the regulatory investigation had anything to do with its pursuit of new revenue sources or the likelihood of future subsidies. The company told Land and Climate Review that the U.K. government is conducting a consultation on future support for biomass generators, which it welcomes.

The power company announced plans to construct up to 11 new biomass power plants across the U.S. and Canada last year, each with additional carbon capture and storage technology. With this new (and expensive) tech, the company plans on going beyond the already contentious claims that its U.K. power plant is carbon neutral to claim its new facilities will be carbon negative. In January, it launched a new subsidiary, Drax U.S. BECCS Development LLC to carry out the projects.

Headquartered in Texas, Drax’s new Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage arm claims it has already earmarked two sites in the U.S. South for power plants and that it is evaluating nine more across North America. Drax claims its first power plant project in the Southeast will require a $2 billion investment and is aiming to make a final investment decision by 2026.

Previous investigations have estimated that if all 11 plants matched Drax’s U.K. power station in fuel consumption, they would burn the equivalent of approximately 300 million trees a year and need to capture and store more than 100 million tons of CO2 in order to zero out their emissions. Drax contests these calculations, in part due to its carbon accounting methods.

The eligibility of Drax’s new power plants for federal subsidy will depend on whether the U.S. chooses to adopt the same controversial carbon accounting rules that allow Drax to report its power station emissions as zero in the U.K.

The company certainly appears to be pushing for this. Through its lobbying firm VNF Solutions, Drax has engaged the services of Mary Landrieu, the former U.S. senator from Louisiana who chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee when in office. Landrieu has lobbied on “legislation related to bioenergy with carbon capture and storage,” according to VNF Solutions’ lobbying disclosures.

Biomass energy in the U.S. is at a juncture. In May, the U.S. Treasury proposed regulations relating to the Clean Electricity Production Tax Credit. While the eligibility of biomass power plants was not addressed explicitly, the rule proposal stated that any “clean energy facility that achieves net zero greenhouse gas emissions” will be able to access the tax credit — which would apply to Drax’s plants if its preferred carbon accounting rules are adopted. It is one of a number of federal tax credits introduced through the Inflation Reduction Act that could help fund plants like the ones Drax plan to build.

When asked if Drax was recruiting Rural County Representatives of California or its agencies to lobby for a power station in California, Blacklock, the RCRC CEO, said equivocally that “Drax definitely have that interest but candidly so do we. … We have some shared interests.”    

In the last year and a half, Rural County Representatives of California has spent over $1.5 million lobbying the California government. In lobbying reports from January 2023 to June 2024, biomass is mentioned 13 times. 

It is not yet clear whether the Democratic or Republican parties will take strong stances on biomass power. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has threatened to gut the Inflation Reduction Act entirely, which would no doubt disappoint Drax’s American CEO, who released a press release describing the “eye-watering” subsidies in President Joe Biden’s bill as “transformative” for the company.

But a Kamala Harris win is no guarantee of plain sailing for Drax, either. The Democratic presidential candidate is currently under fire for lacking a clear energy policy, and she may eventually find herself under pressure from other Democrats to exclude Drax’s business model from new subsidy regimes.

Major party figures have begun to speak out against the industry, such as Sen. Cory Booker, who said it exposes “low-income and minority communities [to a] disproportionate burden of environmental hazards and injustices.”

Along with other senior party figures such as Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Booker introduced a law to reform biomass carbon accounting in April. That same month, the EPA launched a research project investigating the health impacts of wood pellet plants.

“They’re currently in the process of doing that investigation and are doing health impact analysis as well,” said Ashley Bennett at EarthJustice. “So I think that those are signs that this industry as it is currently operating is unsustainable.”

“Clean energy should not lead to increased logging and forest degradation, and it shouldn’t create greenhouse gas emissions,” she said. “These facilities are just not good for the communities that they come into. They put public health at risk, put forests at risk, put the ecosystem at risk, and ultimately, they further exacerbate the climate crisis.”

Update: October 1, 2024
This article originally referred to Rita Frost at the Natural Resources Defense Council. It has been updated to include her full name, Rita Vaughan Frost.

The post The Dirty Business of Clean Energy: The U.K. Power Company Polluting Small Towns Across the U.S appeared first on The Intercept.

It was peak soccer simultaneity. A vicious shot hit the crossbar on one pitch; on the next, a midfielder streaked past defenders on a breakaway; a corner kick on the third field; and on the fourth, a straight shot found the back of the net. In the stands, cheers went up for “Dani!” and “Ari!” and “Kylie!” and “Amber!” And as the night wore on, more and more of these young women stood with flushed faces and hands on hips, breathing deeply whenever a stoppage gave them a chance.

The Soccer Coliseum bills itself as the “leading youth soccer arena in America, attracting more teams … than any other indoor facility.” Since 1996, this fútbol mecca — which rents space inside New Jersey’s Teaneck Armory — has offered youth soccer programs, including tournaments, classes, and camps, for kids as young as 3, introducing a generation of children to the beautiful game.

Under the 35,000 square feet of red, artificial turf and the site-mandated rubber-soled shoes, however, lurked a hidden danger. The basement had housed an Army National Guard indoor firing range, or IFR, for decades. Each time a citizen-soldier fired a rifle or pistol, it emitted an extremely dangerous form of lead: toxic dust that research shows is frequently tracked around armories on soldiers’ clothing and dispersed through ventilation systems.

Exclusive documents obtained by The Intercept show that the Army National Guard knowingly endangered the health and safety of soldiers and civilians at armories — also known as readiness centers — across three, and possibly 53, states and territories. A Soccer Coliseum director told The Intercept that he was never informed about a potential source of lead contamination in the basement below the playing fields.

Despite being aware of the public health threat posed by lead-contaminated indoor firing ranges, the Army National Guard “didn’t take required action to remediate lead hazards from readiness centers with IFRs,” according to a 2020 Army audit of more than 130 armories that was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. “ARNG, States, and territories potentially put Soldiers and family members health at risk from lead exposure.”

An investigation by The Intercept finds that nearly 50 years after the U.S. government sounded the alarm about the “potential health hazard” of IFRs, almost 40 years after the National Guard admitted most of its indoor ranges were “unsafe,” and more than 25 years after a Pentagon study urged decontamination of National Guard indoor firing ranges due to “lead hazards,” at least 600 and possibly more than 1,300 National Guard IFRs, from coast to coast, may still pose a threat. Additional armories may also be falsely counted as safe; an untold number that have undergone remediation may still pose health risks. But exactly where citizen-soldiers and civilians are most endangered remains a mystery. National Guard officials admit to flawed recordkeeping and say they do not have a ready list of sites that they call “high-risk IFRs.”

“There ought to be congressional action. And the Secretary of the Army should immediately order the clean-up of these 600 sites. They should be cleaned up in a hurry,” said Ruth Ann Norton, a member of the Environmental Protection Agency’s Children’s Health Protection Advisory Committee and a steering committee member of Lead-Free NJ, a collaborative focused on addressing lead hazards in the state. “It’s worth the cost, the return on investment, in terms of preventing the health impacts — kidney malfunction, hypertension, stillbirths, miscarriages, cardiac issues, neurological dysfunction — not to mention the moral imperative not to put people at risk.”

Teaneck’s Soccer Coliseum is not mentioned by name in the nearly 50-page audit which obscures even the names of the states where the armories are located, but a picture of the enormous facility, with its distinctive red turf, unique windows, and high arching roof, as well as the audit’s description of the site, leaves no doubt. “Soldiers, civilians, and the public had unrestricted access to two centers with three IFRs in State C,” reads the 2020 audit, noting, in understated fashion, that one of those centers in State C — which the Army confirmed is New Jersey — “hosted an indoor soccer league.”

A National Guard official told The Intercept that their database lists the Teaneck Armory as “cleaned and remediated” according to a November 2019 “final clearance document.” But the 2020 audit states that while New Jersey’s armories with IFRs were remediated from 2017 to 2019, the remediation was done with “a high-pressure power wash system” that is barred “because it may embed lead throughout a readiness center and generate large quantities of hazardous waste.” The audit further revealed that “soldiers and civilians used the basement — a former IFR — as a storage room” and that the room still contained “lead-contaminated sand” from its days as a firing range.

“You can’t take a power-washer and use it to clean a facility. That’s prohibited. It’s just going to spew lead everywhere — and it embeds it in all kinds of places and then it comes back out,” said Maria Doa, the senior director of chemicals policy at the Environmental Defense Fund who spent more than 30 years at the EPA. “The federal government should know its own regulations and abide by them. Not doing so seems criminal.”

The Intercept spoke to Yas Tambi, a director of the Soccer Coliseum, about the findings of the Army audit. Tambi, who said he has been with the organization for 29 years, could not recall receiving any information from the State of New Jersey, the Army, or the National Guard concerning lead dust or lead abatement, including during 2017 to 2019 when power-wash remediation efforts reportedly took place at the Teaneck Armory. “It wasn’t on my radar. Even if remediation was mentioned, I would think, ‘OK, they’re doing their job,’” said Tambi. “If we heard about any kind of contaminants in the building, we would be the first to complain about it.”

Tambi stressed that, to his knowledge, longtime staff suffered no health effects, and that no complaints had been made by members of the public. “If anyone got sick, I would know,” he told The Intercept.

The Soccer Coliseum referred The Intercept to the New Jersey National Guard for answers to additional questions. “We’ll have a response for you by the end of the day today,” Maj. Amelia Thatcher, a spokesperson for the New Jersey National Guard told The Intercept on Tuesday. After the deadline came and went, Thatcher said her promise of a comment had been “optimistic.”

The Teaneck facility was one of more than 130 armories where the Army National Guard put people at risk, according to the audit. In three states — New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio — National Guard personnel did not properly report whether armories with IFRs were active; restrict public access to sites when lead levels were unknown; or conduct thorough lead abatement, jeopardizing the health and safety of soldiers and civilians. 

“State ARNGs didn’t thoroughly remediate lead hazards from readiness centers with IFRs and certify results before converting IFR space to other uses (such as storage area, classroom, or office space),” reads the September 2020 report, which goes on to note that IFRs that haven’t been remediated — such as those in New Jersey — “pose a significant risk” if public access isn’t restricted. The audit also questioned the efficacy of the ANRG’s ability to manage almost $200 million spent on lead dust abatement measures. Almost four years after the audit’s release, the Army National Guard still has not followed through on the auditors’ recommendation that the director of the National Guard compel personnel in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio to perform the required in-depth evaluations to identify the full extent of lead contamination levels and conduct required remediation at 73 armories with IFRs, according to Matt Ahearn, an Army spokesperson.

“It’s stunning,” said Eve Gartner, director of Crosscutting Toxics Strategies at Earthjustice, a nonprofit that uses the courts to protect the environment and the public’s health. “We’ve known for 100 years that lead is a toxin that has very serious health effects especially for developing fetuses, children, and pregnant women, but we’ve really dropped the ball as a country in truly protecting people from exposure.”

From its opening in 1938, lead dust accumulated in the Teaneck Armory — as it did for decades in readiness centers across America. Whenever a National Guards member pulled a trigger, the bullet’s explosive primer, which ignites the gunpowder, released a tiny amount of lead; additional lead then flaked off as the bullet raced down the weapon’s barrel; and still more was released after it tore through its target, slammed into a backdrop, and fell into a sand pit. Across the U.S., this toxic dust was tracked into armories’ common areas on shooters’ clothing and was sucked into ventilation systems and spread throughout facilities.

There is no known safe level of lead exposure according to the World Health Organization and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A heavy metal that is highly toxic when ingested or inhaled, lead is particularly dangerous to children and causes permanent damage to the brain and nervous system, resulting in stunted mental and physical growth. Even low levels of lead in the blood can reduce a child’s ability to concentrate and negatively impact academic achievement. Damage caused by lead poisoning is irreversible.

In adults, lead exposure increases the risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular problems, and kidney damage. Pregnant women exposed to high levels of lead are more likely to suffer miscarriages and stillbirths. According to a 2023 Lancet study, worldwide lead exposures may have contributed to 5.5 million adult cardiovascular disease deaths and 765 million lost IQ points among children under 5, in just one year.

The danger of lead, especially to children, was becoming clear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and several European countries banned or restricted the use of lead paint. Concerns over the toxicity of leaded gasoline were raised in the 1920s. But the U.S. would not ban lead paint until 1978, and leaded gas was not completely phased out until 1996. 

Related

Newark’s Lead Crisis Isn’t Over: “People Are Still Drinking Water That They Shouldn’t”

Ignoring lead hazards has been a reoccurring theme in America. And over the last several decades, hidden dangers of lead have been revealed in myriad contexts, including in hundreds of neighborhoods around the U.S. where lead factories, known as smelters, once stood; in drinking water from lead pipes in places like Flint, Michigan and Newark, New Jersey; and in paint found in an estimated 29 million older homes.

The hazards of lead-contaminated shooting ranges have been studied since the 1940s, and in the early 1970s, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health conducted surveys of IFRs — most of them in basements or sub-basements similar to those in Teaneck and other armories — and discovered “a potential health hazard due to inorganic lead exposure existed at each range.” In 1979, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration finally established standards for airborne lead exposure in the workplace, including indoor firing ranges.

Since then, 45 years of official reports, media investigations, and failures to act have followed. In the 1980s, National Guard requests for funds to upgrade indoor firing ranges were met with rejections from the Army for failing to specify which IFRs were selected for renovation. 

In the 1990s, the Defense Department’s inspector general investigated indoor firing ranges at National Guard and Army Reserve facilities and found hazardous levels of lead dust in 12 armories, noting that a number had converted firing ranges into storage and office space without decontaminating them. As a result, all ARNG indoor ranges were mandated to “fully comply” with health and safety standards, with the completion date scheduled for February 2010.

In 2016, an investigation by The Oregonian, based on tens of thousands of pages of official records from 41 states, found that hundreds of armories were still contaminated with dangerous amounts of lead dust.

In 2015 and 2016, the Army National Guard directed all 54 states and territories to report on the operational status of readiness centers with IFRs, determine remediation requirements, restrict public access, and fully remediate all lead dust contamination by the end of 2022. All IFRs were shut down, according to National Guard Bureau spokesperson Paul Swiergosz, with about 1,300 identified as “needing remediation.”

Congress also stepped in. “Nearly 20 years after a military audit urged a cleanup nationwide, the lawmakers said it’s time to make the nation’s armories safe,” reads a 2017 press release from 10 senators who called for lead remediation in National Guard armories. 

But when the Army Audit Agency investigated readiness centers from 2018 to 2020, it found the same systemic problems that had persisted for decades. The audit discovered that in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio, 73 of 83 IFRs — nearly 90 percent of those analyzed — were not thoroughly remediated and the required in-depth lead evaluations were not conducted. Those 73 armories with IFRs also didn’t restrict public access when lead levels were unknown.

North Carolina performed “routine housekeeping cleaning” of its 29 IFRs but not the areas outside of ranges where personnel may have tracked lead. It also failed to remediate lead from bullet traps, vents, and heating and ventilation systems. Ohio focused its lead dust remediation efforts on its 24 IFRs but neglected the rest of those facilities. Its armories did not clean or replace the heating and ventilation systems, and the audit found it was “likely that lead contaminants spread throughout the center when the system was operating.” A different 2020 audit, this one by New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli, noted that while New York IFRs had not been used in more than 20 years, decades of accumulated lead dust had been tracked around armories on soldiers’ shoes; dispersed through the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning systems; and spread by weapons cleaning, maintenance, and storage.

In 2015 and 2016, 35 of 42 New York armories were found to have excessive levels of lead dust on surfaces. As part of the 2020 audit, investigators visited 12 armories that were undergoing remediation and found lead levels still exceeded the acceptable threshold at four of them: Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory, which houses an arts institution and a women’s homeless shelter; the Jamaica Armory in Queens, also home to a women’s shelter; the Saratoga Armory, which contains a museum; and Manhattan’s Harlem Armory, home to the Harlem Children’s Zone, whose youth programs include “Parent and Me gymnastics for toddlers” as well as basketball, dance, and soccer.

Despite assurances by New York State’s Division of Military and Naval Affairs that it had posted warnings (“Danger — Lead Hazard Area” and “Pregnant Women Not Permitted”), the comptroller’s office found no such signage at any of the four armories with dangerously high lead levels. “None of these armories disclosed these excessive lead levels to the public and this is unacceptable,” said Stephen Lynch, New York’s assistant comptroller for state government accountability who spent a combined 30 years in military service, including the Army Reserve and National Guard. “There needs to be improved oversight.” 

Lynch’s personal experience highlights the risk to current Guard troops as well as the plight of generations of veterans and former members of the Guard and Reserve who were exposed to toxic lead dust in armories. Toward the end of his service, while drilling in an New York armory, Lynch saw a memo directing that no civilians or pregnant women should enter the facility because of lead contamination. “It was,” he said, “concerning for many reasons and begs the question, ‘What about military members or civilians working or training at the armory?’”

The number of military personnel and citizen-soldiers potentially exposed to lead dust in armories since the 19th century is astronomical. By the early 1900s, a significant percentage of “organized militia” in various states were using “indoor target galleries.” And since 1916, all Guard units have been required to “assemble for drill and instruction, including indoor target practice, not less than forty-eight times each year.” That year, there were 132,194 members of the Guard and militia. By the 1950s and 1960s, the average number of Guard members had ballooned to more than 360,000, and even off-duty marksmanship training at indoor ranges was being officially encouraged. By 1988, there were 455,182 Guard members, and between 1990 and 2023, alone, more than 2.8 million military veterans served in the National Guard or Reserve. The fallout of exposure to toxic lead dust to millions of military personnel across parts of three centuries has, however, been mostly overlooked.

Doa, a top official in the EPA’s Science Policy Division until 2021, said that the threat posed by lead has long been given short shrift. “Lead does such horrible things to people and — I saw this when I was working on lead at EPA — it just was not taken as seriously as it needed to be,” she said.

“The Army National Guard should go in and clean up these facilities following best practices for abatement. They should get down to EPA’s more protective proposed lead dust standards,” Doa told The Intercept, referring to changes which would classify any level of lead dust greater than zero as a hazard.

Since New Jersey, North Carolina, and Ohio didn’t conduct the necessary lead dust remediation, it was, according to the Army audit, “highly likely that other states and territories may have done the same,” and the problem “likely exists ARNG-wide.” There is good reason to believe it. 

The Intercept requested the status of 27 armories. The National Guard provided information on 13 and failed to locate two in their database. The Guard refused to search for information for 12 other armories because it was “taking up too much bandwidth of the environmental team,” according to Swiergosz, the National Guard spokesperson. He instead recommended filing Freedom of Information Act requests for the documents. The Intercept is still waiting on remediation documents requested via FOIA in 2023. 

The Intercept found discrepancies in the National Guard’s own data, resulting in the continued use of facilities that may still be contaminated with lead dust.

In New Hampshire, the Manchester armory’s IFR has been “closed” but has not been remediated, according to the National Guard. The armory has continued to host military personnel and civilians. In February, the facility was packed with National Guard members returning from the Middle East as well as their families, including a sizable contingent of children, according to photos published in Stars and Stripes.

The National Guard told The Intercept that according to its national database, known as PRIDE, the armory in Hernando, Mississippi, is listed as “closed,” but the National Guard found no mention of a final clearance document. “Closed” status means an IFR has been shut down and the area certified as having acceptable surface lead levels. The Army audit, however, discovered that ARNG personnel could offer “no assurance” that any of the 797 IFRs listed as closed in PRIDE “met the criteria for being successfully cleaned and converted.” The audit found, for example, an armory in North Carolina that hosted “ARNG family members” had a “fully functioning” IFR littered with bullet fragments but was nonetheless listed as “closed” in PRIDE. 

The armory in Waterbury, Vermont, was cleaned in 2017 and is listed as “closed” in PRIDE. Decommissioned in 2022, it is now the site of a Federal Emergency Management Agency Disaster Recovery Center; was used this summer as the site of a youth camp for the Civil Air Patrol, a civilian auxiliary to the U.S. Air Force, hosting about 75 tweens and teens; and has also been talked about as a future homeless shelter. The IFR at an armory in Tamaqua, Pennsylvania, was listed as having been “cleaned, tested, and closed in 2017” in PRIDE, but the National Guard offered no additional information about remediation or a final clearance document. Last December, the armory hosted a Toys for Tots event. 

The Army Audit included 12 recommendations, including that armories in the states examined perform evaluations to identify the extent of lead contamination and that the ARNG ensure the accuracy of its database. Ahearn, the Army spokesperson, told The Intercept the critical recommendation that the states perform the required evaluations and IFR lead dust remediation efforts in accordance with ARNG guidance has not been met, although 11 other recommendations had. The Army National Guard’s ability to verify its compliance is, however, questionable. 

The National Guard press office told The Intercept that “it is impractical for ARNG to travel to each site to verify completion” of remediation projects and that the Guard instead relied on self-reported data entered into the PRIDE database by the 54 individual states and territories.

Two sources within the ANRG, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that even basic information about lead abatement in armories was inconsistently tracked and stored — one of the 11 issues supposedly addressed following the 2020 Army audit. Both expressed skepticism that lead contamination data was accurate. Swiergosz admitted as much in an email, noting that while he was no expert, it appeared “there are inconsistencies in how the data is entered into the database.” (He declared this was “off the record,” apparently without realizing that this stipulation is not achieved by unilateral decree.) These findings echo the Army audit which discovered proper documentation was often missing and basic information was lacking. “The data wasn’t complete or accurate,” the auditors wrote of PRIDE. “We couldn’t validate the reliability of facility and IFR data.” 

Experts say that the Army must provide definitive answers about the safety of armories and concrete proof of remediation. “Our laws are very under-protective,” said Earthjustice’s Gartner. “We have laws and rules about lead in residences but much less so when it comes to public buildings — even more so when it comes to a hybrid military and public facility.”

The Army National Guard said it had “addressed” lead threats at around 710 IFRs, as of December 2023. These sites have been “repurposed” and are now “no longer a threat.” Swiergosz told The Intercept that the Army and the National Guard prioritized “high-risk IFRs” and, since 2017, allocated $205 million toward those projects. But when asked for a list of such sites, Swiergosz said they “really don’t track sites that way” and could not provide it nor an inventory of remediated armories.  

In 2019, the PRIDE database listed 1,324 IFRs and 2,911 total armories, but investigators wrote that “ARNG personnel couldn’t tell us if IFRs existed at the remaining 1,587 centers.” The Army audit found that four states over- or under-counted a total of six IFRs and the operational status of another 25 was inaccurate in PRIDE. The auditors also identified one state, which was not in their review, that failed to report any IFRs in the PRIDE database but nonetheless conducted 29 lead remediation projects.

Remediation is also no guarantee of safety. New York’s Whitestone Armory began serving as a community center in the 1980s and, by the early 2000s, was offering programs for children and seniors, including aerobics, arts and crafts classes, basketball, and line dancing. Information from the New York State Comptroller’s Office shows a $1.6 million contract, mostly for “lead mitigation” at the site, was awarded in 2017 and ran until 2020. The next year, however, New York’s Army National Guard informed the state’s Division of Military and Naval Affairs of excessive lead levels there. It was the same for the Orangeburg and Staten Island armories which were remediated under contracts issued in the late 2010s but were also, the comptroller’s office told The Intercept, found to have unacceptably high lead levels in 2021.

“It is a known problem that armories across the country have been found to be contaminated with high levels of lead,” DiNapoli told The Intercept, noting that while New York’s Division of Military and Naval Affairs had taken steps to remediate the lead hazards, more was needed. “If testing is not done consistently and safety standards are not enforced, then unsafe levels of lead could have serious health effects on people using armory facilities.”

While some National Guard armories became community centers decades into their existence, the Teaneck, New Jersey, site was never intended to be a purely military facility.

As its basement began accumulating toxic dust, the Teaneck Armory became, according to the Bergen Record, the “Madison Square Garden of Bergen County.” Beginning in 1938, spectators crowded in to watch amateur boxing and, over the ensuing decades, dog shows, bingo, roller derby, professional wrestling, professional tennis, a rodeo, the crusade of evangelist Billy Graham, performances by entertainers from Frank Sinatra to the Ronettes, and a speech by then-presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. In the 1960s, the armory even briefly became the home of the New Jersey Americans of the American Basketball Association. (Today, they are the National Basketball Association’s Brooklyn Nets.) The armory eventually became a movie soundstage for films like the Tom Hanks/Meg Ryan romantic comedy “You’ve Got Mail” before becoming home to the Soccer Coliseum.

One morning earlier this year, girls from NJ Crush Football Club, New York City Football Club, and other teams sprinted back and forth on the Soccer Coliseum’s red turf. As the hours evaporated, goals added up and wins and losses mounted. In the stands, players’ younger siblings climbed over the folding seats, sat transfixed in front of iPads, or wolfed down baggies of snacks.      

For years, scenes like this have played out weekend after weekend, adding to the hundreds of thousands of people — soldiers and civilians, children and adults — who have visited the armory over its long tenure as a sports arena, concert hall, and community hub. Much the same can be said for other National Guard armories from coast to coast that have opened their doors to members of their local communities. The number of those potentially exposed to lead dust over more than a century is staggering — and so are the potential costs.

“Lead poisoning doesn’t stop when a child turns 6, the risks continue: kidney impacts, hypertension, cardiac arrest, and a 46 percent increase in early mortality,” said Lead-Free NJ’s Norton, the architect of the State of Maryland’s effort to reduce childhood lead poisoning. “But this is so fixable. It’s just a question of whether we make the moral and political choice to fix it.”

The Intercept’s coverage of veterans’ health is made possible in part by a grant from the A-Mark Foundation.

The post The National Guard Knows Its Armories Have Dangerous Lead Contamination, Putting Kids and Soldiers At Risk appeared first on The Intercept.

The activists had come to protest the expansion of Camp Grayling, already the largest National Guard training facility in the country. The opposition had arisen a year earlier, when the military had proposed leasing more than 150,000 acres of forest land managed by Michigan’s Department of Natural Resources, doubling the size of the training installation.

The National Guard, though, did not make an appearance at the University of Michigan career fair. The activists proceeded with their plan anyway.

“Want blood on your hands?” read the flyers activists distributed on recruiting tables. “Sign up for a government job.” When the recruiters returned from lunch, two protesters rushed in, dousing the NSA recruiting table and two Navy personnel with fake blood sprayed out of a ketchup container. (The NSA did not respond to a request for comment.) The “Stop Camp Grayling” protesters were subdued, booked, and charged.

“We’ve seen over the years that the FBI opens very aggressive investigations based on a very low criminal predicate in cases against protest groups.”

Everything about the protest had been relatively routine, right down to the arrests, but the local and federal authorities saw something more sinister. According to public records obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, the local sheriff’s office in Oakland County, Michigan, documented the incident in a case report as a hate crime against law enforcement. (The sheriff’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

The FBI recorded the incident as part of a terrorism investigation.

“We’ve seen over the years,” said Michael German, a former FBI agent and fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice, “that the FBI opens very aggressive investigations based on a very low criminal predicate in cases against protest groups.”

Over the following months, according to the documents obtained by The Intercept and Defending Rights & Dissent, the FBI’s counterterrorism investigation unlocked additional federal resources, deepened coordination with military intelligence, generated sustained counterterrorism attention on minor acts of vandalism, and ultimately culminated in a six-person boots-on-the-ground operation conducting physical surveillance of the Stop Camp Grayling Week of Action.

“The Department of Military and Veterans Affairs (DMVA) does not participate in civilian law enforcement investigations or surveillance of any group,” said Michigan National Guard public affairs officer David Kennedy, when asked about state police sharing intelligence with the military. “We do occasionally receive law enforcement notification of individuals or groups who are expressing intent to take action or threaten the safety of military members, training events or facilities.”

Green Scare

Treating the Stop Camp Grayling protesters as terrorists is the latest episode in a worldwide trend of governments smearing climate and environmental activists as terrorists — an ongoing Green Scare. Misapplication of the terrorism label frequently serves as pretext for invasive surveillance and sustained scrutiny.

The FBI has a long history of fixating on environmental protest movements as terrorism suspects. The focus escalated in the 1990s. Most of the movements are engaged in routine First Amendment-protected activity; a few use minor property damage as a protest tactic.

The FBI maintains federal domestic terrorism categories that include “anti-government violent extremism” and “animal rights/environmental violent extremism.” Under pressure to generate investigations, the FBI has launched probes against environmental groups based on thin evidence of criminal activity — or sometimes no evidence at all.

“Since the FBI created ideological categories, they’re incentivized to open cases in those categories,” German said.

“Since the FBI created ideological categories, they’re incentivized to open cases in those categories.”

Because the counterterrorism division does not collect incident data, he said, there is little accountability for the FBI investigations. “If you can’t see how the FBI divides up its domestic terrorism resources between ideological categories where there are a number of homicides and bombings, versus low-level vandalism and other regular protest activities, then you can’t determine whether the FBI is actually investigating true terrorism versus just targeting groups for investigation because they don’t like their political beliefs,” said German.

According to the FBI’s own definition, domestic terrorism comprises acts dangerous to human life or “intended to influence the policy of government by intimidation or coercion.” Yet few of the investigated environmental groups have threatened human life in any meaningful way; not a single homicide can be attributed to the environmental movement. (The FBI did not respond to a request for comment.)

Stop Camp Grayling — like most other movements organized around environmental activism — is not engaged in any type of systematic criminal activity. Movement adherents have never endangered human life. Much of their protest activity involved banner drops, teach-ins, and graffiti on billboards.

Yet the FBI saw fit to share an activist zine with military intelligence, drag in other alphabet agencies, and justify physical surveillance operations — all underpinned by the designation of the movement as worthy of a domestic terrorism investigation.

PFAS Polluters

In 2022, activists convened to fight the proposed expansion of Camp Grayling, a National Guard base that sprawls across three counties in Michigan. Already the largest National Guard base in the country, Camp Grayling announced plans in 2022 to more than double its size.

As host to an annual joint exercise that draws 6,300 participants, Camp Grayling argued that expansion into protected Department of Natural Resources land would facilitate on-the-ground training while expanding airspace available for fighter jet maneuvers.

When the expansion was proposed, it drew the ire of environmental and anti-militarism activists. An alliance of local residents and activists pointed to Camp Grayling’s dismal environmental record, particularly its use of PFAS “forever chemicals” in fire suppressant foam in the ’70s and ’80s.

PFAS levels in local bodies of water had already caused health warnings, leading a state regulator dealing with PFAS to oppose the Camp Grayling expansion. The expansion would have included sensitive riparian ecosystems, leaving only a razor-thin portage as protection against contamination of two rivers leading to Lake Huron and Lake Michigan.

A vigorous protest movement sprung up in Michigan. The Stop Camp Grayling protesters took their inspiration from “Stop Cop City,” the movement to block a massive police training facility to be built on public forest land at the outskirts of Atlanta.

Stop Camp Grayling came onto the Michigan State Police’s radar during a October 23, 2022, protest at the home of the Department of Natural Resources director, followed by vandalism of several historic police vehicles at the Ypsilanti Automotive Heritage Museum.

“Our troopers are frequently called upon to ensure protestors can safely exercise their rights by blocking traffic during marches and protecting protestors participating in lawful activities,” said Shanon Banner, the director of the Michigan State Police’s Communications and Outreach Division.

It wasn’t long before the state police sought help from federal authorities. After the first protest at the DNR director’s house, a senior counterterrorism analyst sought recommendations for an FBI agent to join the case. By the end of the week, an agent from the FBI Detroit field office began gathering intelligence on Stop Camp Grayling protesters.

Some of this intelligence fell squarely within the domain of First Amendment-protected activity. At one point, the FBI agent assigned to the case forwarded a zine to military intelligence headquarters at Camp Grayling. The zine criticized American militarism and detailed the ecological impacts of the proposed expansion.

The University of Michigan recruiting fair protest marked a turning point in the ways authorities — both local and federal — viewed Stop Camp Grayling protests. Within a week of the recruiting fair incident, the national FBI Counterterrorism Division became involved in the case.

Days after the fake blood incident, an Army special agent with the National Joint Terrorism Task Force wrote to an agent at FBI headquarters, according to the public records. “We noted this incident and other related activity have been documented by FBI DE in an open 266 file,” the Army investigator said, referencing a classification reserved for domestic terrorism investigations.

“I Will Be There in Person”

In April 2023, the acting director of the DNR blocked the no-strings-attached lease of 162,000 acres to Camp Grayling, attributing the decision to an inundation of public concern and opposition from tribal governments. The DNR decided instead to allow limited-use permits on 52,000 acres of public lands.

The movement had scored a victory, but for hard-line Stop Camp Grayling activists and conservation groups, the substitute DNR decision left lingering concerns over the ecological impacts of testing electronic warfare systems in the Michigan forest. The Stop Camp Grayling protesters proceeded with a week of action that included demonstrations, community building, and strategizing about next steps.

The protests, however, were on authorities’ radar well before any demonstrators set foot in the forest. Because the end of the week of action nearly coincided with the August 4 start of Operation Northern Strike, police and military officials were on high alert. Even the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Command, tasked with addressing foreign intelligence entities, was read into FBI operations on the ground.

“I’ll in turn forward their info to military intel and federal LE partners.”

The Department of Homeland Security agent working on the case decided to travel to the area. “I will be working out of Grayling this Friday through the following Friday,” Dan Lorenz, the DHS officer, wrote to an intelligence official in the state police, “so if you need anything or if I need to respond to anything I will be there in person.” (DHS did not respond to a request for comment.)

A Michigan State Police officer instructed his colleagues to collect intelligence on Stop Camp Grayling protesters they encountered. “I’ll in turn forward their info to military intel and federal LE partners,” First Lt. Scott McManus wrote.

Banner, the Michigan State Police spokesperson, said, “The Michigan Intelligence Operations Center (MIOC)” — a so-called fusion center for information sharing — “adheres to strict guidelines that prohibit the collection of information based solely on an individual’s or group’s participation in lawful activities. If criminal activities are identified, the MIOC may play a role with relevant local and/or federal partners in an effort to keep our residents safe.”

During the Stop Camp Grayling Week of Action, all eyes were on the protesters. A lawful protest, mostly involving chanting, sparked a flurry of emails. The vandalism of two billboards sent intelligence and law enforcement agencies into conniptions. “This makes the cut,” Lorenz wrote in response to a Michigan State Police write-up of the graffiti. “I will get it into reporting first chance I get.”

Eventually, the FBI decided that watching from afar was no longer sufficient. On July 26, the FBI planned to carry out in-person surveillance against Stop Camp Grayling protesters.

“Just wanted to give you guys a heads up that we will need both of you for FISUR” — physical surveillance — “on Friday,” an FBI official with the Joint Terrorism Task Force wrote to two colleagues in the Detroit field office.

Six FBI agents, including two with Portland field office designations, were sent a 13-page operation plan, along with an attached document called “Camp Attendees.docx.” The entire operation plan, beyond confirmation that six FBI agents were involved, is redacted. The Michigan State Police indicated that it withheld a significant portion of documents responsive to The Intercept and Defending Rights & Dissent’s records request, due to claimed exemptions to freedom of information laws.

The section heading in the physical surveillance plan reveal that six officers took part in the physical surveillance, with two more case agents listed. Another line lists a Michigan State Police “Contact for Traffic Stop.”

Below the list, followed by a black redaction that covers most of the page, is another section labeled: “DEADLY FORCE POLICY.”

The post They Protested a Military Base Expansion. So the FBI Investigated Them as Terrorism Suspects. appeared first on The Intercept.