The New York Times investigation that led to major legislation compensating wildfire fighters who had worked for years in toxic smoke and developed cancer and other debilitating illnesses began with a reporter’s observation: They weren’t wearing masks.

That led Hannah Dreier down a monthslong reporting journey as she conducted more than 400 interviews, made public records requests to eight government agencies, analyzed thousands of pages of medical and service records and created a database of every national wildfire fighting crew deployment over two decades.

Following the publication of Dreier’s series, “Exposed and Expendable,” Congress passed legislation requiring the government pay $450,000, tax-free, to federal wildland firefighters who become disabled or die from smoke-related cancers. The U.S. Forest Service also began providing masks to firefighters battling large fires.

For her reporting and impact, Dreier was awarded the 2026 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting from the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, where The Journalist’s Resource is housed.

I recently spoke with Dreier for an hourlong, behind-the-scenes look at how this investigation came together. Watch the full video below and keep reading for five tips pulled from our conversation.

1. Simple questions can lead to big stories.

Back in the Times newsroom following maternity leave, Dreier noticed maskless firefighters on TV news coverage of the 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, despite official health guidance recommending that the public use masks or respirators.

Her question? Why.

“I thought that it might be worth looking into,” she said. “Why that was — why are firefighters out there with no protection? And what might the health risks be?”

Dreier expected a quick answer. Then she learned that Canada, Australia and Greece give wildfire fighters respirator masks with replaceable filters. Firefighters in countries using masks were not suffering from increased heatstroke, one reason the Forest Service gave Dreier for why they didn’t offer masks.

“Getting to that point took a while,” she said of confirming that other countries provide masks. “But once we figured that out, I thought, ‘This has got to be a bigger story.’”

Forest Service researchers had recommended the agency provide masks because of the negative health effects from smoke, she reported. Still, wildfire fighters in the U.S. were continuing to inhale poisons without protection. In fact, Forest Service wildfire fighters were “not allowed to wear masks on the front line, even if they want to,” Dreier wrote.

And the agency, which employs most wildfire fighters in the country, was in a media lockdown. No one there would help her connect with firefighters.

“I couldn’t get any access through the agency,” she said. “I realized I had to basically go out and just start meeting people where they worked.”

That meant going into wildfires herself to interview firefighters. That was possible thanks to a law in California that gives members of the press access to emergency areas.

2. Recast abstractions so they’re familiar to a broader audience.

Many Americans viewed the Los Angeles wildfires through images seen on T.V. news, as Dreier initially did. Those images, though arresting, were far away. For most, the wildfires were an abstraction being fought by anonymous men and women.

The investigation turned out to be a climate change story, Dreier said, with fires becoming more intense and fire season lasting longer as Earth warms.

It was also a workplace safety story, with many wildfire fighters loving the work despite facing immediate and long-term dangers and having limited other employment options.

Those two angles, climate change and workplace safety, gave the story heft and resonance that fleeting images on TV news couldn’t convey.

“The people doing this work are really proud, and it’s incredibly brave, important work,” Dreier said. “They also, to me, seem like people without a lot of options and who were pretty disempowered. These are basically kids who are not going to know what the chemical composition of smoke is unless their employer is telling them. And in this case, they just were not being told anything.”

She added:

“When I started talking to sick firefighters and they started telling me that even though they had severe lung damage, or even though they, you know, maybe had had a cancer diagnosis and were in remission, they were going to go back to the job because they needed the money. That’s when I realized how much this was really sort of a socioeconomic story in addition to everything else.”

3. Meeting sources where they are conveys authenticity.

It wasn’t easy for Dreier to build rapport with firefighters inside the wildfires.

They’d joke that if they talked to the press they’d have to buy the whole crew a beer, she said. She heard it over and over. But Dreier didn’t take the joke to mean the firefighters wouldn’t talk to her — just that they wouldn’t talk in front of their crew. So she’d try to get their phone numbers, then reach them when they were back at their camps.

“That was really helpful because it allowed me to have these more intimate conversations over the phone,” Dreier said. “I think people also respected that we had bothered to go all the way out to an active wildfire and been in this risky situation together.”

4. Intimate narratives enhance data and documents.

One of the first records requests Dreier put in was for national crew deployment data over two decades from the Forest Service. The agency refused. So Dreier went to the Interior Department instead, which had the same data and provided it.

“We needed to know who’s fighting fires,” Dreier said. “We needed to know, how often are they going out there? Just to get the universe of how many wildfire workers are there, and to be able to say that the reliance on contract crews has been skyrocketing.”

That led Dreier to Luis Martinez, an undocumented immigrant and contract firefighter facing cancer without health insurance while raising his 11-year-old son. Dreier was struck by Martinez’ story — by his dedication to the work and to his son, she said.

“You’re basically auditioning characters,” Dreier said of meeting sources. “You’re looking for the people who are going to be able to anchor a whole story. Part of what I’m doing is also keeping a running list of people who I think might be a main character.”

5. When you’re ready to publish, think about how to bring your reporting to the communities your sources are part of.

It’s common for wildfire fighters to take videos of themselves with billowing smoke in the background. The firefighters are usually young men on two-week deployments, Dreier said. The videos they make are one way they pass their downtime. Back at camp, they upload them to social media.

“They’re taking these videos of themselves with all this black smoke behind them, and they’re just taking it for fun,” Dreier said. “For me, I’m like, that is a documentation of an occupational hazard.”

The Times put together features explaining Dreier’s reporting that were made for social media platforms — mostly TikTok and Instagram — where firefighters virtually gather.

“People risked their careers, really, to talk to us and to go on the record,” Dreier said. “I wanted to do everything we could to make sure that this was also going back into that community.”

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This comic is co-published under a Creative Commons license by the Boston Globe Magazine and The Journalist’s Resource, a project of Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, which commissioned the work.

Interested in republishing this piece in print? Get the PDF.

Editor’s note:

In “Before the doctor sees it: Test results in the era of instant access,” Josh Neufeld uses comics journalism to highlight certain provisions in the 21st Century Cures Act. The comic draws on the findings of several academic research articles, along with additional sources — including interviews with researchers Bryan Steitz, an assistant professor in the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University, and Liz Salmi, the communications and patient initiatives director at OpenNotes.

Steitz and Salmi are characters in the nonfiction comic, which discusses the implications of a rule that lets patients receive their medical test results as soon as they’re ready — often before their physicians have a chance to review them.

This piece adds to the growing field of graphic medicine, which uses comics as a tool to tell true stories about health care experiences, as well as to distill and discuss complex medical topics. 

Neufeld is the creator of several health care related comics, including “Vaccinated at the Ball: A True Story about Trusted Messengers,” which won the 2023 GMIC Award for Excellence in Graphic Medicine, Short Form, from the Graphic Medicine International Collective.

Source list

“Patient online record access in English primary care: Qualitative survey study of general practitioners’ views.” Charlotte Blease et al. Journal of Medical Internet Research, February 2023.

“As a journalist my partner fought for the facts. Yet the truth of his own medical condition was kept from him.” Charlotte Blease. The Guardian, April 2023.

“Leveraging large language models for generating responses to patient messages — a subjective analysis.” Siru Liu et al. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, March 2024.

“Knowing what the doctor knows.” Alvin Powell. Harvard Gazette, November 2022.

“Association of immediate release of test results to patients with implications for clinical workflow.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. JAMA Network Open, October 2021.

“Perspectives of patients about immediate access to test results through an online patient portal.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. JAMA Network Open, March 2023.

“The 21st Century Cures Act requires that patients receive medical results immediately — and new research shows patients prefer it that way.” Bryan D. Steitz and C. T. Lin. The Conversation, July 2023.

“Impact of notification policy on patient-before-clinician review of immediately released test results.” Bryan D. Steitz et al. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, July 2023.

“Repeated access to patient portal while awaiting test results and patient-initiated messaging.” Bryan D. Steitz, Robert W. Turer and Liz Salmi. JAMA Network Open, April 2025.

“HHS announces crackdown on health data blocking.” U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Press release, September 2025.

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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is an independent bureau that is part of the Federal Reserve System. It was created in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession to provide federal oversight of consumer financial products and services, in order to prevent another economic crisis.

While the agency has been in turmoil under the second Trump administration, it remains a rich source of data, particularly on consumer complaints, for reporters covering personal finance and consumer issues.

We recently convened a hands-on demo of CFPB data with Erie Meyer, who served as the CFPB’s first chief technologist from 2021 to 2025, and Joel Jacobs, a data reporter for ProPublica who has mined the consumer complaint database for stories.

“Credit reporting complaints — people complaining about potential issues with their credit reports — have been exploding in recent years,” Jacobs said. “They’re really, by far, the most common complaint in the CFPB database.”

A brief recent history of the CFPB

The database is active and available, though most of the agency’s supervisory activities, such as suing companies for illegal activities surfaced through complaints, have halted.

“There is currently a stand-down order and a way to report staffers at the CFPB if they’re caught doing their jobs,” Meyer said. “So the complaint system is working but the internal parts of the CFPB that are supposed to use the complaints are not working — and is one of the reasons why it’s so important that states and other enforcers are using this data.”

This cheat sheet Meyer created will help you find the CFPB data you need.

The CFPB is an executive branch agency, and the president appoints its director, who must be confirmed by the Senate.

Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget, has served as acting CFPB director since February 2025. Prior to President Donald Trump’s second administration, Vought was best known as a primary author of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 document, widely seen as a blueprint for Trump to implement severe cuts to federal government agencies and services.

Last month, the Trump administration announced a plan to reduce headcount at the agency from 1,700 to 500. Ken Sweet of the Associated Press wrote that the CFPB has “largely become inoperable.” Trump previously tried to reduce staff to 200, a move blocked by a federal judge last April.

If you don’t have time to watch the full webinar, keep reading for key takeaways, including insights about the consumer complaint database, spotting trends in the data and more.

And here’s a bonus tip: If you’re hitting resistance from the press office, that doesn’t mean every part of the agency is unhelpful. The staffers in the CFPB Freedom of Information Act office, for example, are dedicated and responsive, Meyer said.

1. CFPB data remains trustworthy and contains rich narratives.

Despite the staffing upheaval at the CFPB, the agency’s consumer complaint data is up and running.

Those complaint records are not like the online rants of someone with an unverified grudge against a business. Companies confirm that the complainant was their customer before complaints are published, Meyer said. The CFPB also gets consent from customers to publish their complaint narratives.

“Cranky people — you would imagine you would have an equal distribution of those types of people in the complaint data — so it is a really interesting view of confirmed customers and what their experiences are with these financial products,” Meyer said.

To search the database, Meyer advises thinking of terms that non-journalists would use.

For example, to identify complaints from people with lower incomes who might be having financial difficulties, search “groceries,” “bread,” “milk” or “formula.”

“You’ll see people who are really struggling just to survive describe what their interactions are with the financial system, because they say, ‘I was trying to buy milk, and all of my cards were turned off, and I couldn’t get a human on the phone to tell me why,’” Meyer said.

2. Journalists can use CFPB data to find stories and hold financial institutions accountable.

If you have coding experience, Jacobs recommends downloading the complaint data in bulk and using languages like Python, R or SQL to explore it. In looking at the data over several years, Jacobs identified two major credit bureaus with a lower share of complaints resolved in favor of customers since the second Trump administration.

But you don’t have to have coding experience to find trends in the data, he said. The CFPB also provides a dashboard of aggregate information with graphics and other visualizations, which are “a great way to do initial explorations,” Jacobs said.

The narrative elements of the complaint data are particularly unique and useful. In reporting a story about Tribal lenders charging triple-digit interest rates, Jacobs used the narratives to identify how those rates were harming customers.

He also noted that financial firms may use different company names for different financial products, or that consumer complaints in other databases might use slightly different spellings for the same company name — but within the CFPB data, the agency attempts to standardize company names.

Standardization of company names “helps a lot as you you’re doing data explorations,” Jacobs said. “This really helped us identify the big players, potential big players, in this in this space.”

3. The CFPB data is great for anecdotes — but lawsuits are better for finding sources.

CFPB data is anonymized. Customer complaint narratives are descriptively rich, but you won’t find sources through them. But bankruptcy cases and lawsuits over unresolved issues are great ways to find contact information for lawyers and, ultimately, their clients.

Take the lead anecdote in Jacobs’ story on credit bureaus dismissing consumer complaints — an accountant in Colorado beset by a lingering $240,000 student loan that wasn’t hers.

“Contacting attorneys is actually how I found her, because she ended up suing the credit bureaus because she couldn’t get her issue fixed,” Jacobs said.

4. State-level enforcement is more important than ever for accountability journalism.

With CFPB enforcement drying up under the current administration, journalists should turn to states as another source of data and to understand local enforcement trends.

These may include municipal consumer protection agencies and state attorney general offices. There are 176 federal and state agencies that handle consumer complaints in the U.S., according to a December 2025 analysis from Meyer. Many of them, especially state attorneys general, still rely on CFPB data to identify illegal activities in their states.

“Twenty-four different state attorneys general have sued the CFPB to have them keep this system operating, because they all rely on our complaint database for their enforcement,” Meyer said.

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As protesters gathered earlier this year in Minneapolis and other U.S. cities in opposition to federal immigration policy, news organizations like 404 Media revealed the tools and tactics that federal officers and agents have been using to monitor citizens and non-citizens.

While a small number of news outlets have done extensive investigations, there remains much reporting left to do on federal surveillance capabilities, according to two experts we recently spoke with — Marianna Poyares, a fellow at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law, and Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at New York University’s Brennan Center.

This explainer will get reporters up to speed on some of the technologies federal officers and agents have access to that can read license plates, recognize faces and query databases.

There are two main federal agencies that enforce immigration laws: Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, which are both under the Department of Homeland Security.

One important distinction between those agencies is that, although they often work together, they have different mandates for where they operate. CBP officers and agents generally enforce immigration laws and can conduct warrantless stops, by federal law, within 100 air miles of U.S. land borders and coastlines. They also operate at more than 300 land, air and sea ports.

ICE officers and agents enforce immigration laws within the country. When asking sources questions about ICE and CBP, it’s helpful to know the mandates and authorities of those agencies, and to be precise about the agency you’re talking about.

Keep reading for insights on surveillance technologies, how local and federal agents cooperate and constitutional considerations at play. Plus, five questions based on our interviews with Poyares and Levinson-Waldman that journalists can use to kick off investigations into federal surveillance in their coverage area.

Government data infrastructure has taken decades to develop. AI is now helping power it

License plate readers. Facial recognition apps. Interconnected databases. These tools and systems are the product of decades of government and private investment. They exist because of policy and procurement choices made over decades — choices that journalists can scrutinize.

For example, federal immigration agents have reportedly used facial recognition software called Mobile Fortify to scan the faces of both citizens and non-citizens.

“Mobile Fortify runs on a mobile device and can capture facial images, contactless fingerprints, and photographs of identity documents,” according to a DHS inventory of artificial intelligence technologies its agencies use or are considering using, published in January 2026.

The app has been used more than 100,000 times since it was launched in June 2025, according to court documents cited by Mother Jones. According to the DHS inventory, the government purchased the Mobile Fortify system from NEC, a multinational corporation headquartered in Japan.

After a federal agent captures faces, fingerprints or documents using Mobile Fortify, the app uses AI models owned by CBP to match that information to government records, according to the inventory.

“This administration especially has made clear that it wants very few restrictions on how it uses AI in any number of realms,” Levinson-Waldman says.

The Department of Homeland Security is also working toward a unified database of biometric data, including faces and fingerprints, according to Wired. In December 2025, DHS authorized CBP officers to collect facial biometric data from noncitizens entering or leaving airports, land ports and sea ports.

Systems like Mobile Fortify “are only able to operate in the way that they operate because they rely on a larger data sharing and data analytics infrastructure,” Poyares says. “That has been steadily growing for at least the last 20 years. I think this is a particularly important element that sometimes folks lose sight of.”

Some local law enforcement agencies are sharing license plate scanning data with federal agents, according to research and reporting.

A company called Flock Safety produces many of the cameras that scan license plates on U.S. streets. Local law enforcement agencies often use the information to solve crimes. Flock has contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, according to NPR.

404 Media last year documented more than 4,000 instances of local and state police looking up Flock data on behalf of federal law enforcement. Reporters Jason Koebler and Joseph Cox write that, “while Flock does not have a contract with ICE, the agency sources data from Flock’s cameras by making requests to local law enforcement.”

In a January 2026 statement, the company said “ICE does not have direct access to Flock cameras, systems, or data, unless the agencies that control their data expressly and deliberately allow it.”

Researchers from the University of Washington used records requests to identify eight law enforcement agencies from that state that allowed U.S. Border Patrol access to their Flock license plate reader networks during 2025.

“[T]he fact that the searches occurred raises important questions about compliance with Washington’s Keep Washington Working law, which bars law enforcement agencies across the state from dedicating local resources for purposes of civil immigration enforcement,” the researchers write in an October 2025 report on their findings.

How law enforcement and federal immigration agents cooperate

Local law enforcement officers, like police and detectives, enforce criminal law.

Federal agents doing immigration enforcement mostly enforce civil law. Someone without proper documentation to be in the U.S. may face civil penalties, such as removal from the country, but not jail time.

(Despite this, ICE was holding nearly 70,000 people awaiting proceedings or removal in “non-punitive” detention centers in February. Nearly three-quarters did not have a criminal conviction, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.)

Those caught entering or re-entering the country after deportation can face criminal charges. But removal hearings before a judge are civil proceedings, regardless of any separate criminal charges. Immigrants have a right to a removal hearing and have a right to hire a lawyer, but they don’t have the right to a court-appointed attorney during a removal hearing, according to a Brennan Center explainer.

“A full removal hearing about whether an immigrant is removable and eligible for a form of relief like asylum, for example, can be concluded in as little as two or three hours,” writes Margy O’Herron, a senior fellow at Brennan. “Removal hearings may take place in person at an immigration court, or some or all of the parties may appear remotely via video conference. Removal hearings generally are open to the public and the press.”

States, counties and cities that have policies limiting local law enforcement cooperation with federal immigration authorities are often called sanctuary jurisdictions. Policies vary by jurisdiction.

The Department of Justice, following an April 2025 executive order, published a list of states, cities and counties it considers sanctuary jurisdictions. The Department of Homeland Security last May published a more extensive list of sanctuary jurisdictions. That list has since been taken down, but it’s archived here.

Outside of sanctuary jurisdictions, local-federal cooperation has deepened in recent years across presidential administrations with 287(g) agreements. The program was pared back under President Barack Obama, then revitalized during the terms of President Donald Trump.

The agreements allow state and local law agencies to “perform a function of an immigration officer,” under the Immigration and Nationality Act. That specific authority is executed under what are known as task force agreements. ICE has task force agreements with more than 1,000 agencies ​in 32 ​states ​and ​two territories, according to agency data.

The Fourth Amendment and the data broker loophole

The Fourth Amendment provides the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures.”

Courts have historically interpreted the Fourth Amendment as allowing for a reasonable expectation of privacy. That expectation does not, however, extend to public spaces.

For example, if you’re walking down a public street, someone else can see which direction you’re headed. Anything an average person could observe in public, so can a law enforcement officer, Levinson-Waldman explains.

Police typically can sit in their vehicles on a public street and stake out your home without a warrant, for example. But police departments are limited by internal rules and resources — there aren’t enough officers to stake out everyone.

“When you have the kind of technology — whether it’s GPS trackers or all of the cell phone location information or other kinds of things that enable very easy, very cheap surveillance — it basically evades all of those structural limitations, and at that point does implicate Fourth Amendment protections,” Levinson-Waldman says. “I think there are good arguments that at least some of these kinds of activities violate the Fourth Amendment, but the case law is very much in development.”

Combined with the general lack of privacy in public there is something called the data broker loophole. While there are federal protections for certain things, like medical and financial data, there are no broad data privacy protections in the U.S.

That means app companies can and do collect huge amounts of data from users, which the federal government then buys from data brokers that compile that information.

“Although we and other organizations have argued that effectively enables a runaround around the Fourth Amendment,” Levinson-Waldman says, “there’s no law prohibiting it, by and large, and the Supreme Court hasn’t yet said that that’s unconstitutional. Those things in combination really enable a lot of this activity.”

Data brokers with reported government contracts include PenLink, Thomson Reuters, and Clearview AI. Journalists and anyone else can use SAM.gov to start hunting down contracts between data brokers and government entities.

“I really think that the media has, right now, a very, very important role to play,” Poyares says.

5 questions journalists can pursue

Which firms are behind surveillance technologies?

Many surveillance technologies are contracted and not created in-house at government agencies. The DHS AI Use Case Inventory Library is a good place to start looking into which companies are making surveillance technologies.

Why is data being gathered?

How long is data being retained — and what information systems at other agencies is data being fed into?

Which specific technologies are being used to identify protesters and observers?

When possible, identify and report on the apps and other technologies that federal agents are using in public during protests and other gatherings.

How do the technologies work in the field?

Does an agent using an app to identify people in public need to be up close to someone, or can these apps be used from points further away, such as across a street?

When drones are used to surveil protesters, what software do they run on and where is information retained?

“Where else was CBP using drones?” Levinson-Waldman asks. “What authority did CBP have in the first place to collect that information? I think there is still probably a lot to look into on the drones front.”

Further reading

Thoughtlessness in the Age of Homeland Security: Race, Surveillance, and Bureaucratic Violence in Immigration Enforcement
Dennis Young. Polity, January 2025.

American Dragnet: Data-Driven Deportation in the 21st Century
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. Updated May 2025.

Biometric Tracking and Immigration
Elena Roe. Virginia Tech case study, June 2025.

The Impacts of Restrictive Interior Immigration Enforcement on Undocumented Immigrants’ Decisions: Self-Deportation Out of Fear?
Jihye Park and Rene Rocha. The Sociological Quarterly, September 2025.

Raiding the Genome: How the United States Government Is Abusing Its Immigration Powers to Amass DNA for Future Policing
Georgetown Law Center on Privacy & Technology. September 2025.

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SAM.gov, the federal government’s System for Award Management, tracks billions of dollars in contracts and subcontracts, the companies and organizations that receive them, and entities barred or suspended from doing business with the government.

But the system, which incorporates several retired databases on government procurement, can be daunting to use — even for journalists who have some familiarity with it.

That’s why last week The Journalist’s Resource convened a hands-on demo, which I moderated, with David Zvenyach. He’s a software developer, lawyer and product strategist who has held executive roles in three presidential administrations, including as Executive Director of 18F and Director of the Government Services Administration’s Technology Transformation Services.

Understanding how to access data in SAM.gov is the first step for any public interest journalist who wants to know how federal dollars flow to business interests in the U.S., both locally and nationally.

More than 150 of you attended, and Zvenyach answered many of your questions.

The full video below is well worth the hour. But if you don’t have time, read on for three quick takeaways.

1. Follow the codes

You’ll find several numerical codes when working with data from SAM.gov, but there are two in particular that will help you understand what the government is buying.

North American Industry Classification System codes — NAICS codes — identify the industry that a business selling something to the government is in. It’s a standardized system across federal government purchasing.

Look up individual NAICS codes via the Census Bureau.

Code 334511, for example, includes firms that make search, detection, navigation, guidance, aeronautical and nautical systems and instruments.

The other code type to know is product and service codes. Those are especially useful for understanding what the government is buying, Zvenyach said.

Find individual product and service codes in the product and service code manual, which includes specifics on the types of goods, services, research or development the government bought under that code.

Code 1410, for example, includes “complete drones, initially designed as missiles, but converted to drone use,” according to the manual.

2. Keep an eye out for errors in the data.

While data accessed from SAM.gov contains rich and specific information on government purchasing, there may be errors.

Which begs the question: Can the data really be trusted?

“I’m the sort of person that lives and eats and breathes this data every day,” Zvenyach said. “The short answer is kind of — but kind of not.”

During the webinar he showed a subcontract that was entered into SAM.gov as beginning in 2106. An unlikely start year, being 90 years in the future. The real year was probably intended to be 2016, Zvenyach noted. Errors don’t mean journalists shouldn’t use the data, but journalists — or anyone working with it — need to know that errors are lurking.

“That’s part of this process, is just knowing that the data is imperfect,” Zvenyach said. “It’s manually entered a lot of the time.”

See more examples of errors within SAM.gov on Zvyenyach’s Gov422 blog.

3. Use SAM.gov and USAspending in tandem.

SAM.gov is good for initially identifying contracts, while USAspending is good for digging deeper into those contracts, Zvenyach said. With USAspending, you can see outlays — which is how much the government has actually spent under a contract.

USAspending also allows for searching for contracts by geography and by various codes, including NAICS and product and service codes. You can find how much a company has received in government contracts over time, as well as recent executive compensation figures in certain cases. And there’s information on grant awards that government agencies have given.

“One of the questions that people ask is, how can you kind of get a sense of how much the government is spending, and which agencies, and who’s winning?” Zvenyach said. “USAspending is a really good source for that sort of aggregate information.”

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About 78% of Americans subscribe to broadband internet at home, while 16% only access the internet on their phones, according to polling from Pew Research Center. Americans living in rural areas are especially likely to lack broadband. This piece will help you understand what’s holding back broadband deployment and what states are doing to improve access. It was originally published by The Pew Charitable Trusts and is edited here for style.  

The federal $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment program aims to expand high-speed internet access nationwide — and it dominated broadband policy headlines in 2025.

But state legislatures were also active in their efforts to bridge the digital divide.

Combined, states passed over 160 broadband-related bills and resolutions last year. These included regulatory changes, expanding the authority of their broadband offices and addressing internet affordability for low-income customers.

As states prepare to deploy BEAD projects and navigate new uncertainties from federal policymakers — including the potential withholding of some funding from states that have passed certain regulations on artificial intelligence — it will be increasingly important for states to balance administering federal funding while advancing their own priorities.

Following the changes made to the BEAD program in June 2025 — shifting which locations are eligible for funding and the type of networks that can be awarded — state-funded programs may have an increasingly important role to play in complementing federal efforts to ensure that all communities are connected.

Bills passed in 2025 provide early insight as to how state legislatures may consider managing these challenges in 2026 and beyond.

Broadband deployment barriers

In the long preparation process for BEAD, a program authorized as part of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act of 2021, state broadband offices identified several barriers that could prevent them from achieving the goals of the program on time and on budget.

Two leading barriers emerged:

• Federal, state, local and private permitting processes for constructing new high-speed internet networks.
• A lack of trained workers.

Given that both challenges can involve federal, state, and local governments, they cannot be fully addressed at the state level. Still, there was progress last year.

Legislatures in Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, and West Virginia updated their rules governing the broadband construction process to set new timelines and fee structures for permit applications.

In Texas and Kentucky, state legislatures approved funding for new broadband workforce training programs. The legislators in Texas put $5 million toward an apprenticeship program to reimburse participating broadband utility engineering and construction companies. In Kentucky, legislators earmarked $6 million for hiring workers to replace utility poles and manage permits, funding originally passed in 2024 and carried forward in 2025.

As states prepare for their BEAD projects, they’re also administering their own state-funded programs, including those aimed at filling gaps in federal policies, and targeting their own deployment priorities. Pew’s analysis of the 2025 state legislative sessions found that 26 states allocated a combined $1.3 billion to a variety of broadband programs, including new or upgraded networks for homes, small businesses, schools, libraries and other government buildings.

Virginia appropriated $50 million in 2025 to the Virginia Telecommunication Initiative, which has awarded broadband grants since 2017. The 2025 allocation commits funding for new deployment projects administered by the initiative, as well as to accelerate deployment of projects funded by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, which must be completed by the end of 2026. The legislature earmarked $30 million of these funds for additional construction costs, such as permitting fees, for projects that may be at risk of missing the 2026 project deadline.

The Minnesota state legislature also approved $50 million for deployment grants in 2025. Minnesota has operated a state broadband expansion program since 2014 and the state has awarded over $400 million, funding broadband connections to nearly 120,000 homes and businesses.

Unlike the federal programs that states administer, state-level programs can be designed to address specific priorities or needs in a given state or community, such as increasing market competition among internet service providers in certain areas or funding the deployment of networks capable of reaching speeds higher than the minimum federal standards.

For example, under Mississippi’s Broadband Expansion and Accessibility program, the state statute defines communities that have access to service only from satellite providers or mobile wireless networks as “critical need areas” and therefore eligible for project funding.

Some states, including California and Maine, also used their own funding to cover the final costs of connecting homes to existing networks, frequently referred to as “line extensions.”

State broadband office responsibilities

As state broadband offices continue to administer federal and state funding, their functional capacity and authority are key factors in their ability to successfully administer these complex programs.

In 2025, 13 states dedicated new administrative funding for their broadband offices, charging them with new responsibilities such as collecting data from internet providers on subscriptions and service areas, publicly reporting on the progress being made by their programs, and offering enhanced resources to support network construction.

For example, a new law in Colorado requires the state’s broadband office to expand its technical assistance offerings to help internet providers to apply for and manage grants, including resources for the deployment of new wireless services.

Broadband affordability

The bulk of federal funding in recent years has focused on building networks to reach communities without access to high-speed internet service.

However, affordability of service remains a barrier to closing the digital divide — high costs of monthly service can prevent a household from subscribing or staying connected.

These factors, referred to as “adoption rates” and “subscriber churn,” can also determine if providers deliver new or upgraded service in higher-cost communities. In 2025, several state legislatures took steps to address this challenge.

Oregon passed legislation allowing the Oregon Public Utility Commission to increase the support offered to low-income customers through its state Lifeline program. At the federal level, the Lifeline program offers a $9.25 monthly discount on phone and internet bills for eligible low-income households.

Under the Oregon bill, eligible households there can receive an additional broadband discount of up to $24.95 per month, or $49.95 on Tribal lands — and, for the first time, receive a $100 discount when buying a computer.

In February 2026, two other states adopted similar policies: California launched a new home broadband pilot and New Mexico passed its Low-Income Telecommunications Assistance Program.

Based on Pew’s analysis, there are now nine states that increase the discount their residents can receive from the federal Lifeline program on internet services.

Connecticut also instituted new affordability requirements for providers. Passed in June 2025, its legislation requires providers that contract with the state to offer a low-cost plan of $40 per month or less to eligible households. The requirement will take effect on Oct. 1 this year.

In January 2025, a similar law went into effect in New York, which requires providers serving more than 20,000 customers throughout the state to offer service at $15 or $20 per month. Prices are based on minimum speeds and available to low-income and other qualified households.

Looking ahead

Several state legislatures are actively working on broadband issues in 2026.

These include bills introduced in Maryland and Illinois to address affordability; proposals to change the regulatory landscape for providers in West Virginia; and an extension of Missouri’s broadband program, which is set to sunset in 2027.

States are also already weighing bills that could alleviate future challenges for their BEAD projects, including a bill in Kansas adjusting the process for when broadband projects intersect with railroad crossings and a bill in New York on how utility poles are managed.

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U.S. and Israeli attacks in Iran have reportedly killed more than 1,300 people since the war there began late last month. Missile and drone strikes have destroyed or closed significant energy infrastructure across the Middle East. The effective closing of the Strait of Hormuz — 20% of the world’s oil supply passes through it — has meant rising energy prices for U.S. and other consumers.

“The war in the Middle East is creating the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market,” according to a recent report from the International Energy Agency.

On March 16, as the war entered its third week, The Journalist’s Resource and EconoFact convened a panel to discuss the ongoing economic consequences of the Iran war. I moderated the discussion with:

• Binyamin Applebaum, lead writer on economics and business for the New York Times editorial board.
• Nicholas Bloom, the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
• Michael Klein, the William L. Clayton Professor of International Economic Affairs at Tufts University and Executive Editor of EconoFact.
• David G. Victor, distinguished professor of innovation and public policy at the University of California San Diego.

Our wide-ranging conversation touched on economic uncertainty, windfalls for oil producers, how business leaders may be communicating with the administration of President Donald Trump, and even artificial intelligence — insights that local reporters and independent journalists can adapt for their audiences.

Here’s one story idea: Whether business uncertainty spurred by the war is slowing hiring within your coverage area. Watch the video and keep reading for takeaways from our discussion.

The war could increase uncertainty in U.S. hiring

The early days of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. were marked by the Great Resignation — workers leaving their jobs at high rates for a range of reasons, from low pay to a lack of advancement opportunities to feeling disrespected at work.

Now, business uncertainty is fueling the opposite — the Great Hesitation, some are calling it — marked by slow hiring processes and high standards for job candidates. The reason, Bloom explained, is that when businesses are uncertain about the future they’re hesitant to invest the time and money it takes to hire someone, unless they think a candidate is a perfect fit.

Still, the labor data isn’t all doom and gloom, Bloom said. For example, the unemployment rate remains historically low at 4.4%.

But job growth is also low, in part because of immigration crackdowns. And adding more uncertainty to that equation isn’t going to help hiring prospects for those on the job market.

“What will the event in Iran do? I think it’s going to make that worse,” Bloom said.

With energy prices rising due to the war, short-term inflation expectations are also up, as Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell explained during remarks on March 18.

Interest rates tend to follow inflation, Klein said during the webinar. As the cost of borrowing increases, businesses turn reluctant to invest and expand their workforces.

“Financial conditions probably will deteriorate, would be my guess, based on what’s going on right now,” Klein said.

Oil producers are seeing windfalls

With Brent crude trading at triple-digits per barrel and U.S. gas prices nearing an average of $4 per gallon, oil producers have reaped historic market valuations since the start of the Iran war.

“You’ve seen, just in the last few days, reporting on the incredible increase in valuation of essentially all the Western oil companies,” Victor said. “Anyone who’s not too tethered to getting their product out of the Gulf — and that includes Texas. So there’s going to be a huge windfall.”

Other oil producing countries — including those unfriendly to U.S. interests — also stand to benefit from the choking off of oil shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.

“Russia is going to be a big beneficiary of this,” Klein said. “Not only because of the increase in the price of oil but the relaxation of sanctions on Russian oil.”

If business leaders are discontent over the war, they’re communicating it behind the scenes

It might seem that the oil industry would be, if not thrilled about the war, then perhaps content, considering that the price of their product has significantly risen.

But oil companies think long-run, Victor said. They’re concerned with political support for the industry across multiple administrations, along with public backlash.

The same is true of companies across many industries. When companies communicate concerns with this administration in particular, they tend to tread lightly, Applebaum explained.   

“I’ve spent a fair amount of time talking to business leaders about their interactions with the Trump administration, and the overarching theme that you hear repeatedly is that what they learned during the first Trump administration is that there is almost zero value, and indeed significant negative value, in confronting the president or in criticizing him publicly,” Applebaum said.

Instead, he said, when business leaders have issues with administration policies or actions, they tend not to communicate those publicly, but rather behind the scenes through intermediaries.

“That is why you are not seeing corporate executives talking about this in public,” Applebaum said.

The war could slow economic growth from AI

Infrastructure and software behind the artificial intelligence boom are helping spur economic growth in the U.S., according to a recent analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. AI data centers that require huge computing power are a major part of AI-related infrastructure growth.

The energy needs of AI data centers are well documented. An AI data center may consume as much electricity as 100,000 households, according to the International Energy Agency.

“If energy prices go up there’s more political pressure to push back on AI and its energy use, and that could be another big issue for U.S. growth,” Bloom said. “That I could see coming reasonably soon.”

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Transparency, methodological gold standards and survey weighting: Those were three of many topics covered during two webinars The Journalist’s Resource recently hosted featuring Roper iPoll, from The Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at Cornell University.

Roper iPoll is a comprehensive opinion data research platform that offers access to nearly a million survey and poll questions from 1935 to today. Eligible small media organizations and independent journalists can apply for a one-year membership to Roper iPoll.

Kathleen Weldon, director of data operations at the Roper Center, discussed how journalists can use Roper iPoll to access both up-to-date and historical opinion polls.

With the 2026 U.S. primaries underway, keep reading for three insights that will help you accurately cover opinion polls. These takeaways are from both webinars, held on Feb. 26 and March 4. And check out our past work on covering surveys and polls and understanding question order bias.

1. Good polls will be transparent about their methodologies.

Methodological transparency is the foundation of reliable polling data.

“You can’t say that any particular poll is great just because it’s transparent,” Weldon said. “There can be bad polls that are transparent. However, it is very uncommon for good polls to not be transparent.”

The code of ethics of the Association for Public Opinion Research, a major professional organization for public opinion survey professionals, requires that member organizations commit to transparency in how they design, conduct, analyze and report their surveys and findings.

“What we push over and over again is transparency, transparency, transparency,” Weldon said. “It’s the only way that you can ensure that the people who are doing the research are acting in good faith — that they’re willing to share their information, and to allow people to interrogate the data.”

2. There’s no single gold standard for survey methodology.

Phone surveys with live interviewers and random digit dialing has long been considered the gold standard of public opinion polling. But response rates have fallen over recent decades — people don’t answer their phones like they used to — and new polling methods have emerged.

“There’s really no certainty that there is one method that is appropriate in all situations — that can be said to be a perfect gold standard,” Weldon said. “There is a method that does represent most of what currently comes into our archive. And that is online probability polling.”

In probability-based sampling, pollsters randomly select participants. This helps reduce bias in results. If everyone in a population being sampled has an equal chance of being selected, there should be an equal chance that all potential answers to questions will be represented.

3. Take a close look at survey weighting.

Non-probability online samples are another common methodology that journalists may encounter when reporting on polling data.

They may include “opt-in” surveys, where people choose to participate. And because these online samples are not random, they may introduce bias.

Some pollsters use sophisticated weighting methods to try to overcome potential bias and ensure their results more closely represent the population being studied. For example, if the target population is 50% men and 50% women, but 40% of respondents were women and 60% were men, the responses from women would count more than those from men in the final results.

“Definitely pay attention to weighting,” Weldon said. “Is there something they’re not weighting to that seems like it should be there? Almost all of them are weighting to sex and age. People have been waiting to sex and age since the beginning of polling. But some of the other things — like education and income, or even access to the internet — those types of things can be really valuable weights.”

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An earlier version of this article first appeared on Austin Kocher’s Substack. We’ve edited it for style and republished it with permission.

Even while staying busy with my own research, I try to read as much of other people’s work as I can.

Keeping up with the news is important, but I think reading deeply invested work by academic and policy experts will give you a less sensational and less emotional understanding of the immigration enforcement system than the news cycle alone.

These reports and articles take months or years to produce. They draw on data that most people never see.

And they tend to ask better questions than the ones that dominate cable news.

The problem is that a lot of this work is hard to find. Unlike books or journal articles, reports don’t have a central repository. They circulate online, and if you happen to be in the right networks you see them — and if you’re not, you don’t.

My effort here is to highlight a few pieces that you might have missed, all of which have come out recently and all of which I think represent really important work.

I’ve gone over my notes and marginalia for each of these and pulled out three key observations. Most of the pieces below are policy reports. One is a peer-reviewed academic article. Thanks to everyone named and unnamed for the massive aggregation of intellectual labor that went into these five pieces.

ICE Arrests across Trump’s First and Second Terms: Variation in Targeting, Method, and Geography
Chloe N. East, Elizabeth Cox and Caitlin Patler. NBER Working Paper, February 2026.

A lot of people have written over the past year about how immigration enforcement under Donald Trump’s second presidential administration has shifted away from people with criminal convictions.

I’ve written about this extensively myself, and this observation remains important. But it is also important to reproduce that analysis with greater academic rigor — which is exactly what this paper does — and to surface patterns in the data that have been missed, which it also does.

Using administrative data covering the complete universe of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests from 2015 through October 2025, this team compares the two Trump administrations directly to identify what is different between them statistically and what is driving the shift toward arresting people with less criminal history. Here are three key findings.

• The share of ICE arrestees with criminal convictions dropped sharply after the second inauguration, from about 52% to 37%. This decline was far steeper than at the start of the first Trump administration, when the share also fell but by a smaller margin.
• A major driver is the shift toward “community arrests,” which are arrests on the street, at workplaces, courthouses, and other community sites. These more than doubled as a share of all arrests, rising from about 19% to 44%. Community-based operations are far less likely to pick up people with criminal records compared to arrests conducted through law enforcement partnerships.
• Areas of responsibility containing major Democratic-controlled cities saw the largest spikes in community arrests during the second term. Across virtually all regions, as arrests increased, the share of people with criminal convictions declined.

Some in the news media have touched on this topic, but what this team brings is the kind of rigorous, comprehensive data analysis that deepens our understanding of what is driving enforcement. Digging into the full universe of arrest data and comparing the two administrations side-by-side is exactly the kind of work we need more of right now.

Mass Deportation and the Intensity of Policing in the United States’ 100-Mile Border Zone
Geoff Boyce. Law & Policy, October 2023.

This paper was published before the current administration, but it may be one of the most important pieces you can read to understand what is happening right now. Boyce’s argument is that the familiar binary between “border” and “interior” enforcement obscures far more than it reveals.

Drawing on an expansive archive of internal government records obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests and court litigation, primarily I-213 arrest forms from Border Patrol sectors in Tucson, Arizona, Buffalo, New York and Detroit, Michigan, Boyce documents what enforcement looks like across parts of the 100-mile border zone.

• In the Detroit sector, 86% of arrested noncitizens were of Latin American origin, far exceeding their share of the local foreign-born population. Agents cited contradictory justifications for stops: Slowing down was suspicious in 33% of records, but speeding up was suspicious in 17%. Avoiding eye contact was flagged in 39% of cases, while making eye contact was flagged in 25%.
• Local and state police function as critical force multipliers. In the Buffalo sector, nearly half of all arrests of long-term residents were initiated by other law enforcement agencies that channeled individuals into Border Patrol custody. Despite a nationwide directive prohibiting Border Patrol agents from acting as interpreters for local police, nearly 30% of “other agency” arrests in the Detroit sector involved agents being summoned for that purpose.
• The intensity of enforcement can be reduced through policy. When New York in 2017 banned state employees from inquiring about immigration status, “other agency” arrests in the Buffalo sector dropped from nearly 50% to 31%. When Tucson curtailed local cooperation with Border Patrol, arrests of long-term residents fell 53%.

As I recently argued on the Project Censored podcast, rather than thinking about enforcement in terms of where the border is, we should think about what the border does. Boyce’s work is essential to that reframing. He proposes an “intensity” framework: the volume, diversity, and networked interconnectivity of law enforcement institutions operating in a given area at a given time.

This helps explain why the arrival of Border Patrol agents in cities like Minneapolis and Chicago should not be understood as an aberration, but as an extension of a long-standing enforcement logic. The enforcement authority, racial profiling, and web of inter-agency cooperation that Boyce documents in border communities travel with those agents wherever they go.

Immigration Enforcement in the First Nine Months of the Second Trump Administration
Graeme Blair and David Hausman. Deportation Data Project, January 2026.

The Deportation Data Project, based at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law — in collaboration with the University of California, Los Angeles — has been one of the most important initiatives in the immigration space over the past year. Their core contribution has been making the data available in the first place.

Through repeated FOIA requests and litigation — they sued ICE when the agency failed to respond — they have obtained and published individual-level enforcement data that the administration has otherwise refused to share transparently. Without this project, we would have very little reliable information about what the Trump administration is doing on immigration enforcement.

It’s really valuable that the team fought to get this data and took the time to analyze it. Given their deep knowledge of the datasets — and the limitations of the data — this report provides an authoritative summary and analysis that will be useful to researchers, journalists, and anyone trying to understand the full picture of what has happened over the first nine months of the second Trump administration.

• Interior deportations increased by a factor of 4.6. Street arrests, meaning arrests on sidewalks, at workplaces, and in communities — rather than transfers from jails and prisons — increased by a factor of eleven. For the two decades prior to 2025, ICE had relied overwhelmingly on custodial transfers for its interior enforcement. Street arrests at this scale are, as Blair and Hausman put it, “a new phenomenon.”
• Arrests of people without any criminal conviction increased sevenfold. Arrests of people with violent crime convictions increased by only about 30%. The shift away from targeting people with convictions was evident in both street arrests and custodial transfers.
• Once detained, virtually no one was released. Release within 60 days of arrest dropped from 16% to 3%. Voluntary departures increased by a factor of 21, a pattern the authors attribute to the coercive pressure of indefinite detention with no prospect of release. In July 2025, ICE issued guidance asserting that anyone who had entered between ports of entry was ineligible for bond regardless of how long they had lived in the U.S. Despite hundreds of federal court opinions finding this policy illegal, ICE and immigration courts have continued to apply it.

Still, the administration is not close to its stated goal of deporting one million people per year. At the most recent rate, the government would deport under 300,000 people annually. That is unprecedented in this century, but well short of the political rhetoric.

Immigration Detention Expansion in Trump’s Second Term
American Immigration Council. January 2026.

If the Deportation Data Project report gives you the numbers, this report from the nonprofit American Immigration Council — which advocates for immigrant inclusion in the U.S. — gives you the full picture: the policy architecture, funding pipeline, infrastructure buildout, conditions on the ground, and the human stories of people trapped inside the system.

It is, in my view, the definitive overview of what has happened to immigration detention during the first year of the second Trump administration.

While the overall numbers have been covered by many people at this point, some of the most valuable parts of this report are its observations about what kinds of detention facilities are being built, what is happening to people once they enter the system, and how bad conditions have gotten.

• The administration has created entirely new categories of detention infrastructure. Florida opened “Alligator Alcatraz,” a tent camp at the Dade-Collier Airport bordering the Everglades that is wholly owned and operated by the state under a 287(g) agreement, with no direct ICE involvement. No state had ever previously argued it could run its own immigration detention facility. Meanwhile, the military base tent camp at Fort Bliss — “Camp East Montana” — became the largest detention center in the country by November, holding over 2,700 people in soft-sided temporary structures, with plans for up to 5,000. The administration reportedly transferred $10 billion to the Navy to build tent facilities that could house up to 10,000 people each.
• People are disappearing inside the detention system. FOIA data show that transfers between facilities have become dramatically more common. In 2024, 47% of people taken into ICE custody were never transferred from their initial facility. In the first half of 2025, that dropped to just 23%, and the share of people transferred four or more times doubled. One person was transferred 15 times across facilities in Florida, Arizona, California, and Hawaii before being deported from Louisiana. ICE’s own detainee locator system has become unreliable, with people sometimes not appearing for weeks after arrest. One man’s family had to search a detention commissary app to find him.
• Conditions have deteriorated across the system. By April, nearly half of all detention centers were operating above contractual capacity. At the Krome North Service Processing Center in Miami, overcrowding reached nearly triple capacity, with 60 to 80 people crammed into rooms designed for 25 and women left in chains on buses for hours without access to bathrooms. At the newly reopened Delaney Hall facility in Newark, New Jersey, people were sent in while basic plumbing was not operational, food was limited to two meals a day, and a riot broke out after guards served only slices of bread for dinner. Thirty people died in ICE detention in 2025 as of December 18, more than during the COVID pandemic.

The report also documents the gutting of oversight. The Department of Homeland Security Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties was cut from 150 staff to 22, the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman from 110 to 10, and Congressional surprise inspections have been effectively blocked.

This is an essential reference document.

Profiting Off Pain: Privatized Detention, Mass Surveillance and the Drive for Immigrant Prosecutions
American University Washington College of Law, Immigrant Justice Clinic and the National Immigration Project. January 2026.

This is the report to pair with the AIC detention report above, and the distinction matters. The AIC report documents what is happening.

This one asks why the system exists, who built it, and who profits from it.

• The report’s central argument is that criminal prosecution, privatized detention, and mass surveillance are three components of a single interlocking system. The legal engine at the center are Sections 1325 and 1326 of Title 8, which criminalize unauthorized entry and re-entry.
• The anatomy of who profits is detailed and specific. According to the report, GEO Group reported $2.42 billion in total revenue in 2024, with 41% coming from ICE contracts alone. CoreCivic drew 29% of its total revenue from ICE. GEO Group spent $1.4 million lobbying Congress and DHS in 2024, and its political action committee contributed more than $3.2 million to Republican candidates in the 2024 cycle, according to the report.
• Congressional bed quotas, first mandated in 2010 at 33,400 beds, created a built-in financial incentive to detain. ICE contracts include “tiered pricing” structures that give the agency a discount for each person detained above the guaranteed minimum, meaning ICE pays less per person the more people it locks up. The $45 billion allocation in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act caused private prison company stocks to jump between 50 and 70 percent, according to the report.

This is a report about a feedback loop: criminalization fills beds, filled beds generate profits, profits fund lobbying, lobbying produces more criminalization. The report also documents how the surveillance industry and the detention industry are converging, with companies like Anduril, Palantir and Amazon Web Services deeply embedded in the enforcement apparatus.

It flags the resuscitation of World War II-era provisions that criminalize failure to register with the federal government or to produce registration documents when stopped by a federal agent. Understanding this loop is essential to understanding why the detention system keeps growing regardless of which party is in power — and why the American Immigration Council’s projection of 135,000 beds is a business plan.

This report was produced with significant contributions from law students in American University’s Immigrant Justice Clinic, including Andrew Gamble, Kailey Kynast, Jack Murer, Junnah Mozaffar and Kimly Tran, supervised by Professors Jayesh Rathod and Chloe Sugino.

It is exactly the kind of clinic project that produces real impact. These students deserve recognition for the depth of research they helped pull together.

A Case for Reading Deeply

Thanks to all of the authors and contributors to these five reports for helping us understand the immigration enforcement apparatus from a systemic and theoretically robust perspective. This kind of work takes months or years to produce, and it matters enormously.

One of my favorite books is Cal Newport’s “Deep Work.” His argument is that the ability to focus without distraction on cognitively demanding tasks is becoming both rarer and more valuable. I think about that a lot in the context of immigration.

The news cycle can exhaust you. Instead, you need to be able to put other things aside and focus on high-quality resources like the ones I have highlighted here. Print them out if you can, sit with them, read them top to bottom and read the footnotes. That is the kind of work it takes to develop a real understanding of these systems — and it is part of my case for reading deeply.

The post Want to understand immigration enforcement in 2026? Read these 5 reports appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

How to use a new crime data repository, where to turn for numbers since federal funding for public safety research has been gutted, and how to use data to both check statements from public officials and identify crime trends: Those were a few of the takeaways from our recent webinar on digging into crime data.

I moderated the discussion on Feb. 4, which featured insights from:

• Jeffrey A. Butts, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Executive Director of the John Jay Research and Evaluation Center.

• Mensah M. Dean, a staff writer at The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that covers gun violence. Dean covers policies and solutions related to gun violence in the Philadelphia metropolitan area.

• George LeVines, editor of The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub, which is open to the public and aims to be the “single most reliable and expansive resource for gun violence in the U.S.”

Experienced crime reporters and journalists new to the beat will find the discussion informative and incisive. But, if you don’t have time to watch the whole thing, keep reading for five takeaways.

1. Get to know The Trace’s Gun Violence Data Hub.

There are three main components to the Gun Violence Data Hub.

The help desk is where anyone – including journalists and academic researchers — can ask questions of reporters and editors at The Trace. Reach out for help understanding gun violence in the areas you cover; collecting, cleaning and analyzing data on gun violence; and proposing collaborations on journalistic or research projects.

On the resources page, find fact sheets, guides and a glossary that can kickstart investigations into gun violence issues locally, statewide and nationally.

And use the data library for trustworthy data on a range of gun violence topics, from ghost guns to suicide to road rage to mass shootings across a range of geographies.

The library includes data from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Transportation Security Administration and many others.

“We’ve got 21 datasets right now updating at various intervals — some daily, some weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly,” LeVines said.

2. Explore data alternatives in the wake of federal funding cuts for public safety research and data.

In April 2025 the U.S. Department of Justice cancelled about $500 million in grants for many public safety initiatives, including more than $60 million for research, evaluation and data collection.

“The state of federally sponsored gun research is really poor right now,” Butts said. The John Jay Research and Evaluation Center, along with other programs that research solutions to public safety issues, have seen awarded federal funding withdrawn, he said.

Learn more about federal cutbacks for criminal justice research in this explainer from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

Researchers are increasingly turning to philanthropic foundations, along with state and local governments, where competition for grants is stiff, Butts said.

“The workforce has not gone away but the support for it has been slashed badly,” he added. “It’s not just crime and justice, obviously. Health, environment — everything’s been slashed.”

While nothing will replace the research and data collection that rescinded federal grants would have made possible, there are still reliable data sources that reporters covering gun violence can use.

The WONDER database from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention includes numbers on gun deaths and is being updated, LeVines said.

Shortly before President Donald Trump was inaugurated for a second term, the CDC launched a dashboard mapping violent death rates across the country by Census tract, county or state. It also remains active.

For other data sources, Dean pointed to these:

• The Washington Post’s database of police shootings, which covers 2015 to 2024.
• The Henry A. Wallace Police Crime Database from Bowling Green University, which includes more than 20,000 cases from 2005 to 2021 where local or state law enforcement officers were charged with one or more crimes.
• The Gun Violence Archive, an independent nonprofit that tracks gun violence incidents across the country from more than 7,500 sources, including law enforcement agencies and news media reports.
• And Mapping Police Violence, which tracks police-involved killings in the U.S. It’s produced by Campaign Zero, a nonprofit that advocates for policies that aim to eliminate killings by law enforcement.

“But the front line, I would say, is that you’ve got to get to know your police departments,” Dean said. “Becoming acquainted with their system of how they present their data online is essential.”

3. Know which data can help you fact-check statements from public officials.

Too often, news stories quote local or police officials without fact checking, Butts said.

Quotes without context or fact-checking can especially mislead the public when officials want credit for crime reductions.

“If they’re smart, they don’t come right out and say, ‘We did this.’ But they’ll say, ‘We’re pleased to see these numbers coming down.’ And then they assert their hypotheses … and it’s possible to check these statements,” he said.

Homicide rates are useful for tracking public safety over time, he added. That’s because homicides are more likely to reported than lower-level crimes, such as assault or vandalism. Particularly for property crimes, that data is tracking the probability that a crime is reported, not whether a crime occurred.

“You’re just measuring police activity,” Butts said. “You’re not measuring public safety.”

Beyond published data on reported crimes, victimization surveys are a major source of crime data that journalists can use to vet statements from officials.

The best known is the National Crime Victimization Survey from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. This survey each year reaches a nationally representative sample of roughly 240,000 people and asks whether they have been victims of personal or property crimes — and why the crime was or wasn’t reported to police.

But while victimization surveys are done well at the national level, there’s a need for repeated surveys with consistent methodologies at local levels, Butts said. National surveys don’t allow for direct comparisons of crime victimization between cities.

“It’s not exactly how you make sure that Dubuque, Iowa, is experiencing more safety — by asking the whole country about their experience of crime,” he said.

Journalists should be aware of this limitation of victimization data, though it’s worth checking if the city you cover has conducted recent victimization surveys.

4. Use at least five years of data to report trends.

Police departments are another critical data source for reporters covering criminal justice, along with district and state attorney offices, Dean said.

He recommends that reporters covering criminal justice and public safety look to at least five years of data to identify trends within a specific area.

“Between 5 and 10 years for almost any type of story you’re reporting on would give you a good window of time on how a situation is trending,” he said.

5. Question data that doesn’t make sense.

While working on a piece on record low homicides in Philadelphia, Dean said he went searching for other data on gun crimes for context. When he looked up shooting incidents for 2026 from the Philadelphia Police Department website, it said there were none in January.

That didn’t seem right, so Dean left that data out of the story.

Last week, after he talked to a police department spokesperson, the database was updated to show dozens of shootings for January.

“If anything looks suspicious or hanky, unless you can get someone on the phone to explain that to you, I would highly recommend that you not use those numbers,” Dean said.

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This piece about research on hope, originally published in January 2024, was updated on Feb. 2, 2026, with additional findings.

Research on hope has flourished only in recent decades. There’s now a growing recognition that hope has a role in physical, social, and mental health outcomes, including promoting resilience.

In a 2025 study, published in the journal Emotion, researchers found that people who felt more hopeful reported a stronger sense of meaning in their lives. In other words, it’s not just feeling good — or believing you can reach goals — that matters; the specific feeling of hope uniquely contributes to perceiving life as meaningful.

So what is hope? And what does the research say about it?

Merriam-Webster defines hope as a “desire accompanied by expectation of or belief in fulfillment.” This definition highlights the two basic dimensions of hope: a desire and a belief in the possibility of attaining that desire.

Hope is not Pollyannaish optimism, writes psychologist Everett Worthington in a 2020 article for The Conversation. “Instead, hope is a motivation to persevere toward a goal or end state, even if we’re skeptical that a positive outcome is likely.”

There are several scientific theories about hope.

One of the first, and most well-known, theories on hope was introduced in 1991 by American psychologist Charles R. Snyder.

In a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Snyder defined hope as a cognitive trait centered on the pursuit of goals and built on two components: a sense of agency in achieving a goal, and a perceived ability to create pathways to achieve that goal. He defined hope as something individualistic.

Snyder also introduced the Hope Scale, which continues to be used today, as a way to measure hope. He suggested that some people have higher levels of hope than others and there seem to be benefits to being more hopeful.

“For example, we would expect that higher as compared with lower hope people are more likely to have a healthy lifestyle, to avoid life crises, and to cope better with stressors when they are encountered,” they write.

Others have suggested broader definitions.

In 1992, Kaye Herth, a professor of nursing and a scholar on hope, defined hope as “a multidimensional dynamic life force characterized by a confident yet uncertain expectation of achieving good, which to the hoping person, is realistically possible and personally significant.” Herth also developed the Herth Hope Index, which is used in various settings, including clinical practice and research.

More recently, others have offered an even broader definition of hope.

Anthony Scioli, a clinical psychologist and author of several books on hope, defines hope “as an emotion with spiritual dimensions,” in a 2023 review published in Current Opinion in Psychology. “Hope is best viewed as an ameliorating emotion, designed to fill the liminal space between need and reality.”

Hope is also nuanced.

“Our hopes may be active or passive, patient or critical, private or collective, grounded in the evidence or resolute in spite of it, socially conservative or socially transformative,” writes Darren Webb in a 2007 study published in History of the Human Sciences. “We all hope, but we experience this most human of all mental feelings in a variety of modes.”

To be sure, a few studies have shown that hope could have negative outcomes in certain populations and situations. For example, one study highlighted in the research roundup below finds that Black college students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with Black students who had lower levels of hope.

Today, hope is one of the most well-studied constructs within the field of positive psychology, according to the journal Current Opinion in Psychology, which dedicated its August 2023 issue to the subject. (Positive psychology is a branch of psychology focused on characters and behaviors that allow people to flourish.)

We’ve gathered several studies below to help you think more deeply about hope and recognize its role in your everyday lives.

Research roundup

Hope as a Meaningful Emotion: Hope, Positive Effect, and Meaning in Life
Megan E. Edwards; et al. Emotion, March 2025

The study: This study examines whether hope, and specifically the feeling of hope, not just goal-directed thinking, plays a unique role in people’s sense that life is meaningful. Previous research focused mostly on hope as a cognitive trait. The authors argue that hope is also an emotion and that this emotional component may matter in a distinct way. The researchers ran six studies, with a total of 2,312 participants using multiple methods and populations.

The findings: Hopeful feelings predicted greater meaning in life. In daily life, days when people felt more hopeful were days they felt life was more meaningful. In longitudinal analyses, hope predicted future meaning, while other positive emotions generally did not. Hope was linked to three facets of meaning — purpose, coherence, and significance — whereas other emotions showed more limited or inconsistent associations.

Key takeaway: “People are motivated to feel like life is meaningful, and emotions can provide affirming information in this regard,” the authors write. “Hope may be especially important in affirming life’s meaning during difficult times.”

While positive emotions like happiness and contentment may be harder to access during difficult times, “feeling hopeful may be an available positive experience even at such times, allowing for the maintenance of meaning regardless of the vicissitudes of life,” the authors write.

The Role of Hope in Subsequent Health and Well-Being For Older Adults: An Outcome-Wide Longitudinal Approach
Katelyn N.G. Long; et al. Global Epidemiology, November 2020.

The study: To explore the potential public health implications of hope, researchers examine the relationship between hope and physical, behavioral and psychosocial outcomes in 12,998 older adults in the U.S. with a mean age of 66.

Researchers note that most investigations on hope have focused on psychological and social well-being outcomes and less attention has been paid to its impact on physical and behavioral health, particularly among older adults.

The findings: Results show a positive association between an increased sense of hope and a variety of behavioral and psychosocial outcomes, such as fewer sleep problems, more physical activity, optimism and satisfaction with life. However, there wasn’t a clear association between hope and all physical health outcomes. For instance, hope was associated with a reduced number of chronic conditions, but not with stroke, diabetes and hypertension.

The takeaway: “The later stages of life are often defined by loss: the loss of health, loved ones, social support networks, independence, and (eventually) loss of life itself,” the authors write. “Our results suggest that standard public health promotion activities, which often focus solely on physical health, might be expanded to include a wider range of factors that may lead to gains in hope. For example, alongside community-based health and nutrition programs aimed at reducing chronic conditions like hypertension, programs that help strengthen marital relations (e.g., closeness with a spouse), provide opportunities to volunteer, help lower anxiety, or increase connection with friends may potentially increase levels of hope, which in turn, may improve levels of health and well-being in a variety of domains.”

Associated Factors of Hope in Cancer Patients During Treatment: A Systematic Literature Review
Corine Nierop-van Baalen, Maria Grypdonck, Ann van Hecke and Sofie Verhaeghe. Journal of Advanced Nursing, March 2020.

The study: The authors review 33 studies, written in English or Dutch and published in the past decade, on the relationship between hope and the quality of life and well-being of patients with cancer. Studies have shown that many cancer patients respond to their diagnosis by nurturing hope, while many health professionals feel uneasy when patients’ hopes go far beyond their prognosis, the authors write.

The findings: Quality of life, social support and spiritual well-being were positively associated with hope, as measured with various scales. Whereas symptoms, psychological distress and depression had a negative association with hope. Hope didn’t seem to be affected by the type or stage of cancer or the patient’s demographics.

The takeaway: “Hope seems to be a process that is determined by a person’s inner being rather than influenced from the outside,” the authors write. “These factors are typically given meaning by the patients themselves. Social support, for example, is not about how many patients experience support, but that this support has real meaning for them.”

Characterizing Hope: An Interdisciplinary Overview of the Characteristics of Hope
Emma Pleeging, Job van Exel and Martijn Burger. Applied Research in Quality of Life, September 2021.

The study: This systematic review provides an overview of the concept of hope based on 66 academic papers in ten academic fields, including economics and business studies, environmental studies, health studies, history, humanities, philosophy, political science, psychology, social science, theology and youth studies, resulting in seven themes and 41 sub-themes.

The findings: The authors boil down their findings to seven components: internal and external sources, the individual and social experience of hope, internal and external effects, and the object of hope, which can be “just about anything we can imagine,” the authors write.

The takeaway: “An important implication of these results lies in the way hope is measured in applied and scientific research,” researchers write. “When measuring hope or developing instruments to measure it, researchers could be well-advised to take note of the broader understanding of the topic, to prevent that important characteristics might be overlooked.”

Revisiting the Paradox of Hope: The Role of Discrimination Among First-Year Black College Students
Ryon C. McDermott, et al. Journal of Counseling Psychology, March 2020.

The study: Researchers examine the moderating effects of hope on the association between experiencing racial discrimination, stress and academic well-being among 203 first-year U.S. Black college students. They build on a small body of evidence that suggests high levels of hope might have a negative effect on Black college students who experience racial discrimination.

The authors use data gathered as part of an annual paper-and-pencil survey of first-year college students at a university on the Gulf Coast, which the study doesn’t identify.

The findings: Researchers find that Black students who had higher levels of hope experienced more stress due to racial discrimination compared with students who had lower levels of hope. On the other hand, Black students with low levels of hope may be less likely to experience stress when they encounter discrimination.

Meanwhile, Black students who had high levels of hope were more successful in academic integration — which researchers define as satisfaction with and integration into the academic aspects of college life — despite facing discrimination. But low levels of hope had a negative impact on students’ academic well-being.

“The present study found evidence that a core construct in positive psychology, hope, may not always protect Black students from experiencing the psychological sting of discrimination, but it was still beneficial to their academic well-being,” the authors write.

The takeaway: “Our findings also highlight an urgent need to reduce discrimination on college campuses,” the researchers write. “Reducing discrimination could help Black students (and other racial minorities) avoid additional stress, as well as help them realize the full psychological and academic benefits of having high levels of hope.”

Additional reading

Hope Across Cultural Groups
Lisa M. Edwards and Kat McConnell. Current Opinion in Psychology, February 2023.

The Psychology of Hope: A Diagnostic and Prescriptive Account
Anthony Scioli. “Historical and Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Hope,” July 2020.

Hope Theory: Rainbows in the Mind
C.R. Snyder. Psychological Inquiry, 2002.

The post Hope: A research-based explainer appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

A lawsuit filed against the U.S. Department of Education last summer challenges the constitutionality of three federal grants that, together, have provided hundreds of millions of dollars a year to colleges and universities formally designated as Hispanic-serving institutions.

The Education Department has since slashed funding for these schools, where at least 25% of full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic. Meanwhile, U.S. Sen. Jim Banks of Indiana filed a bill last month that would eliminate all grants the federal government gives to higher education institutions based on their percentage of students who are racial or ethnic minorities.

To help journalists report on these issues, we asked experts in law, education and education journalism for advice. Below are four of the tips they shared during our recent webinar,  “The Future of Federal Funding at Hispanic-Serving Institutions.”

But first, some important context:

For several decades, the U.S. Department of Education and other federal agencies have helped fund higher education institutions with a disproportionately high percentage of students who are racial or ethnic minorities. The goal of the Education Department’s Minority-Serving Institutions Program, which provides the bulk of that funding, is to broaden access to higher education and help more people from historically marginalized groups earn college degrees. Most minority-serving institutions are Hispanic-serving institutions, commonly referred to as HSIs.

Both public and private colleges and universities can compete for federal HSI grants. However, it’s unclear how many schools received HSI-related grants in 2025. A total of 602 had the qualifications to become HSIs during the 2023-24 academic year, according to Excelencia in Education, a nonprofit advocacy organization that collects data on HSIs.

The Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project, a collaboration among several academic researchers, reports that 219 colleges and universities received grants through the Department of Education’s program in 2021, the most recent year for which it has data. At the time, 462 institutions were eligible to compete for those dollars.

It’s also unclear the total amount of money that all federal agencies, combined, spent on HSIs in 2025. Several agencies, including the Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Defense, have provided funding through their own programs. The Congressional Research Service estimated in 2023 that annual appropriations made to all minority-serving institutions in accordance with the Higher Education Act of 1965 totaled $1.29 billion in fiscal year 2023.

Last June, the state of Tennessee and the nonprofit Students for Fair Admissions filed a federal lawsuit arguing that the Department of Education’s HSI program is discriminatory and violates the U.S. Constitution. Students for Fair Admissions is the national organization that sued Harvard University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill over their student admissions processes in 2014. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately sided with Students for Fair Admissions, deciding in 2023 that it is unconstitutional to give racial and ethnic minorities an edge when deciding which students to admit.

Two other organizations have joined the HSI lawsuit as plaintiffs — the nonprofit National Association of Scholars and Faculty and the all-volunteer advocacy group Students Opposed to Racial Preferences. The Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities has intervened as a defendant.

In July 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice notified Congress that it would not defend the Education Department’s HSI program in court. The agency determined that it violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection component.

The Education Department announced in September that it was slashing funding for most types of minority-serving institutions by a total of about $350 million. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon said the agency will no longer spend discretionary funds — the part of its budget it controls — on grant programs “that discriminate by restricting eligibility to institutions that meet government-mandated racial quotas.”

Two types of minority-serving institutions receive grant funding based on their historical missions, not the percentage of underrepresented minorities they serve: Tribal colleges and universities, often referred to as TCUs, and Historically Black colleges and universities, commonly known as HBCUs.

TCUs receive the bulk of their funding from the federal government as part of its trust and treaty responsibility to tribal nations. HBCUs were founded before 1964 with the primary mission of educating Black Americans at a time when they were generally barred from institutions that served white students.

Keep in mind that an HBCU is different from a school that has been designated as a predominantly Black institution, which qualifies for federal funding if at least 40% of its students are Black.

Tips for reporting on Hispanic-serving institutions

The three experts who spoke at our webinar focused on HSIs. They shared these tips to help journalists ask more probing questions and better understand how the federal lawsuit and proposed legislation could affect HSIs and higher education more broadly.

Our guest speakers were:

• Daarel Burnette, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Higher Education who oversees news coverage of HSIs and minority-serving institutions more broadly. He is also a member of the national Education Writers Association’s board of directors.
• Dan Morenoff, executive director of The American Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit law firm representing parties to the federal lawsuit challenging HSI funding. He is also an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute.
• Anne-Marie Núñez, a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies HSIs and Hispanics in higher education. She is also executive director of the Diana Natalicio Institute for Hispanic Student Success.

1. Be aware of myths about HSIs so you can avoid reporting them as facts.

Núñez described and debunked some of the most common myths about HSIs that she has encountered. For example, many people mistakenly assume all HSIs get grants when, actually, a lot of them do not, she said. She also pointed out that the money does not only benefit Hispanic students.  

“In fact, HSI grants often serve as modest, targeted investments that are used for campus-wide improvements that benefit all students,” she said.

Núñez also noted that HSIs do not exist specifically to serve Hispanic students. They do not give preference to Hispanic students or limit students from other demographic groups.

“So, if we’re thinking about admissions, for example, I work at a large, four-year HSI, and my institution is open access,” she said. “So, students who meet college eligibility requirements can attend my institution. There are not admissions quotas. There’s no exclusion. The majority of HSIs are broad access institutions, and about half of them are community colleges.”

About 5% of HSIs are R1 institutions, a classification the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education gives to colleges and universities that produce the most academic research and confer the most doctoral degrees. These schools tend to be the most selective. During the webinar, Núñez miscalculated the percentage of HSIs that are R1 institutions but contacted The Journalist’s Resource afterward to provide a corrected estimate.

2. Interview Hispanic students, Hispanic faculty and political conservatives to demonstrate the range of views on the issue.

Many higher education stories are told from the perspective of college administrators, Burnette, a veteran education journalist, said. The views of individual students and faculty are frequently missing.

He urged reporters to interview Hispanic students and faculty from different backgrounds and school types when reporting on HSIs. He noted that people who are racial or ethnic minorities often hold differing views on programs created to promote racial equity.

“Some students think it’s the best thing ever,” he said. “Some students think it’s the worst thing ever. Some students think it’s humiliating. Some students think it’s affirming.”

Burnette also said journalists covering higher education need to engage with political conservatives.

“We ignore conservatives,” he said, adding that his news outlet started covering the debate around HSI funding after discovering a blog that cited Morenoff’s work. “One of the things that I was so fascinated by was how much, how many policy papers and research papers were out there about racialized policy within higher ed, and how little we had written about this. And this is the Chronicle of Higher Education.”

3. Examine proposals to use HSI grant money for other purposes.

Morenoff pointed out that the lawsuit that challenges the Education Department’s HSI program does not aim to eliminate that funding. It seeks changes to the program to allow all higher education institutions to participate, regardless of the racial or ethnic makeup of their student body.

“The plaintiffs asked to open the door to broader competition to allow all schools to compete for federal money on an even basis,” he said.

The bill that Banks introduced last month calls for funding to be redistributed. The Promoting Equal Learning and Liberty Act, or PELL Act, would eliminate funding for most types of minority-serving institutions and, instead, use that money to help lower-income students.

That’s a change that Morenoff’s organization, The American Civil Rights Project, had urged Congress to make in early 2025.

“I think it’s worth mentioning that to whatever extent any group remains underprivileged, this approach would help them most,” he said during the webinar. “And that it at least appears that it would do so in a way that’s fair — at least race-neutral — [and] doesn’t appear to have any constitutional difficulties, and would maximize those students’ control over their own education.”

4. Explain the legal arguments being made against the Department of Education’s HSI program.

The federal lawsuit argues that the program is unconstitutional in two ways:

1. It is discriminatory because its three grants only go to institutions where at least 25% of full-time undergraduate students are Hispanic. This, the plaintiffs contend, denies students and faculty the equal protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.

2. Its funding violates a federal spending rule called the independent constitutional bar doctrine. Under the rule, federal spending cannot prompt a recipient of federal funds to do something unconstitutional. Morenoff said during the webinar that some colleges and universities have worked to increase their proportion of Hispanic students to qualify for HSI grants, which he said the 2023 Supreme Court ruling prohibits.

He suggested journalists read an article that attorney Alexander M. Heideman wrote on this topic in 2023, while working for the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

In the article, published in a legal journal of the right-leaning Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies, Heideman shares examples of institutions declaring their plans to boost Hispanic enrollment to 25%.

Other resources to help you cover HSIs

Read these journalism tip sheets and explainers:

• Hispanic-Serving Institutions: A Primer With Story Ideas and Guiding Questions for Journalists
• Minority-Serving Institutions: 8 Key Facts About Colleges that Serve Many Underrepresented Students
• Higher Education Funding in the US: A Broad Overview
• If You Report on US Colleges and Universities, Get to Know These 19 Higher Education Databases

Review these government reports and documents:

• A December 2025 legal opinion from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which determined that it’s unconstitutional to give federal grants to colleges and universities based on the racial makeup of their student body.  
• A 2024 report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office that examines HSIs’ “extensive” facility needs, including building repairs, technology upgrades and maintenance backlogs.
• A 2023 report from the Congressional Research Service that offers a broad overview of federal laws and policies related to minority-serving institutions.

Also worth checking out:

• “¿Qué pasa, HSIs?” — a podcast hosted by higher education scholar Gina Ann Garcia.
• HSIs Database for Researchers, a free database maintained by Excelencia in Education.
• HSI STEM Resource Hub, a project that aims to “grow the STEM thinkforce by advancing the efforts of Hispanic Serving Institutions to eliminate barriers to STEM student success.”

Get to know the academic research centers and nonprofit groups that study, track and provide data on HSIs. The most prominent ones include:

• Rutgers Center for Minority Serving Institutions
• The Minority-Serving Institutions Data Project
• Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities
• Excelencia in Education
• State Higher Education Executive Officers Association
• American Council on Education

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Debt collection lawsuits have risen in the U.S. since the COVID-19 pandemic ended as a global health emergency in May 2023. Research shows Black and Hispanic borrowers are more likely than white and Asian borrowers to have a court judgment against them in debt collection cases.

Borrowers past due on their debts may face a variety of collection actions from lenders, including phone calls, mailings and lawsuits. Debt collection lawsuits can be particularly burdensome to individual borrowers facing well-heeled financial institutions or third-party debt buyers.

Among potential causes, researchers point to the phaseout after the pandemic of federal and corporate efforts to ease debt collection.

Debtors facing lawsuits often experience various financial challenges, which lawsuits may compound. These may include taking out new debt to pay off existing debt — known as a debt trap cycle — which can lead to lower credit scores and higher interest payments in the long run.

While Congress abolished debtors prisons in the 1800s, debtors can also face arrest if they don’t comply with court orders. Sometimes, debtors don’t know they’re being sued.

Medical debt remains a top form of consumer debt, while some types of medical-related debt, such as co-pays for office visits, may not show up in data on medical debt. To help enrich local and national reporting on debt collection lawsuits, we cover recent research on:

• The landscape of debt collection lawsuits
• How default judgments work
• Race and class disparities in debt collection lawsuits
• Lawsuits related to medical debt
• The role of artificial intelligence in debt collection lawsuits
• Potential solutions for state governments

The landscape of debt collection lawsuits

Consumer debt is any debt an individual takes out unrelated to running a business. This may include credit cards, medical debt, mortgages, auto loans and student loans. In 2025, total household debt in the U.S. topped $18.5 trillion, with about $13 trillion in mortgages, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. About 14 million people have more than $1,000 in medical debt, while 3 million have more than $10,000 in medical debt, according to a 2024 KFF analysis.

It is illegal under the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act for debt collectors to use “abusive, unfair or deceptive practices” when collecting debt, according to the Federal Trade Commission. When lenders send written notices to debtors, federal law requires they include certain information, including the amount owed and when the debtor can no longer dispute the debt. There are also rules about when and how often lenders can call debtors.

One way lenders recoup money from delinquent borrowers is by filing lawsuits in state civil courts. During the pandemic, those lawsuits declined, as many Americans lost their jobs and faced reduced pay. Credit card companies offered forbearance, giving borrowers extra time to pay their debts. The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act provided forbearance for most mortgages and federal student loans.

“The CARES Act’s consumer protections, as well as other financial institution loan forbearance programs, likely helped avoid sharp increases in loan delinquencies,” according to a May 2021 report from the Congressional Research Service.

But debt collection lawsuits are rising, particularly over the last two years, in some of the most populated states. The Debt Collection Lab at Princeton University tracks these lawsuits across all or parts of 12 states, and is one of the only repositories for this information.

That data shows a general upward trend since 2022 in Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia.

A recent analysis from January Advisors, a data consulting firm, uses case-level data from the Debt Collection Lab, with additional individual case data in Wisconsin and Virginia, and aggregate case data for Texas. For states with case-level data, January Advisors was able to assess characteristics of individual cases, while for Texas they could only assess statewide trends. There were seven states with statewide debt lawsuit data available for the analysis.

Consumer debt cases in 2024 in Connecticut, North Dakota and Texas were up about 20% from 2019 levels, the year before COVID reached the U.S. Minnesota in 2024 matched its level in 2019. Wisconsin, Indiana and Virginia were all below their 2019 levels, but up substantially from 2022, which marked the recent low point for debt cases in those states.

In states where full data is available, a large percentage of collection lawsuits are filed by a small number of firms. In Connecticut, for example, 10 plaintiffs account for 80% of the debt docket, according to an analysis by Pew Charitable Trusts of the January Advisors and Debt Collection Lab numbers.

Some of those plaintiffs are firms that buy debt from lending institutions for a fraction of their value, says Lester Bird, senior manager at The Pew Charitable Trusts, who coauthored the analysis. This means people might be sued by an entity they’ve never heard of, not the institution that loaned them money.

“In many states, they don’t even have to say who they purchased a debt from,” Bird says. “They don’t have to give you information. They don’t have to tell you how many times that debt was bought and sold. And so, for consumers, it gets really confusing.”

Some of the most prolific debt buyers filing lawsuits since the pandemic include LVNV Funding, Midland Funding, Portfolio Recovery Associates, Jefferson Capital Systems and Cavalry SPV, according to a January Advisors analysis of six states with full data on individual cases — Connecticut, Indiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Viginia and Wisconsin.

LVNV Funding has been particularly active, with their filings up 350% since 2019, according to the Pew analysis. Credit card companies Capital One and Discover Bank also file at a high rate, the analysis found.

How default judgments work

In the world of debt collection litigation, a judgment means the court orders the borrower to pay the debt. A judgment may allow the lender to recoup what they’re owed through garnishing the borrower’s wages or bank funds, or putting a lien on property.

“When people get sued for debt, most can’t afford a lawyer,” writes David McClendon, a principal consultant at January Advisors, in a December 2025 blog post. “In many states, they also can’t simply show up to court to defend themselves. They have to file a formal written answer within tight deadlines, sometimes paying hundreds of dollars in filing fees to participate in their own case. Only then will the court give them a date and time to show up.”

Courts could improve show rates among defendants by dropping the requirement that they respond in writing, and allow them to simply show up in court, according to a January Advisors analysis.

Default judgments are automatic judgments that don’t consider the merits of a case, typically because the defendant did not respond to the lawsuit. Default judgments favoring plaintiffs are common — on the order of 70% in some jurisdictions, according research from Pew.  

“The No. 1 outcome we see is a default judgment,” Bird says. “A default judgment, that’s an automatic win for the plaintiffs because no one engaged. After that, we see a bunch of cases that’ll get settled or dismissed. Very rarely do we see judgments in favor of a defendant.”

Garnishments and other measures may be taken against borrowers of virtually any debt, including credit card, medical and student loans. The Department of Education, for example, began sending garnishment notices this month to some borrowers in default, following a six-year respite for borrowers from garnishments.

Race and class disparities in debt collection lawsuits

Judgments vary by race and ethnicity of the debtor, even after controlling for personal income, credit scores and levels of delinquent debt, finds a 2024 paper in the Journal of Banking and Finance.

“Black and Hispanic borrowers are 52% more likely to experience a debt collection judgment,” compared with white and Asian borrowers, the authors write. They estimate the gap in debt judgments using a nationally representative panel of credit data drawn from credit bureau Experian, merged with racial and ethnic information from federal mortgage data, from mid-2013 to mid-2017.

In addition to financial harm from wage garnishment and other collection measures, pressure from debt collectors can exact a mental health toll on borrowers, finds a 2025 paper in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior. Drawing on a national longitudinal survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the authors examine mental health outcomes related to debt collection for 7,236 people born from 1980 to 1984.

They find that, by age 40, more than 1 in 3 people in this cohort had been “pressured to pay bills by stores, creditors, or bill collectors,” with rates of 55% for lower-income adults and 49% among Black adults.

In considering the effects of debt collection on psychological distress, the authors look at self-reported symptoms of depression for the cohort, with results from nine follow-up surveys through 2019, after the initial survey in 1997. They conclude that “debt collection pressure is associated with increased psychological distress, with more severe consequences among low-income young adults.”

Around 1% of U.S. workers were having their wages garnished to creditors in 2019, finds a 2024 paper in American Economic Review: Insights. With data spanning 2014 to 2019 from Automatic Data Processing, the largest payroll firm in the U.S., the authors find an increase in garnishments toward the end of the period, “driven primarily by a rise in new student debt garnishments.”

Garnishments in the sample last about five months, with about 11% of gross earnings sent to creditors each month. Wage garnishment was almost twice as common for middle class workers in zip codes where residents were  predominantly Black or had lower levels of average education.

“The magnitude of these collections raises the possibility that unexpected wage garnishment could severely strain workers’ budgets and cause them to fall behind on other bills, thus potentially perpetuating a cycle of debt,” the authors write.

Lawsuits related to medical debt

Many Americans are familiar with medical debt, despite most having health insurance. Four in ten adults in the U.S. — more than 100 million people — have medical debt, according to KFF Health News. There is no national database of debt collection lawsuits, so it is difficult to say how many suits related to medical debt are working their way through state courts at any given time.

But researchers suggest medical debt suits are fairly common.

“Our best guess is 25% to 35% of a state court’s docket is related to medical debt,” Bird says. “You just wouldn’t know it.” 

That’s because medical debt can be “a lot more complicated than it looks,” he says. For example, people put copays and deductibles on their credit cards — but that’s tallied as credit card debt. 

“That will never count as medical debt,” Bird says. “A lot of medical debt reforms are missing a significant amount of debt because they’re so narrowly scoped to only hospital debt.”

Most doctors work for large corporations, whether nonprofit or for-profit, and have nothing to do with patient billing or debt collection tactics their organization may use, says Dr. Luke Messac, an instructor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“Patients will ask me how much something will cost,” he says. “I can’t answer that question, because it depends largely on what kind of insurance they have, what kind of negotiated rate the hospital has with that insurer, how exactly what I write down is written into the bill, which I really don’t know.”

Luke Messac compares how doctors billed patients in the 1800s with the current medical billing system. Interview conducted Dec. 16, 2025, by Clark Merrefield.

Messac, a historian and author of the 2023 book, “Your Money or Your Life: Debt Collection in American Medicine,” has found that hospitals and debt collectors have both pushed for less oversight when it comes to federal rules about medical billing and collection.

The Affordable Care Act of 2010 prohibited nonprofit hospitals from pursuing “extraordinary collection actions” without first making “reasonable efforts” to figure out if a patient was eligible for the hospital’s financial assistance program, as Messac and co-authors explain in their 2024 paper “The Policy Alliance Between Hospitals and Debt Collection Agencies,” published in Inquiry: The Journal of Health Care Organization, Provision and Financing.

But collection actions the federal government viewed as “extraordinary” were still being worked out, and “reasonable effort” remained undefined. In 2012, the Internal Revenue Service issued proposed regulations with a “reasonable effort” definition:

“In general, to have made reasonable efforts under the proposed regulations, a hospital facility must determine whether an individual is [financial assistance policy]-eligible or provide required notices during a notification period ending 120 days after the date of the first billing statement.”

When a federal agency proposes rules or regulations, the public is often allowed to comment, including individual people or organizations. Between June and October 2012, the proposed IRS rule received 224 comments. Commenters included health care organizations, debt collectors and debt buyers.

Their comments are essentially a public record of their point of view at the time of how “reasonable effort” should be defined. Messac and his co-authors in their 2024 paper organized the comments to pinpoint thematic overlap among the commenters.  

“There’s a lot at stake in defining exactly what a hospital and a third-party debt collector have to do before they start engaging in these actions,” Messac says. “Hospitals, it turns out, and their debt collectors were largely aligned in arguing that less should be done.”

In addition to responding to the proposed “reasonable effort” definition, Messac and his co-authors identified several other issues commenters raised. Weighing in on what should be considered “extraordinary collection actions,” hospitals and debt collectors “were nearly unanimous in arguing that debt sales and adverse credit reporting should not constitute ECAs,” the authors write.

“Patients can end up in real dire straits, you know?” Messac says. “Getting their bank accounts seized, getting their homes put liens on — even getting arrested — when they can’t afford care. I’ve spoken to medical audiences around the country and the uniform reaction is horror and anger at what’s going on. But it’s also ignorance. [Doctors] haven’t been involved in this process. We’ve relinquished so much control to people who don’t have the same responsibilities to patients.”

In addition to confronting dire financial straits, families with children facing any amount of medical debt are also more four times more likely to experience food insecurity, research has found.

Another issue raised in the comments for the 2012 proposed rule was whether hospitals should be responsible for collection tactics of third-party debt collectors they sell debt to or otherwise engage with to collect outstanding balances.

“Hospitals worried about being liable for the actions of debt collectors if they pursued [extraordinary collection actions] without meeting the criteria for ‘reasonable efforts’ to determine eligibility for financial assistance,” the authors write. They find that of the 67 hospitals that offered an opinion on liability for third-party collections, “all were opposed to such liability.”

Of the 16 patient advocacy organizations that stated an opinion, all favored hospitals being liable for third-party debt collection tactics. One organization, the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, wrote, “Only if hospitals remain financially or otherwise responsible will there be sufficient deterrence of inappropriate behavior by third parties.”

The IRS issued its final rule on the last day of 2014. The agencies described several actions as falling under “extraordinary collection actions,” including a hospital reporting delinquencies to credit rating agencies, and selling debt to third parties without making “reasonable efforts” to determine whether a patient is available for financial assistance.

“In the final rule, a hospital can be said to have made such efforts if it has notified the patient that there is [a financial assistance policy], given the patient an opportunity to remedy an incomplete application, and processed any complete application to determine eligibility,” the authors conclude. “In other words, federal regulations allow a hospital to sue a patient even if the patient qualifies for assistance, as long as the patient has not successfully completed the application for charity care.”

In examining debt lawsuits filed by hospitals in Virginia, the authors of a 2019 paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association identified 48 hospitals in 2017 that garnished an average of $2,783 from 8,399 patients. There were 34 nonprofit hospitals, 12 for-profit hospitals and one was government owned, with garnishments more common at nonprofits than for-profits. One-quarter of hospitals that garnished were rural, while three-fourths were in urban areas.

The 48 hospitals that garnished wages had $806 million in average annual revenue, compared with $946 million in average annual revenue for the 87 hospitals that did not garnish wages. Five hospitals, four of them nonprofits, accounted for more than half of all garnishment cases.

Luke Messac on state reforms to help patients use financial assistance programs at hospitals. Interview conducted Dec. 16, 2025, by Clark Merrefield.

The role of AI in debt collection lawsuits

Chatbots trained on large language models have generally made it easier for individuals and organizations to file lawsuits. For example, a homeowner involved in a simple contract dispute with a builder over an incomplete renovation could turn to a chatbot for help writing a legal petition, according to the nonprofit National Center for State Courts.

But it’s unclear the extent to which the recent rise in debt collection lawsuits is fueled by the AI tools that have recently become widely available.

“When someone uses AI to create a petition, if the petition is sufficient — if it doesn’t contain hallucinations — the court doesn’t know, or frankly care, if it was AI-generated or not,” says Diane Robinson, principal court research associate at NCSC. “And so there’s no real way for us to track that.”

People using chatbots for advice, whether legal or mental health related, is an ongoing concern for the public and professional organizations. Still, Robinson says she’d be surprised if law firms were not using AI to create first drafts of petitions in debt lawsuits. In fact, businesses exist that do that.

“You do research in this area, you know that in many jurisdictions it’s a relatively small number of filers who are filing the vast number of petitions,” she says. “These firms buy up debt, they buy it for pennies on the dollar, they file a whole bunch of lawsuits. I think AI certainly makes that process easier and quicker for doing those kinds of volume filings.”

An open question, she says, is whether those petitions make a sufficient legal case and are vetted by human lawyers before being filed in court — especially considering how common it is for cases to end in a default judgment in favor of the plaintiff.

“The whole system is built on being an adversarial system,” Robinson says. “But when that system breaks down, there’s a real risk that insufficient petitions are getting default judgments.”

Potential solutions for state governments

Journalists covering debt lawsuits should understand their state laws on the topic, as they can vary widely and affect which types of debt lenders may sue over. LawAtlas out of Temple University’s Center for Public Health Law Research is a good source to start to get a handle on your state’s laws.

The Pew Charitable Trusts’ Courts & Communities project offers an overview of steps they say state legislators and courts can take to improve defendant participation in debt cases. These include:

• Using GPS tracking to show that people delivering paperwork for courts attempted to serve debtors being sued.
• Enacting legal standards to make sure debt lawsuit petitions are legitimate.
• Eliminating the need for a formal written response to debt lawsuits and automatically scheduling hearings.
• Automatically applying state legal protections related to garnishments, instead of making debtors request those protections.

Connecticut is one state that has tried to improve its debt lawsuit regulations. In 2011, the state mandated that plaintiffs present more complete evidence when attempting to sue debtors, in an effort to reduce frivolous lawsuits.

“The reforms led to a decrease of approximately 10 filings per quarter by third-party plaintiffs relative to first-party plaintiffs, suggesting that the heightened documentation requirements may have deterred meritless lawsuits,” write the authors of a 2024 report from the Debt Collection Lab.

Still, when the authors randomly selected 88 lawsuits brought by debt buyers from 2021 to 2022, they found not one case where the debt buyers complied with all the documentation requirements.

“Despite the noncompliance, in most cases the debt buyer obtained a default judgment,” the authors write. “This is a failure of plaintiff compliance, but responsibility also lies with the courts as — per the rules and statute, judgments are not supposed to have been entered in these cases.”

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The Environmental Protection Agency is planning to do away with cost estimates related to reducing premature deaths when regulating certain pollutants, with a sole focus on industry costs related to pollution limits, according to reporting Monday in The New York Times.

Federal analysts routinely produce cost-benefits reports for proposed rules and regulations. They try to answer a basic question: Will the benefits of a proposal outweigh its costs?

Some rules and regulations save lives — or, more accurately, prevent deaths. If an industry is prohibited from emitting a large amount of pollutants known to cause cancer, for example, then some number of cancer deaths likely will be prevented.

Federal agencies use a monetary value for each death prevented. Most federal agencies put that value at $10 million per death avoided. Far from being a cold, detached calculation, these estimates have played a large role in justifying numerous safety standards enacted over the past half century.

When the EPA news hit my inbox, I reached out to W. Kip Viscusi, who developed the modern calculations federal agencies use to put a monetary value on human lives.

Viscusi is a University Distinguished Professor of Law, Economics, and Management at Vanderbilt University, and he wrote the 2018 book “Pricing Lives: Guideposts for a Safer Society.” The book, among other things, chronicles his efforts in the early 1980s to get federal agencies to increase their estimates of the monetary value of human life.

We talked about the measure he developed, the “value of a statistical life,” which placed a much higher monetary value on life than what the federal government used at the time. Broadly defined in academic and government literature, the value of a statistical life is the cost people are willing to pay to prevent one death.

We also discussed his response to the EPA news, and his advice for journalists covering the regulatory environment of the current presidential administration. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

—

Clark Merrefield: What is the “value of a statistical life”?   

Kip Viscusi: Government agencies have always had to figure out how important it is to save lives. The Department of Transportation has been doing this forever. And what they did is, they looked at how much is paid off after a wrongful death case in a fatal job accident, which is essentially the present value of lost earnings, maybe medical costs, you know, basically monetary costs, maybe some pain and suffering thrown in. But it was a fairly low number. It was a few hundred thousand dollars.

Until 1980, government agencies used this number to try and monetize deaths. They didn’t want to go out and call it the “value of life,” because that seemed sacrilegious, or it was controversial. So they called it the “cost of death,” which to them seemed less controversial. But it was a pretty small number.

The [Occupational Safety and Health Administration] did this for a hazard communication regulation. This is the first regulation that would have regulated hazardous chemicals in the workplace. They calculated the benefits and costs using their cost-of-death method, and the numbers came out where the costs were greater than the benefits. But OSHA thought the regulation was still desirable.

The Office of Management and Budget — this is at the start of the [Ronald] Reagan administration — turned down the regulations, saying the costs are greater than the benefits. I was brought in to analyze the dispute between the two agencies.

What I found is that if they only replaced the cost-of-death numbers with my “value of statistical life” numbers, that would increase the benefits by a factor of 10. By the way, these numbers came from my Harvard Ph.D. dissertation, so I like them. The value of a statistical life was several million dollars, three-to-four million dollars, as opposed to a few hundred thousand dollars. Benefits now exceeded costs.

Agencies jumped onto this and said, “Wow, this is great.” They may have even thought it was the right thing from an economic standpoint to do it. But the good thing from the standpoint of an agency’s self-interest is they got to increase their benefits by a factor of 10. Increasing the estimated benefits for the regulation was very attractive to them.

CM: Your initial development of the value of a statistical life was in the context of workplace safety and it was novel because what it accounted for was the value that workers place on their own lives and the risk that they were taking on to do potentially dangerous jobs. You were essentially asking a question that hadn’t been asked yet: What’s the point of view of the workers? And there’s data on that, in the form of the wages that the workers are willing to accept to do risky work. Is that a fair overview of the approach you took in developing this measure?

KV: That’s essentially it. There’s great data on worker employment, there’s good data on fatality risks, and you can get a handle on how much extra workers are paid for extra risk. Statistically, it’s a good area to look at.

Since then, I’ve also looked at car prices. Do safer cars command a higher price, controlling for everything else? Housing prices, are housing prices adversely affected by the cancer risk from having a hazardous waste site nearby? There are a lot of different market contexts where you can do it. There’s also a flourishing industry where people go out and ask survey questions. How much would you be willing to pay for safer food, safer cars? They generally have come up with fairly similar numbers.

CM: What was your reaction to The New York Times reporting that the Environmental Protection Agency is planning to do away with using cost estimates of certain health effects, including premature deaths, in their clean air rules — with a focus instead, reportedly, on the costs to businesses of complying with those rules?

KV: They’re going after the particulate matter regulations and ozone regulations. These are two pretty important regulations. In fact, particulate matter accounts for something like 70% of what the EPA’s done recently.

It’s irresponsible. It will also be likely overturned by the courts as being an arbitrary and capricious thing that they’re doing that’s inconsistent with anything the government’s done over the past half century. Even before 1980, they didn’t say lives were worth nothing. They were worth less than what we say they’re worth now, but there’s always been a non-zero value attached to lives.

The lion’s share of what the government does is mortality risk reduction. Whether it’s EPA, whether it’s highway safety, whether it’s job safety, consumer product safety, the biggest benefits are from saving lives. If saving lives is irrelevant, this has to have huge effects across everything society’s doing.

CM: What advice do you have for journalists covering the regulatory aspects of the current presidential administration?

KV: Getting into the mechanics of how you construct the value of a statistical life usually makes people dizzy. But I think this case, this incident, is going to be really easy to explain. In the past, during the George W. Bush administration, EPA lowered the value of statistical life and there was an uproar. It got a lot of media attention. Stephen Colbert did a bit on it: You know, the government now says your life is worth less.

This is even easier to understand. The government says your life is worth nothing. You don’t even have to be an economist and know the mechanics of the calculation to know this is off the charts. This is certainly the biggest shift we’ve seen.

CM: In your book “Pricing Lives,” you talk a bit about the part that you played, as an academic, and working in the government, in advocating that federal agencies use the value of a statistical life when doing cost-benefit analyses on proposed regulations. When did this measure become commonly used in those federal analyses and what was your role in making that happen?

KV: Until I did the analysis as part of the OMB-OSHA dispute, they never used [value of a statistical life]. I used the VSL in my analysis. The day after my analysis reached the Reagan White House, they approved the regulation that had been turned down before.

Going forward, agencies then started using it, but they didn’t go high enough. Agencies that had been anchored on the lower wrongful death numbers were slower to move up, like the Department of Transportation. I’d done a study for the [Federal Aviation Administration] that asked what number should they use to value lives for people killed in plane crashes. I came up with my numbers at the time, maybe $4 million [per life].

[Editor’s note: See “The Value of Risks to Life and Health,” published December 1993 in the Journal of Economic Literature for an overview of Viscusi’s value of statistical life research at the time.]

And representatives from the auto industry also met with people at the Office of the Secretary of Transportation, where they argued, well, a million dollars sounds like certainly enough. A million dollars at the time was moving [the department] up, but it still wasn’t getting them up to the right number.

But right now, Department of Transportation’s great. I mean, I think they’re phenomenal in terms of how they do it. They’re superb. Government agencies, the Department of Health and Human Services — all across the federal government, they’re all using numbers over $10 million.

If I were to pick a number, I’d say $13 million would be a reasonable number [today]. And $13 million is a whole lot bigger than zero. So this is a huge shift, in what [the EPA] is doing.

CM: You touched on this a little bit, but for a topic such as air quality, the prospect of valuing life and valuing premature death is more complex than looking at the wages someone will accept to do certain work. The EPA seems to use, as you said, some of these surveys where they’re asking people, “How much would you pay to save a life in this context?” Is that correct?

KV: They use those as well as the market data. They’re thrown in one hopper. And I’ve done some survey studies for the EPA, so I like them, too.

With respect to death, the one area I’ve done for EPA was cancer deaths. Cancer deaths also entail an additional morbidity effect: You’re not just simply dying, you also may have a period of illness before you die. And the question is, how much should they value that? Should you get a premium for that?

I’ve found that, yes, additional morbidity losses should count more. The example we did was 20% more for that particular context. Those estimates are still being refined, because there’s different kinds of cancer, different morbidity effects. Being killed in a traumatic accident in the workplace isn’t pain-free, so you also have to look at, you know, what’s the difference? Conceivably, if anything, EPA might merit a premium on how much they value mortality risk, as opposed to being zeroed out.

CM: So the survey was about pain and suffering, not doctor’s bills and things like that. And you’re asking people: How much would you pay to have this not happen to you? Because it would be worse, if you’re thinking about these things in a vacuum, to have to suffer over a period of time than to die quickly.

KV: The survey was structured to set aside medical costs.

In this case it was, if we could prevent, let’s say, five deaths. We’ve saved five lives from cancer. In this case it was bladder cancer. If we save five expected cancer deaths here, how many automobile deaths would that be equivalent to? Is it five for five? Or do five cancer deaths count as much as six traffic deaths?

So, just trying to get a sense of, are cancer deaths more valuable than traffic safety [deaths]? I thought that was easier for people to think about, rather than asking, point blank, how much would you be willing to pay?

We gave them a description of what was entailed. I’ve done this for several different kinds of cancer, chronic bronchitis and other ailments. You give them: Here’s the medical scenario of what it is, what it means to your life, how it affects your activity.

And knowing that, how would you value the risk?

The post Q&A: W. Kip Viscusi on how the US government assigns monetary value to human life appeared first on The Journalist's Resource.

We updated this explainer, originally published in August 2024, to include new research, data and other information on school vaccination policies and strategies for boosting student vaccination rates.

The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted routine childhood vaccinations across the U.S., reducing the percentage of children entering kindergarten immunized against serious, highly contagious diseases such as the measles, diphtheria and polio. Since then, vaccination rates have continued to fall, partly because many states now allow kids to skip immunizations that were required in prior years.

Public health officials warn that communities do not have herd immunity against a disease until a large proportion of the people who live in, work in and visit the area are immune. The measles, for example, is so contagious that at least 95% of the population needs to receive both doses of the measles vaccine to prevent transmission, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

About 92.5% of kids who started kindergarten during the 2024-25 school year had received the MMR vaccine, which protects against the measles, mumps and rubella, the CDC estimates in its most recent report on the topic. About the same proportion were immunized against polio. Meanwhile, 92.1% had received the DTaP vaccine, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis.

David Higgins, an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado Anschutz, notes that national averages for vaccination rates mask variations in vaccination coverage across local communities. In an interview with SciLine in August, he points out that an outbreak of measles in West Texas last year spread rapidly through communities with lower vaccination rates.

Nearly 800 people contracted the disease, 99 of whom were hospitalized, the Texas Department of State Health Services reported in August. Two children, a 6-year-old girl and an 8-year-old girl, died.

“The vaccination rate at your own school or community is much more meaningful than what the national vaccination rate is,” Higgins told SciLine, which helps reporters find reputable scientists to interview.

The U.S. had declared the measles to be eliminated in 2000. But as childhood vaccination rates dropped, the disease reappeared. The CDC confirmed a total of 2,065 cases of measles in 2025, up from 285 cases in 2024 and 59 cases in 2023.

Cases of pertussis, commonly known as the whopping cough, also have increased. Provisional data show that 35,493 cases of pertussis were reported to the CDC in 2024 — more than five times as many as in 2023.

Strategies for boosting student vaccination

Researchers have spent decades studying strategies that encourage people to get vaccinated. Many of these studies focus on schoolchildren and the ways that local schools, community centers and other organizations can help families overcome the various barriers they face in getting kids all doses of the vaccines their state mandates for school attendance.

In July 2024, editors at the leading scientific journal Nature urged policymakers to consult academic research to determine which interventions work best.

“The burgeoning science of vaccine-uptake effectiveness is throwing up some unexpected results that could help public-health authorities to sharpen their policies — and save more lives,” the editors write in the editorial.

Studies published in recent years suggest these four strategies help improve child vaccination rates. Toward the bottom of this article, we provide detailed summaries of key papers that examine these interventions.

• Offering inoculations at schools, libraries and other places children and their families frequent.
• Providing incentives such as financial rewards to families and to health care providers who administer vaccines to children.
• Eliminating exemptions to school vaccine requirements, except for students with medical conditions that prevent them from receiving vaccines.
• Reducing the number of kids admitted to school before they have received all doses of all required vaccines. Many schools allow students to enroll on a “provisional” or “conditional” basis while they catch up on their shots.

Vaccine exemptions

Communication scholar Dolores Albarracín says schools send families mixed messages about the importance of childhood vaccinations when they allow lots of kids to skip immunizations. In Idaho, for instance, families can request vaccine exemptions for any reason. Statewide, 15.4% of kindergartners there were exempt from immunization requirements during the 2024-25 academic year, CDC data show. The exemption rate exceeded 9% in Alaska, Arizona, Oregon and Utah.

Nationwide, 3.6% of kindergarteners — some 138,000 kids — obtained exemptions from at least one state-mandated vaccination in 2024-25. That’s up from 3.3% the prior year.

Albarracín, who is director of the Communication Science Division at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, has studied vaccination policies. A paper she coauthored, published in Nature’s Scientific Reports in December 2023, suggests vaccination policies can alter social norms and change people’s attitudes toward vaccines.

Like the American Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, Albarracín supports eliminating vaccine exemptions that are not directly tied to a student’s medical condition.

“How can schools be trying to really ensure [vaccination] if, at the same time, they’re allowing parents to not vaccinate kids for all these personal and religious reasons?” she tells The Journalist’s Resource.

School vaccination requirements

Children must be vaccinated against certain communicable diseases to attend school in the U.S. School vaccination mandates vary by state but generally apply to both public and private K-12 schools, including charter schools and parochial schools.

Schools generally require kids to get these four vaccines before enrolling in kindergarten: 

• 2 doses of MMR, which protects against measles, mumps and rubella.
• 5 doses of DTaP, which protects against diphtheria, tetanus and acellular pertussis.
• 2 doses of VAR, which provides immunity against varicella, also known as chickenpox.
• 4 doses of Polio, which helps prevent poliomyelitis, commonly referred to as polio.

All states allow exemptions to these requirements, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which tracks student immunization policies. As of July 2025, every state provided exemptions to students for medical reasons such as having a weakened immune system or being allergic to a component of a required vaccine.

Religious exemptions are common, too. Most states offer them. Meanwhile, 15 states grant exemptions if parents object to immunizations for personal reasons, the National Conference of State Legislatures reports.

In 2015, California banned all exemptions not tied to a medical issue, becoming the first state in almost three decades to do so. At the time, only West Virginia and Mississippi prohibited non-medical exemptions.

In 2019, New York and Maine eliminated religious exemptions, followed by Connecticut in 2021.

Various groups have challenged such policies, however. In 2023, a federal judge in Mississippi sided with several parents who argued that not being able to forgo state-required vaccines on religious grounds violated their First Amendment rights. The court ordered Mississippi, known for its high MMR vaccination rate among kindergarteners, to begin offering religious exemptions.

In November, a circuit court judge in West Virginia ruled that families there should be allowed religious exemptions. But the state Supreme Court temporarily suspended that ruling, pending an appeal by the West Virginia Board of Education, the West Virginia Watch reports.

Focusing on under-vaccinated kids

Epidemiologist Sarah Michels says states could boost vaccination rates quite a bit by focusing on children who have started a vaccine series but not finished it. Michels has conducted national studies of infants and toddlers and found that many are just one or a few doses away from being fully vaccinated.

This is relevant because most doses of the four vaccines schools require are generally administered to children before age 2.

“Most families choose to vaccinate their infants and children, and what we saw is that more than 1 in 6 kids are missing doses,” says Michels, a former epidemiology specialist at the University of Montana’s Center for Population Health Research.

A study she led, published in Pediatrics in 2023, suggests the main reason more young children are not immunized is because of barriers families face in accessing vaccines and not because they fear or object to vaccines. For lower-income families, it can be difficult to make time or afford transportation to vaccination clinics and medical offices.

“We found that moving across state lines, higher numbers of children in the household, lacking health insurance, lower household income, living in a rented home, and race and ethnicity were each associated with a 20% or greater risk of failure to complete multidose vaccine series in early childhood,” Michels and her colleagues write in their paper.

About 7.5% of all kindergarteners in 2024-25 had not received all doses of the MMR vaccine, according to the CDC. The percentage of kindergarteners missing at least one dose of any required vaccine varied by state, reaching as high as 21.5% in Idaho.

Growing opposition to vaccination mandates

Vaccines were a polarizing issue long before the COVID-19 pandemic began. But a 2022 analysis from researchers at Baruch College and Fordham University finds that the political divide in attitudes toward vaccines has widened over the last decade.

“By 2015, a partisan spit emerged across not only vaccine attitudes, but also in reported vaccination behavior,” political scientists David R. Jones and Monika L. McDermott write in the working paper. While Republicans “have become more vaccine skeptical,” they add, Democrats “have become more vaccine supportive.”

In recent years, lawmakers in several states have pushed to make it easier for students to get vaccine exemptions and to ensure parents know which exemptions are available to them. For example, in Idaho, a state law that took effect in 2024 allows students aged 18 years and older to request school vaccine exemptions for themselves. A state law enacted in Louisiana the same year requires schools to include information about exemptions in all communications with parents about vaccine requirements.

Attitudes toward vaccines have continued to diverge under President Donald Trump, who chose vaccine skeptic Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to take over as secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services last February. On Monday, federal health officials decided not to continue recommending that all U.S. children receive vaccines for hepatitis A, hepatitis B, meningococcal disease, rotavirus, influenza and respiratory syncytial virus.

In late 2025, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announced his plan to make Florida the first state to end school vaccine requirements.

A recent report from the Pew Research Center indicates that public support for school vaccine requirements has fallen. When Pew conducted a national survey in 2019, 82% of U.S. adults agreed that healthy children should have to get the MMR vaccine to attend public schools. When Pew asked about the MMR vaccine again in late 2025, 69% of U.S. adults agreed.

Pew, which surveyed a nationally representative sample of 5,111 adults in October, also finds that Republican parents are much less likely than Democratic parents to have a high level of confidence in childhood vaccine effectiveness, safety testing and the recommended vaccine schedule.

Summaries of key research studies

State Repeal of Nonmedical Vaccine Exemptions and Kindergarten Vaccination Rates
Anthony Bald, Samantha Gold and Y. Tony Yang. JAMA Pediatrics, October 2025.

The study: Researchers looked at changes in kindergarten vaccination rates in the four states that stopped granting exemptions for religious, philosophical or personal reasons during the prior decade. They analyzed data on vaccination rates and vaccine exemptions that all states reported to the CDC’s National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases from 2011 through 2023. The study focuses on kindergarten students who attended public or private schools.

Key findings: After repealing all vaccine exemptions except medical exemptions, kindergarten vaccination rates in the four states rose 2 to 4 percentage points, compared with states that continued to offer both medical and non-medical exemptions. In these four states, the proportion of kindergarten students who received the DTaP vaccine increased by 4.1 percentage points and the proportion who received the MMR vaccine increased by 4 percentage points. Meanwhile, the percentage of 5- and 6-year-olds vaccinated against polio and hepatitis B grew by 3.8 percentage points and 2.8 percentage points, respectively.

The proportion of kindergarteners who were granted medical exemptions rose slightly in the four states — by about 0.4 percentage points, on average, three years after each state stopped allowing non-medical exemptions. The increase was largely driven by California’s repeal in 2015, the researchers explain. After California eliminated personal belief exemptions, schools there saw a sharp increase in students submitting medical exemptions. Earlier research on California’s repeal indicates that some parents who could no longer get personal belief exemptions obtained authorization from doctors to skip vaccines for medical reasons.

In the authors’ words: “Our results indicate that, amid growing vaccine hesitancy, restricting exemptions may play a role in maintaining vaccination coverage. We observed minimal substitution toward medical exemptions, suggesting that state oversight of medical exemption processes effectively limited this potential workaround.”

A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Strategies to Promote Vaccination Uptake
Sicong Liu, et al. Nature Human Behavior, August 2024.

The study: Researchers analyzed research conducted in recent decades to determine which interventions work best to encourage immunization. They combined and examined the results of 88 randomized, controlled trials conducted with a total of 1.6 million people across age groups in 17 countries.

This meta-analysis, which was pre-registered in August 2022, evaluates seven strategies, including broadening access to vaccines, sending vaccination reminders, providing incentives, supplying information and correcting misinformation. The interventions studied targeted various vaccines, including the flu vaccine, the COVID-19 vaccine and routine childhood vaccines.

Key findings: The researchers found that the most effective interventions offered incentives such as cash rewards and made it easier for people to find and get immunizations. “Providing incentives, however, is presumably most effective when they are valued by their recipients, guaranteed to be delivered and delivered immediately after vaccination,” the authors write.

Enhancing access to vaccines — for example, offering vaccinations in places people frequent — “holds the most promise in lower-income countries or countries with lower healthcare access.”

In the authors’ words: “We showed that the odds of vaccination were 1.5 times higher for intervention than control conditions. Among the intervention strategies, using incentives and increasing access were most promising in improving  vaccination uptake, with the access strategy being particularly effective in countries with lower incomes and less access to healthcare.”

Failure to Complete Multidose Vaccine Series in Early Childhood
Sarah Y. Michels, et al. Pediatrics, July 2023.

The study: Researchers estimate the percentage of U.S. babies and toddlers who have not received the all doses of seven recommended vaccines. The researchers also investigate the reasons why a substantial proportion of young children start but do not finish at least one vaccine series. The analysis is based on national data for 16,365 children aged 19 to 35 months, collected from the 2019 National Immunization Survey.

Key findings: Most young children — 72.9% — completed the seven-vaccine series. About 1.1% were completely unvaccinated. Meanwhile, 8.4% lacked just one dose of one vaccine and 17.2% started but did not finish at least one vaccine series. Children were most likely to miss doses of the MMR and VAR vaccines.

Children from lower-income households and children who lived in rental homes were 25% to 30% more likely to be missing vaccine doses. “Having multiple immunization providers increased in the risk of starting but failing to complete all series by approximately 50%,” the researchers write. Black children were less likely than white children to complete a vaccine series.

In the authors’ words: “More than 1 in 6 U.S. children initiated but did not complete all doses in multidose vaccine series, suggesting children experienced structural barriers to vaccination. Increased focus on strategies to encourage multidose series completion is needed to optimize protection from preventable diseases and achieve vaccination coverage goals.”

Coverage with Selected Vaccines and Exemption from School Vaccine Requirements Among Children in Kindergarten — United States, 2022-23 School Year
Ranee Seither, et al. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, November 2023.

The study: Researchers analyze federal data on vaccination rates among kindergarteners in the U.S. during the 2022–23 school year. They provide several charts outlining vaccination rates and vaccination exemption rates in the 50 states and District of Columbia.

Key findings: Vaccination rates for all four state-required vaccines declined in most of the U.S. In 2022-23. About 93% of kindergartners had received all doses of the four vaccines, down from 95% in 2019-20. The nationwide exemption rate was 3%, compared with 2.6% the prior year. In 10 states, more than 5% of kindergartners were exempted from at least one vaccine. Exemption rates ranged from less the 0.1% in West Virginia to 12.1% in Idaho.

In the authors’ words: “Schools and providers should work to ensure that students are vaccinated before school entry, such as during the enrollment process, which is often several months before school starts. State and local provisional enrollment periods that allow students to attend school while on a catch-up schedule also provide the opportunity to fully vaccinate students and to prevent nonmedical exemptions resulting from lingering under-vaccination due to COVID-19 pandemic–related barriers to vaccination, such as reduced access to vaccination appointments.”

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