This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This coverage is made possible through a partnership between Grist and Interlochen Public Radio in northern Michigan. 

Flooding across northern Michigan last month pushed rivers to record levels, testing the limits of the state’s aging dams so severely that officials in one city nearly ordered evacuations as water threatened to spill over the top of a key barrier—a close call that highlights the growing risk that intensifying storms pose to similar infrastructure around the country.

Nationwide, the average dam is 64 years old and most were built for rainfall patterns that no longer reflect today’s changing climate. Thousands are classified as high hazard, meaning their failure could result in the loss of life. Dam safety experts say inspections are uneven and improvements often underfunded.

More than half of Michigan’s dams are beyond their 50-year design life, and the risks became clear as snowmelt and weeks of heavy rain swelled rivers. Rising water came within 5 inches of flowing over Cheboygan Dam in Cheboygan, a city of about 4,700 people, on April 16. In Bellaire, officials deployed about 1,000 sandbags to shore up a century-old dam.

“This needs to be considered not the worst we can experience. This needs to be considered as typical of the future,” said Richard Rood, a professor emeritus at the University of Michigan who studies climate change.

There are about 92,000 dams in the United States. About 18 percent are considered high-hazard. The Association of State Dam Safety Officials estimates repairing all of these aging structures will cost more than $165 billion. In Michigan, that estimate is $1 billion.

Communities facing these risks are left with difficult choices. Given the cost of repairing and upgrading dams to withstand stronger storms, removing them is often cheaper. That can reduce long-term risk and restore rivers to a more natural state. But it often faces resistance from property owners and communities with economies built around the reservoirs those dams created.

As floodwaters recede across Michigan, local leaders, dam safety advocates, and experts are renewing calls to bolster safety regulations and deal with aging dams.

Bob Stuber, executive director of the Michigan Hydro Relicensing Commission, considers the April flooding a wake-up call and believes the solution is clear: upgrades where feasible and removal where it makes sense. “I think every opportunity we have to remove an aging dam, we should take advantage of it because it’s not going to get better,” he said. “It’s just going to get worse.”

Officials in Traverse City came to that conclusion in 2024 and removed the Union Street Dam along the Boardman-Ottaway River as part of a decades-long restoration project that includes FishPass, which will allow key species to pass while blocking harmful invaders like sea lamprey. Engineers said that removal and upgrade most likely reduced flooding impacts when waters surged to near-record levels last month, falling just short of a 500-year flood.

“Upstream would have been under 2 more feet of water, which would have been quite devastating,” said Daniel Zielinski, a principal engineer for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. “We actually had a really great stress test of the system. It functioned really well.” 

Removals are increasing across the country, according to data from American Rivers. Since 2000, more dams have come down than gone up, and that pace is accelerating as aging infrastructure, safety concerns, and environmental benefits reshape how communities weigh their value. 

In northern Michigan, conservation groups like Huron Pines help dam owners make that decision. It has managed nine removals in the last 13 years and has seen growing interest after the recent flooding, said Josh Leisen, a senior project manager for the organization. Removal reconnects river ecosystems and eliminates the need for expensive upkeep of aging structures, he said.

“There are costs associated with repair and there are risks associated with having a dam,” Leisen said. “Even if it seems to be in good condition, you get extreme weather events like we just had.”

Removing dams is not always straightforward. Beyond the technical challenges, many communities are reluctant to give up the lakes and waterfronts those structures create. “There’s this emotional attachment to that impoundment,” said Daniel Brown, a climate resilience strategist at the Michigan-based Huron River Watershed Council.

In other cases, dismantling isn’t practical. Some dams provide electricity or drinking water, linking them to local economies and infrastructure. Removal “is not really something that’s on the table because they are connected in this very practical way,” Brown said.

Still, Brown said, there are limits to how much aging structures can be adapted to a warming world. “[A dam] is this very long-term, huge, expensive infrastructure that you’ve put on the landscape that’s going to stay there. And that is not how climate change or nature or rivers behave,” Brown said.

Dismantling dams, like upgrading them, can come with steep costs. The Boardman-Ottaway River project—which removed three dams in the largest removal effort in state history—cost $25 million. Huron Pines is managing the removal of Sanback Dam in Rose City next month, at an estimated cost of $4 million.

Half of the expense is funded through a grant program from the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, launched in response to the 2020 Edenville Dam failure which overwhelmed the downstream Sanford Dam. The twin catastrophes forced the evacuation of more than 10,000 residents, destroyed thousands of homes, and flooded ecosystems in a disaster that investigators later found was avoidable. The $44 million state program funded several dam removals, upgrades, and engineering studies before it ended last year.

Federal funding is available through programs administered by agencies such as FEMA or U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. But those resources fall short of the estimated $165.2 billion needed to address the issue, and some are at risk of elimination.

State governments regulate roughly 70 percent of the dams in the United States, with the federal government regulating hydropower dams and providing funding and guidance. This means inspection standards, regulations, enforcement, and resources can vary widely.

In Michigan, about 1,000 dams fall under state oversight, while 99 hydroelectric dams are overseen by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The remaining 1,500 are smaller barriers that don’t fit the criteria for state regulation, according to the Michigan Dam Inventory.

Now, state officials are renewing calls for more money and stronger regulations. “Dam safety may be an issue that isn’t partisan,” said Phil Roos, director of EGLE.

Proposed state legislation would bolster inspection rules, address private ownership, update design standards, and create more funding opportunities for upgrades or removals. “It’s so important to our state that we can come together, and whether it’s passing the legislation that was proposed, or improving procedures, or ultimately funding,” Roos said.

Michigan state Senator John Damoose has expressed concern about private dam ownership since the close call at Cheboygan Dam, which is under both state and private control. About 75 percent of the dams Michigan regulates are privately owned.

“Somebody made a point, ‘Well, we can’t have private companies owning these things.’ I tend to believe in private ownership but they might be right,” Damooose said during a Traverse City roundtable discussion on dam safety.

It’s not just a Michigan issue. Most dams in the United States are privately owned, meaning responsibility for maintenance, upkeep, and potential failure falls on individuals, not governmental agencies, according to the Association of State Dam Safety Officials. 

Climate change is expected to bring more frequent and intense storms. As the world warms, the atmosphere holds more moisture, fueling more intense precipitation, according to Rood at the University of Michigan.

Recent flooding “has shown an incredible vulnerability,” he said. “[Dams] are either going to have to be removed or reengineered. Or they’re going to become a set of slowly unfolding failures.”

Luke Trumble, chief of dam safety for Michigan, said the state is already dealing with conditions that many dams were never designed to withstand. “It’s a little bit of a misconception that if we fix the dam issue, there’ll be no more flooding,” he said. “There’s still going to be flooding on rivers whenever we get rain like this, or rain on snow.

“What we can do with dam safety legislation is help ensure that flooding is not made worse by a dam failure,” Trumble said.

President Donald Trump’s energy secretary shrugged when asked on Sunday whether gas prices could rise to $5 per gallon and offered no clear plan to address the affordability predicament the administration has forced upon Americans. 

“I can’t predict the price of energy in the short term or even the medium term,” Chris Wright told Kristen Welker on Meet the Press. And regarding potential solutions, he said, “we are constantly looking for different ideas.”

As Welker pointed out, in March, Wright said that it was “very possible” that gas prices would drop below $3 a gallon before the summer. He also told CNN’s Jake Tapper in April that “prices have likely peaked and they’ll start going down.”

According to the US Energy Information Administration, the price of regular gas in the US has increased more than 40 cents per gallon since Wright’s April statement. 

So now Wright is backtracking his predictions, instead claiming during his Sunday interview that the US is in a “tremendous position,” as it is “by far the largest producer of oil” and “by far the world’s largest producer of natural gas.” 

“Gasoline and diesel prices are up, and they’ll remain up while this conflict is in place,” Wright said, but after the war, “they’ll come back down lower than they were before.” 

Wright’s claims come as the US and Iran remain locked in negotiations over a new ceasefire proposal. According to a Sunday report from the Associated Press, Iran wants to end the war on all fronts—including Israel’s strikes on Lebanon—and secure safe shipping in the region amid a US blockade of their ports. Iran’s leadership said it would discuss the latest US proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and scale back its nuclear program at a later time. 

In other words, it does not look like the war will end any time soon. And even if transit through the Strait of Hormuz resumes to pre-war levels, it will take months to get oil and gas flowing due to the devastating strikes across the region.

On Mother’s Day, the US Department of Health and Human Services launched a website that promotes pro-life pregnancy centers for new and expecting mothers.

The federal government’s new site, Moms.gov, “offers guidance and information to support the health and well-being of mothers and their families,” according to a Sunday press release by HHS. The website also prominently features a link to find local pregnancy centers at Option Line. The pregnancy help contact center attempts to dissuade people from considering abortion, including by advising them to ask about the risk of physical harm from the procedure and by urging them to remember “it’s OK to change your mind.”

Decades of scientific research demonstrate that abortion is a safe way to end a pregnancy.

In addition to pregnancy centers, Moms.gov includes resources for nutritional guidance and links to set up $1,000 “Trump accounts” for children—all amid widespread cuts by Republicans to family support.

“Moms.gov delivers critical tools and support to help parents foster healthy pregnancies, strengthen young families, and create brighter futures for their children,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., said in the press release. This is how you Make America Healthy Again.” 

Option Line’s locator tool provides a list of their “participating pregnancy centers” that offer “peer counseling and accurate information about all pregnancy options.” Many of the facilities that Option Line recommends are crisis pregnancy centers, according to Crisis Pregnancy Center Map, a national directory led by Drs. Andrea Swartzendruber and Danielle Lambert, two professors from the University of Georgia’s College of Public Health. 

Crisis pregnancy centers portray themselves as legitimate reproductive health care clinics but instead attempt to deter people from accessing abortion care and even some contraceptive options, according to the American College of Obstetricians & Gynecologists. 

“As part of a pro-life, pro-family administration, HHS is committed to delivering critical tools to help parents foster healthy pregnancies, strengthen young families, and create brighter futures for their children,” HHS press secretary Emily Hilliard told Mother Jones on Sunday regarding the agency’s promotion of Option Line.  “The pregnancy centers and Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) [which receive federal funding to provide primary care for underserved communities] listed on the website provide supportive services to expecting mothers.”

As my colleague Julia Métraux wrote last month, HHS has long pushed these crisis pregnancy centers, directly giving at least $34 million to 16 facilities between 2018 and 2024. In April, the Trump administration proposed plans to dismantle its Title X family planning program, switching from promoting contraception use and instead urging providers to concentrate on “optimal health (defined as physical, mental, and social wellbeing), not just medical intervention.”

This story was originally published by Yale E360 and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Justin Smarsh and his family used to kayak a few times a year on the rivers and creeks near their home in Cherry Tree, Pennsylvania. High on the Appalachian Plateau, northeast of Pittsburgh, he spent hours in the woods and taught his two sons to hunt. Today, Smarsh said, he gets “suffocated just walking.” He has a constant dry cough, and he loses his breath if he bends down to tie his shoes. 

A few years after he graduated from high school and got married, Smarsh went to work in a coal mine in his home county, just as his father and grandfather had. “It was the best-paying job around,” he said. “It still is.” Now Smarsh, 42, has progressive massive fibrosis—the most severe form of coal workers’ pneumoconiosis, or black lung.

There is no cure for Smarsh’s condition. He tries to slow the progression with “piles of meds,” he said, but things will eventually worsen, potentially to the point of heart failure. In patients with advanced disease, a flu or common cold can lead to a kind of drowning as the lungs fill with fluid. Smarsh’s doctors say he won’t live to see 50. 

“Most people think coal mining is a thing of the past,” said Deanna Istik, CEO of Lungs at Work, a black lung clinic in Washington County, Pennsylvania. “Meanwhile, we see more people being diagnosed with black lung disease than we ever have before.” 

Coal mining has always been a hazardous occupation. But today’s miners face a new danger because they’re inhaling something worse than the coal dust that settles in lungs, triggering immune cells to form nodules, masses, and scarified black tissue. Most of the large coal seams in the mountains of Appalachia are gone now. To reach smaller seams, miners must cut through much more rock with high levels of quartz, which gets pulverized into crystalline silica.

When tiny particles of silica are inhaled, they act like minute shards of glass, leading to severe tissue scarring and inflammation and eventually to progressive massive fibrosis. Researchers from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH) estimate the disease now afflicts one in 10 working miners who have worked in mines for at least 25 years. Rising rates of the disease have led to stark increases in lung transplants and mortality. Between 2013 and 2017, hundreds of cases of progressive massive fibrosis were identified at three Virginia clinics alone, leading NIOSH to declare a renewed black lung epidemic. Black-lung-associated deaths, which declined between 1999 and 2018, rose between 2020 and 2023.

The disease is on the uptick at a time when the Trump administration is calling for the expansion of coal production. Last fall, the US Department of Energy announced it was investing $625 million in coal projects, and this month, President Trump signed an executive order reaffirming coal as essential to national security, a move that will direct billions of dollars in federal funding to the industry. But while the administration is calling for more coal, it is simultaneously delaying implementation of new regulations that would protect miners from deadly silica. 

In the United States, black lung was officially acknowledged as a workplace-related illness only in the late 1960s, after a highly publicized disaster at a West Virginia mine killed 78 coal miners. Subsequent strikes and protests led to the passage of the 1969 Coal Mine Health and Safety Act, which mandated federal safety inspections of mines, set fines for violations, and established a benefits program to compensate miners with black lung. 

Rates of the disease dropped almost immediately, and by the end of the 20th century, thanks to the implementation of those standards and a strong union presence in mines in Pennsylvania and across Appalachia, black lung was nearly eradicated. 

In the last two decades, US coal production has fallen precipitously. It peaked in 2008 at more than 1,170 million tons, according to the US Energy Information Administration; in 2023, production was 578 million tons, a drop of more than 50 percent. But in Pennsylvania, says Istik, “this is not a dead industry. We’re still cutting coal.” A 2024 report by the Pennsylvania Coal Alliance counted more than 5,000 mining jobs generating some $2.2 billion in economic output. Nationwide, there are still close to 40,000 coal workers. 

Black lung diagnoses continue to mount. Doctors and miner advocates say the condition is underdiagnosed, as many miners are reluctant to undergo testing for fear of losing their jobs should their employer find out. “I think there’s always going to be that fear of retribution,” said Istik. But eventually, she added, the symptoms become debilitating. Smarsh, a patient of Lungs at Work, didn’t see a doctor about his labored breathing until his wife, Alicia, insisted he had no choice. 

Black lung clinics are seeing more and more patients like Smarsh, who’ve gotten sick in their 30s and 40s. In earlier generations, miners might have needed decades of coal dust exposure to develop serious disease, if they got sick at all. “My dad and my pap were both miners, and they didn’t get it,” Smarsh said. “So, I thought, ‘Who says I’m going to?’” But today’s workers, who are breathing a much higher proportion of silica, can develop a disabling illness in much less time.

Smarsh worked mostly as a roof bolter—the person responsible for installing supports to prevent cave-ins—drilling up into rock. He spent eight years underground before his lung condition made it impossible for him to work, or to walk across his own backyard without using an inhaler. 

Experts have understood the dangers of silica dust for decades. In the 1970s, NIOSH suggested regulations that would limit exposure to 50 micrograms per cubic meter of air, averaged over a 10-hour workday in the mine. In 2016, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) adopted the 50-microgram silica standard for other occupations, like construction and manufacturing. But in 2017, the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA)—which is mandated to conduct quarterly inspections of underground mines and enforce safety standards—responded to industry pressure and set the limit for mining at 100 micrograms over an eight-hour workday. 

After a negotiation process that spanned years and multiple administrations and involved mining industry lobbyists, legal groups, and scientists from NIOSH and other agencies, MSHA announced in 2024 that it would issue a new rule reducing the silica exposure limit in mines to 50 micrograms, with enforcement to begin in April 2025.

The new rule would require operators to use “engineering controls,” such as improved ventilation systems, as the primary means of meeting the standard. Those tools could be supplemented, when necessary, by “administrative controls,” such as clothing decontamination and avoidance of especially dusty areas, to keep miners from breathing unacceptable amounts of silica.

The National Mining Association and other industry groups mounted a legal challenge, arguing that when ventilation systems aren’t enough to bring respirable silica levels below the 50-microgram standard, operators should be able to require miners to use respirators to achieve compliance.

But “respirators are really the last line of defense because they aren’t foolproof,” Istik said. “Silica is such a small particle; it still comes through.” 

Smarsh wore a respirator some of the time when he was underground. But there were other times, he said, when it was too difficult to see or breathe through it. “Anytime you’re underground, you see dust,” he said. “But it’s not the dust you see that gets you. It’s the little stuff you don’t see.” 

While respirators are important safety equipment, it should not be the coal miner’s responsibility not to get black lung, said Erin Bates, communications director of the United Mine Workers of America. It is the company, she added, that must ensure a safe work environment for its employees.

When the Trump administration came into office, it cut MSHA’s budget and staff. The agency had already been operating at a disadvantage: According to data from the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, MSHA’s coal mine enforcement staff has been cut in half over the last decade. The American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) reported that another 7 percent of the agency’s full-time workforce accepted the Trump administration’s “Fork in the Road” buyout last year, and 90 newly hired mine inspectors had their job offers rescinded.

There were concerns among black lung experts and advocates about the diminished agency’s ability to implement the new silica exposure rule. The loss included people “we desperately needed,” Carey Clarkson, who represents Labor Department workers for the AFGE, told NPR at the time. “I can’t image how many years of experience we lost.” 

A few days before the April 2025 enforcement date, the rule hit two different roadblocks: the 8th US Circuit Court of Appeals granted an emergency stay of the rule in response to a petition led by another industry group, the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association, and MSHA itself announced it would delay implementation to give operators more time to “come into compliance.” 

The litigation has remained in limbo. Last November, MSHA moved to have the legal proceedings paused as it “reconsiders” parts of the rule, and earlier this month it announced the delay would continue “indefinitely” pending judicial review. The agency did not respond to a request for comment.

Bates said the union is disheartened. The agency “was literally created for the health and safety of coal miners, but they don’t want to take that into consideration,” she said.

Rebecca Shelton, director of policy for the Appalachian Citizen’s Law Center, which has been advocating for a new silica rule since the late 2000s, said her organization had hoped to see the rule implemented under the Biden Administration “because we were concerned about challenges it might face.” The process was slowed by intense lobbying, she said, and MSHA’s need to study the rule’s impact across diverse mining industries. 

“If the Trump administration actually cared about protecting coal miners from black lung, we’d have a strong silica rule in place right now,” she said in a statement issued by the center after MSHA announced the indefinite delay. “Instead, they are hiding behind a ridiculous legal process to delay action while miners get sick and die.”

Smarsh said his 19-year-old son wants to work in the coal mines. “Me and my wife tell him all the time, you see what I’m going through? All the good coal that was around here is gone. Now there’s nothing but rock and silica.” Gone too, Smarsh said, is any trust he once had in a coal company to keep miners safe. 

“All they’re worried about is ‘you better have that black gold,’” he said. “They say they care about miners, but you go underground, you’re taking the risk, for you to get nothing but sick, and to fill their pockets full.”

As Mother’s Day approaches, a group of senators are raising the alarm about the “appalling and horrific treatment” of pregnant and nursing people in immigration detention. On Thursday, Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie K. Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) wrote to Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin demanding information about the treatment of this vulnerable group, and urging the agency to release pregnant women from Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.

Their letter comes on the heels of new legislation introduced this week by Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) that would establish care standards for federally incarcerated pregnant people—including those jailed in ICE and Customs and Border Protection facilities. The bill builds on one that the House already passed in 2022, which only applied to those in Bureau of Prison’s custody. 

It’s hard to know how many pregnant people are in federal custody, and what percentage of those are immigrants. In 2023, more than 700 incarcerated mothers gave birth in prison, according to the Prison Policy Initiative. Between January 1, 2025, and February 16, 2026, 363 pregnant, postpartum and nursing immigrants were deported, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Sixteen miscarriages were recorded during those six weeks. As of March, there were an estimated 126 pregnant women still being held in detention, according to the senators’ letter.

The care those who are pregnant in detention receive—or don’t receive—varies widely depending on the state they’re in, or even the individual facility. Federal guidelines are sparse: There are no federal rules on prenatal nutrition for incarcerated mothers, and some facilities still reportedly shackle pregnant inmates, even around their bellies. Some mothers are separated from their newborns only moments after birth. These practices can put mothers’ lives in danger, and can lead to miscarriages, psychological, and physical trauma. 

Kamlager-Dove’s Pregnant Women In Custody Act would mandate adequate prenatal healthcare in federal prisons, jails, and ICE detention centers. It would prohibit the use of shackles during labor, and improve health-related data collection in federal facilities. 

“It’s unacceptable that there are virtually no legal safeguards for pregnant women in federal custody, and this bill aims to right that wrong by ensuring healthier, safer futures for mothers and babies,” Rep. Kamlager-Dove wrote in a statement.

The senators who wrote to Secretary Mullin about the issue also wrote to two private contractors—Acquisition Logistics, LLC and Amentum Services, Inc.—which contracted with DHS to operate Camp East Montana, an ICE detention facility in El Paso, Texas. As the New York Times reported in March, there is no doctor onsite at that facility, yet pregnant women are held there. “When one experienced vaginal bleeding and requested medical care she was reportedly given only water, prenatal vitamins, and a temperature check,” the senators wrote.

“We write today with deep concern about the callous indifference with which this Administration appears to be mistreating this extremely vulnerable population,” they wrote in their letter to Mullin, adding: “We urge you to immediately resume the commonsense practice of presumption of release of pregnant women from ICE custody.”

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

For decades, the US Forest Service has actively managed public lands to reduce wildfire risks by clearing underbrush and trees, or employing prescribed burns—something Indigenous nations have practiced for centuries. Scientists have generally lauded the ecological benefits of what is also known as “fuel treatment.” Now, they say there’s another reason to support this approach: It saves money. 

According to a study published today in the journal Science, every dollar that the agency spent on such tactics avoided $3.73 in smoke, property, and emissions harm. “A lot of people have suggested that there could be potential economic benefits,” said Frederik Strabo, the lead author of the paper and an economist with University of California, Davis. “But it’s been a pretty understudied area.”

The study analyzed high-resolution data from 285 wildfires across 11 Western states between 2017 and 2023 that burned through areas where the Forest Service had reduced the fuel load. On average, the treatments decreased the total area burned by 36 percent and cut the amount of land burned at moderate to high severity by 26 percent. Researchers then modeled the economic benefits of those reductions. 

The paper estimated that fuel treatments prevented $1.4 billion in health and workforce productivity losses tied to wildfire smoke, $895 million in structural damage, and $503 million in carbon dioxide emissions. Overall, that amounted to an average savings of about $3.73 for every dollar the government spent. The research also found that larger treatments—those covering more than 2,400 acres—were the most cost effective. 

“It’s a significant number, but when you compare it to the total cost of wildfires it’s small,” caveated Strabo, noting that the cost of the worst disasters can reach hundreds of billions of dollars. But he also said the boon could be even greater than calculated. The research didn’t, for example, examine any savings or benefits for the multibillion dollar outdoor recreation industry. “We’re only capturing a specific subset of benefits.”

Morgan Varner, the director of fire research at the conservation nonprofit Tall Timbers, called the work “the missing link for a lot of fuels treatment research,” and said that data like this can be extremely helpful in guiding decision-makers. “Studies like this round out the story and provide more evidence for the benefits of these treatments.” 

David Calkin, who until last year was a Forest Service research scientist, also applauded the analysis, calling it “novel.” But he does not find the math entirely convincing, and questions the notion that such an intangible public good can, or should, be assigned a monetary worth. “A lot of the values of fuel management are non-market,” said Calkin, who wasn’t involved in the study. Ecological benefits, for instance, can be hard to quantify, as can things like public recreation access. 

“I’m not trying to reduce the importance of fuel management and the value of it. It’s just highly uncertain,” he said. “I worry about trying to monetize the value of treatments on public lands.”

One issue Calkin notes is that such work on federal lands may not significantly mitigate the costliest fires, which ignite near communities and destroy homes and buildings. “The best way to protect a structure is at the structure itself,” he explained. That means the study could be overestimating the amount of property damage that clearing and prescribed burns avoid.

Strabo disagrees, saying that an unpublished portion of the analysis found that fires that interacted with fuel treatments accounted for a disproportionately large share of structure losses and suppression costs. “That suggests [those fires] were often among the more economically consequential wildfires,” he said, pointing to the 2021 Caldor Fire near Lake Tahoe as an example. “The fire still caused substantial damages, but treatments helped prevent it from becoming even more catastrophic.”

One thing the paper explicitly didn’t account for was the smoke and carbon dioxide emissions that intentional fires produce. “We’re finding that’s not a nontrivial amount in our research,” said Mark Kreider, a Forest Service researcher. Because wildfire is unpredictable, he explained, you inherently have to treat more of the landscape than will actually encounter flames. How to best factor those emissions in is part of Kreider’s ongoing work, but he says it could potentially even flip an analysis like the one in Strabo’s paper. Still, he said, that doesn’t undermine the core point that fuel treatments are effective.

“It’s very clear,” he said, “that on the whole they are very beneficial.”

Not everyone supports such tactics. Critics argue they can harm ecosystems, disproportionately target larger trees, and open forests to logging under the guise of fire prevention. Some opponents also contend that this approach is less effective against extreme fires, while others question whether public funds would be better spent hardening homes and communities.

The federal government’s approach to forest management has shifted since President Donald Trump returned to office. In 2022, the Forest Service released a 10-year wildfire plan that increased forest management and prescribed burns. The Trump administration, which has announced plans to radically remake the agency, has placed greater emphasis on fighting wildfires than preventing them. According the Forest Service, in 2025, the agency reduced vegetation on about 1 million fewer acres than in 2024.

A Forest Service spokesperson attributed most of that decline to elevated wildfire activity in the Southeast. The agency also called 2025 “one the most successful wildfire years in recent history.” But critics worry it is moving away from proactive forest management.

“The takeaway that I really got from this article was that it provides further evidence that the administration’s current policy of full suppression in Western wildfire situations is misguided,” said Heather Stricker, a climate and lands analyst with the Sierra Club. While that approach might sound protective, she said a large body of research shows that it can often backfire. “This paper reiterated a lot of that previous research, but then took it a step further to quantify the cost savings.” 

The Trump administration has also announced plans to increase logging on federal lands. This has added to longstanding fears from environmental groups that instead of thoughtful, well-managed fuel treatment, the government could resort to clear-cutting. Even the paper notes this resistance. “Public pressure and risk aversion,” it reads, “skew wildfire management resources toward fire suppression rather than prevention.”

Strabo is hopeful that by adding to the range of evidence supporting forest management, his paper could help guide policymakers. “We could have these economic and ecological benefits if we scaled it up,” he said. “It’s a critically underfunded public good.”

Over the past four days, bettors on the prediction platform Polymarket have wagered nearly $3 million on whether we’ll see a hantavirus pandemic this year. A cluster of cases of a particularly deadly strain of the virus erupted on a cruise ship last month, killing three people out of eight suspected cases linked to the vessel. Though the news has stoked fears, the World Health Organization currently classifies the risk of a full-blown pandemic as low. 

But Polymarket users are spending big across several hantavirus-related propositions—including whether a vaccine will be developed this year and whether or not officials will tie the cruise ship outbreak to a “lab leak.” Polymarket declined to comment on hantavirus betting. 

“I want to be unequivocal here. This is not the start of a Covid pandemic,” said Maria Van Kerkhove, director of epidemic and pandemic management at the WHO, at a Thursday press conference. “This is not Covid, this is not influenza. It spreads very, very differently.”

Because outbreaks of this hantavirus strain have occurred before, infectious disease experts already know that the virus requires close contact to spread between people, and a person with the virus is only infectious for about a day. Just as those metrics allow public health officials to calibrate their response, they also inform how some online gamblers are placing their money.

Online gambling has been on the rise since sports betting was legalized by the Supreme Court in 2018, but the Covid pandemic gave it a huge boost. In 2020, sports betting revenues jumped up 69 percent over the previous year, though not too many sports events were happening.

But there were other bets to be placed, like how many people would die from Covid-19, a topic some people wagered on as early as April 2020. At the time, those bets were illegal, the subjects of online betting being more strictly regulated. But a 2024 court ruling took the rails off of websites known as prediction markets. Now, on mega-platforms like Polymarket and Kashi, users can bet on almost anything—including public health crises.

“Anybody who’s betting on a viral spread, I’m going to…guess that they have an addiction problem when it comes to gambling,” says John W. Ayers, a public health professor at University of California, San Diego. “If someone is very addicted to gambling, they’re more likely to find themselves interacting with these more fringe things you could possibly bet on.”

For several years, public health experts have been concerned that gambling addictions are on the rise, though the exact numbers are hard to pin down. A study Ayers led that came out last year found that Google searches seeking help for gambling addiction jumped 23 percent nationwide since the legalization of sports betting. Other researchers estimate about 10 percent of men ages 18 to 30 have a problematic relationship to gambling. 

Platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket grow based on use, helping the range of niche bets to multiply—and since taking off during the Covid pandemic, the prediction-market industry has multiplied in size many times. By 2030, it’s been estimated, prediction markets could  grow to $1 trillion in annual trading volume.

That gambling is a public health issue in itself, Ayers says. Gambling addiction is correlated with other forms of addiction that are significant sources of premature deaths in the US. Financial stress isn’t great for your health, either. 

“Culturally, it’s normalized, and now we give it this veneer of, ‘Oh, it’s not gambling. It’s a prediction market.’ Doesn’t matter,” Ayers says. “The harm still exists. Call it a prediction market or a sports book, you’re still losing money, and the house always wins on these bets.”

Unlike many other forms of addiction, gambling problems can often be invisible before someone hits rock bottom, especially now that most of these transactions are happening in an app. It is possible to regulate prediction markets and place barriers on addictive behaviors—some countries place limits on how many bets a person can take, restrict the use of credit cards, or institute mandatory rest periods between bets—but right now, the US more or less doesn’t. Instead, we bet on everything: viruses included.

“The fact that people will gamble on these things indicates to me the larger societal problem—everything becomes an opportunity for monetization,” Ayers says.

Or as Donald Trump put it earlier this year, “the whole world, unfortunately, has become somewhat of a casino…it is what it is.”

When the FBI showed up at a warehouse in Fulton County, Georgia, to seize hundreds of boxes of 2020 election records this past January, County Commissioner Dana Barrett thought it looked less like a criminal investigation and more like political theater. 

It’s been more than five years since the election, the results already had been investigated multiple times, and the ballots had been counted, recounted, and recounted again.

The lie that the 2020 election was stolen has persisted. And the “Stop the Steal” movement’s most ardent believers now hold unprecedented positions of power, including on the once-sleepy State Election Board in the important swing state of Georgia. A lawyer known for his willingness to take on long-shot election cases has gone from a little-known private practice attorney to a role in the White House, overseeing the country’s election integrity effort—despite being sanctioned by a court for making “unequivocally false” assertions around voting. And everyday members of the movement are trying to change what they fervently believe is a broken system—at the risk of actually breaking it in the process.

This week on Reveal, Mother Jones reporter Abby Vesoulis and Reveal’s Najib Aminy examine how the long shadow of doubt over the 2020 elections is being weaponized and what it means ahead of the 2026 midterms.

Update, May 10: According to Bozeman Tenants United, King Arthur and Mountain Meadows Parks have now officially been sold to an undisclosed buyer. The tenant union has voted to continue its rent strike until the new owners drop the rent hike and bargain with the union.

35-year-old Benjamin Moore has lived in Mountain Meadows Mobile Home Park, outside Bozeman, Montana, since he was 17. This month, for the first time, he’s withholding his rent.

On May 1, Moore received a rent bill for $947, up 11 percent from the month before, and the second hike in nine months—the product of the park’s sale to an undisclosed buyer. 

Moore hung a sign on his trailer that says “RENT STRIKE.” He and his neighbors in Mountain Meadows and nearby King Arthur Park, organized with the citywide group Bozeman Tenants United, are collectively withholding over $50,000 a month from their landlord. 

Historically, trailer parks have been a relatively affordable housing option—a third of trailer park residents in America live below the poverty line. But on average, their cost of living has risen 45 percent over the past decade. By unionizing, the Bozeman trailer park tenants believe they might be able to fight the most recent rent hike—especially given the state of their housing. 

For years, tenants say, the maintenance hasn’t been attended to: tree limbs hang perilously over trailers, and water shutoffs are a regular occurrence. “I cannot recall a time in the past 20 years where we had three straight months of water and power working all day, every day,” Moore said. 

Shauna Thompson, another resident, calls the water “atrocious…like a Milky Way, like you’re drinking skim milk. It’s very nasty and turned off all the time, without any notice.” And tenants allege that they’ve experienced retribution for maintenance requests, punitive eviction attempts, and unsafe conditions. 

“It’s really hard on people here,” Moore said. Some residents are “already paying their entire Social Security check for rent. It’s a very poor neighborhood. We’ve got old folks. We’ve got young families. We’ve got working-class people who can’t afford anything else.”

For the past four decades, a group called Oakland Properties has owned both trailer parks. When they learned about the sale, tenants were scared that their parks would be bulldozed, or that their rent would be increased even further, forcing them to move. 

The tenants attempted to buy the parks themselves, but were decisively outbid. The winning bidder demanded an NDA. The transaction should be finalized next month, park owner Gary Oakland said, but residents still don’t know who’s going to own the land they live on.

This month’s rent hike, Oakland acknowledged, was “part and parcel” of the sale. But for tenants, it’s a catastrophe. On top of the $947 lot rent—more than double the national average—many residents also pay off home loans on their trailers, as well as insurance and utilities costs.

Oakland calls claims of broken utilities “nonsense”: “If it was such a bad place to live, why would the homes be selling for such high dollars?” he said. The rent strike, Oakland points out, is “just a group of people not paying their rent.”

Some people are rationing their medication to make ends meet, Moore said. “There’s one person who canceled Life Alert. It’s either Life Alert or rent, and if you don’t pay rent, they evict you and throw you in the streets.” 

Tenant organizers across the nation have found a foothold in recent years organizing against individual landlords, and Bozeman’s tenant union, situated in one of the fastest-growing communities in the state, is no exception. Tenant unions from Los Angeles to Kansas City to New York have organized to win rent freezes, maintenance, and security in their homes.

Mobile home parks—increasingly private-equity-owned and uniquely at-risk in the face of climate disasters—are organizing, too: a group of trailer park residents in Columbia, Missouri, unionized in February. In Montana, as Rebecca Burns recently wrote for In These Times, mobile homes were already once a site of tenant organizing: buoyed by the state’s miners unions, the first Bozeman-area mobile home tenants’ union won an agreement with their landlord in 1978.  

Oakland says park residents “have been terrorized by the union,” and plans to evict the strikers. The strikers say they’ve retained a lawyer and will fight to stay in their homes.

“I wish none of this was happening,” Moore said. “Your utilities should work. Your place should be safe. You should be able to get in and out of it. These are the absolute basics, and they just haven’t kept them up. And if you call them on it, they threaten you.”

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum recently tried, unsuccessfully, to feed cinnamon Altoids to a Park Police horse. Also, Burgum enjoys artificial intelligence, in particular “AI Teddy,” a planned exhibit at a new facility scheduled to open on July 4 at Theodore Roosevelt National Park. And, it seems, he likes the band Creed.

Those are among the idiosyncratic pieces of information communicated by Burgum during an 88-minute address Wednesday at an “All-Hands” meeting held for around 70,000 Interior Department employees.

In many ways, the Interior Department seems to be struggling. The Trump administration is working to slash the budget and workforce of department components like the US Geological Survey and National Park Service.
Meanwhile the department is racing to open federal lands to mining. And Interior is hurling billions of dollars and no-bid contracts toward what critics call “vanity projects” tied to Trump’s plan for MAGA-style celebrations of America’s 250th anniversary. Those festivities will include a UFC fight at the White House on the president’s 80th birthday and an Indy Car race around the National Mall.

But Burgum on Wednesday touted the department’s “administrative efficiency.” And, in often discursive remarks wending through DOI programs, he made various calls for reducing “red tape” and “redundancies.”

I watched video of Burgum’s remarks and heard from Interior Department employees, who, on the condition of anonymity, provided fact-checking, and mockery, of the secretary’s address.

Some pointed out the irony of Burgum causing thousands of federal employees with more pressing tasks to sit through a hour-and-a-half harangue on operating efficiently. It’s not clear how many DOI employees attended event in person or virtually. The department’s press office didn’t respond when asked how many people were on the call.

Employees pointed out that the first half of Burgum’s speech—organized around slides touting the words, “Gratitude,” “Humility,” Curiosity,” and “Courage”—largely repeated remarks Burgum made about a year ago at a previous departmental all-hands meeting. One department employee said that Burgum had even repeated some of the same anecdotes from the prior year. Employees also noted that for the second year in a row, as the meeting concluded, the Creed song “Higher” played in the auditorium.

Among notable asides was Burgum’s description of his encounter with Sibbell, a US Park Police horse that eats Altoids. Burgum informed the Interior Department that he had encountered the mare during a recent event celebrating plans for the NFL to hold its 2027 draft on the National Mall. “I pull out the Altoids, my favorite…cinnamon Altoids,” he said. “And she did not even blink. It was like: ‘I could care less about your cinnamon Altoids.'”

The upshot of the anedote was that Sibbell (like many horses) prefers mint-flavored candy. But it was also part of lengthy celebration of the Park Police, one component of Interior Department that is receiving more money under Trump. Burgum said that was due to that agency helping the Interior Department to play “a massive part” in the president’s effort to “get DC safe and beautiful.”

That is a euphemistic reference to the deeply unpopular occupation of Washington, DC that Trump began last year. As part of that effort, Burgum deputized immigration agents—who are part of the Department of Homeland Security—to accompany Park Police officers patrolling National Park land in DC. The Park Police helped ICE agents by conducting traffic stops on federal roads and property in the district, in what critics charge was racial profiling.

Park Police also helped carry out Trump’s push to remove homeless encampments in DC. Burgum said Wednesday the agency had “eliminated 82 homeless camps.” And he claimed that occurred without “a front page story and barely a back page story in the Washington Post. It wasn’t even covered.”

In fact, the Post and other outlets reported extensively on the homeless camp removals in stories that noted, contrary to Burgum’s claims Wednesday, that many of the people ousted from tents on federal land did not receive services, or beds in local shelters. Large numbers remain unhoused and some appear to have returned to their former camps.

But the secretary did not tarry on on such wrinkles. In his remarks, he touted Rwanda’s and Ecuador’s park management as worthy of US emulation. “If you’re an American and you wanted to go see the gorillas in Rwanda, or you want to go to the Galapagos Islands, get ready to pay about $800 a day,” Burgum said, in a justification for new fees on foreigners at national parks that critics argue are hurting tourism.

On Burgum’s instructions, the department is removing hundreds of signs and exhibits about American history and science from federal sites to comply with a Trump order to ensure placards are “uplifting” and free of “improper ideology.” As I’ve reported, the purge includes a sign at Fort Laramie in Wyoming about a funeral the US Army held for the daughter of a Lakota chief; signs at Glacier National Park about wildfires, wolves, and the use of dams to support agriculture; and placards at Big Bend National Park about fossils and geology.

But the Park Service is planning to open a new library at an entrance to Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Burgum’s home state of North Dakota as part of the 250th anniversary celebration. And Burgum on Wednesday sounded especially jazzed that the library plans to give visitors the chance to play “that parlor game, which figure in history would you like to have dinner with?”

An “AI Teddy,” Burgum said, will answer questions using words Roosevelt wrote or spoke during his lifetime. It’s unclear whether that will include racist statements Teddy made about Black people (“inferior to the whites”) or Native Americans (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indian is the dead Indian, but I believe nine out of every 10 are”).

Burgum, who last year signed a memorandum of understanding with the United Arab Emirates to collaborate on artificial intelligence, touts the technology as a way for the department to improve efficiency. “If you’re concerned about AI taking your job, then I would just say learn how to use AI and, and, and your job will get better,” he said Wednesday.

Amid the DOGE-driven firing of thousands of National Park Service employees, that agency had lost nearly a quarter of its workforce by mid-2025. Much of the department faces new proposed budget cuts. For a number of remaining employees—many of whom say they feel overworked and beset by ill-advised initiatives from the Trump administration—Burgum’s touting of “administrative efficiency” landed poorly.  

Burgum “has implemented 1,700 bureaucratic hurdles on everything we do,” one DOI employee wrote. “No exhibits or social media posts without approval. No travel without approval. Credit card limits…This is the main dissonance of his entire message.”

The all-hands event included awards to department employees who had excelled at cutting “red-tape,” and a QR code for “Interior’s Innovation & Red Tape Reduction Survey.” That form allows agency employees to identify inefficiencies “in the context of mission delivery at Interior…that, if solved, could result in demonstrable improvements in your daily work life and in benefits to industry or the American public.”

The form is publicly accessible, and the Resistance Rangers, a group  of current and former National Park Service employees, this week asked its followers to weigh in and send Burgum a message: “fund our parks and stop censoring science and history.”