"Live insects crawled through the facility’s production workshop, while dead ones lay on the floor. Condensation from rust-covered pipes dripped into a water tank waiting to be mixed with raw ingredients." 🤢 😮 --> by @anniewaldman.bsky.social @bxroberts.org www.propublica.org/article/fore...

NEW: Billions of pounds of food are imported to the U.S. each year. The FDA inspects foreign producers to ensure what we're eating is safe from pathogens and dangerous manufacturing practices. But now, after Trump's drastic staff cuts, these inspections have plummeted to a historic low. 🧵/

New incredible detail here: ICE says a match in its facial recognition app Mobile Fortify is a "definitive" determination of a person's status, and that this overrides birth certificates. This is an app ICE is using in the field to scan people www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

New: Videos show ICE/CBP agents are scanning peoples' faces on the street to verify citizenship. ICE has tool to instantly look up unprecedented number of databases with just a photo “I’m an American citizen so leave me alone” “Alright, we just got to verify that” www.404media.co/ice-and-cbp-...

Great article. Archiving the internet is such a difficult thing without much of a financial motive, too. But reliance on a single entity has blown up in our faces so many times in the past.

From @juddlegum.bsky.social’s newsletter this morning: “A Popular Information investigation reveals tens of millions in new ICE spending on guns, chemical weapons, and explosives.” popular.info/p/ice-boosts...

I feel like "generate new ideas" is pretty debatable here 🤣

Top VA officials testified that they don’t know how many doctors and nurses have left. We do. The VA is down 600+ doctors and 1,900+ nurses this year. After years of growth, the number of docs has declined each month since Trump took office. www.propublica.org/article/vete...

Office of Science and Technology Policy is requesting federal rules/guidelines/etc "that unnecessarily hinder" the development, deployment, and adoption of AI. The list of "not appropriate" assumptions is interesting because AI experts will tell you many of these are critical to responsible AI use.

Love seeing a local AI story. This one can be replicated anywhere too. 🔥 www.knkx.org/government/2...

We ❤️ @ire.org! @propublica.org employees wore buttons & flyered at the IRE gala to rally support for our fight for a fair contract. The future of investigative journalism depends on protecting the workers who make it possible. You can help by signing our petition: actionnetwork.org/petitions/te...

🚨JOURNALISM JOB ALERT🚨 @propublica.org is looking for our next Ancil Payne Reporting Fellow. Some key details: •For journos with 3-7 yrs professional experience •Two-year fellowship; starts Jan. 2026 •Based in our DC office •$75K/year + Benefits •Apply before 10/13 9am ET More here:

FDA's Digital Health Advisory Committee are accepting comments in advance of their meeting around "Generative Artificial Intelligence-Enabled Digital Mental Health Medical Devices" aka AI therapists (cringe every time I write that)

When Assad’s security state collapsed, locked doors opened, spilling decades of secrets. Among them: 100s of stolen children, hidden in orphanages & used to blackmail parents. We’ve done the deepest dive yet into this cruel system. Here’s what we found 🧵 www.lighthousereports.com/investigatio...

In case you needed more evidence you can't just blindly copy and run code written by AI: I just asked a llama3.2 model how to sort by create date and it gave me a command which would have deleted every file from the directory (after sorting) 😅

US Coast Guard partnering with AI voice transcription + analytics company VoiceBrain in a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA). "Eliminating human error and fatigue" but nothing about the new machine errors it will introduce. public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2025-17361.pdf

GIJN piece detailing how we covered DOGE using AI at the Dept of Veterans Affairs to try and cut contracts. Includes some tips for reporters working to investigate other uses of AI. By @dwindelspecht.bsky.social gijn.org/stories/how-...

The AI fake journalist saga continues ... Business Insider alone has retracted 40 articles now wapo.st/4p9E7hz Editors who've published a pitch from someone they never talked to nor saw and paid via PayPal have been put on notice 😅

There's an opening on the News Apps team at ProPublica! If you're a journalist who knows how to code and build things, apply below 👇👇 grnh.se/k5crh6ph6us

A federal employee directory helped us figure out just how many workers have left federal health agencies since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term. Here’s how we crunched the numbers. By @pratheekrebala.bsky.social @anniewaldman.bsky.social @bxroberts.org

Our latest -- The gutting of the Department of Health & Human Services. We provide a first look at the raw numbers of who has departed, where they worked and what it means for the country.

Consistent and clear internal processes result in better journalism!

I just can't with this

Finally some good news www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/alde...

Proposed Dept of Education rule change around "Advancing Artificial Intelligence in Education". Is this backed by anything other than vibes? www.federalregister.gov/public-inspe...

How segregated are your local private schools? With our database, look up the demographics of private schools across the country and see how they compare to the public schools nearby. By @cerealcommas.bsky.social @natlash.bsky.social @bxroberts.org

Apply to be part of the @pulitzercenter.bsky.social's fourth cohort of the #AI Accountability Fellowships. Don’t miss this opportunity to report in-depth on the impact artificial intelligence has on society. Deadline: August 11, 2025. More: https://twp.ai/9PTQRk

"disorderly conduct by revealing the existence of an arrest" 🤯

Catch me talking a little bit about DOGE artificial intelligence and my work into FDA's "secret gamble" with the safety of America's drug supply

Will Lewis emails the Washington Post staff, encouraging those who "do not feel aligned" with the company's future plans to consider the buyout offer.

Terrible AI use case right here. If Law360 doesn't trust their editors to "spot bias" then they have a cultural problem, not a technological one. Throwing AI at this is ridiculous. www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/law3...

ProPublica obtained records showing how a DOGE software engineer with no health care or government experience created an AI model to identify contracts to kill at the VA. @bxroberts.org‬ takes us through what we learned when we asked experts to review the model’s underlying instructions and code ⤵️

My latest: Why some potentially contaminated drugs are still allowed into the U.S., despite FDA knowledge of issues like filthy labs and falsified records. We dug into the data and identified 70 hospitalizations and nine deaths related to these drugs.

Following our investigation, a trio of lawmakers demanded transparency from the Department of Veterans Affairs and questioned the use of AI to assess contracts for possible cancellation. By @bxroberts.org‬ and @vernalcoleman.bsky.social‬

NEW: Following a ProPublica investigation into how DOGE had developed an error-prone AI tool to determine which VA contracts should be killed, a trio of lawmakers said the Trump administration continues to “stonewall” their requests for details. By @bxroberts.org & @vernalcoleman.bsky.social

Great thread from one of the experts that made our reporting possible

THREAD: An ex-DOGE engineer with no government or medical experience used AI to identify which Veterans Affairs contracts to kill, labeling them as “MUNCHABLE.” @vernalcoleman.bsky.social @ericumansky.bsky.social and I got the code. Here’s what it tells us 1/

Job alert ‼️ We're looking for someone to join us for a two-year fellowship, helping us responsibly leverage AI in our tip/lead gathering process. job-boards.greenhouse.io/propublica/j...

More Than a Dozen U.S. Officials Sold Stocks Before Trump’s Tariffs Sank the Market @robert-faturechi.bsky.social @pratheekrebala.bsky.social @bxroberts.org

Three of our colleagues are being placed on PIPs today and @propublica.org management has refused to allow stewards in those meetings. We're not shutting up about this — our colleagues deserve better and we're extremely disappointed in management for denying us this basic union right.

NEW: Two days before Trump announced dramatic plans for “reciprocal” tariffs on foreign imports, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy sold stock in almost three dozen companies, according to records reviewed by ProPublica. By @robert-faturechi.bsky.social and @bxroberts.org

I left my job at ProPublica about a month ago. Here's why: I've teamed up with @mantzarlis.com to launch indicator.media, a new publication dedicated to exposing digital deception and to equipping professionals and the public with knowledge and skills to investigate it. Sign up for free below!

THREAD: We recently heard that the Trump administration was leaning on the government of Gambia to help Elon Musk. For weeks, our team made phone calls, wrote letters and knocked on folks’ doors to try to confirm it. But we were stuck. So our reporters got on a plane to Banjul. 1/

"A Masterclass In What Not To Do When Detained By CBP" Hasan has been calling himself a journalist for years now, but this really shows it takes a lot more than that plus an audience to do the work. www.techdirt.com/2025/05/13/h...

1/4 UPDATE: This week, @propublica.org management informed a third bargaining unit member that they will be placed on a performance improvement plan and denied steward representation at the meeting where it is discussed. Our full statement 👇

NEW: U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 million and $5 million worth of Trump Media stock the same day Trump unveiled new tariffs that caused the stock market to plummet, according to records obtained by ProPublica. By @robert-faturechi.bsky.social and @bxroberts.org

1/ 🚨 Yesterday, @propublica.org management confirmed that it will again deny steward representation at disciplinary meetings. Our full statement 👇

I love this 😂 submit your worst PDFs!

It's maddening seeing reports citing "an independent journalist" no name no link no attribution at all. www.thehandbasket.co/p/independen...

Today, we issued a letter — signed by 70% of our unit — to @sengelberg.bsky.social and @robinsparkman.bsky.social asking them to uphold ProPublica’s values of fairness, transparency and accountability at the bargaining table.