In early August, election workers north of Spokane, Washington, went across the street to the post office to check for late mail-in ballots. It was three days after the primary and they were expecting no more than a few dozen.

Instead, their mailbox was brimming with envelopes — more than 500 of them, each a vote that wouldn’t count. The sight was “jarring,” said Auditor Lori Larsen, a Republican who oversees voting in Stevens County.

Across the region, other election officials were getting similar jolts. In the 11 predominately rural counties in eastern Washington, nearly 2,000 ballots came in late, compared to about 600 in 2022, the previous midterm primary.

In recent weeks, concerns about mail-in voting disruptions have focused almost entirely on President Donald Trump’s now-shelved plan to sharply restrict who can vote by mail. 

But a ProPublica data analysis shows that delays resulting from the U.S. Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas, not only in Washington, but across the country.

Over the past three years, as mail volume continued to plummet and annual deficits ballooned, the Postal Service started consolidating the processing of first-class mail at larger regional plants instead of at smaller hubs closer to local post offices. Then, in a little-noted switch that mostly took effect after the 2024 election, the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from these processing plants, from twice daily to once.

The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and, most importantly for ballots, pushed back postmarking, which doesn’t happen until mail reaches the regional centers. 

In this year’s primary, the effects of the cuts were clearest in five states that make detailed data on mail-in ballots available: Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon. All have or recently had grace periods allowing ballots to count if they come in after Election Day as long as they’re postmarked by the deadline.

In these states, the number of ballots rejected for arriving late soared in counties affected by the service changes compared to 2022, ProPublica’s analysis showed. 

Rejection rates in counties where services were cut doubled or tripled from what they were four years ago, dwarfing any increases in counties where postal pickups remained as they were, our analysis showed. In urban Spokane, for example, the number of ballots rejected for being late actually dropped this year.

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Across the five states, the delays have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024, ProPublica’s analysis shows. In Washington, Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat, said he sees the service changes directed by Republican appointees leading the Postal Service as a way to undermine mail-in voting. 

“I don’t think they realized how much it was going to affect their voter base,” he said, adding that Washington has “a lot of rural Republican voters.”

Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts into place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout. They have circulated a memo to the nation’s more than 30,000 post offices saying that for the 10 days before the election, managers should separate completed ballots from other first-class mail and deliver those intended for local election offices the day they come in.

At an Oct. 15 news conference, Postal Service leaders emphasized the agency’s longstanding recommendation that voters mail ballots back at least a week before their states’ deadlines, while defending the agency’s ability to fast-track ballots through the system. 

“We work to identify and address issues quickly,” said Amber McReynolds, chair of the Postal Service board of governors, “so ballots can continue to move swiftly from election offices to voters and from voters back to election offices.”

Election consultants, researchers and former Postal Service officials told ProPublica that the guidance for the upcoming vote gave more detailed directions on how to expedite ballots. They said they hoped the agency’s special measures would limit delays, but some said mistakes were likely. 

“I don’t think we can say with any kind of conviction that there will be no ballots rejected,” said Tammy Patrick, chief programs officer of the National Association of Election Officials. “It isn’t a question of ‘if,’ but a question of ‘how many.’”

A pilot program instituting the delivery changes in 18 regions before the 2024 election ran into problems. An audit by the Postal Service’s inspector general found that agency staff in these areas sometimes didn’t handle ballots correctly, mainly because instructions weren’t clearly communicated. (A Postal Service spokesperson said “learnings from the pilot” have been applied as the program has expanded.)

After this year’s primary, reports by media outlets noted that mail-in ballot rejection rates were higher than in the past, but ProPublica’s analysis shows these increases were directly connected to Postal Service changes. Research published in September by the Brookings Institution also found this connection, projecting that if the pattern held in the general election, tens of thousands of mail-in ballots could be rejected.

At least seven closely contested congressional districts — including Washington’s 3rd, California’s 22nd and North Carolina’s 11th — are in areas that were affected by service changes in the primary, ProPublica found.

Elena Patel, who conducted the Brookings analysis, said service changes may still imperil mail-in votes in the general election.

“I think there remain risks to ballots,” she said, adding that the Postal Service’s plan for the general election “depends on flawless execution.”

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Mail-in voting has become more popular over the last decade, with many states broadening access to it during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Nearly 1 in 3 Americans voted this way in 2022 and 2024. Trump himself frequently votes by mail, and in recent weeks has started to encourage his supporters to do so as well, though he has claimed without evidence that the process is rife with fraud.

The Postal Service has mostly ensured the timely delivery of hundreds of millions of ballots, even as mail volume overall has dropped 50% from its high in 2006. 

When Louis DeJoy was appointed postmaster general in spring 2020, he inherited an $81 billion operating deficit and rapidly took steps such as eliminating overtime to reduce costs, under pressure from Trump and others in his administration. (DeJoy did not respond to questions from ProPublica.)

The NAACP sued that August, alleging the measures could affect mail-in votes in that year’s general election. Courts ordered DeJoy to reverse some of the cuts and the Postal Service agreed to implement special procedures to ensure ballots weren’t delayed. The Postal Service has continued following those procedures since. 

Still, DeJoy went forward with a 10-year restructuring plan designed to save the agency billions. It ended evening pickups from some post offices, often in rural areas. Trucks serving these places travel long distances and at times were mostly empty. This part of the plan — called regional transportation optimization, or RTO — was projected to eventually save the Postal Service $4 billion a year.

The agency announced the national rollout of the RTO plan in 2024, but DeJoy agreed to pause it leading up to that year’s November election, leaving only about 4,000 ZIP codes in the pilot project affected by the service changes.

In January 2025, the Postal Regulatory Commission, which oversees the Postal Service, warned that moving forward with the plan would be disruptive to rural communities and might not save as much money as expected. The Postal Service rolled out the reductions anyway, extending the changes to almost 20,000 ZIP codes to date. Officials said they expect the system to be fully implemented within two years.

This January, the agency put out a statement saying the transportation cuts would mean it took longer for mail, including ballots, to be postmarked and delivered. But the Postal Service didn’t specify which voters would be affected by the slowdowns and which wouldn’t.

Though the delay from RTO is often only a day, mail can be delayed longer if it’s deposited in a mailbox after the daily pickup time, or just before Sunday or a holiday.

A Postal Service spokesperson said the agency told election officials that RTO would change schedules and reemphasized the need for voters to get their ballots in the mail at least a week ahead of time. Election officials in Washington said the Postal Service wasn’t direct enough about the fact that the changes would lead to delays in delivering and postmarking ballots.

“What they said was, ‘We are going to change the way we do postmarks,’” said Hobbs, Washington’s secretary of state. “That was it.”

Patel, the Brookings analyst and a former Postal Regulatory Commission employee, said that more direct communication to voters could have helped change their behavior. “That’s the part that I think has not been super transparent about the whole process,” she said.

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Many of the areas that saw a spike in late ballots were in Western states, which were the earliest and most enthusiastic adopters of expanded mail-in voting.

In 2004, Washington became the second state to start conducting all-mail elections, in which every eligible voter automatically receives a mail-in ballot. Most residents vote by putting their ballots in drop boxes. Still, in 2024, about 33% put them in the mail.

In the 30 mostly rural Washington counties most affected by RTO, the percentage of ballots postmarked late more than tripled compared to the 2022 primary, ProPublica found.

In Garfield County, in southeastern Washington, 19 ballots — nearly 1 in 10 cast — had late postmarks this year. In 2022, only a single ballot was postmarked late. In Pend Oreille County, in northeast Washington along the Idaho panhandle, 6% of ballots were rejected for arriving late, compared to 1% in the 2022 primary.

“It was pretty awful telling people we couldn’t count their votes,” said Marianne Nichols, Pend Oreille’s longtime auditor. “They were quite upset because they felt like, ‘Why? This was in the mailbox on election day, the post office picked it up and had it.’ They felt like it should have counted.”

In Stevens County, the percentage of ballots rejected for having a late postmark jumped to 8%, from 1% in 2022.

Steve Hutkins, a retired professor who analyzes the effect of Postal Service changes on Savethepostoffice.com, also found that places in Washington with RTO had more ballot rejections during local elections earlier this year for school board and other measures. The patterns “set off the alarm bells,” he said.

Stuart Holmes, the state’s director of elections, said he reached out to Postal Service officials to find out what had happened, but got few answers and no specifics on delays related to RTO, which were a “total surprise,” he said.

Election officials in California and Oregon also reported thousands more ballots rejected for arriving late during their primaries. Counties affected by RTO, including Kern County, California, had substantially higher rates of ballots rejected for mail-related reasons, ProPublica found.

Kern County’s assistant registrar of voters, Laura Cantu, said election officials are urging rural voters to use drop boxes to cast their ballots in the general election.

The expansion of RTO had a similar effect in North Carolina and Ohio, where the rates of late ballots were about twice as high in counties affected by the restructuring as rates in counties that weren’t. Since 2022, these states have also eliminated grace periods in which ballots postmarked by Election Day could count even if they arrived later. Voters unused to the tighter deadlines also could have contributed to an increase in late ballots.

ProPublica didn’t find any association between RTO and higher rates of late ballots in Wisconsin, even though clerks reported delays involving mail-in ballots cast in its state election, held this spring. (Other Postal Service changes may have contributed to the delays.) 

Wisconsin’s data does not distinguish ballots sent by mail from those cast in drop boxes or in person, making it impossible to definitively measure rejection rates just for ballots returned by mail. Election researchers said Wisconsin’s deadline for mail ballots, which must come into election offices by 8 p.m. on Election Day, also probably had an effect. 

“If you know that you don’t have a grace period, it probably affects voter behavior,” said Patel, the Brookings researcher. 

Recent Postal Service audits have found that RTO-related changes had saved the agency about $2.8 billion by the end of fiscal year 2025 — less money than expected — and are slowing down all first-class mail, not just ballots. Residents of rural areas are waiting longer for everything from prescriptions to bills, a report published in September by the Postal Service’s inspector general said.

A Postal Service spokesperson still defended the plan, both for financial reasons and to adjust to the changing marketplace. “These savings are both significant and necessary,” he said.

In the lead-up to Nov. 3, the agency’s plan is to route ballots meant for local election offices to a nearby postal facility or directly to their destination. They shouldn’t go to regional plants, which the Postal Service says should minimize delays.

Larsen, the Stevens County auditor, is encouraging Washington voters to deposit their ballots in drop boxes rather than relying on the mail. Since the primary, she’s increased the number of red, white and blue drop boxes that sit outside government buildings from seven to 12. Near each box, there’s a large sign encouraging people to take selfies when they vote and send the photos to Larsen. 

In prior years, Larsen said, she avoided telling voters how or when to vote, concerned they might regret choices they made if critical information later emerged about the candidates. That’s no longer uppermost in her mind.

“Now we are more concerned that we get your ballot,” she said.

The post Ballot rejections soared in rural counties after USPS reduced mail service appeared first on Salon.com.

In late August, President Donald Trump announced what he called the “biggest oil deal in world history.” Since then, the full text of the accord — which grants the U.S. sweeping access to Venezuela’s oil reserves — has been one of the most sought-after secrets in Washington, D.C. 

ProPublica has reviewed a copy of the 18-page strategic partnership agreement signed for the United States by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The document reveals carefully constructed terms that favor U.S. interests at every turn and cements the power of a small group of people handpicked by the Trump administration to govern and profit from the deal. The role of the Venezuelan government and the potential benefits to its people are largely absent from the text.

One of the most criticized aspects of Trump’s announcement has been his choice of a partner: Alejandro Betancourt, a globe-trotting Venezuelan oligarch who has faced money-laundering investigations in three countries. 

The Trump administration is taking a 35% stake in Betancourt’s firm, North American Blue Energy Partners, by acquiring shares in a Barbados-registered parent company. The deal document provides little information about the owners and investors behind the parent company, who could receive enormous wealth from the arrangement. 

The agreement also safeguards Betancourt’s position as chief executive of NABEP and says the U.S. government will work with the parent company to appoint a powerful seven-member board to govern the venture for an initial 15-year term. Those aspects of the deal, according to people with knowledge of how it came together, were designed to prevent future U.S. and Venezuelan leaders from dismantling the enterprise. 

Orlando Alvarado, a name not disclosed by the Trump administration as a party to the accord, signed the agreement on behalf of the parent company, alongside Betancourt, Hegseth and Rubio. Alvarado has held senior roles in multiple Betancourt businesses, including as chief financial officer of an energy firm that became embroiled in scandals a decade ago. According to the Miami Herald, federal prosecutors identified Alvarado as an unindicted co-conspirator in a scheme to embezzle money from Venezuela’s national oil company.

NABEP spokesperson Terry Wade said that “neither Mr. Betancourt nor Mr. Alvarado has ever been charged with any crime in any country, and any claims against them are baseless.” 

Key aspects of the plan differ from the Trump administration’s public pronouncements. Trump has said the deal will secure America’s energy dominance for the next century. But the text indicates that U.S. purchasing rights expire in half that time and that the underlying operating rights appear to run afoul of Venezuelan laws limiting oil concessions to 25 years.

The agreement does ensure the United States a deep discount from fair-market value on 20% of NABEP’s oil, as Trump has said. It does not, however, explicitly guarantee that Betancourt’s company is obligated to pay the estimated $200 billion in royalties and tax payments to Venezuela that the White House has said would benefit the country. 

There are also significant caveats related to Trump’s central selling point to Americans — that the deal will bring a gusher of low-cost oil imports. 

The agreement gives the U.S. the right to purchase 20% of NABEP’s oil at a discounted rate of $30 a barrel, or less than a third of what oil has sold for in recent months, according to one of three supporting documents reviewed by ProPublica. 

But this fee does not account for the cost of getting Venezuela’s oil out of the country. Much of Venezuela’s raw crude is so thick that it won’t flow through pipelines unless it is first blended with 20% or more of oil thinner products. Under the deal, the potentially significant cost of importing millions of barrels of those blending materials is not included in the price.

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The White House, the State Department, the Pentagon and the energy company NABEP all defended the agreement, saying in statements that their new public-private venture will provide meaningful and lasting economic benefits to both countries that cannot be captured in a legal document. 

“This historic deal marks a major step toward stabilizing Venezuela’s economy after years of hyperinflation and almost no new investment, while more than doubling the United States’ oil reserves,” said White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers.

Wade emphasized that NABEP was chosen because of its track record of expanding oil production in Venezuela in recent years and that the agreement was between the company and the U.S. government, not Venezuela.

“Thanks in large part to the agreement,” Wade said, “there is a surge in confidence about the future of Venezuela’s oil industry and, as a direct result, substantial new investments are flowing into the country.”

He added that much of NABEP’s oil comes from fields that require little or no blending materials and that blending costs would not meaningfully impact the price of production. “Our barrel economics are strong.”

The newly revealed details of the agreement are nonetheless likely to raise more questions about whether the unorthodox marriage of the United States and a foreign energy baron can bring lasting benefits to either country — and which private parties might benefit along the way. Trump’s oil deal is likely to face scrutiny in both the United States and Venezuela, especially if Democrats win one or both chambers in the midterm elections, according to former U.S. diplomats and congressional staff.

“Question number one in a new U.S. Congress will be: Why Betancourt?” said former Ambassador James Story, who served as the top U.S. diplomat in Caracas from 2018 to 2023, in an interview. “Why did he get this deal? And was he involved in criminality? It seems reasonable to have a congressional hearing about those questions.”

“Question number one in a new U.S. Congress will be: Why Betancourt?”

James Story, former U.S. ambassador to Venezuela

In public comments, Delcy Rodríguez, who won the backing of the Trump administration to serve as Venezuela’s interim president, praised the accord as “historic.” She has asserted that Venezuela will retain sovereignty over its natural resources and defended the choice of Betancourt. 

People with knowledge of the Trump administration’s behind-the-scenes decision-making and negotiations with Betancourt spoke to ProPublica on condition of anonymity because they were either not authorized to do so or were fearful of retribution. 

One reason that the precise terms of the deal have remained hidden until now is that the signed agreement is marked as a “sensitive” government document. That classification is commonly used to shield a variety of federal records from public release, including those containing personnel information, details about ongoing law enforcement operations and matters protected by attorney-client privilege. The document also contains a confidentiality clause barring Betancourt’s company from disclosing the “existence and terms” of the U.S. government agreement.

One person familiar with the deliberations said that people close to the Trump administration  seemed keen to partner with Betancourt’s company because of the privacy and flexibility it offered. That appeared to give NABEP an advantage over publicly traded oil companies, which would be obligated to shareholder reporting requirements. 

“For example,” the person said, “Chevron couldn’t give 35% of their shares to the Pentagon.”

The Deal

The oil deal is sensitive partly because of likely resistance in Venezuela, where critics have already described it as a U.S. takeover of the country’s precious natural resources.

A ProPublica analysis shows that its terms favor American interests at nearly every turn and try to enshrine the Trump administration’s imprint indefinitely. 

The document states that a majority of the seven-member board must be U.S. citizens at all times, and the U.S. government can appoint one “non-voting observer” to join the group. Betancourt, who will serve as the chief executive, is the only board member named by the agreement. The initial board will establish the process for choosing new members. 

“Throughout the evolution of the deal, it was clear that the governing structure was intended to ensure maximum control by the people making the deal and to insulate them from future administrations seeking to reverse the agreement or call it into question,” a person familiar with the negotiations said.

There is no requirement for any Venezuelan government participation in the board.

The agreement also offers long-lasting protections for Betancourt and unnamed investors. It requires a supermajority vote of five to oust Betancourt as CEO, change the board composition or execute any transactions with a shareholder that isn’t the U.S. government, an indirect equity holder, director, affiliate or “immediate family members.”

The board will determine compensation for Betancourt in his role as chief executive, the document says. As structured, the deal does not appear to require any public disclosures about pay or distribution of shares to executives.

The agreement does not say which shareholders, affiliates or family members have been approved to transact with Betancourt’s company. Under Barbados corporate law, there is almost nothing that can force those interests to be revealed publicly. 

The agreement does, however, require the company to maintain “anti-money laundering controls,” submit to external audits and inspections of its records by the U.S. government, and provide the U.S. government with an annual budget and quarterly unaudited financial statements. It is unclear if these reports will ever be made public. 

It could be some time before the company produces enough oil to fulfill a significant share of U.S. demand. Betancourt’s company currently produces about 200,000 barrels per day — or about as much over the course of a year as the United States uses in three days. 

NABEP aims to increase its production to 500,000 barrels per day by the end of 2028, according to recent reports.

In addition to securing a discount on 20% of NABEP’s oil, Washington also has “first priority” to purchase all of the company’s remaining oil production for the next 50 years, including an irrevocable right to buy its entire oil supply in the event the U.S. declares a national emergency. 

The U.S. also receives a “most favored nation” status that requires Betancourt’s firm to disclose any other business agreements it signs, and, if they are favorable, to grant Washington matching terms.

One person who reviewed parts of the contract was surprised at the tangible benefits for the U.S. compared with the lack of binding commitments to Venezuela: “I gave you 20% of my production at ‘cost plus,’ fine. I gave you all of my production if there’s a national emergency, OK. … So what do I get in exchange?”

A U.S. official said Rodriguez had granted NABEP 100-year oil concessions to operate there, although this figure is not referenced in the accord and appears to contradict Venezuelan law. 

In the event of a dispute, Venezuela can’t challenge the deal in its own courts. The agreement dictates that any conflict between the company and the United States must be settled under U.S. law, not Venezuela’s. The two sides even spelled out that any civil case or arbitration must be argued before the United States District Court for the Northern District of Texas, where Trump’s Justice Department has turned, time and again, for favorable rulings. 

Where U.S. law does not apply, Texas state law governs, the agreement states. 

A Pentagon office has been tasked with someday executing the financial transaction to capitalize on the U.S. government’s 35% share in the venture. The document shows that the U.S. will pay nothing upfront but plans to acquire its stake in Betancourt’s company by paying $0.01 per warrant share. Those terms are set to expire on the 75th anniversary of the closing date.

In a White House statement last month, Trump touted those shares as potentially worth “hundreds of billions,” plus dividends. But Democrats on the Senate Armed Services Committee said they believe the Pentagon office does not have the legal authority to execute an agreement with a foreign entity operating in a country under U.S. sanctions.

Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson said that the Defense Department conducts “extensive due diligence” before extending capital assistance. Wilson declined to comment on any of the legal considerations or further technical aspects of the deal “to protect the integrity of the process.”

Several other detailed aspects of how the company will operate are currently under negotiation among the Trump administration, Betancourt and the parent company, the partnership documents show. The agreement repeatedly cites a set of “Implementation Documents” that will finalize the U.S. ownership stake and the rights of unnamed investors. 

The full force of the deal will not take effect until both parties have complied with its closing conditions, which the agreement indicates could happen within months.

Last month, Senate Democrats blasted what was known of the oil accord and demanded details in a letter to Rubio, Hegseth and Secretary of Energy Chris Wright.

“It is unclear why the American public should support this attempt to entangle the United States with a relatively unknown foreign oil company that lacks the capacity or credibility to develop oil fields of the magnitude described and whose leadership has faced international criminal investigations,” four ranking senators said in the letter. 

They asserted that most of the “oil fields are nowhere near ready for production” and that it could “take up to a decade before global oil markets are meaningfully impacted and the American people see any tangible benefit.”

A Willing Partner

Almost immediately after U.S. special operations forces seized President Nicolás Maduro in January and airlifted him out of Venezuela, Trump left little doubt that his larger goal was to restore American access to Venezuela’s oil reserves two decades after most U.S. firms had been ejected from the country. 

By early spring, an obscure cast of energy officials, lawyers and lobbyists had started to craft plans to deliver on Trump’s America First energy agenda. One person familiar with the deliberations said that U.S. officials had considered backing an idea for publicly held American oil companies like Chevron, Exxon and Conoco to carve up and rehabilitate Venezuela’s aging oil sector. Another potential route went through Betancourt’s company, which is the second largest private oil firm operating in Venezuela. Working with the Venezuelan state company, Petróleos de Venezuela, SA, was never really an option due to its underlying debt and history of corruption, the person said.

The option of turning to large multinational oil companies quickly stalled. In some cases, oil executives balked at jumping back into the complexity of the Venezuelan market; in others, firms struggled to get more than “lip service” meetings in Washington and Caracas, according to media reports and people familiar with the deal. 

“NABEP was given priority,” one person said. “Exxon, Conoco and the others were treated as second class.” 

Betancourt’s star was rising in the Trump administration. He had served as an interlocutor for Washington with the Maduro government and had ties to some leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, according to current and former U.S. officials. He had also provided information that helped the U.S. forces seize Venezuelan oil tankers and that aided strategy and planning before the capture of Maduro, Reuters reported. 

In addition, Betancourt had developed a good relationship with Rodríguez, whom Trump had backed as the country’s interim president. And Betancourt had done so despite the fact that her influential brother, National Assembly President Jorge Rodríguez, had accused him of corruption in a televised speech in 2020, according to former U.S. officials and press reports.

U.S. officials also saw practical reasons to partner with Betancourt, several people said. He and his then-business partner in the U.S., Harry Sargeant, a Trump supporter, appeared to be a rare success story in a battered industry, operating some of the only active oil fields in the country.

“The main thing I found promising is that the fields are producing in Venezuela,” said a former State Department official who analyzed the company’s activities. “I think it’s particularly important that you buy into fields that are producing. … If your policy goal is to raise production quickly, this makes sense.”  

But partnering with Betancourt posed major challenges. 

For starters, the 46-year-old billionaire was confined to house arrest on his 300-acre Oxfordshire estate in England, fighting off a Swiss extradition request tied to an international money-laundering probe. Betancourt could fly to his $46 million London residence by private helicopter — but his Venezuelan and Italian passports were locked down, and British authorities had barred him from driving on public roads, according to media reports about the special bail arrangement.

Betancourt’s legal problems stemmed from his role in troubled Venezuelan energy projects during the corrupt rule of former President Hugo Chávez. Several of Betancourt’s known or alleged associates were charged or convicted in a major U.S. money-laundering investigation known as Operation Money Flight. Betancourt surfaced as a suspect in the U.S. case and is still under investigation for suspected money laundering by authorities in Spain, according to former U.S. and European officials and press reports. 

The most popular leader of the Venezuelan opposition in exile, María Corina Machado, recently described Betancourt as having been involved in “obscene corruption” that caused great suffering for the Venezuelan people, according to a recent New York Times interview. 

Betancourt has not been charged in any country. His lawyer has maintained his client’s innocence, saying Betancourt has been unfairly maligned because people associate him with a group of wealthy young Venezuelans, some of whom have been accused of wrongdoing, according to press reports.

Many Venezuelans see Betancourt as a “totemic, emblematic, corrupt figure,” said Brian Naranjo, a former senior U.S. diplomat in Venezuela, in an interview.

“He is not really an oil man,” Naranjo said. “The talent he brings is that he’s a new person in a long line of Venezuelan businesspeople who deal in influence. Their big lever is connections and influence. It is know-who, not know-how.”

In a recent interview with Spanish language media, Rubio defended Betancourt, praising his oil company’s work in Venezuela and his support for factions of the Venezuelan opposition in exile.

Rubio downplayed the legal scrutiny Betancourt has faced, saying a review conducted with U.S. law enforcement agencies indicated “there were no investigations of him in our system.”

“The talent he brings is that he’s a new person in a long line of Venezuelan businesspeople who deal in influence. … It is know-who, not know-how.”

Brian Naranjo, former U.S. diplomat

It remains unclear exactly how Betancourt shed the travel restrictions imposed by European authorities. But The Washington Post reported that senior Trump administration officials, including Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, petitioned their foreign counterparts to allow Betancourt to travel freely and to close their investigations into him and his business ventures. 

The Trump administration’s next hurdle to working with Betancourt was figuring out how to legally invest. The government’s $200 billion investment agency, the International Development Finance Corporation, was created to do just that but is currently barred by U.S. law from operating in Venezuela.

At different points through the summer, aides to Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought stepped in, pressing Defense and State department officials to consider alternate financing paths, according to one person familiar with the deal’s progression.

By July, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, headed by David Lorch, emerged as a potential solution.

Lorch, who had moved to the Pentagon from Deputy Defense Secretary Steve Feinberg’s private equity firm, Cerberus Capital, quickly embraced the idea, according to people familiar with the deal. Lorch and other Pentagon and State Department officials flew to Caracas in the final days of that month and agreed in principle to a deal. The details would be hammered out back in Washington, the people said.

A Pentagon spokesperson said Lorch declined to comment.

On Aug. 5, Betancourt strode into a conference room behind the art deco facade of the old Greyhound Bus Terminal in downtown Washington that houses an auxiliary Pentagon office. The assembled Defense Department officials gave the Venezuelan billionaire the red carpet treatment, lining up to shake his hand, according to people familiar with the meeting. But some in the room were stunned to discover that the U.S. government was preparing to do business with Betancourt, the people familiar with the meeting said. 

Betancourt was accompanied by Jacob Hirshman, the chief executive and co-founder of Erebor Bank, the first new bank chartered after Trump returned to office, according to people familiar with the meeting. The bank, backed by Trump supporters and investors Peter Thiel and Palmer Luckey, has vowed to reconnect Venezuela to the world economy.

Hirshman did not respond to a request for comment.

Lorch told the group, which included dozens of former Wall Street associates he’d hired into the office, that the alliance with Betancourt was a major “opportunity” to fulfill one of the Trump administration’s top goals, securing benefits to the United States and Venezuela for decades to come. 

The meeting touched off a month of around-the-clock calls and video conferences.

People familiar with the deal’s progression said Lorch soon became involved in structuring key aspects of the deal beyond its financing, including how the board would sit for 15 years and choose its successors. One said he put an explicit premium on setting up the venture in a way that it could not be undone by Trump’s successor.

The months of work on the deal burst into public view on Aug. 28 with a Trump announcement on Truth Social.

“The United States of America has just entered into an Agreement with the Country of Venezuela on, THE BIGGEST OIL DEAL IN WORLD HISTORY!” Trump posted on a Friday night.

Two days later, Hegseth, Rubio, Betancourt and Alvarado signed the deal.

The post The secret terms of Trump’s Venezuelan oil deal appeared first on Salon.com.

In the summer of 2023, after he was impeached on charges of abusing his office for personal gain, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton was suspended and barred from conducting any official business for more than three months while awaiting trial in the state Senate.

So, he traveled.

Paxton, a Republican who is now running for U.S. Senate, took at least 17 trips over three months, including to resort destinations Park City, Utah, and Vail, Colorado. He visited the Oklahoma town where he owns a vacation lodge and a Utah community with a golf resort, where he later bought four condominiums.

State police joined him each time, costing taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars for trips unrelated to his job as attorney general. The Texas Senate ultimately acquitted him on the impeachment charges.

But Paxton’s use of the taxpayer-funded detail did not begin or end there. In fact, it stands out compared with his predecessor, fellow elected officials in Texas and other state attorneys general, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune found.

Paxton has traveled frequently out of state while listing little on his official calendar, The Associated Press reported last week. ProPublica and the Tribune’s analysis, which included reviewing every publicly available document Paxton’s office says it possesses about his travel, discloses for the first time how few of his trips had a listed business purpose: just 1 in 6.

It also found Paxton’s security has cost taxpayers far more than has previously been reported.

Since assuming office in 2015, Paxton has taken nearly 1,000 trips with a state-funded security detail, costing $3.3 million. The newsrooms’ review of Paxton’s travel records, obtained through the state’s Public Information Act, could only connect 138 of those trips and $553,000 in security costs to state business.

Records detailing the purpose of Paxton’s visits to 36 states and 19 countries do not appear to exist in most cases. These include a trip to a small town in Hawaii months before his family’s blind trust bought land there; 24 trips to Utah, where the trust owns five properties; and 53 trips to Florida, where Paxton and the trust have two houses and a townhome.

“If you’ve got all these extra trips, it becomes ethically and morally problematic,” said Chris Toth, former executive director of the National Association of Attorneys General, who has also criticized Paxton’s conduct on other issues. “The ethical question is whether a legitimate security function has effectively become a taxpayer-funded subsidy.”

Texas law allows the Department of Public Safety to provide security for key state leaders, including the attorney general, but does not require officials to use it. In fact, Paxton himself hasn’t used it in at least two dozen cases while traveling on official business.

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Paxton has dismissed opponents’ attacks that he has used the perks of office to benefit himself and has not answered questions about how he vastly increased his wealth as a public servant.

He also did not answer detailed questions for this story. ProPublica and the Tribune sent Paxton a spreadsheet detailing travel for which there was no record that he was on state business and asked him to provide additional information if the trips were not personal. Neither Paxton nor his office provided such records. Instead, his office provided a general statement.

“Throughout his career, Ken Paxton has faced numerous security threats stemming from his courageous work as Attorney General fighting on behalf of the people of Texas,” his office said in the statement. “Those threats are a direct result of him taking on the cartels terrorizing Texans and some of the nation’s most dangerous violent criminals.”

Paxton’s office directed additional questions to DPS.

A DPS spokesperson declined to answer the newsrooms’ questions, saying the agency does not comment on its security arrangements.

An Outlier Among Peers

To analyze Paxton’s travel, ProPublica and the Tribune reviewed DPS logs for his security detail and records from the attorney general’s office, including airfare and lodging receipts, per diems and his daily calendars.

The records available for his predecessor, Greg Abbott, show a stark difference: Abbott traveled mostly within the state as attorney general, and his security cost $203,000 during his last three years in the office. Adjusted for inflation, Abbott’s security detail cost $7,400 per month. Paxton’s has averaged $24,300.

Because the state keeps records only for a limited time, Abbott’s travel expenses and his daily calendars as attorney general no longer exist, so the news organizations could not determine how many of his trips were for business.

Records are available, however, for Abbott’s security costs as governor and for Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. Both are also offered state police security and have been in their current roles as long as Paxton.

When compared, the records show Paxton has taken 82 more out-of-state trips with a security detail than Abbott and nearly as many as the governor and lieutenant governor combined.

Though DPS security detail records are available for state leaders’ full tenure, Abbott’s office only provided calendars that document business-related activity for his first six years in office. More than two-thirds of the governor’s international trips during those years had a listed business purpose, compared with just two of 25 for Paxton during his full tenure. The governor’s office said it planned to release the remaining five years on Tuesday but only provided five months, saying it needed more time.

The attorney general’s records do not show a business purpose for travel to Albania, Aruba, Australia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, the Dominican Republic, England, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Malta, Mexico, Poland, South Africa or Taiwan.

The share of Paxton’s travel with a documented business purpose peaked early in his tenure, in 2018 and 2019, at 30%, the newsrooms’ analysis found. That aligns with the governor’s share of business travel during that period.

Since then, Paxton has taken fewer trips that are documented as state business while increasingly traveling out of state. Last year, just five of Paxton’s 91 trips with the security detail had a listed business purpose. Forty-one were outside Texas.

In some cases, Paxton has taken business trips without a DPS detail, an analysis of records from the department and the attorney general’s office shows. They include a 2019 meeting in Nashville, Tennessee, with that state’s attorney general to discuss opioid litigation and a 2021 visit with unnamed U.S. senators in North Carolina. There is also no record of Paxton taking the detail on political fundraising trips to Florida and the Bahamas.

But Paxton has traveled with security to other campaign-related activities, including one that came just two days after he was acquitted in the impeachment trial. Paxton boarded a Maine-bound private plane owned by a North Texas businessman to tape an episode of Tucker Carlson’s show, according to campaign finance records. During the interview, he hinted that he’d challenge U.S. Sen. John Cornyn in the 2026 Republican primary.

“Everything is on the table for me,” Paxton said when Carlson suggested he should run.

In his interview with Carlson, Paxton said it was unfair that he was automatically suspended before he could clear his name. He said he was eager to get back to work and that he was “reenergized to do the things the voters sent me to do.”

Paxton should pay for his own security on trips where there is no benefit for Texans, like vacations and campaign events, said Richard Briffault, a professor at Columbia Law School who has written about government ethics.

“There’s no reason for the taxpayers to be paying for things that they would not be paying for if he had stayed home,” Briffault said. “That’s a misuse of public funds.”

State officials said there are no records of Paxton or his campaign reimbursing Texas for security costs.

Of the 10 most populous states, Texas and New York confirmed that they provide security for their attorneys general, while Florida law allows its top lawyer to receive a detail upon request. North Carolina does not. Attorneys general offices for the remaining six states did not respond to requests for comment.

Former Oregon Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum said she never used a security detail during her 12 years in office, which ended in 2024. The Democrat said that Paxton’s higher profile might create a greater need for protection, but his extensive out-of-state travel without a documented business purpose raises questions about his workload.

“Was he minding the store? There’s a lot of work to be done at the office,” Rosenblum said.

Travel and Real Estate

Some of Paxton’s travel to four states with a security detail has overlapped with locations where he or his family’s trust has purchased 10 properties since 2021. A recent ProPublica and Tribune analysis found he owns or co-owns 15 properties with a market value of about $11 million.

In June 2021, Paxton attended an attorneys general conference in Maui. The security detail listed the destination as Lahaina, a small community on the Hawaiian island’s west coast. Four months later, Paxton’s family trust purchased an oceanview lot in a residential neighborhood there for $410,000, land records show.

The 7,000-square-foot lot remains vacant but has proved to be a savvy investment, now assessed at $1.2 million by Maui County.

Paxton set up the trust with his estranged wife, State Sen. Angela Paxton, who declined to be interviewed but said through a spokesperson that she has not been involved in her husband’s business dealings since 2024, when she filed for divorce. The Paxtons’ friend, Chip Loper, runs the trust. He did not respond to requests for comment.

Paxton has also gone to the Salt Lake City area 19 times, twice for listed business purposes. He visited three times — once on business — in the months leading up to his family trust’s July 2021 purchase of a plot in the ski town of Eden. The trust bought a mountainside lot on about two-thirds of an acre for $315,000 in cash, the seller told the newsrooms. It also remains undeveloped.

During his suspension in August 2023, Paxton visited St. George, Utah, a small city in the state’s southwest corner. Nearby is the Black Desert Resort, which hosts an annual PGA Tour golf tournament. Paxton purchased one condo at the resort in 2025 and three more in February. Paxton took out mortgages totaling $1.9 million for them, according to legal documents filed with the local county.

Paxton has visited Florida more than any other state, 53 times. Two of those trips have a documented business purpose. Between 2021 and 2022, Paxton purchased two homes in Ocala, known for its horse breeding industry, and a townhome in Dunedin, on the Gulf of Mexico near Tampa.

Paxton also traveled with the detail twice to Broken Bow, Oklahoma, where he purchased a $1.5 million vacation lodge in 2022. He visited in June 2023, during his suspension. Then again the following December. He traveled to the neighboring town of Idabel in 2023 and 2024. None of the trips had a listed business purpose.

Records that show travel with a security detail do not list the attorney general’s name but rather the position. State officials familiar with the travel records said the two temporary attorneys general appointed during Paxton’s suspension did not take the trips listed on the state police travel logs.

The attorney general’s office has said that Paxton’s work to secure large legal settlements with drugmakers and tech companies requires routine travel. Such travel is noted in calendars reviewed by ProPublica and the Tribune. Even so, more than 800 trips lack a documented business purpose.

Paul Nolette, a Marquette University political science professor who studies attorneys general, said that the role has become more expansive in recent years as states increasingly collaborate on big lawsuits. That could lead to more travel, he said. Nolette added these officials deserve occasional vacations like everyday Americans.

But given repeated accusations from Democrats and Republicans alike about Paxton’s ethics, Nolette said it is difficult to give him the benefit of the doubt that he’s constantly working while leaving the state so frequently.

“It just raises more red flags about how he’s using the office to do things that may not give the best bang for the buck for Texans,” Nolette said.

Paxton has not commented publicly about his use of the taxpayer-funded detail. During a podcast interview in November, Houston lawyer Tony Buzbee, who led his impeachment defense, asked the attorney general where he liked to travel.

“I love Jackson Hole. I like Park City. I like the mountains. I also like beaches,” Paxton responded. “I like places in Florida, places in California, even though I don’t like to admit I go to California. But it’s beautiful to see them.”

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We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either. 

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.

For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.

This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.

Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.

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All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?

Inside a flag shop in Little Rock, we surveyed our options. There were handheld American flags on skinny sticks, midsize ones to display on a wall and majestic formal flags adorned with silky gold fringe.

State law in Arkansas doesn’t require much to open a private school, nothing about teacher skills or what kids learn. But it does require that all schools display an American flag, and we wanted to follow the rules. So, at the Arkansas Flag and Banner store, we decided on a smallish one that could fit in a circular base atop a newsroom cubicle. We also bought an Arkansas flag — even though only public schools are required to have those. Total cost: $49.45. 

Picking the flags for our new school was the hardest part of an astoundingly easy process.

Early in our reporting in Arkansas, we tried to figure out what steps we’d need to take to make a private school. We couldn’t find all the answers online, so we called the state.

“We don’t have rules for opening a private school,” Kaelin Clay, an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, told us earlier this year.

In fact, we didn’t even have to file anything with the Education Department. All it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website, where we registered the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC as a business, listed ourselves as agents and officers, and paid a fee. 

“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.

The secretary of state’s office approved our new business the same day. We even got a certificate. 

The Arkansas Department of Education does not regulate private schools once they’re open, and no one from the state inspected the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location we chose for our school. As far as we know, nobody checked our backgrounds, either.

Arkansas adopted a private school funding plan in 2023, and back then there were fewer than 100 private schools on record. With the state in the fourth year of its Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides vouchers that can be spent on private schools, there are now more than 220. 

In addition, 143 microschools, which are a different category in Arkansas, were approved this year to accept tax dollars. That’s up from about 100 last school year.

Establishing the Curiosity Academy was so simple — and, frankly, a bit anticlimactic — that reporters then applied to become eligible to receive public funds. (Again, we applied with our names, work email addresses and a note that this was a journalistic exercise. We had no intention of actually ever taking any public money.) 

We wanted to see how far our curiosity could take us. 

Accessing public funds as a microschool in Arkansas is easier than it is for other types of private schools, even though there is no limit to the number of students one can enroll. Unlike private schools, we didn’t need to seek accreditation or show proof of financial solvency to accept state funding. 

It took about 10 minutes to fill out the required information in early September. Other than our contact information, we had to upload just two documents — one detailing our proposed tuition and fees, and the other with our refund policy. 

We said that — “should we open a school” — our tuition and fees per student would not exceed $7,208 per school year, the exact amount of Education Freedom Account money that each student in Arkansas is eligible for this year. We said tuition “would be collected only if education is delivered, and it would be the policy of the school to refund all tuition payments for educational services that are not provided.”

When more than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard back, we reached out to the state Education Department. An employee called back that afternoon and explained that the department had decided not to accept any more because the school year was underway.

But he didn’t reject us outright. He looked up our application and invited us to keep pursuing the public money. He said we still could apply to receive public money this school year, but as a vendor providing educational services such as tutoring. He also said we could apply as a microschool next year and even suggested a tweak to the language in our tuition policy should we decide to do that.

After we hung up, he emailed us the vendor application (which we will not pursue) and let us know the microschool application for next school year will open in the spring.

We asked the state Education Department whether it would be OK with us operating a publicly funded microschool. Clay, the spokesperson, said the agency’s role is to decide if schools meet state requirements. Microschool families, she said, “have the freedom to choose the educators and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs.”

Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook. We wrote that we would serve middle school students and listed our first day as TBD.

Leaving the crunchy, ragged edges on the paper, we stuffed our notice of intent into an envelope. We’d seen other new operators file similarly casual ones as they sought to register private schools in West Virginia. 

Then we drove over to the state Education Department to deliver the request. Our group — two reporters, a photographer and a video journalist — went through security and, camera rolling, wound our way through the maze of the midcentury building. We got lost once, and our entourage received several perplexed glances from workers, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. The person we needed to deliver the letter to was out, but a friendly employee agreed to place it on his desk.

Dozens of new private and microschools have set up shop in the state in recent years, fueled by the roughly $5,400 the Hope Scholarship offers each student to pay tuition. New private schools all go through Dustin Lambert, a manager in the Office of Student Enrichment and Support at the West Virginia Department of Education.

We heard back from Lambert the next day. Our notice was received. (Hooray!) He said now we needed a letter from the fire marshal that our school building was safe for children. (Oh no.)

This was a problem. Our school would be housed in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom, which had not been inspected as a school site. We didn’t want to usurp public resources to undergo a new inspection. It felt like the end of our Mountain State school experiment.

But it wasn’t.

After we followed up to ask whether all schools, including virtual schools, need safety clearance to register with the state, Lambert told us that though all brick-and-mortar private schools do, we “may want to consider the microschool route.” 

In that case, we later learned, the department wouldn’t be involved because state law doesn’t include any mechanism for oversight.  

West Virginia defines microschools as schools that charge tuition and are started by one or more teachers. In practice, there’s no real difference between a microschool and private school — neither has a limit on enrollment. (Yes, a micro can be macro.) He forwarded us the rules for starting a microschool, which involve providing proof of a high school diploma, at least. We notified the local school district of our new microschool venture and sent a college transcript.

The Kanawha County school district, in turn, notified the state of the existence of a new microschool.

And with that — bypassing the building health and safety requirements — we established the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. Officials at the Department of Education said they were aware that journalists were establishing a school. But they had to just watch us do so — they have no authority over the state’s microschools.

In an official statement, the department’s spokesperson said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.”

By law, should we open our microschool — and we won’t — we could enroll an unlimited number of students.

On Friday evenings, hundreds of people gather at Ponysaurus Brewing Co., a trendy spot in Durham, North Carolina, to savor its craft beers and cocktails, hardly the place you’d expect a school to open. But why not? 

On a recent Tuesday morning, the brewery was quiet and closed to customers. Behind the bar, yeast busily converted sugars into alcohol inside giant stainless steel fermentation tanks. Two journalists settled onto barstools beneath signs for pilsners and cherry sours. Icy cold glasses of Tell the Truth, a light and lemony ale, sat before them on a high-top table beside a stenographer’s notebook and a laptop. 

The brewery created the craft ale in partnership with The Assembly, which also is ProPublica’s journalistic partner in this private school endeavor, so it all felt very symbiotic. Ponysaurus’s owners had agreed to let us use their building and its fire and sanitation inspections, which are required to open a private school in the Tar Heel State.

Reporters from The Assembly and ProPublica scanned a state of North Carolina website that details how to file a notice of intent to open a private school. 

First, it explained the state’s statutory requirements for opening a private school, things like reporting the school’s name and address. We also would have to administer a standardized test in certain grades, if we were going to open an actual school, and maintain annual records about student attendance and immunizations. 

Then, we watched a four-minute, 39-second video explaining how to file the required notice of intent. 

From there it seemed simple. We created a login, then filled in the address of our school (Ponysaurus’s building), noted its owner and chief administrator (our reporters), and named it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy. We’d hoped to include the word Curiosity in the name, but the field in the form didn’t allow enough characters. In North Carolina, our curiosity would have to be implied.

We filled in a few more fields, including the grades we would serve (high schoolers), whether we would open a religious school (no) and the dates of our academic year. 

Then we needed to upload fire and sanitation inspection reports. This step is what brought us here, to Ponysaurus, filling out the online notice to the tune of a hissing compressor that kept clean air moving through the brewing system.  

“You will need to secure inspections for the building where the school will be housed. You will need a fire inspection from the local fire marshal and a health and sanitation inspection from the local health department,” the video said. 

Just that morning, a City of Durham Fire Department inspector had visited the brewery and provided Ponysaurus with a fresh business occupancy inspection. We uploaded the new report, along with the brewery’s current food establishment inspection (on which it received a 99, an excellent score, we felt, for a school).

The screen flashed a confirmation. “Thank you. We have received your request to open a private school.” If approved, the page said, we should receive a school identification number in three to five business days. 

We hoped to join the at least 169 other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the 2021-22 school year, which marked the start of a series of expansions to the state’s publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition.

If we wanted our school to tap the voucher money, we’d have to go through some additional steps such as getting criminal background checks. We weren’t doing that.

The following day, we hit a snag. It came in a brief and garbled email. It said only: “Good morning and thank you for submitting a Notice of Intent to operate a private school. To complete the process we need to fire and sanitation inspections to” and then ended abruptly like that, no explanation or period. We emailed back, asking for clarity and noting we had already uploaded the inspection reports.

An official from the state Division of Non-Public Education then called. The school’s name needs to be on the inspection reports, she said, something we had not seen in any of our research. We also had not found any state statutes or rules that would preclude us — or anyone else — from opening a private school wherever we saw fit, be that a church or a brewery, as long as it passed “reasonable fire, health and safety inspections.” 

In a follow-up call, she clarified that her division checks only to be sure the building has passed inspections specifically for a school. A spokesperson for the agency later added that state statute does not allow them to deny a private school application, but they won’t process an incomplete application — notably one without the proper inspections.

We hadn’t expected we would need a school-specific inspection at this point. The video explainer referred to inspections only generally, and the state’s written guidance indicated only that this would need to happen before occupancy. 

Given we had no intention of actually opening a school, we had decided ahead of time that we wouldn’t consume any additional public resources — such as fire or health inspectors’ time — in our journalistic pursuit. 

Perhaps Ponysaurus could pass the school-specific inspections. But the ethical red line would be our stop sign. Our curiosity would have to end in North Carolina.

The post We’re reporters, not teachers. We were able to start private schools anyway appeared first on Salon.com.

Without Amy Miller, some elderly and disabled people wouldn’t be able to vote.

The attorney for Disability Rights Nebraska travels the state, investigating the quality of nursing homes and assisted living facilities. As she reminds the residents how they can report abuse or neglect, she also offers voter registration forms. Last month, she helped a veteran with a traumatic brain injury fill out change-of-address paperwork so he could vote in the upcoming midterm elections. “He 100% knew who he wanted to vote for,” Miller said, but he struggled to write with a pen.

Congress funds her organization’s efforts to ensure that even people who might not have access to the internet or transportation have the opportunity to participate in elections.

Now a White House proposal threatens that work. 

The White House Office of Management and Budget wants to change spending rules to prohibit anyone from using federal grant money for voter registration drives or what it vaguely calls “related activities.” The office is headed by Russell Vought, who has long criticized the use of taxpayer money for voter registration efforts and who more recently used his position to cancel, freeze or redirect vast amounts of federal funding in defiance of Congress’ orders.

Miller, who has worked at her nonprofit for six years, said she’s never faced regulators wanting to impede her work.

“Shutting that down and making it more difficult for these Americans to access the ballot box is bewildering to me,” she said. 

The proposal is part of the Trump administration’s broader assault on federal efforts to expand access to voting, especially among groups that have historically faced discrimination and disenfranchisement. 

President Donald Trump has championed the SAVE America Act, a bill that would require people to provide documents proving their citizenship when registering to vote, and that may require everyone to deliver that proof in person, which would effectively end voter registration drives. 

Last year, the Trump administration banned nongovernmental organizations from conducting registration drives at naturalization ceremonies, though the agency temporarily lifted the ban amid litigation over the policy change. The Department of Education also sent a letter to colleges and universities stating that they could not use federal work-study dollars to support voting-related work. (The directive has been contested.) Previously, those funds were used to pay students who had part-time jobs to conduct voter registration on campus and in neighboring communities.

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And on the first day of Trump’s second term, the president rescinded an executive order signed by Joe Biden that had directed federal agencies to expand opportunities for registration. Biden’s order acknowledged that some Americans, including Black citizens and people with disabilities, face historic and ongoing barriers to voting access. 

Neither Vought nor his office responded to ProPublica’s questions about the proposed change. But in a letter sent to state officials in 2022, he condemned Biden’s executive order as a “power grab” that would “increase voter registration and turnout, especially among Democratic Party supporters.” 

Vought’s proposed change, which wouldn’t go into effect until after the 2026 midterms, could have ramifications for the next presidential election well beyond voting accessibility. 

Nonprofits that receive government funds to help people sign up for Medicaid benefits, food stamps or other programs subject to the National Voter Registration Act are required to provide registration forms and help people fill them out. Like Disability Rights Nebraska, these groups would be caught between contradictory federal directives if the proposed ban is finalized.

Thousands more nonprofits receive federal funds for other services but provide voter outreach using private donations. Nonprofit experts said the confusion over which groups the ban affects and the burden of proving an organization is in compliance could lead many to pause or curb registration efforts ahead of the 2028 election. Colleges and universities that help students navigate registering to vote while away from home could be similarly affected.

But it is nonprofits like Disability Rights Nebraska and the people they serve that will be among the most directly hit.

“I don’t really think this rule had in mind that we are going to disenfranchise voters with disabilities. But it’s going to have that kind of effect,” said Rabia Belt, a Stanford law professor who’s an expert on disability and citizenship. 

In 2002, Congress helped tackle the challenges people with disabilities face in voting when it passed the Help America Vote Act. The legislation was designed to upgrade states’ voting systems and improve security in the wake of the controversial 2000 election, when close results in Florida triggered a recount, followed by lawsuits that ultimately ended with a U.S. Supreme Court decision that led to George W. Bush being declared the winner. 

The Help America Vote Act, signed by Bush, created grants to assist people with disabilities in registering to vote, casting their ballots and accessing polling places. That funding continues to this day. In recent years, Congress has budgeted $10 million a year, which is spread among 57 nonprofit groups that together cover every state as well as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Native American communities and U.S. territories. 

That funding has narrowed the gap in casting ballots between those with disabilities and those without, according to an April 2024 report from Rutgers University’s Program for Disability Research that was written for the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel that helps implement the reforms put in place by the Help America Vote Act. 

But challenges persist when it comes to voter registration. During the 2024 election, 3.6% of registered voters with disabilities reported difficulties with registering, compared to 1.4% of registered voters without disabilities, according to survey data from Rutgers. That gap may sound small, but it is statistically significant and represents the experiences of about 740,000 registered voters with disabilities, said Douglas Kruse, one of the Rutgers professors who compiled the survey. 

The draft version of the OMB proposal was published in May. It is part of an extensive attempt to remake the rules governing federal grants. Once OMB’s final rule is released, it will almost certainly be subject to litigation. Legal experts said some lawsuits will likely focus on how the rule contradicts existing laws and policies, like the grants that were enshrined in the 2002 law and repeatedly approved by Congress.

Samuel Bagenstos, who served as general counsel of the OMB for part of Biden’s administration, said the proposal disregards how the Constitution gives Congress the “power of the purse.” The legislative branch sets the budget and gives dozens of federal agencies instructions on distributing those funds; the agencies create detailed policies to select grant applicants and get the money out the door.

Vought understands that federal funding provides a tool to consolidate power into the White House, said Bagenstos, who is now a law professor at the University of Michigan, specializing in disability and appropriations law. 

“This is not even a surgical power grab,” he said. “It’s just a massive across-the-board power grab.”

Disability Rights Nebraska was awarded $141,000 in voter accessibility funds this year. When the organization heard about the proposed rule, it submitted a public comment in opposition. Such a change “would affect the ability of nonprofits such as ours to conduct” voter registration drives, which are “an invaluable service to Nebraskans with disabilities who are otherwise locked out of the voting experience,” the group wrote. 

The organization’s work is strictly nonpartisan as mandated by law, the letter said. During a visit in June to a rural assisted living facility, the group wrote, 30% of the new voters its staff helped register identified as Republican, 20% as Democrat and 50% as nonpartisan or affiliated with a third party.

To ensure their drives are nonpartisan, Miller said she and her colleagues conduct the work in pairs, with each person representing a different party, as required by law. 

Many of the residents she speaks with are essentially cloistered, Miller said. 

She recalled one visit to a rural assisted living facility in early 2024. The community is so small it doesn’t have a library or a gas station. The nearest election commissioner’s office is a 30-minute drive away. 

Disability Rights Nebraska had put up a poster inside the building, listing key facts about voting access for people with disabilities. At one point, Miller said, a young man in a baggy T-shirt pointed at the poster. “Is this true?” He asked her. 

Yes, she told him.

“So I could register?”

“You can,” Miller said. “Do you want to register?”

He did. Miller said he knew what party he wanted to register with, though she declined to identify the party publicly or give personal details about him to respect his privacy. She said he told her he had lived at the home for a couple of years and this was the first time someone had offered to walk him through the registration process.

Miller said she wished the politicians making rules about voting rights could witness such moments.

“If I could just bring a politician with me to stand in the front hall of a nursing home” and see how people react when they realize they can vote again, she said. “I wish they could see that and realize how important the work is.”

The post “A massive power grab”: White House proposal threatens funding that helps disabled Americans vote appeared first on Salon.com.

Earlier this month, the Supreme Court blocked an executive order from President Donald Trump restricting voting by mail in ways that could have thrown the upcoming midterms into chaos. But the White House originally had far more disruptive plans, ProPublica has learned. 

According to several people knowledgeable about the discussions, the administration initially floated an idea that would have virtually shut down mail voting: requiring all ballots to be delivered exclusively through certified mail. The proposal — which would have required voters to be home and sign for delivery of their ballots — was ultimately abandoned, after vehement Postal Service objections that it would have been impossible to execute. 

Even after the idea fizzled, Postal Service officials were cut out of crucial conversations as the Trump administration moved forward with what became the final executive order, two people familiar with the matter said. Issued in March, its contents came as a shock even to the Postal Service’s lawyers.

Trump’s order would have forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t. Beyond that, it would have inexplicably handed authority over the plan’s execution to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has no formal oversight over the Postal Service. 

Inside the Postal Service, which is overseen by a bipartisan Board of Governors, deliberations on whether to comply with the order stretched on for weeks. Some board members found it alarming but feared Trump would respond to a direct challenge by trying to fire them, sources familiar with their concerns told ProPublica. Instead, they remained silent, counting on the courts to block the measure. 

“The board was being careful how or when it took action, knowing that it might be its last action,” one source said. 

ProPublica previously detailed postal officials’ deep concerns with the Trump order. Now our reporting reveals how the order came to be and who was involved in crafting it, as well as the extent to which the White House tried to dictate how mail-in ballots would be processed.

The White House team leading the mail-in voting discussions included J. Brian Sikma, a special presidential assistant who has been involved in other administration election initiatives,

including identifying noncitizen voters for prosecution and seeking to ban voting machines. (Sikma didn’t respond to a request for comment.)

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The commerce secretary, Lutnick, served in “an advisory and coordination capacity” in drafting the order, a department spokesperson confirmed to ProPublica.

“President Trump values Secretary Lutnick’s advice on many matters,” the spokesperson said.

In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence. She said the executive order “added important safeguards to vote-by-mail. These were commonsense measures to protect the security of mail-in ballots and to ensure only Americans vote in American elections.” 

Bis also rejected the idea that the certified-mail proposal was “unworkable,” saying this played no part in the administration’s decision “to go in another direction.”

A Postal Service spokesperson declined to comment on the agency’s internal deliberations about the executive order and said it was the Board of Governors’ policy not to discuss them.

He referred ProPublica to an earlier statement by Postmaster General David Steiner that said: “Postal employees take great pride in their responsibility to support the democratic process. We will continue to approach that responsibility with the care, professionalism, and dedication that voters and election officials expect from the United States Postal Service.”

In an interview, Jonathan Smith, president of the American Postal Workers Union, called the Trump administration’s push to revamp mail voting problematic and baseless. 

“The ultimate goal was to create chaos and doubt in the vote-by-mail process,” he said. “You’re creating a rule to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.” 

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The White House first reached out to the Postal Service in the fall of 2025, saying the administration wanted to explore how to improve mail voting. 

Trump has long claimed without evidence that mail voting is riddled with fraud, though he frequently votes by mail himself. He’s said the process is “inherently corrupt” and contributed to his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Postal Service leaders responded to the administration’s late 2025 overture with recommendations they had been making to local election officials for years. Nearly a third of all ballots in the 2022 and 2024 elections were cast through the mail. Mostly, independent audits showed, the system worked reliably. But at times, ballots got lost or delayed. 

Officials with the Postal Service had long wanted election offices to use standardized ballot envelopes with scannable barcodes, logos and other features that would make it easier to separate election mail from other first-class mail. In 2024, a bipartisan bill to turn those recommendations into requirements stalled in the Senate.

When Trump retook the Oval Office, it soon became obvious the White House had other ideas, including requiring ballots to be sent by certified mail.

Doing this could, in theory, erase some security concerns, but local governments would have to pay a higher fee to send each envelope and postal workers would have to conduct millions of identity checks, crippling timely delivery. 

“It was just, for many reasons, a terrible idea,” one top Postal Service official said.

The White House backed down, but when the final order was unveiled, postal officials said they were surprised to see it demanded that they implement the envelope changes and ballot-tracking measures they’d recommended in time for the midterms.

The directive also required states to provide the Postal Service with lists of eligible mail voters, which workers would then try to match with ballots before sending them out. Designing a new ballot-tracking system would normally take about a year, postal officials said.

They were particularly concerned with the order’s requirement that Postal Service workers reject ballots for an array of reasons, ranging from outdated voter information to unscannable bar codes. All mail ballots from a state could be rejected if the state refused to provide its voter list. 

“That’s not what we do,” a former official involved with the discussions said. “We deliver mail. We don’t decide what goes and what doesn’t.”

Postal Service officials were taken aback that the final order put Lutnick in charge of coordinating with other agencies and the postmaster general in “effectuating all relevant aspects of the implementation.”

Lutnick’s involvement came after Trump had discussed putting the Postal Service under the Commerce Department. At Lutnick’s February 2025 swearing-in, Trump said he thought Lutnick’s “great business instinct” was just what the Postal Service needed. (The postal board fought back, and Trump’s idea of merging the agency into the Commerce Department is apparently no longer on the table.)

Almost immediately after the executive order became public, four separate lawsuits challenging it were filed by states led by Democrats and political and civil rights groups. Democratic members of Congress and postal union leaders urged the Postal Service and its Board of Governors, which had long defended the agency’s independence, to resist. A June 2026 Supreme Court decision allowing Trump to remove leaders of many agencies long considered independent gave the governors pause, however.

Steiner, appointed at Trump’s behest in mid-2025, directed Postal Service leaders to prepare to implement the order. In public statements, he defended the measure and said he would leave it for the courts to decide. At his direction, postal officials began establishing procedures to comply with Trump’s order. 

As they started to craft rules, career postal officials, concerned about voter privacy and disenfranchising legitimate voters, attempted to do as little as they could to comply, three people knowledgeable about their deliberations said. They looked for ways to protect workers from having to step out of their traditional lanes.

For example, they proposed having states turn over their voter lists but not requiring Postal Service workers to use them to decide which ballots to send out. When the Postal Service’s lawyer took the idea to the White House counsel, however, it was rebuffed as “not enough,” the former official said.

The White House team made clear that if even one ballot envelope in a batch mailing didn’t match the state list, the entire mailing should be rejected and election officials should be notified. “That means if four addresses don’t align in a mailing of one million, 999,996 other people don’t get their ballot tomorrow,” the former official said.

As ProPublica has reported, staffers found these issues highly troubling. A whistleblower complaint released in August warned that the system designed to carry out the executive order was rushed into being, untested and error-prone. 

The final rule — 95 pages spelling out how the agency would carry out Trump’s order — was issued on Aug. 21, less than a month before the first mail ballots were due to go out.

It left many questions unanswered: How would lists of voters be kept updated? How would the Postal Service ensure local officials were able to upload voter information to the agency’s new portal? How could postal officials approve the new ballot envelope designs required by nearly 10,000 voting jurisdictions in just weeks? 

“This was going to be a disaster,” the former postal official said.

The Sept. 14 Supreme Court ruling provided a reprieve, but Smith, the postal union president, criticized agency leadership for not stepping in more forcefully. Counting on the courts to halt the order, said Smith, was “a dangerous calculation, and showed a clear lack of courage and integrity.”

The post The untold origins of Trump’s plan to sharply restrict mail-in voting appeared first on Salon.com.