FRESNO, Calif. – The 250-mile-long San Joaquin Valley is an economic powerhouse, producing everything from crude oil to grapes, cotton to pistachios.

It’s also a pollution-trapping bowl, bounded on three sides by mountains and punished by meteorological conditions that cause dirty air to stagnate. All eight counties in the valley are in “extreme non-attainment” of the federal smog standard, which has led to penalties. Lung-searing ozone, the main component of smog, is cooked by triple-digit summer heat. Fine particles, tied to both heart and respiratory disease, fill the air on foggy winter days.

In theory, the Clean Air Act was built for places like this. 

The 1970 law has succeeded by any number of measures. Its benefits — in the form of improved health and productivity, along with lower medical expenses — have far exceeded its economic costs, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. By 2020, the EPA estimated in a peer-reviewed, congressionally mandated report, it will prevent more than 230,000 premature deaths annually from microscopic particles that can make their way deep into the lungs and bloodstream after being discharged by cars, trucks, industrial sites and agricultural operations.

Even here, the law has had demonstrable effects. In 2015, for example, the valley exceeded the federal ozone standard on 55 days, compared to 90 days in 2005 and 113 days in 1995, data from the California Air Resources Board show. In a place where agriculture and oil rule, however, the act has become a bone of contention, fueled by an anti-regulatory mood in Washington and a curious and controversial alliance of business interests and the local air-pollution control agency.

The head of that agency, Seyed Sadredin, is a favorite of lawmakers who want to soften the act. In his third appearance before Congress since October 2015, Sadredin complained at a House hearing this spring about the law’s “artificial and arbitrary” deadlines, which he said could lead to “devastating federal sanctions” in the valley for pollution beyond his regulatory reach.

“Some of the provisions of the Clean Air Act, although well-intentioned, are leading to unintended consequences,” Sadredin said. 

The key elements of this esoteric drama are these: At the same time the valley is violating federal standards, its chief air-pollution cop is deflecting blame and aiding politicians in D.C. eager to pry open a venerable public-health statute.

“[Sadredin] is a state officer,” said Jared Blumenfeld, the EPA’s regional administrator in California until last year. “He swears an oath to uphold the Clean Air Act, and yet he is actively working to undermine this important environmental law.”

Looking for a scapegoat

The conflict in the valley has roots going back 70 years. In 1947, California Gov. Earl Warren signed into law the Air Pollution Control Act, authorizing each of the state’s 58 counties to create an air pollution control district. Los Angeles County, routinely enveloped in a brown cloud by that point, was the first to do so.

As the years passed, state lawmakers came to realize that, as one historical document put it, “air pollution does not respect political boundaries.” At their direction the California Air Resources Board divided the state into 15 air basins based on geological and meteorological characteristics. Starting with one in the Los Angeles basin in 1976, 35 regional air pollution control districts were created to address stationary sources of pollution – oil refineries, power plants, farms — as well as area sources — gas stations, dust from unpaved roads.

The districts prepare detailed plans stating how they intend to meet Clean Air Act standards. The plans are sent to the Air Resources Board, which regulates mobile pollution sources such as cars and trucks (more rigorously than the federal government. The Trump administration wants to change that). All of this is folded into a single document that goes to the EPA, which can accept or reject all or part of it. If the EPA thinks a state is malingering, it has the power to withhold federal highway funds or impose other sanctions – though it rarely does.

The San Joaquin Valley Air Pollution Control District, composed of eight former county offices, was formed in 1991. The district, with a staff of 310 and an annual budget of nearly $200 million, faces a herculean task in a region of 4.2 million people. In Fresno, one in five children has asthma – among the highest rates in the country. Bakersfield — seat of Kern County, California’s oil-producing leviathan — ranked first in the nation for short-term particle pollution in the American Lung Association’s most recent “State of the Air” report. Valley-wide, 1,200 premature deaths each year are blamed on the bad air. 

What to do about all of this has become the subject of endless debate and vitriol spewed by a disparate cast of characters and fueled by a changing political climate. In Washington, newly emboldened Republicans and at least one Democrat in Congress are seeking to stretch compliance deadlines under the Clean Air Act, calling them unreasonable and counterproductive.

Many regulators and public-health advocates in traditionally liberal California are watching with trepidation, but Sadredin, the air district’s executive director, is not one of them. Within weeks of Donald Trump’s election, Sadredin’s name was atop a “presidential transition white paper” calling for an end to “costly bureaucratic red tape” associated with the act.

In interviews with the Center for Public Integrity and KQED’s The California Report magazine, Sadredin insisted he has no desire to see the law eviscerated and pointed to a district proposal sent to state legislators in February. The document said a redo of the Clean Air Act wouldn’t be necessary if Congress could find some other way to inoculate California’s hazy midsection from EPA sanctions for air pollution beyond local control — from heavy trucks that barrel down Interstate 5 and State Highway 99, for example.

“We’re not trying to get out of our responsibilities,” Sadredin said. “We just don’t want to be unfairly penalized.”

The proposal, however, leaves open the option of lobbying to weaken the federal law. Dr. Alexander Sherriffs, a physician in the town of Fowler who sits on the district’s 15-member governing board, cast one of two “no” votes against the plan. At his busy clinic, just south of Fresno, Sherriffs lamented the “terrible” rates of childhood asthma he sees. Even more alarming, he said, are heart attacks among adults that may be pollution-related but aren’t recorded as such on death certificates — “hundreds, if not a thousand, a year.”

Sherriffs acknowledged that anti-pollution measures can be costly. But so are disease and its byproducts: emergency-room visits, medication, lost school days. “We’re paying this hidden expense every day,” he said. The doctor said he’s unwilling to “get off a winning racehorse” and endorse changes to the Clean Air Act. He worries that Sadredin has joined “people with axes” in Washington who want to dismantle the law.

‘Unfair sanctions’ 

For the past five years, valley residents and business owners have paid a $12 vehicle-registration surcharge for violating the federal one-hour ozone standard. An agreement between the EPA and the air district has allowed the cumulative $168 million in penalties to be used for local projects such as replacement of diesel trucks, school buses and tractors, which contribute to both smog and particle pollution.

Sadredin says he fears the EPA could impose more draconian measures on a region of vast oil fields and farms interspersed with swaths of poverty. Among them: “no-drive” and “no-farming” days, and the withholding of billions of dollars in federal highway funds.

“A federal remedy to bar the imposition of these unfair sanctions is our top legislative priority,” Sadredin told the House Environment Subcommittee on March 22.

At the same hearing, Kurt Karperos, deputy executive officer at the state Air Resources Board, painted a less dire picture and urged lawmakers not to weaken the Clean Air Act. Driven by the law’s health-based deadlines, the state’s air quality has improved even as its economy – the world’s sixth-largest — has “continued to grow and prosper,” Karperos said.

Clean-air advocates — some of whom have clashed with Sadredin for years — say the district has dallied, especially on fine particles. The EPA defines these as being 2.5 micrometers — 1/30th the diameter of a human hair — or smaller.

“They are constantly looking to put the blame somewhere else, find a scapegoat,” said Dolores Weller, director of the Central Valley Air Quality Coalition in Fresno. “They’re supposed to be a public-health agency, but they pride themselves on the customer service they offer to [air-pollution] permit holders. That’s who they want to make happy. They could care less about people who have asthma.”

The coalition has compiled a list of steps it says the district could take to meet the EPA’s PM 2.5 standard, including a ban on the burning of agricultural waste and stricter controls on natural-gas flaring in oil-production areas.

Sadredin says the district has adopted more than 600 rules since 1992 and is pondering others. People’s exposure to high smog levels is down by 90 percent since the passage of the Clean Air Act 47 years ago, he says. “If we ever reach a day when we cannot find more things to do to reduce air pollution in the Valley, we’ll close shop and I will quit my job,” he wrote in an email to the Center for Public Integrity.

Sadredin says the federal law’s overlapping deadlines and ever-tightening requirements impede progress in places like the valley: Just as the district figures out how to meet one standard, another appears on the horizon. The Air Resources Board, however, characterizes this as a self-inflicted problem. The San Joaquin Valley air district “has chosen to develop separate plans for individual standards,” the board said in a written statement. In contrast, the South Coast Air Quality Management District, in the Los Angeles area, has found a way to “address all standards simultaneously.” 

Sadredin speaks often about a family of chemicals called nitrogen oxides, or NOx, which contribute to the valley’s vexing fine-particle problem. Eighty-five percent of NOx emissions come from mobile sources “outside our regulatory authority” – mostly trucks and locomotives – he testified at the House hearing in March. But state officials say that up to half of the particle pollution in the valley comes from sources regulated by the district. In October, the Air Resources Board kicked back for revisions a district plan to address the problem. The plan is scheduled to come up for discussion by the board this week.

“Our job is to make sure [districts] are working in tandem and meet federal standards,” board member Dean Florez, a former Democratic state senator from Bakersfield, wrote in an email to the Center for Public Integrity. “If one district goes astray, that’s really concerning.”

Sadredin “does not represent California or other air districts in his messages in D.C.,” Florez wrote. “His constant refrain that they have left no stone unturned is disingenuous. He needs to take a proactive approach to meeting federal and state air quality requirements as opposed to dragging his feet and only complying minimally at the last minute.”

‘Pro-business’ regulator

Most members of the air district’s governing board have parochial interests: eight of the 15 are county supervisors, five sit on city councils. Ties to oil and agriculture — which together contribute some $40 billion to the Valley economy — are strong. The exceptions: two board members appointed by the governor to make sure the health of all valley residents is considered and science is respected as policy is made. Legislation was required to create those seats, which are occupied by Dr. Sherriffs and John Capitman, director of the Central Valley Health Policy Institute at California State University, Fresno.

Sadredin, 57, began working for the district in 1981 and became executive director in 2006. In a 2013 radio talk-show interview, he described himself as a “pro-business conservative” and blamed “extremist environmental groups” for the EPA sanctions that led to the $12-per-vehicle surcharge.

Sadredin wrote in an email that he is a “life-long Democrat” who twice voted for Barack Obama. While he reports to a “conservative, pro-Business board,” he wrote, the body “has promulgated clean air programs that serve as a model for the rest of the nation.”

In 2015, the district’s board adopted a Clean Air Act “modernization” proposal, which suggested, among other things, that “technological and economic feasibility” be contemplated along with the health benefits of pollution controls. When the proposal came up for a vote, Sherriffs and Capitman were the only dissenters. Capitman said the plan “picks up the worst ideas in the country on how to move away from the Clean Air Act. I’m extremely uncomfortable about it.”

The board's chairman, Fresno City Councilman Oliver L. Baines III, said the initiative merely argued for “common-sense” updates to the law that would help protect low-income communities like his West Fresno district, home to one of the most polluted ZIP codes in the state.

“No person in my position who represents a disadvantaged community is going to jeopardize public health,” Baines said. But he said he’s puzzled by resistance to legislative remedies that would shield such places from crippling sanctions.

“We actually approached air-quality advocates in the valley and said, ‘Hey, this is what we’d like to do. We would like your support,’” Baines said. “And, you know, they refuse to help. They are simply afraid to introduce any legislation that would allow the Clean Air Act to be opened up.”

Emails obtained by the Center for Public Integrity under the California Public Records Act seem to underpin the advocates’ skepticism. They show, for example, that the district solicited the lobbying help of an oil industry trade group, the Western States Petroleum Association, “a strong supporter of our federal efforts to improve the Clean Air Act.”

Those efforts have aligned the district with an informal coalition led by Jed Anderson, a Houston-area lawyer who represents corporations in pollution cases and runs a website called cleanairreform.org. Two years ago, Anderson attended a district-organized scientific conference at Yosemite National Park addressing one of Sadredin’s fixations: pollution that drifts into California from as far away as China. The California Air Resources Board says the phenomenon has a negligible effect on the San Joaquin Valley’s air.

In a telephone interview, Anderson said he was “blown away” by Sadredin’s commitment to fixing the federal law. Sadredin called Anderson “an interesting character” who had “zero input” on district policy. 

Nosebleeds and asthma attacks in Lost Hills

The 11 members of the Ruiz family breathe some of the valley’s worst air. They live in the Kern County community of Lost Hills, which adjoins an oil field of the same name. Emissions from the field mingle with those from farms and traffic; the Tehachapi Mountains to the southeast hold much of it in.

The nine Ruiz children suffer chronic health problems their parents blame on pollution. Saul Jr., 14, gets nosebleeds and headaches when the air is especially fetid. “He’ll be out playing, and suddenly he’s bathed in blood,” his father, Saul Sr., said in Spanish. Twenty-one-year-old Ericka is asthmatic and had attacks so severe when she was younger that she would turn purple, necessitating visits to the emergency room. Nine-year-old Julissa is constantly exhausted and falls asleep in class. 

Leaving is out of the question, Saul Sr. said. He stays home on disability and takes care of the children; his wife works at a pistachio-packing plant nearby. “When the air is really bad, everybody in Lost Hills complains — they have weepy eyes, they’re getting sick,” he said. “We need the air district to do something about this.”

What, exactly, is in the air? It’s hard to say. The nearest district air-monitoring stations for ozone and fine particles are about 25 miles and 50 miles away, respectively. With modest foundation funding, Rosanna Esparza, an organizer with the Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment, last year installed monitors inside and outside 20 homes, including the Ruizes’, in and around Lost Hills. Esparza said the devices have detected spikes of fine particles, which can cause symptoms reported by residents: headaches, lethargy, respiratory problems. 

Earlier sampling outside three homes picked up consistent levels of volatile organic compounds, or VOCs, as well as the toxic gas methane. While none of the individual VOC levels was above short-term limits, Esparza said she worries about the cumulative effects. She expects the current round of testing to continue through August and said the results will be presented to air district officials. “They’re not doing their job,” she said. “Somebody’s got to do it. We shouldn’t be picking up the tab on this kind of work.”

Sadredin said the district has “one of the most extensive air-monitoring systems in the nation.” But each station costs about $500,000 to build and $70,000 a year to maintain, with the EPA traditionally footing most of the bill. People in places like Lost Hills are left with a web-based tool that allows a user to type in an address and get an estimate of local air quality based on computer modeling.

Kern County embraces the oil industry as warmly as it does country-music legends Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, who created the rock & roll-influenced Bakersfield Sound. More than 80 percent of California’s oil production comes from the county, which had 44,000 active wells in 2015 and, thanks to an ordinance that eased permitting, could have 72,000 more by 2035. Clean-air activists like Tom Frantz are a decided minority.

Frantz, an almond farmer and a member of the Air Resources Board’s Environmental Justice Advisory Committee, complains regularly about flaring – the burning of natural gas for economic or safety reasons — which throws off NOx and VOCs and adds to the valley’s smog and particle burdens. He kept close watch over one flare in the city of Shafter, six-tenths of a mile from an elementary school, which roared off and on for 17 years until it finally was extinguished. Last year the district gave it permission to release 70,017 pounds of pollutants. “It’s like having maybe a dozen diesel trucks making a one-mile loop, continuously, in your neighborhood,” Frantz said.

The public-interest law firm Earthjustice, the “extremist” group to which Sadredin says he was referring in the 2013 radio interview, has challenged — unsuccessfully thus far — district permits issued to two Kern County facilities that accept rail shipments of exceptionally noxious crude oil from North Dakota and tar sands from Canada.

The firm has had better luck pushing back on district air-pollution plans, convincing the EPA and a federal appeals court to reject aspects as deficient. “The district is scrambling to figure out how to meet the national air standards,” said Paul Cort, an Earthjustice lawyer in San Francisco. “The response has been to ask for amendments to the Clean Air Act to give them excuses for not meeting certain requirements.”

‘The holy grail’

The Clean Air Act is not immutable. It was amended — fortified — by Congress in 1990 to address airborne chemicals and acid rain. President George H.W. Bush signed the legislation — “a demonstration to the American people,” he said, “of my determination that each and every American shall breathe clean air.”

Now, however, some lawmakers want to relax the act rather than strengthen it. The bill on which Sadredin testified in March would, among other things, slow mandatory review of clean-air standards by the EPA from every five years to every 10 years and require the agency to consider “technological feasibility” when revising those standards.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Pete Olson, R-Texas, wrote, “We have made important progress in improving air quality, but state after state has informed us that under the current system, there are Administrative nightmares with respect to compliance and feasibility. We also know that there is pollution beyond our control that drifts into the U.S. from around the world or occurs naturally. This bill is simply about improving the process for state air regulators and industry.”

But Janet McCabe, who ran the EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation late in the Obama administration, sees something more ominous at work. The feasibility provision of Olson’s bill is “a big, big deal,” she said in an interview.

The Clean Air Act dictates that standards be health-based, driven by science and not economics, McCabe said; cost comes into play only after the numbers are set. The law already gives states time to devise and implement pollution-control strategies, she said. “They are not expected to do things that are ridiculously costly or that don’t make sense.” Nor are states responsible for pollution beyond their control.

An EPA spokeswoman declined to comment on the Olson bill.

Tighter standards, more alarming science

It’s true that standards under the act keep changing. In 1997, the federal ozone limit was set at 80 parts per billion. It went down to 75 ppb in 2008 and 70 ppb in 2015 (a number Trump’s EPA chief, Scott Pruitt, is reconsidering). The San Joaquin Valley isn’t projected to hit these targets until 2023, 2031 and 2037, respectively.

There’s a reason ozone limits have gotten stricter: The science has gotten scarier.

At the March 22 hearing, Dr. Homer Boushey, a lung specialist at the University of California, San Francisco, said there is mounting evidence that ozone not only worsens asthma in children but also may induce it, and that it causes premature death and neurological changes — like those seen in victims of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s — among adults.

Karperos, of the California Air Resources Board, testified that Olson’s bill “would mean more people would breathe dirty air longer.” He singled out Sadredin’s domain, saying, “The San Joaquin Valley, in particular, is home to high rates of poverty, pollution and asthma. It is especially critical to continue progress in that region.”

Sadredin said he’s spoken privately to progressive elected officials and environmentalists who’ve warned, “You don’t want to open the act in this Congress, because then they would go beyond some of the reasonable things you’re asking.”

He finds this illogical, he said, but allowed, “I suppose they have to say things like that – that, you know, the Clean Air Act is the holy grail we should not even think about changing.”

Sasha Khokha is host of KQED’s The California Report magazine, a statewide public radio program, and a former Fresno correspondent for the station. Kimberly Kenny, Ana Santos and Carolyn Zhang contributed to this story.

President Trump’s proposed budget for 2018 aims to pump an extra $589 million into building nuclear bombs. What will he get for that sum? Pretty much the same results that President Obama expected a year ago, when they appeared to cost much less.

The Trump administration has proposed to make room for the new nuclear weapons spending by cutting expenditures in other areas at the Department of Energy, including scientific research that looks at alternatives to fossil fuels. It also has proposed a 65-percent cut in the budget for a program that helps other countries keep the ingredients for a nuclear weapon out of terrorists’ hands.

“That is certainly a broad statement of priorities,” observed Matthew Bunn, a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who has worked as an advisor to the government on nuclear security and terrorism.

Despite the new funds, mostly to be spent for modernization of four warheads, the timetables for the completion of these programs wouldn’t be accelerated, and none of the additional money would be spent on new initiatives surpassing Obama’s aggressive nuclear modernization plans.

“In this budget, they’re not doing any new nuclear weapon projects, they’re just continuing the Obama administration’s modernization plan,” said Hans Kristensen, an analyst at the Federation of American Scientists who closely follows nuclear weapons programs. “It’s not clear to me that this budget increase is going to amount to more and quicker.”

It’s not surprising that the expense of holding the status quo went up, according to Kristensen. In fact, he expects the costs of Obama’s modernization campaign, estimated by independent groups to total around $1 trillion over the next three decades, will continue to climb.

“There will almost certainly be a greater expense. No doubt about it. Unless some miracle has happened, this is always the trend with these massive programs,” he said. “They will not come in on time or on budget. That’s a fact. To portray [it] otherwise is just a little silly.”

The NNSA has long understated the costs of modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal, according to a report last month by the Government Accountability Office. Its auditors flagged what they called a “misalignment” between NNSA’s budget requests to the president and the agency’s internal estimates of what modernizing the arsenal will cost.

They said NNSA’s internal estimates for the years 2018 to 2021 are “below the funding levels NNSA has identified as needed for those efforts.” This lowballing will haunt the NNSA in the future, the GAO said, as it keeps deferring inadequately-funded modernization work to future years, pushing an additional bump-up in costs out to 2022 through 2026.

The NNSA long resisted rigorous cost estimating, and rarely set aside reserves to correct unforeseen technical problems, but under its present administrator Frank Klotz — a former head of the Air Force’s Global Strike Command — it has started producing low- and high-range estimates for what many of its weapon updates would cost. Alas, even the low-end estimates for five nuclear weapons modernization programs, the GAO said, are higher than the estimates contained in the NNSA’s budget plan for 2017 to 2025.

The GAO says for instance that NNSA’s internal models estimate a higher cost for the W-76-1 LEP program, which refurbishes the warheads on submarine launched ballistic missiles, than NNSA has budgeted for this program. The gap is more than $143 million over the years 2017 to 2020. The cost of building a modernized B-61 bomb, to be carried mostly by planes in Europe, will be $200 million to $2.6 billion more than the $7.4 billion budgeted from 2016 through 2025, the GAO said.

The shortfall was foretold. In Dec. 2015, according to the GAO report, Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz warned the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget that the NNSA would need $5.2 billion above OMB-approved budget levels from 2018 to 2021 to keep its weapons modernization program viable and sustainable.  He also said that NNSA would need $1.4 billion more over five years than OMB had approved for infrastructure construction, and $550 more than was budgeted for a high-performance computer initiative.

Mostly following this playbook, Trump’s budget seeks an additional $524 million to modernize aging buildings at the NNSA’s eight major sites, plus $111 million for an exascale super-computing effort. It also would curtail construction spending for the controversial Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Plant at the Savannah River Nuclear Site in South Carolina, as the Obama administration had proposed. The plant was begun as a way to convert 34 metric tons of war-grade plutonium into fuel for nuclear power plants, but has since become a problem-plagued symbol of DOE and contractor mismanagement, with heavy cost overruns.

But in several other ways, the Trump budget proposal would reverse course from the Obama years. It would, for example, eliminate an initiative — hailed by then-Secretary of State John Kerry — to accelerate the disassembly of older nuclear warheads that have been retired from the stockpile. “The intention here is that [the Trump administration] didn’t want to have extra resources going into dismantlement that could go into beefing up” the weapons modernization program, Kristensen said.

The proposed cut in spending to reduce the nuclear terrorism threat appears to contradict one of the priorities spelled out by Trump before he became president. “The biggest problem we have is nuclear -- nuclear proliferation and having some maniac, having some madman go out and get a nuclear weapon,” Trump said in a Dec. 2015 debate between Republican presidential candidates. “That's in my opinion, that is the single biggest problem that our country faces right now."

Yet his proposed budget would cut $84 million from the international nuclear security program, bringing it from its present level of $130 million to $46 million. “Is the risk of nuclear terrorism over? I would say no,” Harvard’s Bunn said in a phone interview. “So this is not the time to be slashing funding for this work.” His colleague Nickolas Roth, a research associate specializing in nonproliferation issues at Harvard’s Managing the Atom program, called the proposed cuts to nonproliferation programs “very, very concerning” because it takes money away from “the primary mechanism the U.S. has” to help countries guard weapon-useable nuclear materials from theft.

“As budgets for NNSA weapons programs get bigger and bigger, it will put more and more pressure on other programs like nonproliferation,” Roth said. “I worry what that will do to them in the long run.”

NNSA spokesman Greg Wolf said in an emailed response to questions however that the budget cut for this program “does not indicate a reduction in work scope” but instead the fact that the department has unspent funds for this purpose left over from previous budgets. “All scheduled activities continue as planned,” Wolf said.

He did not provide details, but the NNSA’s work to reduce the threat of nuclear materials thefts in Russia has been sharply curtailed by that country, and so it’s possible that some of the unspent funds — now being carried over to fiscal year 2018 in NNSA planning — came from the truncated remediation effort there.

Bunn said he was well aware that the Russia-related work has mostly ended, but argued that important work remains to be done elsewhere. “What has to happen now in my view, rather than cutting these efforts, is to strengthen and revitalize them,” he said. “How do you protect places where nuclear materials exist? How do you test systems against intelligent adversaries? All of these are really big problems.”

It’s worth noting, finally, that while the nonproliferation budget is shrinking, spending for image-making by the Department of Energy — which includes the NNSA — would grow. The pot of money for its public affairs office would nearly double to $6.2 million from its enacted 2016 level of $3.4 million. And the Chief Information Officer’s division responsible for spreading feel-good news about the Energy Department would get a 25 percent boost to $91 million.

Reporter Peter Cary contributed to this article.

DALTON, GA. — Beneath the “Buy American” roadside signs here, a globalist heart beats in this mostly rural corner of Northwest Georgia.

In the late 1980s, factories began eagerly hiring Mexican immigrants to help fuel a boom in the so-called Carpet Capital of the World. Automation and the 2008 recession went on to pare a lot of jobs. But plants of all sizes are back at it again, producing about half the world's carpeting as well as hard-surface flooring, a new signature product. Other shops nestled in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains churn out everything from auto parts and appliances to goods made from chemicals, metal, wood and rubber. A sense of recovery is in the air.

Global investments flow in. Domestic sales and exports flow out. And just as many factories here turned to immigrants for manpower, they’ve also grown accustomed to foreign sources of materials — from Asia, Europe, Latin America — to make flooring and all kinds of other goods.   

“If I want to make something with quality,” and an import helps, “I’m going to get it. I have to. I want to make money. That’s the point,” said veteran flooring worker Eduardo Osegueda, part of a migration that's brought the world into Dalton, a city of 34,000 that sits along Interstate 75.

While most of the flooring made here is sold domestically, for housing and commercial space, carpet can also end up installed in vehicles, ships and aircraft bound for export. The Dalton area also directly exports more carpeting than anywhere else in the United States, primarily to Canada and Mexico. There’s no doubt that global trade helps grease the wheels of the economy here.

And therein lies the irony. 

Because this is Trump country. In a five-county region surrounding Dalton, three-fourths of voters cast their ballots for the former New York real estate developer. And yet, if the new president follows through on one of his frequent campaign promises — to get tougher with our trading partners — some economists believe that Northwest Georgia wouldn’t become a beneficiary, but a victim.

Big time.

As he crisscrossed the country last fall, Donald Trump stoked populist passions of voters by vilifying other countries, especially Mexico and China, for “stealing our jobs.” He vowed to both boost U.S. exports and “bring back millions of jobs” to the States. He threatened to slap hefty tariffs on imports coming from China and Mexico, two countries that account for a quarter of U.S. international trade. Just in the past month, he’s banged the trade-war drum even harder, starting the process to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, with Mexico and Canada, and slapping countries with targeted tariffs.

But if Trump were to squeeze Mexico and China as hard as he’s threatened, the resulting disruption in cross-border trade would have an impact all over the country, even for businesses that don’t export themselves. In fact, Northwest Georgia would get hit with some of the worst job losses in the nation, from manufacturing to retail, according to a complex data analysis based on Trump’s threats by the Peterson Institute of International Economics, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C., think tank.

Five of the 12 counties with the largest percentages of private-sector job losses, the institute’s modeling found, would be clustered here in Northwest Georgia, just south of Chattanooga, Tennessee — Catoosa, Gordon, Murray, Walker and Whitfield.

Murray County, population 39,315, would be the No. 1 loser nationally, with a crushing job loss of 18.3 percent in a trade war lasting more than a year. Whitfield, where Dalton is the county seat, would suffer a 12 percent slide in jobs, making it the No. 2 job loser.

“We’re not talking Great Depression, but something as severe as anything experienced since,” said study co-author Marcus Noland, an economist and Peterson vice president.

Winds of trade war?

Peterson’s research didn’t reverberate much beyond wonkish Washington, D.C., upon initial release last fall, but the forecast holds new currency now. Trump has started to hit countries with punishing tariffs — so far, narrow in scope — while aides prepare a broad list of trade terms the president might want to change.

Last month, Trump ordered the Commerce Department to investigate whether steel imports “threaten to impair the national security” — sparking Chinese official media to warn Trump to stick with using existing trade grievance systems or risk a trade war.

Trump also hit Canada with a new tariff of as much as 24 percent on softwood lumber imports. The president then sent shockwaves through Congress with a signal that he was poised to withdraw from the tariff-lowering North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, with Mexico and Canada — only to suspend the threat hours later.

As a candidate, Trump made specific threats to hit Mexico and China with 35 and 45 percent import tariffs across the board. Trump — who has manufactured products in both countries — argued that stiff tariffs would drive up import prices, forcing U.S. companies to bring back factory work, and compel Mexico and China to acquiesce to trade reforms he’d want.

But Peterson’s researchers argue that it’s “fully plausible” that China and Mexico would react by slapping reciprocal tariffs on U.S. products. A trade war would ensue, and if it persists more than a year, the institute’s model showed, 29 American counties would suffer job losses of 7 percent or more — and 20 states would suffer job declines of more than 4 percent.

“The U.S. economy is deeply integrated into the global economy, and to try to unwind that globalization would be enormously disruptive,” Noland said.

Even if Trump were not to resort to such dramatic tariffs, the Peterson findings suggest that other broad protectionist trade proposals now in Washington come with risks.

Republican leaders in the House of Representatives, for example, are proposing a so-called border adjustment tax of 20 percent on all imports from all countries. Businesses are split on the proposal. Supporters contend the border tax is vital — it could offset lost revenue from big corporate tax cuts the GOP wants. Republican House leaders also want to eliminate taxes on exports, arguing that businesses will invest those savings domestically to create jobs.

Trump hasn’t endorsed the border tax, but he hasn’t ruled it out. And tariffs remain on the table.

“We’re getting killed. We’re losing all of our jobs. We’re losing everything,” Trump complained before the election. “Trade war? … Who the hell cares if there’s a trade war?”

Peterson’s top researchers, most of whom have government trade policy experience, used their forecast to criticize U.S. failure to support retraining for workers displaced by manufacturing job losses. But the institute — funded by business giants that include Aetna Inc. and Dow Chemical Co. — generally produces pro-free trade research that clashes with Trump’s rhetoric. One of Trump’s closest trade advisers, White House Trade Director Peter Navarro, during the election campaign labeled Peterson’s economists “the pimps of globalization,” who “weave a false narrative.”

The White House did not respond to requests to interview Navarro. The former economics professor from the University of California at Irvine is known for hardline skepticism of the current global trade system. In March, he conceded before the National Association of Business Economists that a trade shake-up aimed at bringing back factory work would come with “difficulties and bottlenecks and labor issues.”

“But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try,” he said.

In Dalton, workers like 25-year-old Jaime Rangel have a stake in the outcome.

“It’s going to be wait-and-see with President Trump,” said Rangel, who until recently drove a forklift at Beaulieu, a prominent local wall-to-wall carpet and hard-surface tile manufacturer. He’s now working toward a degree in finance and economics at Dalton State University and hopes Trump makes “smart decisions.”

“The entry-level jobs, we don’t really know a lot about international trade,” Rangel said. “People might see a headline on Univision or CNN.”

But people remember the recession. “It was a terrible time for our community,” he said. “My parents lost their house.”

Global kings of flooring

The origins of manufacturing here stretch back to the late 1800s, when a Dalton seamstress’ bedspreads morphed into mass production of carpets, and blue-collar work grew plentiful. Befitting Dalton's carpet industry legacy, the global kings of floor manufacturing are headquartered in the area, where they produce goods and direct worldwide operations.

There’s Gordon County-based Mohawk Industries Inc., a Fortune 500 company that identifies itself as the biggest flooring company in the world, and the largest supplier of aircraft carpet. It owns multiple soft carpet lines, Pergo and other hard-surface brands, and ceramic factories in the United States, Mexico and other countries. Mohawk reported a record $9 billion in sales last year, 35 percent outside the United States. Mohawk has operations scattered from Mexico and Brazil to Russia and Malaysia that can directly serve those markets. In its 2016 annual report, Mohawk said its foreign sales and operations are subject to risks of “foreign tariffs and other trade barriers.”

Also here: longtime Dalton fixture Shaw Industries Group Inc., a subsidiary of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Shaw claims current annual sales of $4 billion. In 2013, it opened a carpet factory in China to serve the Asia market and said it would use yarn from U.S. operations. Shaw also opened a new plant south of Dalton in 2016 that could eventually employ 500 people to produce carpet squares. It also converted a carpet plant in Catoosa County to create homegrown, trendy luxury vinyl flooring tile.

Just across the Dalton Bypass from Mohawk is Engineered Floors LLC, a newcomer founded by Robert Shaw, former head of Shaw Industries. The company has built massive factories in the area in the last several years and acquired other U.S. companies that specialize in hard flooring.

Mohawk, Shaw and Engineered Floors turned down repeated requests to discuss proposed White House and congressional trade policies — policies that could disrupt the flow of imports they are using, especially for hard flooring.

Just several miles north of some company plants, up Abutment Road, is a quaint red-brick building in downtown Dalton’s historic district. Inside is the office of the Carpet and Rug Institute, a trade association whose members include Mohawk, Shaw and Engineered Floors.

Joe Yarbrough, president of the institute, said he only speaks for the carpet industry, but not for the hard-flooring side of the business that’s become such a white-hot market. He downplayed the carpet factories' need for imports because most of the essential material is locally supplied. Exports are important, he also said, but they pale in comparison to domestic sales. The association estimates the carpet industry generates $8 billion in regional “business activity.”

In 2015, Murray and Whitfield counties alone exported carpets and related non-apparel textiles valued at $298 million, mostly to Canada and Mexico. That’s far more dollar value than from anywhere else in the United States, based on U.S. Department of Commerce trade data. The New York metro area was a distant second at $171 million. Other factories in Murray and Whitfield counties exported almost $154 million in machinery and goods crafted from chemicals, plastics and rubber that year.

Yarbrough listened to a summary of Peterson’s findings. “Well, I can’t predict the future,” he said. No one wants to lose business, including exports, he said. But manufacturers are more excited about tax cuts and deregulation prospects than any other Trump trade promises. Tax cuts, he said, would be more of a “positive way to give relief than a 20 percent border tax.”

Job losses in Trump Country  

Recent history here is a tale of bust and then boom. Steadily, as in other factories, technology has chipped away at less-skilled textile jobs. And when the housing market — and demand for carpets — collapsed in 2008 during the national financial housing crisis, the Dalton area hemorrhaged thousands more jobs.

Between June 2011 and 2012, more than 4,600 jobs evaporated in Murray and Whitfield counties, leaving them with a combined 12 percent unemployment rate. The plunge was the greatest 12-month decline in jobs in any metro area in the country at that time.

Times were so bleak that in 2014 the Obama administration chose Northwest Georgia as one of the first dozen regions in the nation to get a slice of $1.3 billion in federal spending designed to revive manufacturing. Northwest Georgia’s plan was to support a private-public partnership that’s continued to train students and others in “sustainable” flooring jobs as the industry changes.

As the national economy improved, innovation and billions of dollars in corporate investment have added back thousands of jobs.  A United Arab Emirates firm, Mattex, for example, invested $60 million in Murray County to open a factory to produce backing for carpets and artificial turf. The state of Georgia has been luring businesses to the state with tax breaks, and relatively low labor costs. As of December 2016, the five counties reported jobless rates of between 4.5 percent and 7 percent — a big reduction from rates as high as 12 percent to 14 percent just six years ago.

It all sounds good. But based on Peterson's findings, a trade war with partners the size of Mexico and China could push Northwest Georgia back into an even deeper economic abyss than the last recession.

Noland explained why.

Economists used traditional equations to measure how tariffs would affect exports and imports nationally, and depress levels of consumption and investment. With significant tariffs, import-price surges would also lead to inflation and stock market declines. Businesses that produce “capital goods,” goods used to manufacture other goods, like textile machines, would struggle to adjust. Economists applied the fallout to job and industry patterns at the state and county level.

“For a sector to be hit,” Noland said, “it does not have to export directly if its product is used intensively in the production of exports.”

Northwest Georgia would suffer for multiple reasons. Manufacturing would get hit from a fall in demand for carpeting and other goods that go into construction, auto production and other goods. A decline in export markets and imports would hurt earnings and production costs. In addition, rising prices for cheap imported consumer goods would hit retailers — think Walmart and BestBuy — and restaurants, food and beverage stores and even hospitals would bleed jobs as fewer residents would be able to buy products and services.

“Most Americans don’t work in jobs that they would associate with international trade, much less exports,” Noland said, “so most Americans probably don’t think they have a dog in this fight. The thing that was most surprising to us was just how untrue that was.”

Sparsely populated areas anchored by industries sensitive to trade upheaval — as Northwest Georgia is — would also suffer disproportionately because they’re less capable than economically diversified urban areas of absorbing laid off workers.

Down at the five-county level, Peterson’s model predicted that textile plants from yarn to rugs and other manufacturing would lose jobs. But trucking, warehousing and other services that employ fewer people than factories would lose just as large a percentage of jobs, or even more by proportion than factories.

Take Murray County, just west of Dalton. Peterson’s forecast found a trade war could lead to a 5 percent job loss in carpet and rug plants and a 41 percent job loss in synthetic rubber work. That would contribute to an 83 percent job loss in employment agencies and a 71 percent job loss in food and beverage businesses.

The Peterson model didn’t factor in losses to public-sector jobs. And predictions of job losses are likely conservative in some areas, Noland said, because economists didn’t have access to proprietary information about specific imported “supply chain” goods that are critical to certain localities. Supply chain goods are pieces and parts that go into making a finished product.

On a forested hilltop campus, Dalton State College economics professor Robert Culp agreed to opine on the Peterson study. He teaches at the business school and is keyed into Northwest Georgia’s local industries.

Culp said he couldn’t argue with the Peterson findings. A trade war “could be very detrimental to our economy,” he said.

But he is not sure Trump is serious about carrying through on the threat of tariffs.

“It could be just a negotiating point, right?” Culp offered. “That’s what Trump is famous for, right? ‘The Art of the Deal’? I hope that’s what he’s trying to do here.”

Dalton business professor Marilyn Helms teaches students about supply chains. She agreed that carpet factories benefit from a robust local supply chain. But a stifling of cross-border trade would hurt, including Dalton’s exports of textile-related machinery and other specialty goods.

“We’re lucky to keep a textile industry here,” Helms added.

Split on the factory floor

Even though the local Dalton economy improved during the past few years, Trump’s bleak assessment of job conditions nationwide resonated here, along with claims that his business acumen would create more factory jobs.  

Candidate Trump’s promises to tackle trade deals made sense to Matthew Barnes at the Chilewich textile factory, on Highway 225, near Chatsworth, Georgia, population 4,300. About 75 workers use vinyl to weave chic modern placemats, floor and wall coverings, tote bags and ottomans for the high-end market. Much of the material used is purchased in the United States, Barnes said.

“I think that definitely you have to have good relationships with the other countries,” said Barnes, who manages daily operations at the plant. “But to get those relationships, we let them walk all over us — sometimes. And you’ve got to put your foot down every once in a while.”

Inside the Chilewich plant, boxes of textiles ready for shipping line shelves. Machine arms swing, guided by employees, weaving, slicing and rolling out the luxury vinyl designs. Barnes is pleased that over a dozen years Chilewich's sales have soared — even through the recession — and that the company exports about 30 percent of its products, mostly to Europe, but also to Mexico and other foreign destinations.

“We have distributors all over the world,” Barnes said. “One of the things I’ve heard about our customers is that they love that this stuff is manufactured in the U.S.”

But New York City-based co-owners Joe Sultan and his wife Sandy Chilewich, the company’s chief designer, weren’t Trump supporters. They’re skeptical of Trump's pitches for strengthening manufacturing and worried about Congress' proposed trade policies, too.

Sultan strongly believes the United States needs to bolster its manufacturing. But the notion of wielding punishing tariffs against trade partners or border taxes strikes him as perilous. The European Union is already signaling that it would put up protectionist barriers if the United States does, Sultan said.

“I think based on what the Republican House is talking about there very easily could be a tit-for-tat trade war. You know, if they do the 20 percent import tax. I think it’s dangerous,” Sultan said. “I don’t think they understand how complex this can be, and I think it’s going to just grind everything to a halt.”

In Dalton, Swiss immigrants Andreas Bruhwiler and his wife Daniela run Alrol of America, which employs a handful of employees to make metal rollers coated in rubber that are used in the manufacturing of carpets, plastic bags, garage doors and other products.  

Bruhwiler doesn’t export his products directly very often. But he knows that once he sells them, some of Alrol’s rollers eventually end up in machinery in China, Mexico, Canada and other countries. Bruhwiler said he was reluctant to comment on Trump’s trade policies because he considers himself a guest in the United States, but he did say, “I think a free-and-open market is important not only for our reasons, but for our economy in the United States.”

When asked if a tariff would affect Alrol, Bruhwiler said he would be concerned about the price of one key product that he imports.

"It would be very difficult for us," he said, “because of the [price advantage] we have on that particular part.”

Georgia’s foreign supply lines

It’s hard to calculate precisely the kinds of imports flowing into Dalton and the surrounding counties. The U.S. Department of Commerce doesn’t track imports in such granular detail.

But Georgia has long courted trade with Mexico, China and other countries, posting representatives abroad to nurture exports and imports. Last year, the value of Georgia’s two-way trade with the world surpassed $121 billion, an increase of 45 percent since 2008, based on Georgia state officials’ tracking.

By its own count, Georgia is the 11th-largest exporting and 7th-largest importing state nationwide. Canada, Mexico and China top the list of countries receiving Georgia’s exports. China, Germany and Mexico lead the list of countries that send goods into the state.

“With the world's busiest passenger airport and North America's fastest-growing port [Savannah] located here, any business can be assured that its supply lines will never run dry in Georgia,” Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal, a Republican, wrote in a 2015 commentary published by CNBC.  

  To adapt to American consumers’ growing taste for hard flooring, some of the big Northwest Georgia firms are investing in new plants to produce essential materials at home. But it’s a certainty the flooring companies import a lot, said Reginald Tucker, managing editor of Floor Covering News, a trade publication. Planks of wood-like, ceramic and luxury vinyl flooring, which are fast winning consumers’ hearts, often contain multiple foreign components, he said.

“It’s akin to automobile manufacturing,” Tucker said. “Even the large manufacturers import some of their raw materials. It’s just easier to do than to build a whole new plant.”  

And all of that could be subject to new taxes or tariffs at the border, increasing costs.

The United States can’t grow prized exotic wood, cork or enough bamboo, Tucker said. And it’s common for U.S. factories to create finished planks out of layers purchased from suppliers on other continents.  

Northwest Georgia companies have a history of brisk importation of special materials, from components for carpets to hard-surface flooring, based on shipment data gathered by Panjiva, a private company that tracks companies involved in global trade.

In individual shipments that can weigh up to hundreds of thousands of pounds each, a stream of imported cork sheets, bamboo and other wood veneer planks, vinyl sheets, ceramic, stone and assembled parts have flowed into Georgia flooring companies or affiliates over the last decade.

In April alone, USFloors — a Dalton-based company Shaw bought last year — imported nearly 100 shipments weighing more than 14 million pounds signed for in Dalton, according to Panjiva data. Among individual shipments going into Georgia’s Port of Savannah were 186,000 pounds of vinyl flooring, 48,500 pounds of bamboo materials and more than 251,000 pounds of “engineered vinyl flooring.”

In May, Mohawk Industries received, among other shipments, more than 169,000 pounds of vinyl floor tile from China, 108,000 pounds of “hickory engineered flooring” from Vietnam, and more than 100,000 pounds of glazed ceramic tiles from Ecuador. In January and February, Mohawk also received about 740,000 pounds of carpet underlay assembled in Mexico from U.S. parts. Some economists estimate that for every dollar’s worth of a Mexican import, 40 cents of its value originated with U.S. products.

The possibility of disrupting this business doesn’t instill panic yet in Dalton. It’s a sentiment that can be summed by Jenna King, a young mother who worked in the local mills after graduating high school. Now a student at Dalton State College where she is studying human resources management, King said she understands manufacturing employment can be volatile. Her husband was laid off his factory job during the last recession. But she still hopes to land a job with a local flooring manufacturer.

King, who was taking a break in a lounge at the business school, listened to a summary of Peterson’s conclusions: that a big squeeze on imports could kill jobs here rather than create them.   

“That’s a legitimate worry,” King said. “But the American people always have ways to bounce back, whether it’s with carpet or technologies. I believe in our government. I think they would be able to do what’s best for the people.”

Flooring worker Osegueda, who emigrated long ago from Mexico, said that when Trump complains about imports, he can’t help but think about Cuba, and how the communist country suffered from the U.S. trade embargo and Cuba’s own restrictions on foreign commerce.

“If he closes the doors to everybody else, to their products coming into the United States, I guess we're going to have to figure out how to make our own money here,” Osegueda said of Trump. But, he added, “I don’t know how we're going to do that, actually.”

Editor's note: This story was produced in collaboration with weather.com.

QUINTON, Alabama — Up close, the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the United States isn’t as big as you’d expect it to be. From most angles, you can’t even see it until you’re right on top of it.

But hit the right gap in the rolling hills of north-central Alabama, and the James H. Miller Jr. Electric Generating Plant looms large even from miles away. Nestled on about 800 acres on the Locust Fork of the Black Warrior River, the plant is one of Alabama Power’s coal-burning workhorses, putting out enough electricity to power about a million homes. It virtually never stops running – and never stops producing carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

As the view shifts, so does public opinion.

From certain angles, the plant is a pollution-belching monster harming both the environment and the health of communities. Change your perspective a bit, and Miller is a source of good-paying jobs, a means to raise a family in an area where economic opportunities are thin.

Paul Dollar, 75, who has lived just a few hundred yards from the plant property for more than 30 years, sees Miller both ways. On one hand, there’s dust and noise — “this thing I believe is getting my health and it’s bothering me.” On the other, Dollar and his daughter Tammy can name a dozen friends, relatives and neighbors who work for the plant, its contractors, or in one of the related service industries.

“To their credit, Alabama Power is a good corporate citizen. They provide good jobs. They do a lot in the community for charity and such,” said Scotty Colson, a lawyer in Birmingham, 16 miles southeast of the plant. But “you don’t get the impression that [pollution] is a high priority. They’re pretty much OK with shifting the cost onto people who have a problem with what their byproduct is.”

Alabama Power is a subsidiary of the Southern Company, which owns 11 utilities in nine states. Southern has spent nearly $12 billion on pollution controls at its plants since 1990 and “is committed to comply with all environmental laws and regulations,” spokesman Terrell McCollum wrote in a statement for this article.

But Colson, a clean-air advocate, said those costs have been passed on to customers — both directly on their utility bills and indirectly through impacts on health and climate.

“They start putting the onus on everybody else,” he said, “when in fact they have spent quite a lot with lobbying to fight regulations and delay regulations.” Southern spent more than all but a dozen other U.S. companies on federal lobbying during the 2016 election cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics— nearly $14 million.

Colson has lived in the Birmingham area for all of his 58 years and fought asthma for most of them. Miller’s discharges of greenhouse gases and noxious substances have taken a toll, he said, not only on the environment but also on his lungs.

“You rationalize it by saying, ‘I’m taking care of my family first,’” he said. “You rationalize it by saying, ‘Oh, it really doesn’t do any harm.’ That’s your basic climate denial and science denial, which is epidemic in some areas here.”

But the science doesn’t lie. Researchers around the world have repeatedly offered proof that climate change is happening and that humans are causing it.

Colson, at least, has no doubts.

“You can question the science,” he said, “but you can’t question the reality of my lungs.”

‘Old news’

In 2016, average global temperatures hit record highs for the third year in a row, according to NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Most of the warming since the late 19th century has happened since the early 1980s, the agencies said.

Miller was the nation’s biggest emitter of planet-warming gases in 2015, releasing more than 19 million metric tons — the equivalent of about 4 million passenger vehicles driven for a year. U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data show that Miller has been one of the top three greenhouse gas-producing U.S. facilities — not just power plants — since federal tracking began in 2010.

But that doesn’t seem to bother its owner.

“That’s kind of old news,” Alabama Power spokesman Michael Sznajderman said. “It’s jostled for that No. 1, No. 2, No. 3 spot for years.” 

Southern CEO Tom Fanning told CNBC there wasn’t proof that carbon dioxide is the key driver of climate change — contradicting the overwhelming scientific evidence.

“Is climate change happening? Certainly. It’s been happening for millennia. That’s not the issue, OK?” he said.

Though the Miller plant tops the greenhouse-gas list, many large facilities in the U.S. — particularly coal-fired power plants — are also outsize emitters. The 100 industrial sites giving off the most climate-altering gases together make up hardly more than 1 percent of the facilities reporting to the EPA, but account for nearly a third of those discharges. Toxic air emissions are also heavily concentrated, according to a 2016 Center for Public Integrity investigation in partnership with weather.com.

Miller, for its part, halved toxic releases from its stacks between 2010 and 2015, following many years of far higher levels, EPA data show.  The steep plunge came after Alabama Power installed pollution controls to comply with federal regulations. These technologies, like scrubbers and ozone-combating machinery, reduce sulfur dioxide, fine particles and other contaminants associated with coal-burning, Sznajderman said.

Still, some of Miller’s remaining emissions can damage the lungs and, research suggests, increase the risk of heart attack and stroke. The nitrogen oxides coming from Miller, tracked separately by the EPA, are a key ingredient in ground-level ozone, or smog, that’s particularly hard on some people. This county, Jefferson, received an “F” grade from the American Lung Association for its ozone levels.

“That is probably my main trigger for asthma issues,” Colson said. “I kind of connected the dots … Days when the ozone is high are the days that I feel really bad.”

It used to be the steel mills, pumping out brownish “air you could chew,” that cost him days at school and basketball games with his friends. As the mills cleaned up or closed and the sky turned blue again, Colson still noticed a burning sensation when he would breathe.

Miller, he believes, is the primary culprit. The plant was fouling the air all those years, he said, “but you basically didn’t notice that because it was part of an even worse pollution problem.”

Staggering costs

Southern is one of the biggest greenhouse-gas emitters in the country — its plants collectively pumped out more than 100 million metric tons in 2015, EPA data show.

Companywide, greenhouse-gas emissions in 2015 were about 25 percent lower than they were a decade earlier, Southern spokesman McCollum wrote. “This reduction was achieved without federal mandates, while delivering to customers the benefits of a more diverse generating fleet,” he wrote.

The problem with climate change is that greenhouse gases sent into the atmosphere today lock in big costs later. A report from online real estate site Zillow says almost 1.9 million homes worth $882 billion combined “are at risk of being underwater by 2100.”

Add relocation costs for those affected and the loss of tourism dollars in coastal communities, and numbers soar into the trillions — for just a fraction of the damage that experts fear global warming will cause.

Alabama Power’s Sznajderman said Southern is “certainly cognizant of climate change and those carbon issues, and we’re doing some of the leading research in that area.” Indeed, it operates the National Carbon Capture Center — a complex near Wilsonville, Alabama, aimed at finding ways to sequester carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants — for the U.S. Department of Energy.

But none of the technologies is ready for deployment at Miller, Sznajderman said. Southern’s Kemper plant in Mississippi, an effort to gasify coal and capture about two-thirds of the carbon, is more than $4 billion over budget.

Southern also is over budget on a project in Georgia, an expansion of the Alvin W. Vogtle nuclear plant that the company is promoting as a solution for moving away from carbon-based “dirty” energy sources like coal.

Two new power generating units were originally scheduled to be completed by 2016 and 2017, at a cost of $14 billion, but more recent estimates put the project about three years behind with a final price tag of $21 billion.

Construction is only about 43 percent complete, and David McKinney, Georgia Power’s vice president of nuclear development, has said the company is assessing the costs of abandoning the project altogether. Georgians are angry about having to foot the bill.

Fighting the Clean Power Plan

For now, the federal government doesn’t pose a threat to Miller’s place atop the greenhouse-gas list. In March, President Donald Trump ordered the EPA to scrap its Clean Power Plan, an Obama administration carbon-cutting initiative. On June 1, Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement.

Trump’s promises to decrease regulations and support the coal industry play well here. He didn’t win Jefferson County, home of Birmingham, but in three of the counties near the plant, more than 80 percent of voters chose him.

In February 2016, while Barack Obama was president, representatives of Southern decried the Clean Power Plan as an example of the “EPA’s overreaching mandates.” The U.S. Supreme Court’s stay on the rule that month was “the right decision for customers” and went a long way toward “preserving states' authority,” Southern said. Alabama Power took an active role in the fight, joining those suing to stop the plan.

Alabama’s then-attorney general, Luther Strange, called the stay a tremendous victory over “an unprecedented and illegal EPA rule. … The Obama administration's EPA rule would shutter coal-fired power plants around the country, including in Alabama, while killing jobs and raising power bills for hard-working families.”

The state did not join the EPA in its years-long legal battle, largely during the George W. Bush administration, to get Alabama Power to add environmental controls to power plants. The federal agency and the company settled claims related to the Miller plant in 2006.

‘Biggest employer around’

Miller represents a steady source of jobs in the rural swath of northwestern Jefferson County.

“Alabama Power is the biggest employer around,” Tammy Dollar says. “Everybody needs a job, and there’s so many down there.”

Day in and day out, the parking lot is packed with cars, and the Dollars can rattle off a host of relatives who earn a living there: an in-law who drove a coal train, a distant cousin who works as a security guard, a first cousin who’s “way up there now.”

According to Alabama Power, salaries at the plant range from around $36,000 to about $120,000 a year, or about $74,000 on average. The company’s Sznajderman said Miller employs around 365 people but can have as many as 1,500 contractors on site during planned maintenance outages. The plant pays about $12 million a year in property taxes.

It’s not an easy place to live beside — Paul Dollar isn’t the only neighbor to say that. “I’ve called them. I’ve tried to ask them to buy me out,” he said. “They say, ‘Oh, we’ll let you know. We’re gonna let you know.’ And I said, ‘Are you waiting on me to die?’”

Sznajderman said Alabama Power has no record of an inquiry from Dollar but “we plan to follow up with him.”

His complaints aside, Dollar said the plant’s benefits are important — worth the coal dust on his car and racket that sometimes makes it impossible to sleep.

“Even if I could, I wouldn’t shut it down because that’s jobs for people,” he said. “I’m not trying to put people out of business. I don’t want to stop progress or people living, you know. If I had anything to do with that, if I had the power to shut it down: No, huh uh, I’d build more. I would let the plant go on giving people jobs and let it keep moving.”

Nationally, however, the outlook isn't good. Pressured by low natural gas prices, coal lost its spot as the top fuel for electricity generation in 2016, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Coal's share fell from about 42 percent in 2011 to 30 percent last year, the EIA reported.

Virtue and vice

There’s a stubbornness ingrained in the Scots-Irish ancestry of many of the people in this area, Colson says. This translates into fierce loyalty to the community and the Miller plant.

“That loyalty is a virtue,” Colson said, “but that loyalty, in the face of reality, becomes a vice.”

The plant is a mainstay, its benefits obvious. Climate change can seem nebulous and far off, even though some of its effects are alreadymanifesting. 

Nearly 70 percent of the people in Jefferson County believe in climate change, a 2016 Yale University study found, but only half believe it’s caused mostly by human activities.

Around 65 percent think global warming will “harm future generations” at least a moderate amount, but only 39 percent believe it will “harm me personally” to that extent.

There are many barriers to overcome. People here first must believe that climate change is real. Then they must believe that it’s harmful, that Miller is contributing to it and that they can do something about it.

That is, as Colson put it, one “tough row to hoe.”

In the case of Paul and Tammy Dollar, it’s not that they’re unconcerned about the plant’s contribution to climate change – it’s that the consequences seem too far down the road.

Ask them about global warming and they’ll launch into a story about coal dust on their cars or a neighbor who’s ill. That’s real. It’s there, to be touched and smelled and inhaled.

Denying science

The unhealthy gases, chemicals and metals Miller pumps into the air are on the decline. But its greenhouse-gas emissions haven’t fallen nearly as much.  It puts out about 1 million more metric tons of greenhouse gases than the No. 2 facility in the nation, the Scherer power plant in Georgia, owned partly by Southern. 

What lies ahead for power production in the South remains a question, particularly in Miller’s corner of Alabama. Michael Hansen, executive director of Gasp, a Birmingham-based environmental group, fears his state isn’t poised to move in a climate-friendly direction.

“It’s a struggle to figure out how to talk about these issues when so many — not just voters but also politicians and leaders — deny science,” he said. “People don’t even realize the force of greenhouse gases around them. We’re going to need all the help we can get here.” 

But Colson has hope.

“There has been change – it does get better,” he said. “So when people say, ‘Oh, you’re just stubborn,’ or ‘You’re crazy to keep trying to see positive change in Alabama,’ I say, ‘Well, I might be crazy, but I’ve seen it.’ It does not come at a precipitous speed, but it does come with due diligence.”

Eric Chaney is a reporter with weather.com. Jamie Smith Hopkins of the Center for Public Integrity contributed to this story.

The Center for Public Integrity today added more than 100 new Trump administration officials’ financial disclosures to a searchable, sortable database first launched in April.

The database allows anyone to easily understand the wealth, assets and business interests of many of the people working for President Donald Trump. These include Senate-confirmed appointees, White House aides and members of so-called “beachhead teams” sent to prepare executive agencies for the new administration.

Among the prominent Trump allies included in the database update: Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, Transportation Secretary Eliane Chao and White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The new disclosures are possible thanks to the Center for Public Integrity’s collaboration with ProPublica — a fellow Pulitzer Prize-winning nonprofit news organization — which requested the disclosure forms from government sources and made the disclosures available as PDF files.

The Center for Public Integrity’s news developer, Chris Zubak-Skees, extracted data from more than 220 recently filed financial reports, using a software tool he created — and which the Center for Public Integrity is releasing for anyone to use.

Iuliia Alieva, a Dow Jones News Fund intern working for the Center for Public Integrity, extracted data from paper amendments to those filings to ensure the data reflected the latest disclosures.

This updated database (downloadable here) is part of the Center for Public Integrity’s ongoing “White House Spotlight” project, which is shining light in Washington, D.C.’s darkest corridors to help reveal how the new president’s actions affect the federal government — and the American public.

Members of the nation’s highest court are as wealthy as ever.

At least six — and possibly all nine — Supreme Court justices are millionaires, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of new personal financial disclosures released Thursday.

Associate Justice Stephen Breyer leads all justices with a minimum reportable net worth of $6.15 million in 2016 — almost unchanged from the year before. Breyer’s portfolio as of Dec. 31 could, however, be worth more than $16 million.   

Authorship padded Breyer’s income: He reported $45,000 in royalties from Penguin Random House, which last year released the paperback edition of his book, “The Court and the World.”

Chief Justice John Roberts is similarly wealthy, with a minimum reportable net worth of more than $5 million — and a maximum of nearly $11 million.

Mutual funds and education savings plans comprise the bulk of Roberts’ assets, which appear to have grown from 2015, when his minimum reportable assets were valued at about $4.24 million, to 2016.

He also reported several sizable individual stock holdings, including at least $500,000 each in media and entertainment giant Time Warner Inc. and Texas Instruments, and at least $100,001 in Sirius XM Radio and medical research supply company Thermo Fisher Scientific.

Roberts furthermore owns part of a cottage in Limerick, Ireland, worth up to $50,000.

Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are also members of the seven-figures club. Sotomayor saw her minimum net worth jump from about $1 million in 2015 to more than $1.5 million in 2016.

Only Associate Justices Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas, who both reported a minimum net worth just south of $600,000, aren’t guaranteed millionaires. (Their maximum net worth is more than $1 million.)

Assets and liabilities listed on the disclosure forms, which justices file annually, are reported in broad ranges. This makes it impossible to say precisely how much each justice is worth. Justices are also exempt from disclosing the value of their homes, making a precise calculation even more difficult.

Justice Neil Gorsuch, a nominee of President Donald Trump who joined the high court in April after previously serving as a federal appellate judge, has not yet filed a 2016 personal financial disclosure, having received an extension, Supreme Court spokeswoman Kathy Arberg confirmed.

Gorsuch’s 2015 personal financial disclosure indicated his investment portfolio was worth at least $3.1 million and as much as $7.2 million.

Breyer proved to be the most jet-setting Supreme Court justice of 2016, reporting 19 separate trips during which some entity — Harvard Law School, the American Psychiatric Association and the Pritzker Foundation, for three — paid for at least some of his travel or accommodations. Several of the events involved Breyer’s book, and four events took him to France, Spain or the United Kingdom.

Ginsburg — at 84, the oldest member of the court — is nevertheless a notorious traveler herself, making 12 paid trips in 2016, including three in Europe.

One took her to Loyola University Chicago, which in September hosted a “Tribute to Justice Scalia program.” Although Ginsberg and the late Justice Antonin Scalia were ideological foils — he a rock-ribbed conservative, she an unabashed liberal — the two also were best of friends, reveling in a shared love of opera, travel and general socializing.

Sotomayor and Alito each took 11 paid trips.

In August 2016, Sotomayor attended several events at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks that were co-sponsored by Alaska Airlines. Her travel was paid for through vouchers donated by Alaska Airlines to the university.

Most of Alito’s reimbursable travel appears to involve teaching stints, according to his disclosure.

Kagan (six trips), Thomas (six) and Kennedy (five) also benefitted last year from subsidized travel.

None of the justices are required to disclose the value of their trips. That’s no matter for Roberts, who reported no paid trips at all.

Thomas, who almost never speaks during open Supreme Court proceedings, nevertheless derived family income from a decidedly vocal publication, the conservative Daily Caller, where his wife, Ginni Thomas, is a contributor.

Comcast Corp. shareholders have for the fourth time rejected a proposal that would require the cable giant to report how much money it spends lobbying state legislatures and local governments.

The resolution, offered at Comcast’s online annual shareholders meeting Thursday, also would have required the company, a heavy lobbying spender in state capitals, to report its membership in and donations to trade associations and tax-exempt organizations that lobby at the state and local level.

Among such groups: the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council, which writes model legislation for state legislators on a range of policy issues including telecommunications.

“We think it's important that investors are aware of these types of relationships so that we can assess potential reputational risks,” said Jeffery Perkins, executive director of Friends Fiduciary, a Quaker money-management firm that spearheaded submission of the lobbying disclosure proposal. “It’s mystifying why there’s such resistance to providing greater accountability and disclosure …. Maybe I’d have a better idea if we saw the memberships in trade associations and the amount spent.”

The Comcast disclosure proposal cited the Center for Public Integrity’s analysis of five years of lobbyist registrations from all 50 states, in which Comcast lobbied in 36 states. The Center for Public Integrity found that since 2010 the number of entities with either in-house lobbyists or part-time hired guns working in the states has grown more than 10 percent. 

In its filing, the Comcast board recommended shareholders reject the disclosure resolution, citing “competitive concerns,” “unnecessary expense” and the cost of  “diverting management attention” away from other matters.  Comcast is the nation’s second-largest TV cable provider with nearly 23 million subscribers and the largest Internet provider with almost 24 million customers. The company also owns the national broadcast networks NBC and Telemundo, and the film production studio Universal Pictures.

“We value the input of our shareholders, and we met with Friends Fiduciary and their co-filers to listen to their concerns,” said spokesman John Demming. “The proposal’s been submitted repeatedly and overwhelmingly rejected by shareholders each time.”

Comcast shareholders have voted down the proposal for four consecutive years. Even so, Comcast ranks high in corporate political transparency, according to the most recent an annual ranking of large corporations conducted by the Center for Political Accountability, a nonpartisan transparency advocacy group, and the Zicklin Center for Business Ethics Research at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

Trade associations, lobbying groups and corporate leaders argue lobbying disclosure requirements put companies at a competitive disadvantage and violate free speech rights. In a letter to their members last year, and obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Business Roundtable and the National Association of Manufacturers said the “activists” behind the disclosures seek to “silence the business community’s voice.”

The Business Roundtable has since softened its stance.

But asking companies to disclose their political spending is not the same thing as asking for silence, said Timothy Smith, a director at Walden Asset Management, a Boston-based investment firm catering to “socially responsive investors” and a supporter of the Comcast lobbying resolution.

“The argument actually boggles my mind,” said Smith, whose firm holds almost 2 million shares of Comcast stock. “We’re trying to encourage transparency, and we’re not opposed to companies being proactive in this space.”

This year, shareholders at 52 companies — including AT&T Inc., IBM Corp. and Facebook Inc.— filed lobbying disclosure resolutions, according to the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the largest trade union of public employees.

Of those, shareholders have voted on 35. On average, 27.3 percent of shareholders voted for more disclosure, which is up from the 25 percent of shareholders that voted for the disclosure proposals in 2016. Almost 99 percent have failed since 2012, according to the Harvard Law School.

Resolutions calling for more transparency on political giving and lobbying were the second most common proposal among publicly traded companies in 2016, according to the Proxy Monitor, which tracks shareholder proposals. Since 2014, more than half of all shareholder proposals sought more transparency on lobbying, according to a study published this year by the Sustainable Investments Group, which promotes socially responsible investing.

“Companies are revealing more about how much they spend in elections and lobbying but remain reticent about disclosing how much they give to intermediary groups that use corporate money to pursue political objectives — trade associations, non-profit ‘social welfare’ organizations or charities that have clear partisan goals,” the study noted.

Comcast is a member of two influential lobbying groups, ALEC and U.S. Chamber of Commerce, according to the shareholder proposal and Perkins. More than 100 companies, including Alphabet Inc. (parent of Google), T-Mobile US Inc. and Facebook, have rescinded their ALEC membership over the group’s position on policy issues such as voter I.D. and opposition to renewable energy programs because the positions contradict company policy.

Other organizations including Apple Inc. and CVS Health left the U.S. Chamber of Commerce for its opposition to EPA regulation and international lobbying against anti-smoking laws.

Federal spending on lobbying is public information. Comcast spent $14.3 million on lobbying Congress and federal agencies in 2016, the 12th largest among all corporations that year, according to OpenSecrets.org, operated by the Center for Responsive Politics.

Perkins said Comcast should include that information in annual reports.

“I don’t believe we should have to go to a website called OpenSercrets.org to find lobbying spending information when the company could inexpensively and easily provide it to shareholders,” Perkins said.

Only six states collect detailed data on lobbying spending, and 22 require no reporting, the Sustainable Investments Group reported. In those six states, Comcast spent more than $7 million from 2012 through 2015, ranking it fifth behind AT&T, the tobacco holding company Altria Group Inc. (parent company of Philip Morris USA), Chevron Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc.

The defeat of the Comcast lobbying disclosure proposal may have been expected, but supporters don’t view the rejection as a complete loss. Smith of Walden Asset Management said lobbying disclosure resolutions send a message to other shareholders and executives.

“These resolutions don’t get 51 percent, but they’ve opened up a debate that wasn’t occurring before, whether we have a 10 percent vote, a 20 percent vote or a 40 percent vote,” Smith said.

In Mexico, it's been called a "crisis of freedom of expression.”

That’s a modest assessment. For Mexican journalists, this crisis can mean death for those who investigate one of the country’s biggest stories: organized crime groups and their grip on vulnerable communities and institutions. 

On May 15, respected reporter Javier Valdez Cardenas, 50, who wrote for multiple outlets, became the latest victim to be silenced — the sixth Mexican journalist to be killed this year.

Valdez was pulled from his car and shot to death in Culiacan, a city in Mexico’s Sinaloa state. The Pacific coast state exports winter vegetables to the United States and hosts a bustling seafood industry. But it’s also home to brutal drug cartels battling over turf.

On Thursday, June 15, a month after Valdez’s killing, journalists in the United States and other countries are joining Mexican colleagues to say, “basta,” enough.

The singular focus of this campaign is to support Mexican colleagues with a call for the Mexican government to better protect journalists, and to ensure thorough investigation and prosecution that those responsible are brought to justice. This collective call for better protection is linked by this hashtag:  #ourvoiceisourstrength. 

It’s common knowledge in Mexico that American journalists and those in many other countries can report on suspected corruption or other controversy with far fewer risks than their Mexican colleagues.

Valdez was a go-to journalist in Mexico, sought out by CNN and other foreign media for his insight into the intersection between poverty, organized crime and corruption inside terrorized communities. Cartels are known to offer a choice to those they terrorize: “Plata o plomo,” silver or lead, meaning money or bullets.

Valdez not only founded Riodoce, a weekly paper in Sinaloa, he was also a correspondent for La Jornada, an influential daily newspaper based in Mexico City, and a contributor to Agence France Presse, the international newswire. In addition, he earned high honors for his reporting from the Committee to Protect Journalists and Columbia Journalism School.

Valdez’s book, The Taken: True Stories of the Sinaloa Drug War, was published in English in January.

Mexico has long struggled with crime and impunity for those who perpetrate it. But attempted government crackdowns and cartel feuds have in recent years helped make the country one of the deadliest in the world for journalists, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists.  

Based in New York, CPJ counts 95 journalists killed in Mexico since 1992. In 41 of those cases, the victim’s work was confirmed as the motive for the killing. Still, most of the crimes have gone unresolved.

In 2011, when Valdez received its annual Press Freedom award, CPJ  acknowledged Valdez’s will to continue reporting. The group said: “In a country where widespread self-censorship is the consequence of violence by drug syndicates and criminal gangs, Valdez still covers sensitive issues.”

When he accepted the CPJ award in New York, Valdez said in a speech: “Where I work, Culiacan, in the state of Sinaloa, Mexico, it is dangerous to be alive, and to do journalism is to walk on an invisible line drawn by the bad guys—who are in drug trafficking and in the government— in a field strewn with explosives. This is what most of the country is living through.”

He added: “This is a war, yes, but one for control by the narcos. But we the citizens are providing the deaths, and the governments of Mexico and the United States, the guns.”

The same year, Columbia University’s School of Journalism awarded Valdez with a prestigious Maria Moors Cabot prize for reporting that enhances inter-American understanding.

Both federal authorities and those in Sinaloa have said they are investigating Valdez’s murder. Mexican President Enrique Pena Nieto called Valdez’s killing an “outrageous crime” and tweeted that Mexico is committed to press freedom, which is “fundamental to our democracy.”

Valdez’s killers reportedly shot him to death near the offices of Riodoce. In 2009, after the publication ran a series about drug trafficking, it was hit and damaged by a grenade.

In a statement following Valdez’s murder,  Agence France Presse’s global news director Michele Leridon said: “We call on the Mexican authorities to shed all possible light on this cowardly murder.”

CPJ executive director Joel Simon added that Valdez’s death “is a blow to Mexican journalism and to the Mexican public, who see a shadow of silence spreading across the country.”

Columbia University’s Cabot prize jury spoke out as well. The jurors called on Mexican officials “to put an end to the vicious cycle of violence and impunity that is decimating the Mexican media.”

Center for Public Integrity senior reporter Susan Ferriss was a Latin America correspondent based in Mexico City for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Cox Newspapers chain between 1997 and 2006.

The Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington, D.C., chapter on Tuesday awarded the Center for Public Integrity seven 2016 Dateline Awards in its online journalism category — more than any other news organization.

The awards, distributed Tuesday night at the National Press Club, honor excellence among journalists based in the greater Washington, D.C., area.

Winners from the Center for Public Integrity include:

Non-breaking news: David Heath, Jim Morris, Jie Jenny Zou for “Science for Sale”

Online series: Geoff Mulvihill, Matthew Perrone, Liz Essley Whyte and Ben Wieder for the “Politics of Pain,” in collaboration with TheAssociated Press

Features: Allan Holmes, Ben Wieder, Eleanor Bell Fox, Chris Zubak-Skees and Gordon Witkin for “Broadband Inequality”

Business: Fred Schulte for “Low Bar: How Lawyers Profit off Desperate Homeowners”

Commentary/criticism: Dave Levinthal for “Unpacking Political Influence in Election 2016”

Infographics: Chris Zubak-Skees for his portfolio

Editorial cartoon: Adam Zyglis for “Hillary Clinton’s Big Money Doubletalk”

Additionally, reporter Carrie Levine’s profile of now-White House counsel Don McGahn was also named a finalist in the features category.

“Carbon Wars,” a project produced by Center for Public Integrity journalists Jamie Smith Hopkins, Jim Morris, Jie Jenny Zou and Chris Zubak-Skees, in conjunction with the Weather Channel and Al Jazeera English, was a finalist in the online series category.

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists— until this year part of the Center for Public Integrity — was named a finalist for its “Panama Papers” project.

Other news organizations honored with Dateline Awards include: the Washington Post, the Washington Times, Politico, USA Today, Roll Call, the AP, Bloomberg BNA and McClatchy’s D.C. Bureau.

Vermont Gov. Phil Scott has signed legislation creating the Green Mountain State’s first-ever ethics commission — a direct response to low grades from the Center for Public Integrity’s State Integrity Investigation.

The bill signed by Scott on Wednesday would establish a five-member ethics commission with a part-time executive director, starting in 2018. The commission would have no investigative or enforcement authority, but would be tasked with reviewing any ethical complaints. The panel would additionally create a state code of ethics.

The bill also bars certain types of employment for legislators and state executives after they leave office; requires new personal income disclosures for particular state officials and prohibits some campaign contributions for those doing business with the state.

In a signing ceremony Wednesday morning, Scott, a Republican elected last fall, called the measure “a positive step forward to demonstrate to Vermonters that its elected officials are committed to restoring…faith and trust across all three branches of state government.”

Scott added that the legislation was “an overdue step, as most other states have existing ethics commissions, disclosure laws and conflict-of-interest rules already in place.”  

The Center’s 2015 State Integrity Investigation was an oft-mentioned backdrop to the legislative debate over the new ethics law — a debate that has raged over the past two legislative sessions in Montpelier, fueled in part by columnists and editorials arguing that it was time for some changes. The bill experienced numerous twists and turns as it wound through the Senate and House this year, and what emerged was widely acknowledged to be a compromise measure.   

Vermont received a grade of F from the State Integrity Investigation and ranked 50^th out of 50 states in the category of ethics enforcement because it previously had no ethics body of any sort, a rarity among the states. Vermont's overall grade was D minus, ranking it 37^th out of the 50 states.  

For the third time in two years, the Center for Public Integrity has sued the Federal Election Commission— an agency that touts“transparency” in its mission statement — for refusing to release documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act.

The lawsuit, filed Wednesday with the U.S District Court for the District of Columbia, stems from the FEC’s refusal to make public emails between agency officials and the Office of Management and Budget during the initial days of President Donald Trump’s administration.

On Feb. 6, Center for Public Integrity senior political reporter Dave Levinthal filed a FOIA request seeking any email exchanges between a White House and FEC official.

On May 8, the FEC informed Levinthal that it had located responsive documents — all originating from the White House’s Office of Management and Budget — but that it would not release them. Instead, the agency said it was referring the matter to OMB.

Several messages left by Levinthal with OMB about the FOIA request went unreturned until June 2, when OMB wrote in an unsigned email: “We have no record of receiving the Agency consultation from FEC.” OMB did not respond to follow-up questions.

The FEC, for its part, insists OMB is aware of the Center for Public Integrity’s request. FEC officials provided an email documenting how, on May 4, it referred the Center for Public Integrity’s FOIA request to OMB. “And on May 8, we received an email from OMB Assistant General Counsel Trent W. Holbrook acknowledging receipt of our email,” FEC administrative law attorney Robert M. Kahn wrote earlier this month to the Center for Public Integrity.

Since then, neither the FEC nor OMB have provided the documents the Center requested.

As part of its lawsuit, the Center for Public Integrity has also asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to force the FEC to release internal documents pertaining to @alt_FEC — a popular Twitter account purportedly run by an anonymous FEC staff member and critical of the Trump administration and the agency’s Republican commissioners.

On Feb. 1, Levinthal asked for any agency “emails, memoranda or other correspondence or communication that discuss, mention, reference or otherwise pertain” to the @alt_FEC account. On May 2, the FEC produced seven pages of responsive documents but withheld 14 other pages. Levinthal filed an administrative appeal, and earlier this month, the FEC’s five commissioners voted 5-0 to deny the appeal.

Created in January, @alt_FEC now has more than 41,600 followers, compared to the official @FEC account, which has fewer than 9,400.

The Center’s lawsuit was prepared by research editor and in-house attorney Peter Newbatt Smith.

The Center previously sued the FEC in July 2015 after the agency failed for nearly a year to release requested information about commissioners’ work schedules and travel habits.

In response to the lawsuit, the FEC released hundreds of documents responsive to the Center's FOIA request. Satisfied with the result, the Center agreed in March 2016 to drop its lawsuit.

The Center again sued the FEC in October 2015 after the agency refused to release a 44-page security study, prepared by a consultant at taxpayer expense, detailing vulnerabilities in the agency’s technology systems.

The Center filed an administrative appeal with the FEC, and the agency’s commissioners voted 5-1 to deny the appeal. A U.S. district judge then ruled in late 2016 that the FEC could keep the report secret.

The FEC commissioned the security study following Levinthal’s report in 2013 that revealed that Chinese hackers had infiltrated the FEC’s information technology systems.

“This is getting a bit monotonous, but as long as the FEC keeps withholding documents we need to complete our investigations, we will keep going to court,” said Center CEO John Dunbar.

The Center for Public Integrity is one of the country's oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Center for Public Integrity has hired three journalists to bolster its investigations into the Trump administration, big-money politics and secretive political influence efforts.

The additions will add significant reporting expertise to the Center’s award-winning federal politics team, which specializes in accountability and transparency in Washington, while shining light on the effects of big money in American elections.

Sarah Kleiner, an enterprise reporter at The Richmond Times-Dispatch, will join the Center in July. During her 13-year journalism career, Kleiner has reported on a range of topics: state politics, city government, education, mental health, criminal justice, real estate and financial services.

Her work has won numerous honors — most recently, the 2016 Virginia Press Association Journalistic Integrity and Community Service award for her investigationintothedeath of a mentally ill jail inmate.

In 2015, as a reporter for the The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, Virginia, Kleiner’s series about the lasting effects of toxic Chinese drywall received top awards from the National Association of Real Estate Editors and Society of American Business Editors and Writers.

Kleiner is also a veteran of two Texas newspapers: The Abilene Reporter-News and The Midland Reporter-Telegram.

A native of the Lone Star State, Kleiner graduated from the University of Texas at Austin in 2004.

Ashley Balcerzak, a money-in-politics reporter for the Center for Responsive Politics, will begin her second stint at the Center in July. Balcerzak, who has been at OpenSecrets.org since last year, has written about federal money in politics, conflicts of interests, foreign lobbying and how special interests spend their money.

From 2015 to 2016, Balcerzak was a reporting fellow for the Center’s state politics reporting team.

While in graduate school at American University, Balcerzak also worked with The Washington Post investigative team on its police shootings database — a project that won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in national reporting.

Her work has also appeared in The Atlantic, Slate, TIME, The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post. A native of Arizona, Balcerzak earned her bachelor’s degree in journalism at Northwestern University.

Lateshia Beachum joined the federal politics reporting team this month as a full-time staff member. From October through May, Beachum worked at the Center as a Kellogg Investigative Reporting fellow, focusing on economic injustice and broadband communications issues.

Beachum has previously covered community news for The Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y., billionaires for Forbes magazine and health science and politics for The Washington Post.

She earned a master’s degree in magazine, newspaper and online journalism from Syracuse University and a bachelor’s degree in English from Columbia College in her hometown of Columbia, South Carolina.

“This is a team that will dig incredibly deep to break news and explain how self-serving actions of political powerhouses — both liberal and conservative — affect average Americans,” said Dave Levinthal, who will oversee the Center’s political reporting staff.

Levinthal joined the Center in 2013 as its senior political reporter. In addition to managing federal political coverage, he will continue to report on money-in-politics and political influence issues and provide analysis on television and radio.

Levinthal previously covered political influence issues for Politico and co-wrote the daily Politico Influence column. Last decade, he reported on Dallas City Hall and national politics for The Dallas Morning News and the New Hampshire statehouse for The Eagle-Tribune of North Andover, Massachusetts. He has also edited OpenSecrets.org.

A native of Buffalo, New York, Levinthal graduated from Syracuse University in 2002 with degrees in newspaper journalism and political philosophy. He edited The Daily Orange, as well.

The Center has also promoted Carrie Levine to senior political reporter. A federal politics reporter at the Center since 2014, Levine has produced groundbreaking work on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, inauguration and transition, as well as the new president’s fledgling administration.

Levine previously worked as research director for Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and as associate editor of The National Law Journal. She’s also a former reporter for The Charlotte Observer, The Patriot Ledger of Quincy, Massachusetts, and The Sun of Lowell, Massachusetts. She’s graduate of Boston University and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

The Center’s federal politics coverage has been honored for its work on multiple occasions. Earlier this month, the Society of Professional Journalists’ Washington D.C. chapter bestowed a Dateline Award for its analyses of big-money politics in the 2016 presidential election. A piece on Washington lobbying by South Sudan was similarly honored in the international category by the Society of American Business Editors and Writers “Best in Business” competition, and the team’s Election 2016 coverage was a finalist for a Webby Award from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Science.

The Center’s federal politics coverage has also received recent awards from the National Press Club, Editor & Publisher, the Online News Association and the Education Writers Association.

Follow the Center's federal politics reporting team on Twitter here: @davelevinthal, @levinecarrie, @lateshiabeachum, @sarahkleiner9 and @abalcerzak.

The Center for Public Integrity is one of the country's oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations and winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting and the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.

Georgia’s 6^th congressional district is absorbing an abnormal amount of out-of-town cash — and it’s not because of its music scene or southern hospitality.

Since the start of Georgia’s special election early this year, out-of-state groups — super PACS, nonprofits and party committees — have together spent about $26.2 million to sway voters in the district, which has a special election runoff today, with the vast majority favoring the Republican candidate.

Two of the three counties voted for President Donald Trump in November, although polls indicate the Democratic candidate could very well win.

Of the 42 non-candidate groups spending money to influence the election, only five are based in Georgia: Better Georgia, Inc, Engage Georgia, Georgia Life Alliance Action Fund, Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund and the Georgia Republican Party.

Collectively, they’ve spent less than $100,000 — veritable pennies in the river of cash swamping the district, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of independent expenditure data provided by the Federal Election Commission.

The campaigns of the candidates competing in today’s runoff — Republican Karen Handel and Democrat Jon Ossoff — had spent $3.2 million and $22.5 million, respectively, through the end of May, according to campaign finance reports filed with the FEC.

The influx of out-of-state attention has prompted overwhelming fatigue among residents.

“It’s about as saturated as it could possibly be,” said Brandon Hanick, director of communications for Better Georgia. “There are only so many phone calls” voters can take. Better Georgia has paid for some pro-Ossoff digital ads.

In all, a dozen Washington, D.C.-based groups, including super PACs such as the Congressional Leadership Fund, are among the race’s top spenders.

Coupled with the money spent by the candidates themselves, the Georgia 6^th district contest has become the most expensive U.S. House race in history, easily surpassing a record set in a Florida district in 2012, according to federal campaign finance data analyzed by the nonprofit Center for Responsive Politics.

The special election is necessary because former Rep. Tom Price, R-Ga., was confirmed in February as the secretary of health and human services for Trump’s Cabinet.

Republicans have controlled the seat since the 1970s. But Democrats, sensing a backlash against the president, see an opportunity for a win that could supercharge morale after a disastrous November. And outside groups allied with both parties have made the district an expensive battleground.

Handel, whose own campaign has been wildly outspent by Ossoff’s, had out-of-state super PAC and party committee cash to even things out: Roughly 70 percent of the money spent by outside groups supported her, according to a Center for Public Integrity analysis of independent expenditure data provided by the FEC.

Half the outside money came from just two groups, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Congressional Leadership Fund, which together spent roughly $13.3 million propping up Handel’s bid.

“When our candidates need back up, we provide and do what we need in order to win,” Maddie Anderson, an NRCC spokeswoman, said in an email.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the top-spending outside group backing Ossoff, spent about $5 million. They did not respond to requests for comment.

Meredith McGehee, head of policy, programming and strategy for campaign finance reform advocacy group Issue One, said Democrats are pouring money into the race and hoping a victory in Georgia will show they have the strength to take back the Senate and pick up House seats in the 2018 midterm elections.

“Post Citizens United, you see huge amounts of money flooding into these special elections, which become kind of characterized as proxies for political winds,” she said, referring to the Supreme Court’s landmark campaign finance decision in 2010. “The outside money comes in because they're trying to control the narrative.”

Neither Handel’s campaign nor Ossoff’s campaign responded to multiple requests for comment.

The campaigns aren’t letting the non-candidate groups do all the work.

Councilwoman Michelle Cooper Kelly, who represents Ward 6 of Marietta City, located in the Cobb County portion of the district, said her area is inundated with campaign efforts going far beyond traditional TV commercials.

“There’s not one day that’s passed that I have not received something in the mail from the Ossoff campaign, or a phone call,” she said, adding that she’s now getting Handel calls as well.

Matt Blizek, election field director at MoveOn.org, a liberal group, said the Georgia special election has turned into a symbol of resistance against Trump.

“This race is a chance to improve the growing wave and growing backlash that we’re already seeing and building and it’ll only continue to build,” he said.

MoveOn.org spent about $257,000 on ad production, online ads, text messages and TV ads, which have mainly focused on healthcare.

Roughly $350,000 contributions to Ossoff’s campaign came from MoveOn.org members, and about 16,000 of those members live in the congressional district, Blizek said. MoveOn.org has been emailing and direct messaging them, encouraging them to get involved in the Ossoff campaign.

Jere Wood, the Republican mayor of Roswell, a small city within Georgia’s 6^th district, welcomes the amount of business activity that’s increased as a result of the national attention the election has garnered.

“For all the folks, regardless of what party you’re a part of, thank you,” he said.

While Wood is grateful for the extra commerce, he’s nevertheless concerned both candidates have lost sight of local issues as the national spotlight beams.

“Are they going to fix potholes or improve public safety?” he asked.

One of President Donald Trump’s newest appointees is a registered agent of Saudi Arabia earning hundreds of thousands of dollars to lobby on the kingdom’s behalf, according to U.S. Department of Justice records reviewed by the Center for Public Integrity.

Since January, the Saudi Arabian foreign ministry has paid longtime Republican lobbyist Richard Hohlt about $430,000 in exchange for “advice on legislative and public affairs strategies.”

Trump’s decision to appoint a registered foreign agent to the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships clashes with the president’s vow to clean up Washington and limit the influence of special interests.

Trump singled out lobbyists for foreign governments for special criticism, saying they shouldn’t be permitted to contribute to political campaigns. Hohlt is himself a Trump donor, though his contributions came before he registered to represent Saudi Arabia.

“I will issue a lifetime ban against senior executive branch officials lobbying on behalf of a FOREIGN GOVERNMENT! #DrainTheSwamp,” he tweeted in October.

Key advisory body

The commission is essentially a part-time advisory body responsible for making final recommendations to the president of candidates for the prestigious White House fellowships, which President Lyndon B. Johnson created in 1964.

The candidates are usually accomplished professionals with sterling resumes. Fellows are typically given jobs in the White House and federal agencies. Past White House fellows include Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, former Secretary of State Colin Powell, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas and CNN chief medical correspondent Sanjay Gupta.

Hohlt said he is one of 19 commissioners who met over a weekend this month to interview the fellowship candidates — the commission’s only formal duty annually.

Hohlt stresses he has never lobbied the Trump administration on behalf of Saudi Arabia, which has aggressively courted Trump since he became president in January.

“That is not my role,” Hohlt said.

What role, then, does he play?

According to Hohlt’s disclosures with the Department of Justice, he registered to lobby for Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry in October and “provides them with advice on legislative and public affairs strategies.” He disclosed no direct contacts with government officials on the Saudis’ behalf as of April 30, the date covered by the latest Department of Justice report.

Hohlt said he was largely brought in to offer advice on overarching strategy and how the legislative process works.

He did directly contact some congressional offices in late May and June regarding an arms sale, he said, and those contacts will be disclosed in his next disclosure report, as required.

Hohlt added that he’s working for the Saudis without a formal contract. If the Saudis asked him to lobby for something the Trump administration opposed, “I’d say I’m not going to work on it,” Hohlt said.

For example, he said, the administration was in favor of the arms deal.

Trump strikes deals with Saudis

Trump’s first foreign trip as president came in May, when he visited Saudi Arabia.

While there, Trump touted the “tremendous” deals he said he struck with the Saudis, including an expanded arms agreement valued at $100 billion. During elaborate ceremonies, the Saudis heaped plaudits. Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir praised Trump and praised his “vision,” “strength” and “decisiveness.”

Hohlt said he disclosed his Saudi lobbying job to Trump officials during the vetting process before his appointment.

White House spokeswoman Kelly Love said she had “nothing to add” in response to questions from the Center for Public Integrity about Trump’s appointment of Hohlt, including whether the Trump administration was aware Hohlt worked as a lobbyist for Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry.

Love referred the question of whether the administration was aware of Hohlt’s representation of the Saudis to the White House fellows office, which did not respond to a request for comment.

Upon taking office, Trump issued an executive order on ethics that included, among other things, a lifetime ban on executive branch appointees engaging in work that would require registration under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, among other restrictions on lobbyists.

The law, known as FARA, is the same law that mandates disclosure of Hohlt’s work for Saudi Arabia.

Trump’s executive order doesn’t apply to part-time appointees such as Hohlt. Nonetheless, some government ethics experts still say the appointment presents a jarring contrast with the president’s statements.

And despite Trump’s order, he has issued ethics waivers to lobbyists who have taken full-time positions with the administration, including, for example, Michael Catanzaro, a former energy company lobbyist who is now a special assistant to the president and adviser on energy policy. The waiver allows Catanzaro to participate in matters on which he lobbied.

Trump donor

Hohlt is a Trump donor. He contributed $2,700, to Trump’s campaign in August and $5,000 to Trump’s transition in September, the maximum amounts permitted. Those contributions came before he registered to represent Saudi Arabia’s foreign ministry in October.

Nonetheless, “Appointing someone who is registered under FARA as doing work for Saudi Arabia does seem odd at a time when he’s made a very big deal about not having people leave the government and then do work where they have to register under FARA,” said Larry Noble, the general counsel of the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan campaign reform organization.

Kathleen Clark, a law professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, said, “There is truth to the slogan that personnel is policy. And so he’s appointing this lobbyist for Saudi Arabia to a commission that then recommends people for important positions.”

Hohlt also lobbies for numerous corporate clients. This year, he’s been registered to lobby on behalf of oil giant Chevron, the Motion Picture Association of America and a division of tobacco giant Altria, among others.

Asked about any potential conflict of interest, Hohlt pointed to the extremely part-time nature of his fellowship commission appointment.

“I guess I’m an old-fashioned lobbyist,” Hohlt said. “I know how to separate lobbying and not lobbying.”

This article was co-published by NBC News and Public Radio International.

Felonious former lobbyist JackAbramoff is officially a lobbyist again.

Or, at least, Abramoff was for several months during late 2016 and early 2017, as he attempted to schedule a meeting between Donald Trump and the controversial president of the Republic of Congo, according to Department of Justice recordsobtained by the Center for Public Integrity.

Abramoff, the documents detail, was aiding an Italian national hoping to earn a consulting contract with the Republic of Congo that, in part, sought to polish its image in the United States.   

There’s no evidence that a meeting or phone call between Trump and Congolese President Denis Sassou Nguesso ever took place.

But the revelation that Abramoff formally registered as an agent working to advance the interests of a foreign government stands in stark contrast to the political reformist image Abramoff has cut for himself since he emerged from federal prison in 2010.

Abramoff this month filed his retroactive lobbying disclosures at the request of the Department of Justice and promptly terminated his association with the Italian national — Costel Iancu of the firm Global Scructures Group in Bucharest, Romania — and the Congolese government.

Abramoff, reached Wednesday evening, referred questions to his lawyer, Peter Zeidenberg of law firm Arent Fox.

Zeidenberg said he and Abramoff didn’t believe the filing under the Foreign Agent Registration Act was necessary, but submitted the disclosures after the Department of Justice, which administers FARA, requested them.

Under FARA, a person working on behalf of a foreign government to influence the U.S. government must file disclosures within 10 days of agreeing to act as a foreign agent — and before doing anything to benefit a foreign government.

“We didn’t necessarily have a meeting of the minds as to what was required under the law,” Zeidenberg said. “We just decided to file this.”

In a letter to the Department of Justice that Zeidenberg provided to the Center for Public Integrity, Zeidenberg said Iancu “sought to assist the Republic of Congo in helping the Congo to, among other things, defeat the terrorist organization Boko Haram.”

Abramoff never had a written or oral agreement with either Iancu or the Congolese government, Zeidenberg said. Nor did Iancu.

Nevertheless, the colorful narrative detailed in the new Department of Justice documents shows Abramoff going to great lengths to secure a meeting with Trump for Sassou Nguesso, whose more than three-decade rule has been marred by accusations of corruption and nepotism.

Abramoff “flew to Palm Beach on his own initiative, and without any compensation” the filing says.

While there, Abramoff called Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., “to see if he could assist with setting up a meeting with President-Elect Trump since Rep. Rohrabacher has been a leader in Congress opposing radical Islam.”

Abramoff then drafted a letter for Rohrabacher, who once visited Abramoff in prison, to send to Sassou Nguesso.

Rohrabacher in February told Politico, which first reported details of Abramoff’s latter-day lobbying efforts, that he transferred Abramoff’s wording onto congressional stationery and sent it.

“It looked like what I wanted to say,” Rohrabacher told Politico.

When the meeting between Trump and Sassou Nguesso “proved impossible to obtain,” Abramoff asked Rohrabacher to set up a call.

Rohrabacher was obliging, but the call never happened. Instead, Abramoff set up a call between Rohrabacher and Sassou Nguesso in which Rohrabacher said he was interested in leading a delegation to the Republic of Congo.

Politico reported that Rohrabacher made the trip in February.

According to the new Department of Justice disclosure, Abramoff was also in Brazzaville, the Congolese capital, at the time, though he didn’t participate in the meeting between Rohrabacher and Sassou Nguesso.

“It is Mr. Abramoff’s understanding that nothing of substance was ultimately agreed upon during the meeting,” according to the disclosure. No other meetings were scheduled, according to the disclosure.

Does Abramoff have any plans to do any additional lobbying?

“I don’t know,” Zeidenberg said.

In 2006, Abramoff pleaded guilty to felonies and his name became synonymous with corruption in the nation’s capital. The scandal spurred the passage of new lobbying laws and ethics rules.  

After his 2010 release, Abramoff’s political reformer efforts included writing a book, “Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About Washington Corruption From America’s Most Notorious Lobbyist,” and proposing a slate of lobbying and campaign finance reforms.

A Center for Public Integrity collaboration with The Associated Press examining the politics behind epidemic levels of opioid abuse has won a National Press Club Award.

The Politics of Pain series was awarded the club’s Consumer Journalism Award for Periodicals. The investigation provided a unique look at how drug makers and their allies sought to thwart steps intended to combat the opioid epidemic.

"The reporting team did a phenomenal job of providing blanket coverage of the entire country in documenting efforts by big pharmaceutical companies to buy political influence to block and delay legislation and impede other efforts to combat prescription opioid painkiller abuse while pushing their own questionable and very profitable remedies," the judges wrote.

Center for Public Integrity reporters Liz Essley Whyte and Ben Wieder worked with AP reporters Geoff Mulvihill and Matthew Perrone for 10 months to piece together the series, digging into campaign contributions, lobbying reports, internal company documents and government emails key to understanding the role that political considerations played in shaping the response to the crisis.  The series was edited by AP’s Kristin Gazlay and Tom Verdin,  and the Center’s Kytja Weir.

“This was an extremely important story that shined a light on the sometimes dark practices of the opioid lobby,” said Center for Public Integrity CEO John Dunbar. “Thanks to the groundbreaking collaborative effort between the Center and the AP, we were able to show to an audience of millions the inner workings of the one of the engines that helped drive the epidemic.”

The press club recognition marks the fifth journalism prize awarded to the series. Politics of Pain also won honors from the Association of Health Care Journalists Awards for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, the New York Press Club, the New York City Chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists Deadline Awards and the Society of Professional Journalists D.C. Pro Chapter’s Dateline Awards.

The National Press Club Award honorees will be celebrated July 28 at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Among other winners: The Washington Post, ProPublica, Bloomberg and The Chicago Tribune.