Medicare and Medicaid, which provide medical coverage for
seniors, the poor and the disabled, together
make up nearly a
quarter of all federal spending. With total Medicare spending projected to cost
$7.7 trillion over the next 10 years, there is consensus that changes are in
order. But what those changes should entail has, of course, been one of the hot-button
issues of the campaign.
With the candidates slinging
charges, we thought we’d lay out the facts. Here’s
a rundown of where the two candidates stand on Medicare and Medicaid:
THE CANDIDATES ON MEDICARE
Big Picture
Earlier this year, the Medicare Board of Trustees estimated
that the Medicare hospital trust fund would remain fully funded only until
2024. Medicare would not go bankrupt or disappear, but it wouldn’t have enough
money to cover all hospital costs.
Under traditional government-run Medicare, seniors 65 and
over and people with disabilities are given health insurance for a fixed set of
benefits, in what’s known as fee-for-service
coverage. Medicare also offers a subset of private health plans known as
Medicare Advantage, in which roughly one-quarter
of Medicare beneficiaries are currently enrolled. Obama retains this structure.
The Obama administration has also made moves that it says
would keep Medicare afloat. It says the Affordable Care Act would extend
solvency by eight years, mainly by imposing tighter spending controls on
Medicare payments to private insurers and hospitals.
In contrast, Rep. Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney’s running mate, has
proposed a more fundamental overhaul of Medicare, which he says is on an “unsustainable
path.” On his campaign
website, Romney says that Ryan’s proposals “almost precisely mirrors” his
ideas on Medicare. But he’s been fuzzy on other aspects of the plan.
A Romney-Ryan administration would replace a defined
benefits system with a
defined contribution system in which seniors are given federal vouchers to
purchase health insurance in a newly created private marketplace known as
Medicare Exchange. In this marketplace, private health plans, along with
traditional Medicare, would compete for enrollees’ business. These changes wouldn’t start until 2023, meaning current
beneficiaries aren’t affected – just those under 55.
Under the Romney-Ryan, the vouchers would be valued at the second-cheapest
private plan or traditional Medicare, whichever costs less. Seniors who opt for
a more expensive plan would pay the difference. If they choose a cheaper plan,
they keep the savings.
Who’s covered
In the current system, people 65 and over are eligible for
Medicare, which Obama has said he would keep for
now.
Romney has proposed
raising the eligibility age for Medicare beneficiaries from 65 to 67 in 2022,
then increasing it by a month each year after that. In the long run, he would index
eligibility levels to “longevity.” Ryan’s budget plan proposesraising Medicare eligibility age by two months a year
starting in 2023, until it reaches 67 by 2034.
Many others looking to keep Medicare solvent have also proposedraising the age of eligibility.
The Congressional Budget Office estimates
that raising the minimum age from 65 to 67 would
reduce annual federal spending by 5 percent.
But it would also result in higher premiums and out-of-pocket costs for
seniors who would lose access to Medicare.
Obama’s health care law also adds
some benefits for seniors, such as annual wellness visits without co-pays,
preventive services like free cancer screenings and prescription drug savings.
Proposed Savings
The Affordable Care Act is projected to reduce Medicare
spending by $716 billion over the next 10 years. These reductions, as detailed
by Washington Post’s Wonkblog, will come mostly from reducing
payments to hospitals, nursing homes and private health care providers.
While Ryan criticized such spending
cuts in his speech at the Republican National Convention, his own budget proposed
keeping these reductions.
“The ACA grows the trust fund by giving more general revenue
to the Treasury, which then gives the trust fund bonds. But it then uses the
money from those bonds to expand coverage for low- and middle-income people,” explains
Dylan Matthews on Washington Post’s Wonkblog.
Romney hasn’t really come up with a solid answer: he
previously said he would restore
the $716 billion savings that the health care law imposes. Per this New York
Times story,
the American Institutes for Research calculates this would increase premiums
and co-payments for Medicare beneficiaries by $342 a year on average over the
next 10 years.
For more on where the candidates stand on the $716 billion, the
private health policy Commonwealth Fund offers this helpful
explanation.
Caps on Spending
Both Obama and Ryan have set an identical
target rate that would cap Medicare spending at one-half a percentage point
above the nation’s gross domestic product.
But they have different ideas on mechanisms to achieve it.
The Affordable Care Act establishes a 15-member Independent
Payment Advisory Board that, starting in 2015, would make binding recommendations
to reduce spending rates. As Jonathan Cohn points
out in the New Republic, the commission is prohibited from making any
changes that would affect beneficiaries.
Ryan has proposed hard caps on spending and derided
this panel of appointed members as “unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats.” When
laying out his plan in a 2011 memo, Ryan
wrote that to control spending, “Congress would be required to intervene and
could implement policies that change provider reimbursements, program overhead,
and means-tested premiums.”
Romney hasn’t
stated clear proposals for imposing a cap on spending.
THE CANDIDATES ON MEDICAID
Big Picture
Though, it’s far less discussed
on the campaign trail, Medicaid actually covers more people than Medicare. The
joint federal-state insurance program for the poor, the disabled, and elderly
individuals in long-term nursing home care currently covers about 60 million
Americans. The Affordable Care Act has
expanded
Medicaid coverage further. Beginning 2014, Medicaid will include
people under 65 with income below 133 percent of the federal poverty level (roughly
$15,000 for an individual, $30,000 for a family of four). This was estimated
to cover an additional 17 million Americans as eligible beneficiaries.
In June, however, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that
states could opt out of the Medicaid expansion. A ProPublica analysis estimated
that the 26 states that challenged the health care law, and thus may possibly
opt out, would account for up to 8.5 million of those new beneficiaries.
Romney and Ryan would overhaul this current system by
turning Medicaid into a system of block grants:
the federal government would issue lump sum payments to the states, who would determine
eligibility criteria and benefits for enrollees. These grants would begin in
2013.
Effects on spending
The Congressional Budget Office estimates that Medicaid
expansion under the new health care law would cost an additional $642 billion
over the next 10 years.
Under the Ryan plan, federal Medicaid grants would be adjusted
only for inflation, but not health care costs, which grow at a much higher
rate. The CBO estimates
Ryan’s plan would save the federal government $800 billion over the next 10
years. Another study conducted by Bloomberg News shows that the block-grants
could decrease Medicaid funding by as much as $1.26
trillion over the next nine years.
Actual Impact
The New York Times points
out that more than half of Medicaid spending goes toward the elderly and
disabled. An Urban Institute analysis estimates
the Ryan plan would result in 14 million to 27 million fewer people receiving Medicaid
coverage by 2021.
Though rarely mentioned by any of the candidates, Medicaid
costs are soaring to cover the elderly who require long-term nursing care. As
the Times’ details
how, states saddled by high Medicaid costs have begun turning to private
managed care plans to blunt the cost.
For many years, Bush administration officials have said that the CIA waterboarded only three terror suspects. Despite nearly endless revelations and investigations about the U.S.'s treatment of detainees, there has never been evidence contradicting those claims. But that changed earlier this month.
Human Rights Watch recently released a report detailing the accounts of 14 Libyan men who claim they were detained and, in some cases, subject to harsh interrogations by the U.S. before being transferred back to Libyan prisons, where they also faced abuse.
One man, Mohammed Al-Shoreoiya, provided a detailed account of being waterboarded "many times" while in U.S. custody in an Afghan prison between 2003 and 2004. Another man described a similar form of water torture, conducted without a board.
None of the men's accounts could be confirmed, but as the New York Times noted, the detainees did not seek out Human Rights Watch, and their descriptions of their treatment, including waterboarding, are consistent with CIA procedural documents that have been made public.
The CIA first confirmed waterboarding in February 2008, when then-CIA director Michael Hayden told a Senate committee that "only three detainees" had been waterboarded — Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zabaydah, and Abd Al Rahim al-Nashiri. No one, he said, had been subjected to the process since 2003. That claim has been repeated by former President George W. Bush and top officials from his administration. Former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has also noted that the military did not waterboard.
A spokesman for the CIA told ProPublica that "the Agency has been on the record that there are three substantiated cases in which detainees were subjected to the waterboarding technique under the program."
Here are top Bush administration officials stating, again and again, only three detainees were waterboarded [emphasis added]:
George W. Bush
Of the thousands of terrorists we captured in the years after 9/11, about a hundred were placed into the CIA program. About a third of those were questioned using enhanced techniques. Three were waterboarded.
It is a fact that only detainees of the highest intelligence value were ever subjected to enhanced interrogation. You've heard endlessly about waterboarding. It happened to three terrorists.
-- May 21, 2009: Dick Cheney, in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute.
[Michael Hayden] looked at all the evidence and concluded that a major fraction of the intelligence in our country on al Qaeda came from individuals, the three, only three people who were waterboarded... no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo by the U.S. military. In fact, no one was waterboarded at Guantanamo, period. Three people were waterboarded by the CIA, away from Guantanamo and then later brought to Guantanamo.
Let me make it very clear and to state so officially in front of this committee that waterboarding has been used on only three detainees. It was used on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it was used on Abu Zubaydah, and it was used on Nashiri. The CIA has not used waterboarding for almost five years. We used it against these three high-value detainees because of the circumstances of the time.
–Feb. 5, 2008, in testimony to a Senate committee.
Hayden also reiterated the three-person figures in a memo circulated that month to CIA employees and on Meet the Press that March. He repeated it again in an interview with Newsweek in 2009.
John Yoo, former Justice Department official
Waterboarding we think is torture, but it happened to three people. The scale of magnitude is different....We've done it three times."
Yoo also said three people had been waterboarded in a June 2008 congressional hearing.
Karl Rove, senior adviser to Bush
[Coercive techniques] were used against some thirty hard-core terrorist detainees who had successfully resisted other forms of interrogation. Only three were waterboarded.
The fact is that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding — he was one of three people who were waterboarded — did disclose the name — the nickname actually, which was the name that this courier actually used — in the course of the questioning that took place after enhanced interrogation techniques.
--May 17, 2011, in remarks at the American Enterprise Institute.
Jose Rodriguez Jr., former director of the National Clandestine Service at the CIA
In fact, only three detainees: Mohammed, Zubaydah and one other were ever waterboarded, the last one more than nine years ago.
Rodriguez also mentioned the figure in interviews this spring with Fox News and the New Yorker.
Bill Harlow, who co-authored Rodriguez' book on interrogations, said that Rodriguez stands by his statement. "These procedures were not done without extensive documentation and authorization, as part of an officially approved program, and all the documentation there shows three individuals," Harlow said.
The other officials we've cited did not respond to requests for comment.
President Obama came into office proclaiming a ban on torture, stating that waterboarding was unequivocally a form of torture, and making the infamous "torture memos" public. But the administration has said no one would be prosecuted for waterboarding or other interrogation methods previously sanctioned by the government, and announced last month it would close the last two investigations into CIA abuse.
A Justice Department spokesman would not comment on whether the government ever investigated the Libyan cases. Laura Pitter, the author of the Human Rights Watch report, said that none of the men she interviewed said they had been contacted by U.S. investigators about their detention.
The CIA spokesman said that he could not comment on specific allegations, but that "the Department of Justice has exhaustively reviewed the treatment of more than 100 detainees in the post-9/11 period — including allegations involving unauthorized interrogation techniques — and it declined prosecution in every case."
Medical care has its own code and culture, which often does not put patients first, according to Dr. Marty Makary, a cancer surgeon and researcher at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the School of Public Health. And providers who speak against that code can pay a heavy price.
Makary’s new book, “Unaccountable: What Hospitals Won't Tell You and How Transparency Can Revolutionize Health Care,” explores why patient harm persists in the medical system and what can be done about it.
Dr. Makary: The debates about health care reform frustrated me because our complex system of health care and culture of medicine were reduced to simple sound bites. People pushed the idea that changing the payment system would solve the problems. But I observed every day what I see to be the main driver of health care costs: the massive variation in the quality of care – across the country, within cities, and even within good hospitals.
I saw this variation in quality and the alarmingly high error rates, and it hit me that unless we can be open and honest that up to 30 percent of health care is unnecessary, and that 1 in 4 hospital patients are harmed by a mistake, then we’re just going to be continuing to beat our heads against a wall trying to pay for a broken health care system, instead of fixing it.
PP: What type of problems did you observe?
Dr. Makary: I saw cases where a patient was not told about a minimally invasive way of doing a particular surgery because of physician preference or training, and the doctor would just hope that he wouldn’t find out. If that patient were empowered by talking to the right people, or by doing his own research, he would be able to get superior care. It’s no wonder that about a third of all second opinions about surgery yield different opinions.
Medical mistakes are the fifth- or sixth-most common cause of death in the United States, depending on the measure. But few people look at it that way. That’s because we haven’t been honest about it in the past. And we have hospitals that fire doctors and nurses when they speak up.There was a nurse recently fired in Florida for complaining about a doctor doing unnecessary procedures, a report substantiated by an internal report gotten by The New York Times. A cardiologist in Wisconsin was fired for pointing out that EKGs were misread more than 25 percent of the time. We need to change the culture of medicine.
There is New England Journal of Medicine-level data that suggests that almost half of care is not compliant with the evidence. In my own field of cancer surgery, I have seen patients treated in ways that are not supported with evidence.In the case of radiation treatment for pancreatic cancer, there is evidence from large cooperatives overseas that there is a harm to radiation. Many studies show no evidence of benefit to radiation, and yet patients are routinely offered radiation treatment and have the expectation that it’s going to help them do better. I see PET scans offered routinely – an expensive test – that has never been shown to benefit diagnosing pancreatic cancer.
PP: Why do these problems persist?
Dr. Makary: There’s been a corporatization of health care where we have a system where we tell the hospitals to fill the beds, so the hospital administrators fill the beds. We tell the doctors to do more procedures, so they do more procedures. For patients, we create a nation that more care is better care, and so they demand more care. Everyone is doing their job. The problem is we have good people working in a bad system.
The desire and reflex of docs to offer something to patients, even when there’s not much more else they can offer. There’s a strong financial incentive. Doctor groups pay for new equipment that they purchase on borrowed money.
We are also evaluated by the number of “value units” at the end of each fiscal quarter. Our management will sit down with us and say your work units are down or up and in order for you to receive a large bonus you need to increase the number of operations you do. There is increasing pressure on doctors to see more patients, prescribe more medications and do more procedures. This is something that the public is shocked about when they learned about it.
Medicine was not always this way. When I was growing up we had a great community hospital that had lots of community trust. It was almost a charitable institution. The head of the hospital was the head doctor. Now health care looks different. If you have an issue and want to deal with it, it’s like trying to appeal a cell phone bill. Patient rights are limited, and the doctors themselves get frustrated by the growing divide between management and frontline providers.
We have a system where the frontline providers – doctors, nurses, secretaries, technicians, support staff – are part of a corporate culture. They don’t feel that they own the medical culture. They feel like tenants where the management is their landlord. That translates, in our research, to more mistakes, more overtreatment and more waste. If we’re going to get serious about reducing health care costs and improving patient safety, we need to get serious about replacing workplace culture in modern medicine. At about half of hospitals we’ve surveyed, most of the employees said they would not go to that same hospital for their own care.
PP: Can you point us to any bright spots?
Dr. Makary: In the book I try to balance every shocking story with a positive new trend in health care or an exciting success story. In medicine now we have some organizations that post complication rates online and discuss them. And younger doctors are changing the culture. The new generation comes from a different mindset. They have little tolerance for secrecy and demand transparency.
One doctor I found provides a video of each colonoscopy to the patient, to ensure quality control and to serve as a permanent record. He did research to show recording procedures improves quality by 30 to 40 percent. There’s a campaign at Harvard and a few other hospitals called Open Notes, which makes the notes in health records immediately available for the patient to see and even edit. The Society of Thoracic Surgeons partnered with Consumer Reportsmagazine so patients can look up important metrics of hospital performance.
At Johns Hopkins we have gone through a metamorphosis. We’ve made mistakes in some care that have been tragedies. Based on these experiences, the hospital developed a strong research and practical interest in advancing patient safety. I feel fortunate to have Peter Pronovost as a research partner and an institution like Johns Hopkins, where the leadership has praised my book.
PP: What type of transparency should patients demand from doctors and hospitals?
Dr. Makary: Patients should be able to know all of their treatment options, including active surveillance or watchful waiting as legitimate options, as opposed to treatment, surgery or medication. All of these options should be disclosed to patients to get at the problem of overtreatment and undertreatment.
Patients should know about a mistake as soon as it happens. When I make a medical mistake and quickly disclose it to patients, they appreciate it. I can look back almost every year and think of a CT ordered on the wrong patient, or a lab test misinterpreted, or a delay in diagnosis because of a communication failure with my team. Patients are hungry for real honesty in their medical care.
Patients should have easy access to their medical records, which is not true at many hospitals. Sometimes patients are expected to pay $200 or $300 for their records.
Hospitals should report complication rates in a way that’s risk-adjusted, meaningful and user-friendly to patients. They should report how many of each particular condition they see in a year and readmission rates, infection rates and other simple metrics of performance. Patients don’t have to walk in blind.
PP: What are the biggest barriers to increasing transparency?
Dr. Makary: Complacency and blind trust are the greatest barriers. The complacency is embodied in the traditions of medicine. Medicine has its own culture, values, vocabulary and justice system. Part of that culture is that we only listen to ourselves.There’s a tremendous amount of appropriate respect for tradition and hierarchy, like in the military. But now that the knowledge has expanded, so there are so many services offered by a hospital that you have to ask why care isn’t more coordinated. We’ve had little science behind how to implement good care safety and coordinate care safely. That’s the greatest challenge now in the system, asking the questions of how we can cut the giant costs of health care, which is funding unnecessary overtreatment, medical mistakes.
And the blind trust is the blind trust of the public. It’s not their fault. They have no choice but to walk into an emergency room and get treated by the first doctor on call. But the treatment is too often based on that individual’s practice rather than what’s the best evidence.
The exciting thing is that as organizations provide meaningful information to consumers, patients can do meaningful research and reward places that do well and not seek care at places that don’t perform well and have a closed door culture. The general public’s frustration with the hassles and lack of coordination in health care now have people hungry for common-sense and large-scale reforms. We’re seeing that now with orgs stepping up and addressing quality. Health care costs are not going to reigned by different ways of financing our system, but by making it more transparent so that patients can fix the system. I’m convinced that the government is not going to fix health care. And doctors are not going to fix health care. It’s going to be the patients.
As part of our ongoing reporting, we’ve created a new page where readers and providers can be part of the patient safety conversation, get regular updates and share stories or views.
You’ll find a mix of highlights from ProPublica’s Patient Harm Facebook group, links to some of the best reporting on health care quality, analysis from ProPublica reporters and other journalists, interviews with experts and tools you can use to research health care providers.
We have a few broad goals. One is to help patients stay informed. But another is to create a constructive conversation about why patient harm persists, and what might be done to fix it. Perspectives from providers and patients will be key, and we encourage input from both sides.
We also hope that your participation will better inform the work we do. So on the page you’ll find several ways to engage with us:
A link to our Facebook group, where more than 900 people have joined a lively discussion about patient safety curated by ProPublica reporters Marshall Allen and Olga Pierce.
A questionnaire for patients who’ve suffered harm in a health care setting. We’re gathering these stories to help guide our research (responses are confidential unless the patient says otherwise).
Editor's note: This post, which was first published July 23, 2012, has been updated with new developments.
Voter IDs laws have become a political flashpoint in what's gearing up to be another close election year. Supporters say the laws — which 30 states have now enacted in some form — are needed to combat voter fraud, while critics see them as a tactic to disenfranchise voters.
We've taken a step back to look at the facts behind the laws and break down the issues at the heart of the debate.
So what are these laws?
They are measures intended to ensure that a registered voter is who he says he is and not an impersonator trying to cast a ballot in someone else's name. The laws, most of which have been passed in the last several years, require that registered voters show ID before they're allowed to vote. Exactly what they need to show varies. Some states require a government-issued photo, while in others a current utility bill or bank statement is sufficient.
As a registered voter, I thought I always had to supply some form of ID during an election.
Not quite. Per federal law, first-time voters who registered by mail must present a photo ID or copy of a current bill or bank statement. Some states generally advise voters bring some form of photo ID. But prior to the 2006 election, no state ever required a voter to produce a government-issued photo ID as a condition to voting. Indiana in 2006 became the first state to enact a strict photo ID law, a law that was upheld two years later by the U.S. Supreme Court.
Why are these voter ID laws so strongly opposed?
Voting law opponents contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic. Obtaining photo ID can be costly and burdensome, with even free state ID requiring documents like a birth certificate that can cost up to $25 in some places. According to a study from NYU's Brennan Center, 11 percent of voting-age citizens lack necessary photo ID while many people in rural areas have trouble accessing ID offices. During closing arguments in a recent case over Texas's voter ID law, a lawyer for the state brushed aside these obstacles as the "reality to life of choosing to live in that part of Texas."
Attorney General Eric Holder and others have compared the laws to a poll tax, in which Southern states during the Jim Crow era imposed voting fees, which discouraged the working class and poor, many of whom were minorities, from voting.
Given the sometimes costly steps required to obtain needed documents today, legal scholars argue that photo ID laws create a new "financial barrier to the ballot box."
Just how well-founded are fears of voter fraud?
There have been only a small number of fraud cases resulting in a conviction. A New York Times analysis from 2007 identified 120 cases filed by the Justice Department over five years. These cases, many of which stemmed from mistakenly filled registration forms or misunderstanding over voter eligibility, resulted in 86 convictions.
There are "very few documented cases," said UC-Irvine professor and election law specialist Rick Hasen. "When you do see election fraud, it invariably involves election officials taking steps to change election results or it involves absentee ballots which voter ID laws can't prevent," he said.
An analysis by News21, a national investigative reporting project, identified 10 voter impersonation cases out of 2,068 alleged election fraud cases since 2000 – or one out of every 15 million prospective voters.
One of the most vocal supporters of strict voter ID laws, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, told the Houston Chronicle earlier this month that his office has prosecuted about 50 cases of voter fraud in recent years. "I know for a fact that voter fraud is real, that it must be stopped, and that voter id is one way to prevent cheating at the ballot box and ensure integrity in the electoral system," he told the paper. Abbott's office did not immediately respond to ProPublica's request for comment.
How many voters might be turned away or dissuaded by the laws, and could they really affect the election?
It's not clear.
According to the Brennan Center, about 11 percent of U.S. citizens, or roughly 21 million citizens, don't have government-issued photo ID. This figure doesn't represent all voters likely to vote, just those eligible to vote.
State figures also can be hard to nail down. In Pennsylvania, nearly 760,000 registered voters, or 9.2 percent of the state's 8.2 million voter base, don't own state-issued ID cards, according to an analysis of state records by the Philadelphia Inquirer. State officials, on the other hand, place this number at between 80,000 and 90,000.
In Indiana and Georgia, states with the earliest versions of photo ID laws, about 1,300 provisional votes were discarded in the 2008 general election, later analysis has revealed.
As for the potential effect on the election, one analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog estimates they could decrease voter turnout anywhere between 0.8 and 2.4 percent. It doesn't sound like a very wide margin, but it all depends on the electoral landscape.
"We don't know exactly how much these news laws will affect turnout or skew turnout in favor of Republicans," said Hasen, author of the recently released The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to the Next Election Meltdown. "But there's no question that in a very close election, they could be enough to make a difference in the outcome."
When did voter ID laws get passed — and which states have the strictest ones?
The first such law was passed as early as 2003, but momentum has picked up in recent years. In 2011 alone, legislators in 34 states introduced bills requiring voters show photo ID — 14 of those states already had existing voter ID laws but lawmakers sought to toughen statutes, mainly to require proof of photo identification.
The National Conference of State Legislatures has a helpful breakdown of states' voter ID laws and how they vary.
Indiana, Georgia, Tennessee, Kansas and Pennsylvania have the toughest versions. These states won't allow voters to cast a regular ballot without first showing valid photo ID. Other states with photo ID laws offer some more flexibility by providing voters with several alternatives.
What happens if a voter can't show valid photo ID in these states?
These voters are entitled to a provisional ballot. To ensure their votes count, however, they must produce the mandatory ID within a certain time frame and affirm in person or writing they are the same individual who filled out a temporary ballot on Election Day. The time limits vary: They range anywhere from up to three days after the election (Georgia) to noon the Monday after the election (Indiana).
Are there any exceptions to the photo ID requirement?
Yes. Indigency or religious objections to being photographed. But these exceptions don't automatically grant a voter the ability to cast a regular ballot: In Pennsylvania and Indiana, voters will be given a provisional ballot and must sign an affidavit for their exemption within the given time frame. For a more specific breakdown of all exceptions, see this state-by-state summary.
Why is the Justice Department getting involved in some cases?
Because of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires that states with a history of discrimination receive preclearance before making changes to voting laws. Texas and South Carolina passed strict photo ID laws in 2011 but were refused preclearance by the DOJ, which argued that these laws could suppress turnout among minority voters. Texas went to court seeking judicial preclearance from a federal district court; in August, a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia blocked the law. South Carolina has presented arguments before the same court.
What about challenges to the laws?
On Aug. 15, a Pennsylvania judge shot down an attempt to attempt to block the state’s voter ID law. The plaintiffs appealed. On Sept. 18, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, by a 4-2 vote, vacated the judge’s order and returned the case for further review. The justices asked the trial judge to assess whether voters could obtain state-issued photo ID without difficulty in the short time remaining before the November general election. If the judge could not be convinced voters wouldn’t be disenfranchised, the justices wrote, the law should be temporarily blocked.
As we’ve reported, other judges have also ruled in favor of other states’ voter ID laws. Here’s a rundown of the rulings.
The DOJ is also investigating many of the states’ laws, including Pennsylvania's photo ID law. As first reported by Talking Points Memo, the DOJ's Civil Rights Division sent the state's chief election official a letter Monday afternoon requesting 16 separate items, including the state's complete voter registration list, any documents supporting the governor's prior assurance that "99 percent" of the state's eligible voters already have acceptable photo ID, any papers to prove the state is prepared to provide registered voters with ID cards free of charge upon oath or affirmation, and any studies that inform state officials of the "demographic characteristics" of residents who lack valid voter ID.
The DOJ letter states it needs these documents within 30 days to evaluate the state's compliance with Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which forbids voting practices that discriminate on the basis of race, color, or membership in a language minority group.
Have any states attempted to enact strict voter ID laws but so far been unsuccessful?
Yes. In Wisconsin, two judges have blocked enforcement of the state's photo ID law. The state attorney general has asked the Wisconsin Supreme Court to intervene and reinstate the law before the November election. Meantime, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, New Hampshire and North Carolina have vetoed strict photo ID bills passed by their Republican-led legislatures last year.
Are there other voter ID laws in effect that ask for but don't necessarily require photo ID?
Yes. In these so-called "non-strict photo ID states" — Florida, Louisiana, Michigan, Idaho, South Dakota and Hawaii — individuals are requested to show photo ID but can still vote if they don't have one. Instead, they may be asked to sign affidavits affirming their identity or provide a signature that will be compared with those in registration records.
Why has there been such a recent surge in voter ID legislation around the country?
This report by NYU's Brennan Center for Justice cites primarily big Republican gains in the 2010 midterms which turned voter ID laws into a "major legislative priority." Aside from Rhode Island, all voter ID legislation has been introduced by Republican-majority legislatures.
News21 also has this report on the close affiliation between the bills’ sponsors and the conservative nonprofit group, American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).
Republican figures have championed such laws. For instance, Mike Turzai, majority leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, recently praised the state's legislative accomplishments at a Republican State Committee meeting last month. "Voter ID, which is gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania, done," he said.
A spokesman for Turzai, Steve Miskin, told ProPublica that Turzai was "mischaracterized" by the press. "For the first time in many years, you're going to have a relatively level playing field in the presidential elections" as the result of these new laws," Miskin said. "With all things equal, a Republican presidential nominee in Pennsylvania has a chance."
Correction August 20, 2012: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated “voting law advocates contend these laws disproportionately affect elderly, minority and low-income groups that tend to vote Democratic.” It’s voting law opponents who make that contention.
Correction July 24, 2012: An earlier version of this story said Texas went to federal court to challenge the DOJ’s denial of preclearance. In fact, Texas filed a lawsuit seeking preclearance from the federal district court two months before the DOJ announced its decision. Also, some states require a government-issued photo that does not have to come from the federal government as first detailed.
On a cold, overcast
afternoon in January 2003, two tanker trucks backed up to an injection well
site in a pasture outside Rosharon, Texas. There, under a steel shed, they
began to unload thousands of gallons of wastewater for burial deep beneath the
earth.
The waste – the byproduct of oil and gas drilling –
was described
in regulatory documents as a benign mixture of salt and water. But as the
liquid rushed from the trucks, it released a billowing vapor of far more
volatile materials, including benzene and other flammable hydrocarbons.
The truck engines, left to idle by their drivers, sucked the
fumes from the air, revving into a high-pitched whine. Before anyone could
react, one of the trucks backfired, releasing a spark that ignited the
invisible cloud.
Fifteen-foot-high flames enveloped the steel shed and
tankers. Two workers died, and four were rushed to the hospital with burns over
much of their bodies. A third worker died six weeks later.
What happened that day at Rosharon was the
result of a significant breakdown in the nation’s efforts to regulate the handling
of toxic waste, a ProPublica investigation shows.
The site at Rosharon is what is known as a “Class 2” well. Such
wells are subject to looser rules and less scrutiny than others designed for
hazardous materials. Had the chemicals the workers were disposing of that day
come from a factory or a refinery, it would have been illegal to pour them into
that well. But regulatory concessions won by the energy industry over the last
three decades made it legal to dump similar substances into the Rosharon site –
as long as they came from drilling.
Injection wells have proliferated over the last 60 years, in
large part because they are the cheapest, most expedient way to manage hundreds
of billions of gallons of industrial waste generated in the U.S. each year. Yet
the dangers of injection are well known: In accidents dating back to the 1960s,
toxic materials have bubbled up to the surface or escaped, contaminating aquifers that store supplies of drinking
water.
There
are now more than 150,000 Class 2 wells in 33 states, into which oil and
gas drillers have injected at least 10 trillion gallons of fluid. The numbers have increased rapidly in
recent years, driven by expanding use of hydraulic fracturing to reach
previously inaccessible resources.
ProPublica analyzed records summarizing more than 220,000
well inspections conducted between late 2007 and late 2010, including more than
194,000 for Class 2 wells. We also reviewed federal audits of state oversight
programs, interviewed dozens of experts and explored court documents, case
files, and the evolution of underground disposal law over the past 30 years.
Our examination shows that, amid growing use of Class 2
wells, fundamental safeguards are sometimes being ignored or circumvented. State
and federal regulators often do little to confirm what pollutants go into wells
for drilling waste. They rely heavily on an honor system in which companies are
supposed to report what they are pumping into the earth, whether their wells
are structurally sound, and whether they have violated any rules.
More than 1,000 times in the three-year period examined,
operators pumped waste into Class 2 wells at pressure levels they knew could
fracture rock and lead to leaks. In at least 140 cases, companies injected
waste illegally or without a permit.
In several instances, records show, operators did not meet
requirements to identify old or abandoned wells near injection sites until waste flooded back up to the
surface, or found ways to cheat on tests meant to make sure wells aren’t
leaking.
“The program is basically a paper tiger,” said Mario
Salazar, a former senior technical advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency
who worked with its injection regulation program for 25 years. While wells that
handle hazardous waste from other industries have been held to increasingly
tough standards, Salazar said, Class 2 wells remain a gaping hole in the
system. “There are not enough people to look at how these wells are drilled …
to witness whether what they tell you they will do is in fact what they are
doing.”
Thanks in part to legislative measures and rulemaking dating
back to the late 1970s, material from oil and gas drilling is defined as
nonhazardous, no matter what it contains. Oversight of Class 2 wells is often relegated
to overstretched, understaffed state oil and gas agencies, which have to balance
encouraging energy production with protecting the environment. In some areas,
funding for enforcement has dropped even as drilling activity has surged,
leading to more wells and more waste overseen by fewer inspectors.
“Class 2 wells constitute a serious problem,” said John
Apps, a leading geoscientist and injection expert who works with the U.S.
Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. “The risk to
water? I think it’s high, partially because of the enormous number of these
wells and the fact that they are not regulated with the same degree of
conscientiousness.”
In response to questions about the adequacy of oversight, the
EPA, which holds primary regulatory authority over injection wells, reissued a
statement it supplied to ProPublica for an
earlier article in June.
“Underground
injection has been and continues to be a viable technique for subsurface
storage and disposal of fluids when properly done,” a spokesperson wrote. “EPA
recognizes that more can be done to enhance drinking water safeguards and,
along with states and tribes, will work to improve the efficiency of the
underground injection control program."
Some at the EPA and at the Department of Justice, which prosecutes
environmental crimes, say the system’s blind spots suggest that many more violations
likely go undiscovered – at least until they mushroom into a crisis.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
That’s what happened at Rosharon.
The accident prompted the EPA to examine what else had been
dumped at the site, ultimately exposing
a scheme by a company that was not involved in the explosion, Texas Oil and
Gathering, to pass off deadly chemicals from a petroleum refining plant as
saltwater from drilling.
The switch saved the company substantial fees by allowing it
to dispose of the material in a Class 2 well, instead of a more stringently controlled
well for hazardous waste, federal investigators said.
Texas
Oil and Gathering’s owner and operations manager were convicted of conspiring
to dump illegal waste and violating the Safe Drinking Water Act. Both declined to comment for this article.
Texas officials
acknowledged that they had not looked beyond the paperwork submitted by the
operators using the well. The delivery trucks weren’t inspected; the wastewater
was not sampled.
“Staff had no
reason to believe at the time that such testing was necessary at this
facility,’’ Ramona Nye, a spokeswoman for the Railroad Commission of Texas,
which regulates the oil and gas industry activity in the state, wrote in an
email. “The likelihood of unpermitted material being disposed of is low.’’
William Miller, the EPA’s chief investigator on the case,
points out that the only reason anyone was held accountable for
injection-related violations was because the site blew up.
“If you can get the stuff down the well how is anyone ever
going to know what it was?” said Miller, who retired from the EPA in 2011.
“There is no way to recover it. It’s an easy way to commit a crime and not have
any evidence left of it afterwards.”
States and Industry Resist
Environmental Protections
One reason that Texas Oil and Gathering was able to dump
toxic waste for years without getting caught is that environmental regulations
governing how the oil and gas industry disposes of material underground were
weakened almost as soon as they were written.
A series of injection accidents beginning in the 1960s – involving
pesticide waste in Colorado, dioxins in Beaumont,
Texas, and drilling waste that spread for miles through a drinking water
aquifer in Arkansas – prompted lawmakers to impose tougher rules on
injection wells.
Wells were divided
into classes, depending on the source of the waste they handled. Class 1 wells
for chemical, pharmaceutical and other industrial wastes, along with Class 2
wells for the oil and gas industry, were subjected to tough controls under the Safe
Drinking Water Act of 1974. From the start, the EPA says, oil and gas waste was
treated as less toxic than waste from other industries, but all such material
was seen as dangerous to drinking water.
Companies drilling the wells were required to do geological
modeling to ensure that surrounding rock layers would not allow waste to escape
through fissures or fault lines. They also were required to check for the
presence of other wells that could be a conduit for contamination. The EPA set baseline standards and
mandated periodic inspections for defects. In many cases, states oversaw their
implementation.
The ink had barely dried on the new regulations when the oil
and gas industry – aided by sympathetic state regulators who thought
their existing oversight was sufficient – began arguing that its waste
should be treated differently.
Industry officials lobbied for state oil and gas agencies,
some of which already had rules in place, to oversee Class 2 wells, not federal
or local environmental officials. Some argued state energy regulators had
greater expertise in well construction and regional geology.
In 1980, California Rep. Henry Waxman sponsored a measure that
allowed the EPA to delegate authority to oversee Class 2 injection to state oil
and gas regulators, even if the rules they applied varied from the Safe
Drinking Water Act and federal guidelines.
A few years later, Dick Stamets, New Mexico’s chief oil and
gas regulator at the time, told a crowd of state regulators and industry representatives
that the Waxman amendment was a biblical deliverance from oppressive federal
oversight for the drilling industry.
“The Pharaoh EPA did propose regulations and there was chaos
upon the earth,” Stamets said. “The people groaned and labored, and great was
their suffering until Moses Section 1425 (the Waxman amendment) did lead them
to the Promised Land.”
In the late 1980s, the EPA moved to impose more stringent
measures on injection wells after Congress banned injection of ”hazardous” waste.
The new rules barred underground dumping unless companies could prove the
chemicals weren’t a health threat. To earn permission to inject the waste, companies would have to conduct exhaustive
scientific reviews to dispose of hazardous materials, proving their waste
wouldn’t migrate underground for at least 10,000 years.
The energy industry moved preemptively to shield itself from
these changes, too. The Safe Drinking Water Act prohibited the EPA from
interfering with the economics of the oil and gas industry unless there was an
imminent threat to health or the environment. The industry argued that its waste
was mostly harmless brine and that testing and inspecting hundreds of thousands
of wells for waste that would qualify as “hazardous” would delay drillers or
cost them a fortune.
“It would have been crippling to U.S. oil and gas
production,” said Lee Fuller, vice president of government relations for the
Independent Petroleum Association of America. Fuller was a former staff member for
the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, whose ranking member at the
time, the late Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, led the fight against the hazardous
waste rule. “So yes, the industry was very aggressively seeking some mechanism
to address those consequences.”
Bentsen had won the industry a temporary reprieve in 1980 by
persuading Congress to redefine any substance that resulted from drilling
– or “producing” – an oil or gas well as “non-hazardous,” regardless of
its chemical makeup, pending EPA study. In 1988, the EPA made it permanent,
handing oil and gas companies a landmark
exemption. From then on, benzene
from the fertilizer industry was considered hazardous, threatening health and underground
water supplies; benzene derived from wells for the oil and gas industry was not.
The effect was that the
largest waste stream headed for underground injection, that from the oil and
gas industry, was exempted from one of the most effective parts of environmental
rules governing hazardous waste disposal.
“A blanket exemption without any sense of
what the actual chemistry of these wastewaters is, is very concerning,” said
Briana Mordick, a geologist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Other protections also began
to unravel, widening the gap between Class 1 and Class 2 well regulations. Both
regulators and the industry regularly refer to drilling waste as “salt water”
even though, according to a 2002 EPA internal training document obtained by ProPublica, “on any given day, the injectate
of a Class II-D well has the potential to contain hazardous concentrations of
solvents, acids, and other… hazardous wastes.”
Once the wastes were defined as nonhazardous, there was
little justification for holding Class 2 wells to the same rules as other waste
being injected deep underground.
Today, for example, Class
1 wells for hazardous waste are tested for pressure continuously and are
supposed to be inspected for cracks and leaks every 12 months. Oil and gas
wells – though the goal is to inspect their sites annually – have to be tested
only once every five years.
Injection wells are known to cause earthquakes, so Class 1
wells usually have rigorous seismic and geologic siting requirements. Often, Class
2 wells do not. An EPA staff member might spend an entire year reviewing an
application for a new hazardous waste well. Class 2 wells are often permitted
in bulk, meaning hundreds can be green-lighted in a matter of days.
Where Class 1 hazardous waste is injected, companies have to
inspect a two-mile radius for old wells, making sure contaminants will have no avenue
to shoot back up into drinking water aquifers or to the surface. The minimum
standard for oil and gas companies is to inspect within 400 yards, even though
it is widely believed, according to internal EPA memorandums obtained by
ProPublica, that such a rule is arbitrarily defined, runs against “much
existing evidence” and “may not afford adequate protection” of drinking water.
EPA officials
acknowledge that their Class 1 regulations represent the best practices to keep
water safe and that the risk of a Class 2 well leaking is no different than the
risk of a Class 1 well leaking. The contrast in regulations reflects “varying
legal authorities, not varying levels of confidence,” an agency spokeswoman wrote
in an email, referring to the mandate not to let environmental rules interfere
with the nation’s drilling progress.
State injection regulators counter that much drilling-related
waste is put in the same geologic formations that produce oil and gas, in which
contaminants like benzene naturally occur. The water close to these wells is
often already undrinkable, they say, so lesser protections make sense.
According to the EPA’s most
recent inventory, the number of Class 2 wells is near an all-time high.
Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas and
California use tens of thousands of Class 2 wells to push out oil and gas or dispose
of fracking fluids and “produced” water, as the waste derived from drilling is
called. In North Dakota, injection permits have increased tenfold, with more wells being permitted in one
month – September 2011 –than is typical in an entire year. New Mexico
issued twice as many permits last year as it did in 2007. Ohio injected twice
as much waste in 2011 as it did in 2006 and is evaluating applications for dozens
of new injection sites. largely for waste exported by Pennsylvania and New
York, where such wells are deemed unsafe.
As much as 70 percent of the
waste destined for Class 2 facilities would be considered toxic if it were not
for the loopholes in the law, according to Wilma Subra, a chemist and activist
who sits on the board of STRONGER,
a partnership of oil and gas industry representatives and state regulators
aimed at bolstering state standards.
Recently, Stark
Concerned Citizens, an anti-drilling group, asked Ohio regulators why
radioactive materials such as radium weren’t identified or disclosed when
injected into Class 2 wells.
“The law allows it,”
Tom Tomastik, a geologist with
Ohio’s Department of Natural Resources and a national expert on injection well
regulation,
replied in a Sept. 17 email. “It does not matter what is in it. As long as it
comes from the oil and gas field it can be injected.”
Well Operators Game
Safety Tests
When Carl Weller showed up, shovel in hand, at a Kentucky
farm field dotted with injection wells in June 2007, he was acting on a
tip. Weller, a contracted EPA injection
inspector, was an expert in testing for what regulators call “mechanical
integrity,” using air pressure to check if wells have leaks or cracks.
Such tests are among the only ways to know whether cement
and steel well structures are intact, preventing brine and other chemicals from
reaching drinking water.
Using his shovel, Weller
dug around the top of a well, unearthing the steel tubing near the surface. A
few inches down, he came across an apparatus he had never seen before: A
section of high-pressure tubing ran out of the well bore and connected to a
three-foot-long section of steel pipe, sealed at both ends. The apparatus
appeared designed to divert air pumped into the well into the pipe instead,
making the well test as if it were airtight.
“The only
reason that I know of that that device would be installed would be to perform a
false mechanical integrity test, more than likely because the well itself would
not pass,” Weller testified in 2009 as part of a case against the well’s
operator. The EPA did not make Weller available to comment for this article.
When EPA
inspectors kept digging, they found the buried devices on 10 more wells.
The case
stunned regulators. Weller had been inspecting the site’s injection wells, which
were used to enhance the recovery of oil, for the better part of a decade, certifying
them as safe. After the EPA’s
discoveries, workers at the company that operated the wells, Roseclare Oil, accused its manager, Daniel Lewis, of having conspired
to cheat the tests for much of that time.
In 2009, Lewis
was convicted of a felony charge for gaming the
safety tests on Roseclare’s wells and was sentenced to 3 years probation and a
$5,000 fine. He maintains his innocence, saying the wells were rigged by his
father, who ran the company’s local operations until his death, but said such
practices were typical in Kentucky’s oil and gas industry. “I’d say it’s
pretty common,” said Lewis, whose probation was commuted in 2011. “But it’s not something people go around
talking about either.”
From Lewis’ perspective, injection well operators
sometimes have little choice but to try to fool inspectors. Many wells are
decades old and were drilled before the current regulations were written. Some are
decrepit, their cement aging and cracked. They also can’t be easily – or
cheaply – repaired.
Lewis, who is now a part-owner of Roseclare and continues
to run its operations, said that before wells were due for EPA inspections he
would pretest them himself. If one failed, he’d enter problem-solving mode,
prepping the site for the EPA’s arrival. Two of his employees testified that he
ordered them to fabricate and install the diverters.
“You go and work in it and try to get it to hold and it won’t
hold,” Lewis said of the wells. “What are you going to do? It’s kind of a ‘Don’t
ask, don’t tell.’”
Randy Ream, the Assistant U.S. Attorney for Kentucky’s
Western District who prosecuted the case against Lewis, called his scheme unusually
elaborate but agreed that efforts to get around the rules for injection wells are
common. Sometimes, he said, they result in the contamination of private
drinking water wells.
“We have people who have constructed wells that are not
certified injection wells, or we have people who will put their brine in a tank
and carry it over and put it in somebody else’s well,” Ream said. “One guy, he’s got oil coming out of his
shower head.”
“There is just so much brine,” Ream added, “and you have to
get rid of it.”
So Many Wells, So Few
Inspectors
One obstacle to more effective enforcement in Kentucky and
elsewhere, Ream said, is that regulators cannot always keep up with well tests
and inspections.
According to EPA records, Kentucky has 3,403 Class 2 wells,
which are supposed to be tested for mechanical integrity once every five years.
But since 2007, an average of just 253 wells a year have been tested, less than
half as many as there should have been to remain on schedule.
A spokeswoman for the EPA’s regional office in Atlanta said in
an email that only half of Kentucky’s injection wells are actively used and only
active wells can be tested. She said mechanical integrity tests are performed
on each well every 36 months, but did not address the discrepancy between this
schedule and the number of tests reflected in EPA data.
The EPA employs just six people to check its wells across
the southeast, not just in Kentucky, but in Tennessee and Florida, too. Those
same people are also responsible for working with state inspection programs in
North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, which have their
own inspection staffs.
Most states aim to visit injection sites at least once a
year, and some meet or exceed that schedule, EPA records show. Ohio, for
example, recently added staff dedicated exclusively to injection oversight and visits
its active injection sites every 12 weeks. (Ohio also insists that Class 2
wells meet many of the more stringent testing and permitting regulations it
uses for Class 1 hazardous waste wells.)
“Ohio’s [rules] are based on what we felt we needed to
develop to continue to alleviate any concerns,” said Tomastik, of Ohio’s Department
of Natural Resources. “Obviously without regulatory presence in the field, the
operator is not concerned about operating within the requirements.”
But understaffing seems to be endemic across drilling states,
especially where state regulatory agencies are responsible for checking both
producing oil and gas wells and injection wells for waste or to enhance
production.
In Montana,
EPA auditors noted that inspectors are choosing which wells to inspect and
have a “significant” workload. In
North Dakota, EPA auditors also
noted the pressures of “exponential” growth and an “increasing
workload.”
To meet the goal of inspecting each well annually, Texas inspectors
would have to visit eight wells a day, every day, including Sundays and
Christmas. That’s after Texas’ Railroad Commission hired 65 staffers last year to
help inspect the state’s 428,000 wells.
Nye, the commission’s spokeswoman, said the state had
sufficient funding and inspected each of its commercial disposal wells twice
last year.
“The
Commission has a stringent and comprehensive review process for these wells,”
Nye wrote in an email. “Railroad
Commission staff work diligently to ensure saltwater disposal wells are not and
will not be a problem.”
But inspectors don’t check on private disposal wells, which are
far more numerous, with the same regularity. Nor do they keep a schedule for
when officials should conduct such visits.
Other states are struggling under similar burdens. In
Wyoming, inspectors would also have to check eight wells a day for each well to
be checked once a year – a pace possible if wells are clustered together,
experts said, but otherwise difficult to achieve. In West Virginia and Kansas,
inspectors would have to check seven wells per day.
Visiting injection wells often ranks low among inspectors’ priorities
unless there is an accident or spill, according to a 2007 Texas
auditor’s report. The most urgent responsibility for regulators, beyond
responding to emergencies, is typically overseeing the development of new oil
and gas wells.
The result is that several years can pass between inspections
of many injection well sites. In 2010, state regulators visited less than half of
the Class 2 sites that a federal well inventory shows they were responsible for
monitoring, ProPublica’s analysis showed. EPA inspectors checked on such wells even
less frequently, visiting less than one-quarter of the sites under their
jurisdiction in 2010.
“I don’t give a darn whether you have federal regulations,
or a squeaky clean permitting system,” said Bill Bryson, a member of the Kansas
Geological Survey and the former head of Kansas’ oil and gas commission. “If
you don’t have somebody going out and looking at the wells it doesn’t do any
good, and if you don’t have the right people looking … it doesn’t do any good
either.”
Much of the problem with oversight comes down to money,
critics say. In some states, budgets and staff for oil and gas agencies have
dropped relative to the number of new wells being drilled over the last nine
years.
Kansas employs about the same number of inspectors as it did in 2003, even though it drills four times as many new wells. New drilling has nearly
doubled in Louisiana over the same period, but the state’s enforcement staff has
remained static and its oil and gas budget has increased modestly. In Illinois,
drilling has nearly doubled, while the number of enforcement staff has been
reduced.
Since the Underground Injection Control program is run under
a federal mandate, states rely partly on money from the EPA to fund oversight
and enforcement. Federal dollars make up 20 percent of Texas’ budget, for
example. But in the last 22 years, the EPA’s annual operating budget for
injection has remained about the same: $10 million. Taking inflation into
account, funding has dropped at least 40 percent from 1990 to 2012, though the
regulations for all well classes have only grown more complex.
“The UIC program has been flat funded for years,” said Dan
Jarvis, the field operations manager for Utah’s Division of Oil, Gas and Mining.
“With more manpower, obviously you
put them on the ground and you’re going to have better compliance. Our field
people are some of the greatest guys going, but they are overworked.”
The EPA declined to disclose the operating budget for regional
offices that monitor waste wells under federal jurisdiction or oversee state injection
programs. Documents
show, however, that in 2011 the agency suspended its travel budget for
visits to some of the states that have the largest injection programs,
including Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma.
“Do you think we are doing more now than we were doing 30
years ago? No, there is no money,” said Salazar, the former EPA injection
expert. “There are not enough people to know what is going on. It is the ideal
storm for industry. Less and less people, more and more things that the EPA has
to do.”
Ultimately, much of the responsibility for meeting EPA
standards falls to companies themselves. Some operators routinely exceed the
minimum requirements of injection regulations, says Hughbert Collier, who runs
a Texas environmental engineering firm that consults with injection well
operators. They conduct their own integrity tests every year and make sure
employees visit well sites once a month.
But operators inclined to cut corners have little to hold
them back.
“What most people would be surprised about is that regulators
don’t have real good control over everything that goes on in the regulated
community,” said Miller, the former EPA criminal investigator in Texas. “Most
of our environmental law requires self-reporting and that requires honest
people.”
When violations are identified – such as the 140 times
waste was illegally injected and noted in the regulatory reports – the
consequences can be minimal, and only in rare cases do transgressions rise to
the level of criminal prosecution. In the three years of national data reviewed
by ProPublica, which included more than 24,000 formal notices of violations, only
one case was referred to criminal investigators.
Usually, violations result in citations or informal warnings.
If operators do not address violations, then modest fines may be levied; in
some cases, wells are temporarily shut down. There is no central source of
information on the size of fines, but an audit of Louisiana’s
injection program provides a glimpse: In 2011, the state collected an
average of $158 for each violation.
After three deaths, two federal worker safety investigations
and a criminal prosecution, few injection sites nationwide received as much
regulatory scrutiny as those in Rosharon, Texas. Yet, despite all the attention, the wells
there later failed on the most basic level.
On Feb. 17, 2010, thousands of gallons of waste that had
been deposited into these wells gurgled
to the surface in what the Railroad Commission described as a “breakout.” Materials
injected far below the earth had managed to migrate back up to the surface,
perhaps through an old well missed by regulators.
As of this June, investigators were still analyzing whether
the chemicals injected underneath the site had reached water supplies.
Jesse Nankin
contributed research for this report.
Today, we are updating our Nursing Home Inspect tool to include another 9,570 government inspection reports on nursing homes nationwide, bringing the total to 144,172.
We launched the news app in August to allow users to easily analyze the government’s narrative write-ups of problems in nursing homes, which were recently published online by the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). Unlike the government website, Nursing Home Inspect allows users to search the universe of reports by keyword.
Some of the newly added reports cover nursing home inspections done months ago, but the reports are just now trickling in. Government inspectors rate problems on a scale of A to L, with L being the most severe.
The reports do not contain residents’ names and are redacted to remove specific diagnoses and medications. In this month’s update, CMS eased up a bit on its redaction policy so references to pressure sores, also known as pressure ulcers, will not automatically be removed.
Reporters around the country continue to use Nursing Home Inspect to write stories about local homes. WNBC in New York, for example, focused on a 55-year old Long Island man with dementia who wandered away from a nursing home last year and whose body was found three days later. The government cited the home for serious deficiencies.
And be sure to check out ProPublica's new Patient Safety series page, for regular updates and discussion about patient safety and the quality of healthcare in the U.S.
A former Guatemalan Army lieutenant was extradited Friday from Canada to stand trial in Southern California on federal charges related to the massacre of 250 people in a Guatemalan village in 1982, a case that has resulted in landmark human rights prosecutions in Guatemala and the United States.
U.S. federal officers took custody of Jorge Vinicio Sosa Orantes in Calgary Friday morning and were en route to Los Angeles, U.S. officials said. Sosa, 54, is the highest-ranking officer to have been arrested on charges alleging direct involvement in the massacre by a 20-man unit of elite commandos in the northern Guatemalan farming hamlet of Dos Erres.
In May, ProPublica reported the story of Oscar Alfredo Ramírez Castañeda, who
learned only last year that he was a Dos Erres survivor. He had been abducted by
a commander of the unit and raised by his family.
Sosa, a karate instructor who
holds both U.S. and Canadian citizenship, fled his home in the Los Angeles area
in mid-2010 as agents of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) closed in on
him. He went to Mexico and then to Lethbridge in western
Canada, where he has family, and was arrested in January of last year,
according to U.S. and Canadian court documents. Last month, a Canadian appeals
court ended his legal fight to avoid extradition to the United States.
Because U.S. courts do not
have jurisdiction for the massacre, federal prosecutors indicted Sosa on charges
of lying on immigration forms. He allegedly concealed his military service and
involvement in Dos Erres on the forms when he obtained citizenship in 2008 and
residency 10 years earlier, according to an indictment filed in 2010. The trial
could start in about two months in federal court in Riverside, Calif.
In Dos Erres, Sosa allegedly
oversaw the slaughter of men, women and children who were dumped in a well
during a day-long frenzy of torture, rape and pillage, according to U.S. and
Guatemalan court documents. He allegedly fired his rifle and threw a grenade into
a pile of living and dead victims in the well, according to the testimony in
Guatemalan courts of two former soldiers who are now protected witnesses.
Sosa was a sub-lieutenant at the time,
junior in rank only to three lieutenants in the squad of highly-trained
commando instructors. Sosa denied guilt during a recent telephone interview
with ProPublica from jail in Calgary. He said he was in another village doing a
military public works project on the day of the massacre in December 1982. He
described the charges against him as the product of a conspiracy.
The Dos Erres case was one
of the worst of hundreds of massacres during Guatemala's 30-year civil war,
which ended in 1996 and resulted in more than 200,000 deaths. In "Finding Oscar: Massacre, Memory and Justice in
Guatemala," ProPublica told the story
through the odyssey of Oscar Ramírez Castañeda, now a
33-year-old father of four living in Boston. After a dogged investigation by
Guatemalan prosecutors, Oscar learned last year that his life until that point
had been based on a lie.
DNA tests proved that when
Oscar was age 3 and living in the village, a commando lieutenant spared his
life and abducted him after the unit killed the boy's mother and eight brothers
and sisters. The lieutenant died in an accident months later, but his family
raised Oscar as if he were one of their own. Oscar, an illegal immigrant who
came to the United States in 1998, is now a father of four and works two
full-time jobs.
After he learned that he was
living proof the massacre, Oscar applied for political asylum. A decision is
pending. He met in recent months with a prosecution team from the U.S. Department
of Justice and is prepared to tell his story as a witness against Sosa,
according to his lawyer, R. Scott Greathead.
"Oscar is ready to provide
them with whatever assistance they need," said Greathead. "The Sosa prosecution
is very significant. It represents an important law enforcement effort on the
part of the U.S. government to punish human rights abusers who make false
representations to the U.S. government to get asylum and citizenship."
A key eyewitness will
likely be Santos Lopez Alonzo, a former member of the commando unit. Alonzo
abducted and raised a 5-year-old boy from Dos Erres who, like Oscar, had survived
the attack. Alonzo migrated illegally to Texas, where he was arrested in 2010
for illegal re-entry after deportation and offered to testify against other Dos
Erres suspects, according to court documents. He was sentenced to time served
and is in federal custody as a material witness, according to court documents.
The prosecution's
approach to the Sosa case resembles the investigation of Gilberto Jordan, a
former commando who was tracked down in Florida by ICE agents in 2010. Jordan
confessed his role in the massacre and pleaded guilty to similar immigration
charges. Jordan received the maximum 10-year sentence and is serving time in
federal prison.
U.S. authorities
deported to Guatemala another former commando who was arrested in California. He
became one of five suspects in the case who were convicted by Guatemalan
courts. Seven suspects, including the two senior officers in the unit, remain
at large.
The suspects
were first charged in Guatemala in 2000, but the case remained in limbo because
of legal appeals and political resistance by the powerful armed forces. The hunt
for the killers in Guatemala and the United States
began in earnest in 2010 as the result of a ruling by the Inter-American Court
of Human Rights and the appointment of Attorney General Claudia Paz y Paz, who
has aggressively pursued war crimes and corruption.
Dos Erres is the first massacre of the
civil war to result in convictions in Guatemala. It has become a test of the
capacity of that nation's embattled justice system to confront impunity and
lawlessness. Prosecutors have also charged Gen. Efrain Rios Montt, Guatemala's
former dictator, in the Dos Erres case.
Mortgage
giant Freddie Mac did not keep homeowners trapped in high-interest loans in
order to boost profits on billions of dollars’ worth of complex financial bets
it had made. That’s the conclusion reached in a report released today by the inspector general that
oversees the agency in charge of Freddie Mac.
Last
January, ProPublica and NPR reported that Freddie had dramatically expanded
its holdings of mortgage-backed securities that would profit if homeowners stayed
in their existing high-interest-rate loans. At the same time, the company had
taken steps that made it harder for homeowners to refinance at lower interest
rates. Our report stated that there was no evidence of a coordinated attempt to
bet against homeowners’ ability to refinance. The inspector general’s report concludes
that there was none.
But the
inspector general left a key stone unturned: It did not independently evaluate
the firewall within Freddie Mac designed to keep Freddie’s investment arm from
profiting from insider information about the mortgage giant’s plans to tighten
or loosen homeowners’ access to credit. Instead, the inspector general relied
on the word of employees it interviewed and conducted no further investigation.
It also reported that the agency that oversees Freddie has not tested the
firewall’s integrity.
Freddie Mac
and its sister company Fannie Mae were bailed out by taxpayers after the
financial crisis and are now controlled by the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Freddie
and Fannie guarantee most of the mortgages in the U.S., and they have a mission to make home loans more affordable. But Freddie also has a massive
investment portfolio and has to protect against losses. Sometimes, those two
goals can conflict.
Beginning in
2010, Freddie Mac expanded its portfolio of a particular kind of
mortgage-backed security known as an “inverse floater.” The company offered investors
a relatively safe bond with a floating interest rate. It then kept on its books
what is called an “inverse floater,” which pays out the highest returns if
borrowers stay in their mortgages. When interest rates dropped (as they did
during that period), Freddie Mac stood to profit on its inverse floaters,
because the rates being paid by the pool of borrowers were higher than the
prevailing market rates. Inverse floaters lose that advantage the more that homeowners
in the pool refinance at the lower rates.
The report
says that Freddie’s investment wing increased its holdings in inverse floaters
merely because investors were demanding the floating rate bonds linked to them
— not because of any strategy to exploit homeowners trapped in
high-interest-rate mortgages.
Freddie Mac
has an “information wall” designed
to separate the employees running Freddie Mac’s investment strategy from those designing
and carrying out its policies that impact the mortgage market, such as programs
aimed at helping people refinance or making it more difficult for them to do so.
The inspector general’s report says that it found “no evidence” that the wall
had been breached.
Yet, the
inspector general noted that FHFA has not conducted any independent testing of
Freddie’s information wall. And the inspector general limited its own
investigation of the wall to interviewing Freddie executives and FHFA officials
and reviewing policy documents. The inspector general “did not independently
evaluate the efficacy of Freddie Mac’s information wall policy,” the report
states.
The report emphasizes
that there are indeed “tensions between policies aimed at homeowners
refinancing and Freddie Mac’s retained investments.” But it says that such
tensions are not unique to inverse floaters but are “inherent throughout
[Freddie and Fannie’s] various business lines.”
At the end
of 2011, Freddie held about $5 billion worth of inverse floaters, according to
the report, or less than one percent of its $653 billion investment portfolio.
The report
also notes that the company hedges to balance its interest-rate risk, meaning
that it places many different bets so that no matter whether interest rates
rise or fall, its investments will be close to “net flat” — stay roughly
the same, recording neither large profits nor large losses. Freddie does not
try to balance the risk of each individual investment, but rather hedges “on
its portfolio as a whole.” The report explains:
In the context of inverse floaters, although Freddie Mac may
on the one hand benefit from a trend of low interest rates and reduced
prepayments by homeowners, on the other hand, Freddie Mac’s other investments
may equally suffer from such a trend. Thus, the end result, if perfectly hedged
on interest rates, is that Freddie Mac’s overall position will remain the same
regardless of prepayments.
The
inspector general did not independently evaluate Freddie’s hedging strategies. When
ProPublica and NPR first reported on these deals, it was unclear what kind of
hedging, if any, Freddie Mac had performed.
The company
is also supposed to be reducing its investment portfolio as part of the terms
of its government bailout. In a footnote, the inspector general’s report
mentions that Freddie Mac told the Securities and Exchange Commission that
selling the floating rate securities was a way to reduce its balance sheet. But
most Freddie and FHFA officials interviewed by the inspector general said that
reducing its balance sheet was not
the motivation for Freddie to create inverse floaters, even if that was the
result.
Separately, the
way Freddie structured the inverse floaters leaves Freddie with nearly all of
the risk of the assets that no longer show up on its balance sheet. The reason:
As the guarantor of the mortgages that back the securities, Freddie is already
on the hook if the homeowner defaults. With inverse floaters, it also retains
the risks that homeowners might refinance and that overall interest rates might
rise. Indeed, independent analysts told ProPublica and NPR in January that
Freddie may actually have increased its risk, because inverse floaters are
illiquid and hard to sell.
In its
written response to the inspector general’s report, the FHFA did not address Freddie Mac's
statements to the SEC. When contacted by ProPublica, an FHFA spokesperson
declined to comment.
The report
said that FHFA issued misleading statements to the public on when it ordered
Freddie to stop creating inverse floaters. According to the report, in the
spring of 2011, the FHFA began a review of Freddie Mac’s mortgage securities
operation, in large part to determine whether the company held too many complex
and risky mortgage products, including inverse floaters.
But an
executive at Freddie didn’t suspend inverse floaters and certain other complex
securities deals until January 6, and FHFA didn’t explicitly order Freddie Mac
to stop selling inverse floaters until January 30, 2012, after ProPublica’s story was published. In fact, according to the
report, that day marked “the first time that FHFA’s senior leadership met to
discuss the Agency’s position with respect to inverse floaters.”
By then,
however, Freddie had long since stopped selling floating rate securities —
not because of any order from FHFA but because the market for them dried up in
spring 2011 when Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke indicated that interest
rates would remain low for at least another year.
That’s not
how FHFA described what happened after our story broke. In a statement released in response to ProPublica
and NPR’s reports, the agency said that staff met with Freddie in December 2011
and came to an agreement then to suspend inverse floater trades. The inspector
general’s report concludes that statement was misleading: “prior to January
2012, neither Freddie Mac nor FHFA made a decision to halt Freddie Mac’s
creation and investment in inverse floaters; the market for reciprocal floating
rate bonds simply disappeared. Had the market reappeared and Freddie Mac found
the economics were again profitable, [Freddie] would have been free to
structure floating-rate and inverse floating-rate investments.”
In a response
to the report, the FHFA disputed the inspector general’s reading of the public
statement, saying that it did not claim “that there was a specific,
well-articulated FHFA policy and agreement” in December. The agency also
emphasized that it did not take a position on inverse floaters only in reaction
to media reports. While acknowledging that “the key stakeholders” had met
together for the first time on January 30th, the day ProPublica and
NPR released their original stories, the FHFA emphasizes that it had been in
communication with Freddie on inverse floaters over the previous year.
The inspector general’s report was requested by Senator Robert Menendez,
D-NJ, last
January, after our story brought the issue to light.
Outside groups are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to influence the coming elections—money that has long been hard to track.
This summer, the Federal Communications Commission ordered TV stations to pull back the curtain a bit, requiring them to publish online detailed records of political ad buys. Before, these records were only available by visiting stations in person, an issue ProPublica spotlighted in our Free The Files coverage. So far the new rule only covers the top 50 markets, and it's impossible to search these files by candidate or political group—meaning it’s impossible to get a full picture of the spending.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.We want to change that.
Today, we’re rebooting Free the Files with a new tool to help detail campaign ad filings in 33 swing markets. Every day, we’ll be pulling fresh files from the FCC website, and asking for your help extracting key data points that will help uncover outside spending in the final days of the campaign.
Every file you help free will be added to our page, so we’ll all be able to get a better picture of the outside groups’ spending.
What do we expect to find in the FCC filings? A range of information – from identifying which outside groups are buying ads and where, to finding new groups that enter the fray late in the game, to details on who is behind opaque nonprofits that are playing a larger role in the election. That’s how ProPublica’s Justin Elliott found the players behind the Government Integrity Fund, a little-known nonprofit that has spent big money to unseat Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio.
GET STARTED: FREE THE FILES
We have less than six weeks to go before the election. Log in now to help us start freeing the files!
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You can keep track of our progress by joining our Facebook group – tell us what you’ve learned from the documents, get updates from our reporters, or ask questions about the documents.
Free the Files is a new ProPublica news application tracking political ad filings from television stations in swing markets. Our goal is to increase transparency around these filings by sorting and annotating them with key data, making it easier to identify the groups buying these political ads.
What are the files and where do they come from?
Television stations are required to maintain a “political file” of political ads requests and contracts. The files in our database are from the four major television affiliates (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX) in 33 swing markets. The files marked "contract" represent orders for ads. In some cases -- for example if an ad is preempted because of a change in programming -- not all of the ads ordered on a contract will actually air.
How do I free a file?
Look for the green “free a file” button or click here to retrieve a random document. You can also retrieve a document from our list of swing markets by clicking the market name and then launching the green “free a file” button.
These documents are complicated. What am I looking for?
We are looking for four key pieces of information:
1. Who bought the ad: This will usually be a candidate, political committee or issue group, and is usually labeled as “advertiser.”
2. The advertising agency placing the ad: Not to be confused with “advertiser,” this is the agency placing the ad request on behalf of the candidate or group purchasing the ad. This usually appears as “agency name.”
3. The contract ID: This is usually labeled “contract #” or “order #.”
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.4. The amount of the buy: There can be several dollar amounts listed. We are looking for the gross total amount per individual order, sometimes labeled “report total.”
Finally, if there is something else you find particularly interesting about the document – the name of a group you’ve never heard before, the television programming requested, or any unusual notes about the order – please flag the file and note your find.
What if I find a document that isn’t an ad buy?
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.We are only looking for ad contracts – not invoices, order changes, agreement forms or other secondary documents. Look for the red buttons to help us sort extraneous documents. If the document is labeled “invoice” instead of “contract,” please tag the document as an invoice. If it is unclear what the document is, tag it as unreadable.
What if there are multiple contracts in a single file?
We've created a new button for classifying documents with multiple contracts -- please choose the red button labeled "there are multiple contracts in this filing" to skip that document. We will separate those files and refile them for review.
What do I do if I can't read the document or its incomplete?
Please choose the red button labeled "this is unreadable or not an ad order" to skip that document.
When is a file officially freed?
Multiple users must submit concurring data in order for it to show up as a freed file and be included in our swing market logs.
I logged in through Facebook. Does this mean everyone can see my Facebook profile?
If you log in through Facebook, we feature your name and avatar in our leaderboard. But we do not include links to your Facebook profile or automatically publish to your wall. However, we encourage bragging in the name of transparency and do hope you’ll help us spread the word on Facebook and Twitter.
How can I find documents not included in Free the Files database?
The Free the Files app includes annotated files from 33 swing markets, but you can search documents from all 50 markets by going here. We update this document list each day with new files published by the FCC.
However, any files outside of the top 50 television markets are not available online from the FCC. To view those documents, you will have to visit your local television station and ask for “the public file.” This file will also include a “political file” of requests for air time by candidates or political groups, as well as any ad buys made. Most stations will provide a copy of these documents for free, but some may charge a fee per page to print them. The nonprofit Free Press has compiled a helpful checklist to help you prepare your visit.
Do you have any other questions? We would love your feedback. Send us a Tweet with #FreeTheFiles or leave a comment below to tell us what you think.
As Nov. 6 approaches, the efforts of True the Vote, a Texas anti-voter
fraud group recently profiled
by the New York Times, are gaining national attention.
Despite scant evidence
of voter fraud, the group is laser-focused on weeding it out. It has pushed
for voter-ID laws, voter roll purges and other controversial voting-related
measures in a host of states. (Here is our guide
to the voter ID controversy, where we note that evidence on both sides of the
issue is lacking.)
True the Vote also has promised to deliver 1 million
volunteer poll watchers on Election Day, though its resources appear to be quite
modest.
Given its annual summits featuring conservative speakers
and its hand in spurring voter integrity projects
around the country, we thought we’d take a closer look at this activist group.
The basics
True the Vote is a grassroots initiative spun out of a
Houston, Texas-based Tea Party organization called King Street Patriots. Its
focus is on training volunteers to serve as poll watchers on Election Day and inspecting
voter registration rolls for hints of inconsistency to flag
to elections officials.
The group believes
that citizen vigilance is necessary to protect elections from corruption and
fraud.
Its leader, Catherine Engelbrecht, a former poll worker and
suburban Texas mom, has repeatedly emphasized
the group’s nonpartisanship. “This has absolutely nothing to do with race or
creed or color or party or politics, it’s about principle,” Engelbrecht
said earlier this year in an
interview to NRA News, a channel of the National Rifle Association.
True the Vote did not respond to ProPublica’s request for
comment about these allegations.
Last year, True the Vote and King Street Patriots
jointly released a blueprint
for legislation to change voter registration rules. The guide’s recommendations
included requiring photo ID to vote, increasing penalties for forged or
otherwise fraudulent voter registration applications, prohibiting same-day
voter registration, allowing recording devices inside polling precincts and
designating English as the “official language of Texas and the only language
used on ballots.”
What about funding?
So far, there hasn’t been much. According to True the Vote’s
tax
forms, the group raised $65,000 in 2010 and $137,000 in 2011.
According to the Times, True the Vote had to return
the donation because it was given on the condition that the group’s application
for tax-exempt status was approved by the
IRS, which has not happened yet. We’ve asked True the Vote about this donation
and it didn’t respond to a request for comment.
It’s really
going to have 1 million volunteers on Election Day?
That is the goal,
says Engelbrecht, the organization’s chief: To “train, mobilize, and merge a
million new election workers into the 2012 process,” according to remarks she made
last August during a panel hosted by the conservative group Judicial Watch.
But it’s unclear how many volunteers True the Vote
actually has.
While True the Vote initially focused on Harris
County, Texas – the nation’s third-largest voting district – they say
they’ve since expanded into 35 states.
Michael Power, a True the Vote volunteer in Alabama contacted
by ProPublica from a Tea Party Patriots group web
page, said that his work involves looking out for “voters who are
registered at non-residential properties, vacant lots, those types of things,”
or reporting fellow poll workers “who might be improperly influencing a
person’s ballot.”
According to Power, voter rolls are purchased from the
state, but also from “various companies that assemble records from the state,”
a strategy outlined here in this profile
by ColorLines Magazine.
In interviews, Engelbrecht often discusses
her observations as a poll worker during the 2008 election as her “Eureka”
moment. In that year, ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for
Reform Now, became caught up in a controversy
over collecting phony voter registration applications.
In recent months, True the Vote has taken up the mantle of Section 8 of the
National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which requires states to maintain their
voter registration rolls by removing the deceased, convicted felons or
otherwise ineligible voters from their lists. (In February, a Pew Center on the
States report
found that 1.8 million dead people are still included on voter rolls while 2.75
million people are registered in more than one state.)
True the Vote has sent letters to 160 counties around the
country alleging they have failed to update their voter rolls, according to “Bullies
at the Ballot Box,” a report by liberal groups Common Cause and Demos that is
critical of True the Vote’s methods.
Through its attorneys, True the Vote has demanded
a correction and retraction of the report, which it says contains “misleading
information” and “false and defamatory statements.”
Partnerships
True the Vote has helped get out its name by partnering with
larger, more prominent organizations. It has co-sponsored
events with Americans for Prosperity, the conservative group backed by the billionaire
Koch brothers and collaborated with other nonprofits such as Tea Party Patriots in places from Colorado
to Alabama
to host “Election Integrity” fundraisers and recruitment events.
Its mission also strongly resembles that of Republican-led
political action committee Madison
Project’s Code
Red USA, which works on “participating in election integrity efforts,
and/or participating in cross community engagement.”
Engelbrecht told
the New York Times that her group has no connection to Code Red USA.
Connections to the Tea
Party King Street Patriots
True the Vote is often referred to as an offshoot
of King Street Patriots. The two share leadership: Catherine Engelbrecht, her
husband, Bryan Engelbrecht, and a person named Dianne Josephs are all listed as
directors on both groups’ tax forms. But a True the Vote spokesman told us that
despite these connections, the group keeps separate accounting structures and staff
from King Street Patriots.
That is relevant because True the
Vote is seeking tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, which is for charitable
or educational organizations that can only engage in a limited amount of
lobbying and can’t support or oppose candidates for elected office.
King Street Patriots, by contrast, is a 501(c)(4)
social welfare group, meaning it can engage in an unlimited amount of political
lobbying, as long as that is not its primary purpose (the definition of which
is extremely murky, as ProPublica’s recent investigation
into dark money groups detailed).
While it’s common for c4 groups to have separate charitable
arms—The Sierra Club and National Rifle Association are examples of this—they
must keep their financial accounting separate, said Lloyd Mayer, a law
professor specializing in nonprofits and election law at Notre Dame Law School.
“It can even share a name, but it has to have its own money.
That’s the key thing,” Mayer said.
According to a tax
filing King Street Patriots provided to ProPublica, the group received $140,722
in donations in 2010. It’s received an extension on its 2011 tax filing.
‘Verify the Recall’
Earlier this year, thousands of True the Vote volunteers got
involved in the Wisconsin
recall election through an initiative, “Verify
the Recall,” that sought to identify
illegitimate signatures on a petition to remove Republican Gov. Scott Walker
from office.
Using its own methodology,
True the Vote concluded that more than 63,000 signatures were ineligible.
It also identified 2,590 names that were “potentially
false” based on a predetermined list of names the group believed would be
used fraudulently on the petition. Organizers declined to share this list with
state officials.
The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, a
non-partisan state regulatory agency consisting of six former state judge
appointees, later discounted
much of the group’s findings and methodology, concluding they were
“significantly less accurate, complete, and reliable than the review and
analysis completed by the G.A.B.” and that they “would not have survived legal
challenge.”
True the Vote’s Lawsuits
Earlier this year, True the Vote teamed up with Judicial
Watch to sue elections officials in Ohio
and Indiana
for their alleged failure to clean up their voter rolls.
In June, the group filed a motion
for intervention in a lawsuit
brought by the Department of Justice to halt the Florida voter
purge. Should the purge stop, the group argued, “registered voter members
may have their votes cancelled out or diluted by unlawful ballots cast in the
names of unlawfully present aliens.”
Florida elections officials originally identified
up to 2,600 non-citizens registered to vote in the state. But it turns out the
number was actually a lot smaller.
Recently, the state reached a partial
agreement with voting rights groups, agreeing to notify these flagged
voters that they’ll remain eligible to vote in November.
2010 election
controversy
In 2010, the Department of Justice launched
a probe of alleged voter
intimidation efforts by True the Vote poll watchers during the midterm
elections in districts near Houston.
That year, a national voter hotline received
more than 200 calls alleging voter intimidation – as well as other
election snafus – from several states, Texas included. It’s unclear to
what extent True the Vote was responsible for those complaints.
The Justice Department investigation didn’t proceed any
further. True the Vote didn’t respond to our questions about the episode.
Dark money
groups flooded Albuquerque’s airwaves in August, aiming to sway a hotly
contested U.S. Senate race by making more than half the political ad buys on top
TV stations.
That fact, gleaned through a review of TV station
political ad records now available in our Free the Files news application, highlights the role
that unlimited anonymous money is playing in this year’s election.
Our analysis of a month of ad orders in the Senate race
between Republican Heather Wilson and Democrat Rep. Martin Heinrich is possible
because of a new Federal Communications Commission rule requiring major-market affiliates
of ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC to upload political ad files to a government website.
In statements to ProPublica,
the campaigns of Heinrich and Wilson blamed each other for relying on dark
money.
Wilson campaign spokesman Chris Sanchez accused “environmental
extremists” of pouring money “into New Mexico to falsely attack Heather Wilson
because they know her opponent, Congressman Heinrich, supports their radical
agenda.”
Heinrich campaign spokeswoman Whitney Potter accused
“corporate special interest groups” of spending millions in
secret money to support Wilson “because they know she will support their
misplaced priorities that put the wealthy special interests ahead of
middle-class families in New Mexico.”
The Senate race has attracted national attention because,
with incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman retiring, it is a rare open seat. The
race was considered tight earlier this year. After a summer of heavy spending by
outside groups on both sides, Heinrich is now the favorite.
In August, while Wilson’s campaign contracted to spend about
$512,000 on ads in Albuquerque, four prominent conservative groups booked
almost $658,000 of ads attacking Heinrich, station records show.
That means about 56 percent of the ad orders on the
Republican side came from groups that don’t disclose their donors, including
Americans for Prosperity, founded by billionaire brothers David and Charles
Koch, and Crossroads GPS, launched by GOP strategist Karl Rove. Campaigns are
required to report their donors.
Heinrich, who as a congressman has called for donor
disclosure and campaign-finance reform, booked an estimated $246,000 worth of
ads in August. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which also reports
its donors, chimed in with another $74,000.
But nonprofits on the Democratic side spent an additional $288,000
on ads criticizing Wilson, about 47 percent of the money spent on ads overall.
The liberal dark money groups included a coalition of environmental
organizations and the Citizens for Strength and Security Fund, which appears to
be a successor to a nonprofit active in the 2010 election.
The spending figures are estimates because most of the
files uploaded to the FCC website are ad orders. Sometimes, ordered ads never
run because of changes in programming. The numbers also are not comprehensive; other TV stations in
the Albuquerque market besides affiliates of the major networks do not have to put
political ad files online until 2014.
While the FCC files have long been public, they were previously
kept on paper at TV stations and were largely inaccessible. The files capture
certain spending not reported to the Federal Election Commission and offer a
detailed look at how campaigns and outside groups are spending ad dollars,
including how many ads have been ordered, which stations are running them, the
programs they run on, and how much they cost.
The ad spending in Albuquerque shows that nonprofit social
welfare groups are playing at least as significant a role this election cycle as
super PACs, which can also accept unlimited donations but must report their
donors. Not a single super PAC reported buying ads in August on the top
stations in the Albuquerque market, the FCC filings show.
Some of the most prominent conservative social welfare nonprofits
signed up to support Wilson, producing ads labeling Heinrich an out-of-control
spender.
“Big Washington spending
is not helping New Mexico. And the more money Martin Heinrich is spending is
part of the problem,” a narrator in a Crossroads GPS ad says. Pointing to Heinrich’s
support for the stimulus, the ad claims he voted to send $2 million to
California to collect ants and $300,000 to Texas to study weather on Venus.
The group ordered about $166,000 in ads in Albuquerque in
August, TV station filings show.
Unlike most candidates Crossroads is helping around the
country, Wilson has a direct connection to the group. After she left Congress
in 2009, she sat on Crossroads’ board for a six-month period
ending in February 2011, according to her financial disclosure form.
In that role, “she attended
board meetings, wrote an op-ed on defense policy, and provided general
guidance, as all Crossroads board members do, on the organization’s activities
and policies,” said Crossroads spokesman Jonathan Collegio.
Sanchez said Wilson does
not currently have an “existing relationship or communication with Crossroads
GPS.” Outside spending groups such as Crossroads are not allowed to coordinate directly
with candidates.
Like the Crossroads ad,
another pair of August ads funded by anonymous money labeled Heinrich an
irresponsible spender. The American Future Fund, the conservative Iowa
nonprofit, signed up to spend almost $97,000 on ads. Americans for
Prosperity ordered almost $328,000 in ads in August.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the only trade association
spending money in Albuquerque in August, spent more than $67,000 on ads
criticizing Heinrich.
Heinrich’s campaign has seized on the outside money on the
conservative side even as he has benefited from dark money spending by liberal
groups.
Last week, his campaign put out an ad featuring TVs playing conservative
attack ads arriving at an airport luggage carousel. “Here they come,” the
narrator says. “The special interests are here to distort Martin Heinrich’s
record.”
Heinrich has also
supported a bill, which has failed twice
in Congress, to require outside spending groups to disclose their donors for
political ads. In March, he sent a letter to the FCC urging it to
swiftly implement greater transparency measures in disclosing who paid for
political ads.
Nonetheless, a coalition
of environmental groups including the League of Conservation Voters and the National
Wildlife Federation Action Fund, has spent more than $1 million supporting
Heinrich, including an ad accusing Wilson of being
too cozy with polluting corporations.
In August, the coalition put
in orders for more than $70,000 for TV ads in Albuquerque. (Most of the
environmental groups’ spending took place earlier in the summer, before the FCC
required TV stations to put political ad files online.)
On Tuesday an official
from the League of Conservation Voters sent out a press release claiming the groups’
spending had decisively turned the race in Heinrich’s favor.
Another group, the
Citizens for Strength and Security Fund, ordered about $218,000 in commercials
to aid Heinrich in Albuquerque in August. Its ad says that Wilson is “promising
more tax giveaways for millionaires”:
So what is the Citizens for Strength and Security Fund? Its
website says it is a social welfare nonprofit formed in
2011 to strengthen the country and make the middle class more secure. Yet the
site uses the same clip art, cites the same issues, and repeats much of the
language as a now-defunct website for a similarly named group, the Citizens for
Strength and Security Action Fund, or CSS Action Fund, that spent millions on
ads supporting Democrats in the 2010 election.
A ProPublica story in
August
detailed how some social welfare nonprofits pop up for elections and disappear,
only to re-form later, always staying a step ahead of the IRS. ProPublica found
that some groups, including the CSS Action Fund, never applied to the IRS for
recognition of their nonprofit status.
A March 2 letter in the
FCC filings from Albuquerque says the Citizens for Strength and Security Fund
is run by Lora Haggard, the chief financial officer for John Edwards’ campaign
in 2008. The other officer named is Jeremy Van Ess, another longtime operative
who works for Hilltop Public Solutions, a Beltway consulting
firm that supports Democratic causes. The two people listed as running the CSS
Action Fund (the earlier nonprofit) worked for Hilltop.
Haggard didn’t return
calls for comment. Van Ess confirmed the group’s spending in New Mexico and
said it had not applied to the IRS for recognition of its tax status because it
was not required to do so. He declined to answer any other questions about Citizens
for Strength and Security.
With less than 40 days until the election, ProPublica has rebooted its Free the Files project in an effort to uncover who’s behind the hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on political TV ad buys, specifically in 33 swing markets across the U.S.
ProPublica senior engagement editor Amanda Zamora and reporter Justin Elliott join us on the podcast this week to explain how the app works, why we embarked on what has been called one of ProPublica’s “biggest and most advanced crowdsourced efforts ever done,” and how you can help us identify the outside groups influencing campaign 2012.
You can read more about the Free the Files project here, and help us unlock political ad spending on our rebooted (and quite addictive) news app. You can also listen to this podcast on iTunes and Stitcher.
The Bureau of Land Management faced a crisis this spring.
The agency protects and manages herds of wild horses that still roam the American West, rounding up thousands of them each year to keep populations stable.
But by March, government pens and pastures were nearly full. Efforts to find new storage space had fallen flat. So had most attempts to persuade members of the public to adopt horses. Without a way to relieve the pressure, the agency faced a gridlock that would invite lawsuits and potentially cause long-term damage to the range.
So the BLM did something it has done increasingly over the last few years. It turned to a little-known Colorado livestock hauler named Tom Davis who was willing to buy hundreds of horses at a time, sight unseen, for $10 a head.
The BLM has sold Davis at least 1,700 wild horses and burros since 2009, agency records show -- 70 percent of the animals purchased through its sale program.
Like all buyers, Davis signs contracts promising that animals bought from the program will not be slaughtered and insists he finds them good homes.
But Davis is a longtime advocate of horse slaughter. By his own account, he has ducked Colorado law to move animals across state lines and will not say where they end up. He continues to buy wild horses for slaughter from Indian reservations, which are not protected by the same laws. And since 2010, he has been seeking investors for a slaughterhouse of his own.
"Hell, some of the finest meat you will ever eat is a fat yearling colt," he said. "What is wrong with taking all those BLM horses they got all fat and shiny and setting up a kill plant?"
Animal welfare advocates fear that horses bought by Davis are being sent to the killing floor.
“The BLM says it protects wild horses,” said Laura Leigh, founder of the Nevada-based advocacy group Wild Horse Education, “but when they are selling to a guy like this you have to wonder.”
BLM officials say they carefully screen buyers and are adamant that no wild horses ever go to slaughter.
“We don’t feel compelled to sell to anybody we don’t feel good about,” agency spokesman Tom Gorey said. “We want the horses to be protected.”
Sally Spencer, who runs the wild horse sales program, said the agency has had no indication of problems with Davis and it would be unfair for the BLM to look more closely at him based on the volume of his purchases.
"It is no good to just stir up rumors,” she said. “We have never heard of him not being able to find homes. So people are innocent until proven guilty in the United States."
Some BLM employees say privately that wild horse program officials may not want to look too closely at Davis. The agency has more wild horses than it knows what to do with, they say, and Davis has become a relief valve for a federal program plagued by conflict and cost over-runs.
"They are under a lot of pressure in Washington to make numbers,” said a BLM corral manager who did not want his name used because he feared retribution from the agency’s national office. “Maybe that is what this is about. They probably don't want to look too careful at this guy."
******
Wild horses embody the mythic West: Painted Indian war ponies and the cavalry mounts that chased them, pony express runners and the tough partners of cowboys.
At the turn of the 20th Century, they numbered in the millions, but most were rounded up, slaughtered, and used for pet food or fertilizer, until by 1970, there were only 17,000 left.
In 1971, Congress stepped in to save the remaining herds, passing a law that declared wild horses “living symbols of the historic and pioneer spirit of the West” and made it a crime for anyone to harass or kill wild horses on most federal land. The law tasked the departments of Interior and Agriculture with protecting the animals still roaming the range.
In a sense, the Bureau of Land Management -- the part of the Interior Department assigned to oversee the wild horse program -- succeeded in this a bit too well. Protected horses naturally began to reproduce and by 1983 there were an estimated 65,000 horses and burros on the range, competing for resources with cattle and native wildlife.
In the name of maintaining a sustainable balance, the BLM began removing horses from the wild. It now rounds up about 9,400 horses a year, which has kept the wild population at around 35,000.
The captured horses are put up for adoption. Almost anyone can have one for as little as $125 as long as they sign a contract promising not to sell it to slaughter.
Adoptions kept pace with round ups until investigations in the late 1980s and 1990s showed that many adopters, including several BLM employees, had turned a quick profit by selling the horses to slaughterhouses. To discourage such re-sales, the BLM began holding the title of sale for a year. Today the agency says it visits almost every adopter for a “compliance check” within six months to make sure horses are well cared for.
The restrictions protected horses, but discouraged adoptions, a trend compounded more recently by a bad economy and soaring hay prices.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Today, only one in three captured horses finds a home. The rest go into a warren of tax payer-funded corrals, feed lots and pastures collectively known as “the holding system.” Since horses often live 20 years after being captured, the holding population has grown steadily for decades from 1,600 in 1989 to more than 47,000. There are now more wild horses living in captivity than in the wild.
For decades, government auditors and wild horse welfare advocates have warned that the policy of capturing and storing horses is unsustainable and have pushed for the BLM to use fertility controls, introduce predators or expand wild horse territories, but the agency has made little progress toward these goals. In the first half of this year, for example, it treated fewer than half as many wild horses with a birth control drug than was planned.
"I think they are caught in an old way of doing things,” said John Turner, an endocrinologist at University of Toledo who specializes in wild horse fertility control. “Once they round up the horses, I don't think they like to treat and release. They would rather remove them."
Driven by the cost of caring for unwanted wild horses, the annual price tag of the program has ballooned from $16 million in 1989 to $76 million today.
Cost pressures prompted Congress to pass a last-minute rider to a 2004 law directing the BLM to sell thousands of old or unadoptable wild horses for $10 a head without restrictions -- even for slaughter -- but the agency has not done so, fearing public outrage.
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Instead, since then, the BLM has been selling horses, but requiring buyers to sign contracts saying they will “not knowingly sell or transfer ownership of any listed wild horse and or burro to any person or organization with an intention to resell, trade, or give away the animal for processing into commercial products." Violating the agreement is a felony, but there are no compliance checks similar to those done when horses are adopted.
Even when priced at less than a few bales of hay, these horses had little appeal: Sales dropped from 1,468 in 2005 to 351 in 2008.
To explore other options for reducing the number of horses in holding, top BLM officials gathered for weekly closed-door meetings from July to October 2008. According to meeting minutes obtained by the Conquistador Equine Rescue & Advocacy Program, they considered selling thousands of animals for slaughter and even large-scale euthanasia, but concluded such actions would enrage animal-welfare activists to the point they might "threaten the safety of our facilities and our employees."
No clear plan emerged.
As the wild horse program’s situation grew increasingly dire, a new option came knocking: Tom Davis.
******
Davis, 64, a plain-spoken man with a sun-beaten brow, makes his living hauling livestock, but says reselling wild horses now accounts for a substantial part of his income.
By his own account, he has worked around horses all his life -- on racetracks, on ranches, and even rounding up wild horses for slaughter before the 1971 law put a stop to the practice.
For most of that time, he has lived in the tiny town of La Jara, in Colorado’s mountain-ringed San Luis Valley, just down the road from Ken Salazar, the former U.S. Senator who now heads the Department of the Interior.
“When my dad was alive we farmed their land,” Davis said of the Salazar family. “I like them. I do business with them. I do quite a bit of trucking for Ken.”
(Salazar did not respond to repeated interview requests for this story.)
On a warm morning in May, Davis gave a rambling two-hour interview on the 13-acre spread of corrals and truck lots where he lives.
Leaning against the fence of a muddy corral where a half dozen horses nibbled hay, wearing dusty overalls, Davis gave a simple reason for becoming the BLM’s main buyer.
"I love wild horses to death,” he said. “It's like an addiction. For some it's drugs, for me it's horses."
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Tom Davis at his corrals in La Jara, Colo. (Dave Philipps)
According to BLM records, Davis first contacted the program in January 2008. Documents obtained from the agency show he filled out the application to become a buyer over the phone, aided by Spencer, the BLM’s sales director, who wrote in his answers to questions on the form. (A BLM spokesman said in an email that agency employees often did this in the program’s early days, but no longer do.)
Under a question concerning Davis’ intended use of the animals, Spencer wrote “use for movies.” He later told other BLM employees he sold the horses to Mexican movie companies to use on film shoots.
Under a question about what type of horses Davis preferred, the application noted he would take males or females, so long as they were big.
At the bottom of the application, Spencer wrote that she and Davis had “Discussed goal of providing a good home and making sure none of the horses end up at slaughter plants.” A few weeks later, the BLM sent Davis 36 wild horses from its Cañon City, Colo., holding corral.
That was the only load the BLM sent Davis in 2008, records show. But in 2009 -- a few months after the meetings about the holding crisis and two weeks after Salazar became head of the Interior Department -- the agency started sending him truckload after truckload, from all over the West. Soon he was by far their biggest customer.
Davis bought 560 horses in 2009, another 332 animals in 2010, 599 more in 2011, and 239 in the first four months of 2012, agency records show. While most BLM buyers purchase one or two horses at a time, Davis averages 35 per purchase and has bought up to 240 at a time.
The animals came from the mountains of California and Wyoming, the mesas of Colorado and Utah, and the deserts of Nevada and Oregon. Many had lived for decades in the wild: Mature band stallions and resilient mares of every color descended from the first American horses.
Davis has paid the BLM a total of $17,630 for the animals, far less than BLM has expended to provide them – the agency estimates it costs $1,000 to roundup a wild horse and records show it has paid as much as $5,000 per truckload to ship them to Davis. Similar horses that are not acquired from the BLM and can legally be sold for slaughter fetch $300,000 to $600,000 on the open market, according to sales prices from regional livestock auctions.
Some BLM corral managers said in interviews they felt uneasy shipping so many horses to a single buyer, and one they knew so little about, but said such decisions weren’t up to them.
"That all happens in Washington," one said, echoing the comments of many. "We are just peons. We do what we are told."
Davis said BLM employees occasionally asked where his horses ended up, but said he tells them it’s “none of your damn business.”
"They never question me too hard. It makes 'em look good if they're movin' these horses, see?" he said. "Every horse I take from them saves them a lot of money. I’m doing them a favor. I’m doing the American people a favor."
******
So what happened to the wild horses Davis purchased from the BLM?
The agency can’t say for sure. It does not hold onto the titles of wild horses acquired through its sale program as it does with horses that are adopted. Officials also have no process for following up to make sure buyers use animals as they claim they will in applications.
In the interview at the ranch, Davis said he had found most of the mustangs “good homes” on properties mostly in the southeastern states. Asked if he would provide records of these sales, he responded, “Ain’t no way in hell.”
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A helicopter rounds up horses in the Stone Cabin Valley of Nevada in the winter of 2012. (Dave Philipps)
Other people who find homes for rescue horses in the region say they rely heavily on advertising and web sites to connect with buyers. Davis does not appear to do so.
“I’ve never heard of him,” said David Hesse, who runs Mustang and Wild Horse Rescue of Georgia. “If he said he is finding homes for that many old, untamed mustangs, I’m skeptical. The market is deader than dead. I have trouble finding homes for even the ones that are saddle-broken. Wild ones? No way.”
On some sales applications, Davis has said he sells horses to graze on land used for oil and gas drilling in Texas, but oil industry experts contacted for this story said they had never heard of such a practice.
According to brand inspection documents required by Colorado when livestock is sold or shipped more than 75 miles, Davis and his wife say they have sent 765 animals with BLM wild horse brands to a sparsely populated stretch of arid brush country along the Mexico border in Kinney County, Texas. (The records do not give specific addresses where animals were sent, but identify small towns, such as Spofford, as their destination.)
It’s impossible to confirm that the horses actually arrived there or to know where they might have gone next, however, because Texas is one of the few Western states that do not require brand inspections when horses are moved or sold.
Just south of Kinney County is Eagle Pass, a border town that isthe only crossing for horses going to slaughter in Mexico for hundreds of miles.
There have been no horse slaughterhouses in the U.S. since 2007, when Congress barred funding for U.S. Department of Agriculture horse meat inspectors. Since then horse slaughter has been outsourced. A 2011 report by the General Accountability Office found the export of horses for slaughter to Mexico shot up 660 percent after the ban.
In Eagle Pass, as at other crossings, slaughter horses are checked by USDA veterinarians. A USDA spokeswoman refused to make veterinarians available for interviews, but confirmed that vets sometimes see wild horses bearing the BLM brand in slaughter export pens.
Brand documents leave almost 1,000 of Davis’s wild horses unaccounted for. That means they should still be within 75 miles of his residence -- if he has complied with state law.
Asked if this was the case, Davis first said the horses were still on 160 acres of land he leases from the state of Colorado. Then he said some had been shipped out of state without brand inspections, a misdemeanor punishable by up to 18 months in jail and a $1,000 fine.
"Since when is anything in this country done legal?" Davis said in a phone interview.
******
Had BLM officials inquired further about Davis, they might have found reason to question his plans for wild horses.
Davis is a vocal proponent of slaughtering wild horses in the holding system, which he considers a waste of resources. During the interview at his home, he said he would purchase far more horses if the BLM allowed him to resell them to so-called “kill buyers.”
“They are selling me mere hundreds now,” he said. “If they sold me 50,000, I guarantee I could do something with them. I would go to Canada. I would go to Mexico.”
Davis has close friends who export horses for slaughter, including Dennis Chavez, whose family runs one of largest export businesses in the southwest. In 1984, when Davis authored “Be Tough or be Gone,” a self-published book about a horseback ride he took from Mexico to Alaska, he dedicated it to Chavez’s father, Sonny Chavez.
Also, despite the obstacles that impede U.S. horse slaughterhouses, Davis said he has been trying to drum up investors to open a slaughter plant in Colorado.
He said he had approached pet food companies to buy the meat and asked Ken Salazar’s brother, John Salazar, who is the head of the Colorado Department of Agriculture, to help him get a grant to finance the business. John Salazar declined to help Davis, and so far the slaughterhouse venture has not gone forward.
“How can the BLM say with a straight face they are protecting wild horses when they deal with this guy?” said Leigh, of Wild Horse Education.
Animal welfare advocates have raised concerns about Davis’ purchases, but they say federal officials paid little attention.
In late 2010, the BLM rounded up 255 horses in the Adobe Town wild horse area in Wyoming. A local loose knit group of advocates had been photographing the herd for years. After the round-up, group members called BLM officials, looking to adopt a few of the animals, particularly an old stallion they had named Grey Beard.
They were told that the horses had been claimed by an anonymous buyer who planned to resell them to large landowners looking for agricultural tax exemptions. The advocates tried to learn more about the buyer, but Spencer refused to give his name, citing privacy policies.
According to interviews and agency emails, group members told Spencer that anyone buying that many horses at once had to be a kill buyer.
Sandra Longley, one of the advocates, said in an email to another advocate that Spencer had assured her that the buyer in question had a long relationship with the BLM and was “above reproach.”
A BLM spokesman said Spencer did not recall the conversation.
According to BLM records, most of the horses were sold to Davis.
Warnings from advocates about Davis do not appear to have prompted the BLM to reconsider selling to him.In fact, internal agency email shows that officials actively turned to Davis to absorb freshly rounded-up horses so they wouldn’t end up in the overloaded holding system.
In January, the manager of the agency’s corral in Burns, Ore., emailed superiors in Washington, D.C., to ask what to do with 29 mares, almost all of which were pregnant. Spencer replied that Davis would take them.
In March, a corral manager emailed Spencer to say he had 92 “nice horses” just rounded up in High Rock, Calif., and to ask if Davis could take some of the geldings.
Image may be NSFW. Clik here to view.
Freshly captured horses in the Stone Cabin Valley of Nevada wait in a BLM corral to be trucked to the holding system. (Dave Philipps)
A day later Spencer replied, “Davis told me that if the geldings are in good shape he will be able to place them into good homes.”
“How many would Mr. Davis want to buy?” the corral manager asked Spencer. “And are there any specifics that he is looking for?”
“He said he’d be interested in all of them, no specifics,” Spencer replied.
Spencer said in an interview she is under no pressure to approve buyers with questionable backgrounds and feels confident that “we do not sell to people we feel are going to do bad things to the horses.”
When asked about Davis, she said he had been thoroughly checked out and she had confidence in him. More generally, she said that if there were problems with a buyer, she would know.
“People watch where our horses go and the brands are very distinctive,” she said. “If things were going on, we would get a call.”
Davis’ most recent purchase was in April, when he bought 106 animals. Since then, the agency may have opened an inquiry into what he has done with horses bought from the BLM. In June, an agency investigator contacted this reporter seeking information about him. This month, however, the BLM assistant special investigator in Santa Fe (the contact supplied by the agency on this matter) said he was "unable to confirm or deny" that the BLM is investigating Davis.
Animal welfare advocates say the agency’s reliance on Davis is just another indication of how the wild horse program and its overburdened holding system have been mismanaged.
“He is just a symptom of the train wreck that is the Wild Horse and Burro program,” said Ginger Kathrens, director of the horse advocacy group The Cloud Foundation, based in Colorado Springs. “They just warehouse more and more horses and create their own crisis. Then, after they run the program into the ground, they have to find ways out of it. It is a whole unnatural ridiculous system run amok. And who pays the ultimate price? Wild horses.”
This article has been updated to include new reporting. It was first published on Oct. 1.
Oct. 2: This article has been clarified.
With the documents Mitt Romney released
recently, we know a bit more about his
taxes.
We know, for instance, that Romney paid a rate of 14.1
percent on $13.7 million in income on his 2011
tax return, which he achieved by purposely
overpaying. Though he was entitled to deduct $4 million in charitable
contributions, Romney deducted only $2.25 million to keep his tax rate above 13
percent.
(Romney, it
has beenpointed
out, could file an amended return to claim the full deduction after the election.
We've contacted the Romney campaign, and Michele Davis, a spokeswoman, assured
us he would not do so.)
We know, according to a letter from
his accountants at PricewaterhouseCoopers, that Romney has paid state and
federal income taxes each year since at least 1990, which would seem to
disprove Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s claim
in July that Romney had not paid any taxes for a decade.
And we know that Romney’s tax rate since 1990 never dipped
below 13.66 percent, according to his accountants. Romney paid an average
effective tax rate between 1990 and 2009 of 20.2 percent.
But there’s still a lot we don’t know. “I think most of the
major questions we had before [last Friday] are still out there,” said Brian
Galle, a tax law professor at Boston College. Here are a few:
How much did Romney make
before 2010?
While Romney has disclosed his average effective tax rate
for the last two decades, he hasn’t said how much he earned in those years or
how much — the dollar amount — he paid in taxes.
In 2008, for instance, investors everywhere lost money when
the stock market tanked. Romney may have carried those losses forward, Shaviro
said, and used them to reduce his adjusted gross income in 2009. While we know Romney
paid at least 13.66 percent of the income he recorded on his taxes in a given
year, we don’t know what percentage he paid of the money actually took home
that year.
Why is Romney’s IRA
worth so much?
Much of Romney’s wealth sits in his IRA, which is worth as
much as $101.6 million. It’s a remarkable number, in part because Romney would
have been able to contribute a maximum
of $30,000 a year to his IRA while he was at Bain, from 1984 to 1999.
Galle, the Boston College tax law professor,
said the most likely explanation for the outsized IRA is that Romney put in shares
in Bain investments that swelled in value. According to the Wall Street Journal,
Bain allowed employees to buy a special class of shares in the firm’s
investments. The shares didn’t cost very much, but they could be extremely
lucrative. In one deal, the Journal reported, “some Bain employees saw a
583-fold increase” in the value of their shares — an astronomical return.
Because the shares were in IRAs, the profits could be plowed into new Bain
deals without subtracting taxes.
Romney also may have beefed up his IRA by
contributing “carried interest” — a share of the profits in funds managed
by Bain. As Reuters reported earlier this year, any potential carried interest would “not be disclosed in his personal
financial summary or on a federal income tax return.” In other words, even if
Romney released all his tax returns, we still might not know exactly how he
accumulated his huge IRA.
What about Romney’s
investments offshore?
We know many of Romney’s IRA investments are based in
foreign countries but it’s hard to know how much. He valued one account
in the Cayman Islands at anywhere between $5 million and $25 million.
One thing we do know is that Romney pays a far lower tax
rate overseas than he does here. According to Quartz, Romney paid only 2.4 percent in
foreign taxes in 2011 on the $3.5 million he earned abroad. (Romney also had to pay U.S. taxes on his foreign income, after deducting the foreign taxes he paid.)
We also know where Romney’s current overseas investments are held
—Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, Luxembourg — and many of
the firms he has invested in, including a state-owned
Chinese oil company and a Chinese bank that Romney’s family
trusts sold their stake in last year. But we don’t have a lot of other
important documentation, including forms would show whether Romney had, as the
New York Times has reported, “over the years declared all of his foreign income to the IRS in a timely
manner.”
The Wall Street Journal has
reported that Romney’s offshore IRA investments likely helped him avoid a little-known
tax called the unrelated business income tax. The tax, “meant to discourage
tax-exempt entities such as an IRA or college endowment fund from unfairly
competing with for-profit, taxpaying entities by operating a business without
paying taxes on it,” could have hit Romney at up to 35 percent.
The Romney campaign seems unlikely to release any more information
about his finances, but that hasn’t kept reporters from digging it up.
Bloomberg, for instance, analyzed securities filings to report last Thursday
that Romney has set up a type of trust known as an “I
Dig It” trust — a legal way for Romney to avoid estate and gift taxes
and pass some of his fortune onto future generations.
And the New York Times shed a bit more light on Romney's offshore holdings on Tuesday. The Times obtained documents that included a confidential offering memorandum for an offshore fund in which Romney's wife, Ann, has an interest. The memo states that the fund is designed to "accommodate qualified non-U.S. investors and U.S. tax-exempt investors" — making it, in other words, a tax haven. A similar fund in Delaware, the memo noted, would likely be hit with the unrelated business income tax.
Clarification: This article has been clarified to reflect that Romney also had to pay U.S. taxes on his foreign income, after deducting the foreign taxes he paid.
A former 18-year member of Congress who was a longtime friend of the tobacco industry while in office has become a paid consultant and registered lobbyist for tobacco giant Reynolds American.
Steve Buyer, a Republican congressman from Indiana from 1993 to 2011, had been the beneficiary of over $100,000 in Reynolds donations over the years and pushed the company’s legislative goals.
In 2009, he gave a famously colorful speech on the House floor endorsing smokeless tobacco: "You could have smoked that lettuce and you still end up with the same problems. You could cut the grass in your yard, dry it, and roll it up in a cigarette, and smoke it — and you're still going to have a lot of problems," he said. "It is the smoke that kills, not the nicotine.”
Buyer revealed the new job for Reynolds American in little-noticed testimony Sept.19 before the Indiana General Assembly's Health Finance Commission. A federal disclosure filing shows that Buyer and his former chief of staff, Mike Copher, registered to lobby for a Reynolds American subsidiary called RAI Services as of the beginning of September. (Buyer became a lobbyist immediately after leaving Congress in 2011, with a health care company his first client.)
At the Indiana hearing, Buyer said he is working as “an advocate of Harm Reduction Strategies” for Reynolds American, according to his prepared remarks.
“To be an agent of change you can do it from the outside and attack tobacco manufacturers like many anti-tobacco organizations do or you can do it from the inside,” he said. “I have chosen to be an agent of change from the inside.”
Buyer argued that the public is being “misinformed by the public health community about risks presented by tobacco in its various forms.” He disputed statements by the Food and Drug Administration and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that smokeless tobacco — which include chewing tobacco and snuff — is not a safe alternative to smoking cigarettes. The CDC says smokeless tobacco products “can cause cancer, oral health problems, and nicotine addiction.”
Messages to Buyer’s lobbying firm, where Copher is now a partner, were not returned. Reynolds American declined to comment.
In the face of declining U.S. cigarette consumption rates, Reynolds American has been aggressivelymarketing smokeless tobacco products such as its Grizzly and Kodiak snuff lines.
Buyer has long been an advocate of smokeless tobacco and an ally of Reynolds American.
The company gave $132,500 overall to Buyer’s campaign committee, political action committee, and private foundation between 1997 and 2009, public filings show. More than $80,000 of that came Buyer’s way in 2008-9 when proposed stricter tobacco regulations were before Congress and had to make it through the Energy and Commerce health subcommittee, on which Buyer sat.
Buyer led the charge against the bill, which gave the FDA the power to regulate tobacco and was ultimately signed into law by President Obama in 2009. Buyer had offered an amendment that would have delayed implementation of the law for up to 10 years, Congressional Quarterly reported at the time.The amendment failed.
He then offered an alternative bill, backed by Reynolds American, that would have had fewer restrictions and created a new Tobacco Harm Reduction Center in the Department of Health and Human Services instead of giving the FDA the power to regulate tobacco. Buyer’s bill, which also touted smokeless tobacco products, failed in a House vote.
It was during the debate over tobacco regulation in 2009 that Buyer made his remarks about smoking lettuce:
The speech earned him national attention, including a much-viewed episode of the satirical Auto-Tune The News.
Buyer announced in 2010 he was retiring from Congress at the end of his term amid national media scrutiny of his non-profit, the Frontier Foundation. Buyer cited family reasons for the decision.
In six years, the charity had raised nearly $900,000 from companies with business before Buyer’s committees — including $50,000 from Reynolds American. But it had not spent any money on its stated purpose: scholarships for Indiana students. Some of the money was spent on fundraising golf trips to the Bahamas and Disney World for Buyer and the corporate contributors. The foundation maintained it was waiting to raise $1 million before giving out scholarships.
The group’s most recent tax return, covering 2010,reported donations of $10,000 to a pair of Indiana hospitals. It reported nearly $600,000 in assets. Messages left with the Frontier Foundation were not returned.
In an interview with CBS News during the foundation flap, Buyer denied impropriety when asked about his role fighting the FDA regulation of tobacco and the Reynolds donations to his foundation.
"I created this,” he said of his alternative bill. “R.J. Reynolds didn't create that. Steve Buyer created that.”
David Heath of the Center for Public Integrity recently investigateda new breed of corporate dental care chains that cater to low-income adults and children. Heath collaborated with Jill Rosenbaum of PBS FRONTLINE on “Dollars and Dentists.” They found a high-volume business model that scored dentists on production and offered bonuses based on the revenue they brought in. Heath and Rosenbaum reported that Georgia-based Kool Smiles, the biggest Medicaid dental provider, has been accused by state regulatorsof giving shoddy or unnecessary care to some of America’s poorest kids. (Kool Smiles’ response is here.)
As part of our ongoing look at patient safety, we occasionally interview other journalists who’ve examined health care quality.
PP: What did you find in your reporting?
Heath: I looked at what impact corporate dentistry is having on the care being provided. We looked at two of the larger chains, and found evidence that these companies were putting pressure on their dentists to produce at certain revenue targets, thus encouraging them to do procedures that may have been unnecessary.
PP: Can you say a bit more about the harm or overtreatment to patients that you saw?
Heath: One of the chains focused on kids on Medicaid, and the reimbursement rates for Medicaid are pretty low. So in order to get a lot of revenue from these patients they were doing things like taking x-rays that were not needed, or putting stainless steel crowns instead of fillings on their teeth. They could make twice as much money from Medicaid on these crowns versus just putting a filling on a tooth. Kids were getting treatments that they really didn’t need.
We also looked at a chain that focuses on adults who haven’t been to the dentist in years. What were found there is again, patients would come in and everyone was given the same treatments. They were given these deep cleanings and a lot of people would get dentures and we were finding that in some cases maybe they didn’t need those services.
We had one example of an 87-year-old woman who had already been to the dentist and she went in to have two teeth pulled, thinking it would be cheaper at [New York-based] Aspen Dental. Instead they looked at her mouth and they came up with a treatment plan that was going to cost $8,000. They convinced her though hard-sell tactics to borrow that money through a credit card, and something like $2,000 of that was just to clean her teeth. (Aspen Dental’s response is here.)
PP: So, in some cases, you’re talking about pulling someone’s teeth unnecessarily?
Heath: There was a case where a woman went in who needed to have some teeth pulled, but they pulled all of her upper teeth, and several dentists told us she didn’t need that.
PP: What are the market forces that have resulted in private equity-owned chains providing dentistry?
Heath: These days, when dentists get out of dental school, they often owe anywhere between $200,000 and $300,000 dollars. Dental school is actually more expensive than medical school. So they come out with these huge debts, in a lot of cases they can’t really afford to start their own practice.
These dental chains hire people, a lot of the time right out of dental school, and they pay fairly decent salaries and they have a bonus system where the more work you do on a patient the more you get paid. That’s true for a private dentist as well, but the difference is that these companies are owned by private equity firms, and they’re managed in a different way. You have people who are not dentists coming up with a business plan that’s based on metrics. They try to get new patients in who haven’t been to the dentist in a while, and they’ve already calculated how much revenue the average new patient should generate.
If you happen to go in and you don’t really have anything wrong with your mouth and you’re a new patient you’re not fitting the model. That creates pressure for the dentists to find things that are ‘wrong.’
PP: Is dentistry particularly ripe for these kinds of abuses?
Heath: In dentistry there’s not really any peer review or oversight. So there’s really not anyone to challenge dentists. And patients almost never challenge that kind of thing either. For somebody who’s not ethical, there’s a lot you can do and get away with in dentistry.
PP: How is it that so many kids in Medicaid have ended up relying on corporate chains for their dental care?
Heath: Not that many dentists actually accept Medicaid. There are some states where the reimbursement rates are so low that even the chains don’t go there. Like in Florida, for example, the Medicaid rates are so low there that chains don’t really even bother. So children end up going to the emergency room because they have a toothache and there’s nothing else they can do. They end up in hospitals to treat a tooth.
There was a famous case in Maryland where a 10-year-old boy had a toothache and it was abscessed and he ended up dying because he didn’t have a dentist.
[Note: According to a recent study, only about a third of children in Medicaid-- which covers more than 30 million American children -- will see a dentist in a given year. In Florida, where reimbursements are particularly low, only a quarter of the children in Medicaid see a dentist.]
In other states, like Connecticut, Texas and Virginia, they have dramatically increased reimbursement rates. You have more options there, but not the same options a someone who can afford it.
Dentistry is a little unusual from doctors because a lot of people don’t have dental insurance, and even if you do have dental insurance it often doesn’t cover a lot, and a lot of dentists don’t take insurance any more because of low reimbursement rates. So even if you have dental insurance, finding a dentist can be a challenge. So there is a real problem, especially for children, to find a dentist if they don’t have money.
PP: Are changes under way as a result of your story? Are there solutions on the table?
Heath: There is a [U.S.] Senate investigation still ongoing, I don’t know what will come of that. There are investigations in some of the states, Texas being one, looking at this issue. I think there are things in the works we really won’t really know the full impact of for a while yet.
We definitely got the attention of the dental community; we got a lot of feedback from them. This whole issue of accepting patients who have limited resources is a real issue in dentistry and something I think the dental community has to sort out.
Image may be NSFW.
Image may be NSFW.
