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gun deaths?

SEE SCI SUPPRESS EG PJT 2025 OCEAN SENSORS

SEE "REFORM" ?

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A reportpublished by the US Census Bureau last month purported to uncover evidence backing up President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that noncitizens voting cost him the 2020 election. It was the latest salvo in Trump’s broader assault on the safety of US elections. “I WON THE ELECTION,” Trump quickly declared on Truth Social after the publication of the report.

However, though Trump and other government officials quickly shared and praised the report, a WIRED investigation has uncovered significant flaws in the data used to compile the report, as well as in the approval process used prior to publication. WIRED has also learned that a number of the report’s authors have links to the Trump administration and the Republican party. They include one former affiliate of Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency and two researchers from the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a highly influential think tank founded by veterans of Trump’s first administration.

The report, titled “Noncitizen Voting in the 2020 Election: A Beginning Analysis,” claims that an analysis of over 128 million voter records from the 2020 election identified 24,000 people tied to administrative records indicating noncitizen status. The numbers range from 4,300 in California to fewer than 15 in Wyoming—not nearly enough to have affected the outcome of the presidential race. But even these figures seem extremely questionable, and experts and Census Bureau employees who spoke to WIRED allege it is much likelier that they represent basic analytical errors than actual instances of noncitizen voting.

The Census Bureau did not respond to a request for comment. The White House directed WIRED to President Donald Trump’s post on Truth Social and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s post on X, where both officials praised the report.

The number of noncitizens voting in US elections has been repeatedly shown to be vanishingly small. In Utah, for example, the state’s top election official, Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson, reviewed the state’s approximately 2.1 million registered voters. The result was the discovery of 27 “confirmed noncitizens,” none of whom was ever confirmed to have voted. Studies in Pennsylvania and Idaho have returned similar outcomes. Still, the idea that a flood of noncitizens have been voting in US elections for over a decade, skewing the outcomes, has remained one of the central conspiracy theories promoted by Trump and his allies.

John Abowd, former associate director for research and methodology and chief scientist at the Census Bureau, called the Census report “statistical nonsense” and wrote on LinkedIn that “it is extremely uncommon for the US Census Bureau to publish a research report, even one of blog length, without the authors explicitly listed.”

Census Bureau sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity could not say what prompted the report. Records reviewed by WIRED, though, show it originated at the Center for Economic Studies, a division within the Census Bureau that uses confidential data to conduct research.

According to those records, one of the authors was Dan Sweeney, currently a deputy general counsel at the Department of Commerce overseeing the Census Bureau. He previously worked as the “DOGE legal liaison and deregulatory attorney” at the Environmental Protection Agency, according to his LinkedIn profile. Michael Lachanski was also an author, according to two sources with knowledge of the report’s origins, and he was appointed to his current role as the deputy director for data, policy, and science at the Census Bureau just two months ago. Previously, he was a fellow at the Trump-aligned Claremont Institute.

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The two America First staffers involved in authoring the report, according to records reviewed by WIRED, were Matthew Jensen and Jeff McCrea. McCrea previously served as campaign manager for former congresswoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington, who has expressed a belief in creationism and signed an amicus brief contesting the 2020 election results. Jensen previously worked for the American Enterprise Institute, where, according to his bio on the America First Policy Institute website, “contributed to the design of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act,” the tax law passed during the first Trump administration.

Sweeney, Lachanski, Jensen, and McCrea did not respond to requests for comment.

Sources who spoke to WIRED on the condition of anonymity confirmed that Jensen and McCrea are working in government on loan from America First through what is known as the Intergovernment Personnel Act. The IPA is meant to allow people with specialized skill sets from certain institutions, like nonprofits and universities, to work for the government for up to two years on a temporary appointment.

Danah Boyd, a professor at Cornell University who studies the census, says that the Bureau has long used IPAs for scientific work. “But they do what the civil servants require them to do, not what the political [appointees] require them to do.”

Boyd says that the group of people who records indicate authored the noncitizen voting report appear to be of a different stripe. “These ultimately appear to be people coming from a Republican operation that’s pretending to be a 501c3,” she says. “Rather than doing the work for the agency, it appears they’re doing work in political interest.” The AFPI did not respond to a request for comment.

The report was approved by the Census Bureau’s disclosure review board on August 7 through an email vote, which is typically used for publications with tight deadlines or in response to demands from Congress or the White House. The members of the review board who approved the report were shown the three tables contained in the final publication, but not the analysis that accompanied them, according to one source within the bureau who had access to the materials submitted to the review board.

The report concludes that the author’s analysis “readily determined with high confidence that over 128 million of these voter records represented citizens, and that over 24,000 of these voter records represented noncitizens at the time of the election. Over 32 million voter records remain to be analyzed.”

According to documents viewed by WIRED, the authors used data from the DataClear 2020 voting file—a commercial dataset—as well as USCIS immigration records (both the 2025 extract and the February 2026 A-number and case files); USCIS DACA approvals from 2025; State Department immigrant and nonimmigrant visas for 2017 through 2023; ICE student, removal, and national-docket records; IRS form 1040 for 2020; Social Security Numident (2019 and 2020); and State Department passport issuances across 50 vintages from 1978 through 2025.

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Former Census officials say the breadth of data used, as well as the lack of clear explanation of the methodology employed to analyze it, raises significant red flags.

“We don't know whether or how the sources are updating their citizenship info,” Amy O’Hara, a former official who used to run the administrative data linkage unit at Census, tells WIRED. “It is really hard to join and deduplicate these files, especially across a range of years.”

In order to match people between surveys and records without revealing their identities, the Census Bureau uses what are known as Protected Identification Keys (PIKs), which replace identifying information with a unique code. Sources who spoke to WIRED say that they are unsure which data points were used to match PIK data across the many datasets, though something like an address could be used for cross-referencing.

Though PIKs have been used for years to allow academics and government employees to conduct studies without compromising the privacy of the people whose data it is, they are not foolproof. A January 2026 study published by the Census earlier this year found that “while PIK assignment is generally accurate, some person records are not successfully assigned a PIK, which can lead to sample selection bias in analyses of linked data.”

“The brief says ‘high confidence,’ which indicates some probability,” one bureau source who spoke on the condition of anonymity over fears of retribution by the administration, tells WIRED. “However, no confidence intervals in the tables of the brief are shown. The supposed count of non-voters is small relative to the total state population.” The source alleges that there are probably PIK errors and not actual noncitizens who voted.

Abowd says that false match rates—in this case, when a voting record is assigned the wrong PIK, and then when it is “matched” with citizenship data–are likely to be higher when using commercial data like those used in the report. This means that the analysis is more likely to return a “false positive” showing that a noncitizen had voted. “You can’t estimate the false positive rate without more technical details” that were not included in the report, Abowd tells WIRED. “Because the false match rate is much greater than the estimated noncitizen voting rate, the alleged noncitizen voters are more likely to be data errors.”

All of this, Boyd worries, could undermine more than just trust in voting and elections—it could make academics and researchers doubt the quality and reliability of the products and data that the Census Bureau produces. “They're putting it out with the imprimatur of the Census Bureau so it looks legitimate,” she says. “But there’s no authors, no methods, no discussions of the limitations of the data, or the Bureau's approach.”

Republicans have already attacked the accuracy of the 2020 census, alleging that an algorithmic process used by the Bureau to protect data privacy had disproportionately favored Democrats in terms of the drawing of congressional districts. In August, WIRED reported that an internal memo circulated by the Department of Commerce, which oversees the Census Bureau, proposed excluding immigrants from the count, a move that could radically reshape how congressional districts are apportioned.

The report is also just one part of a broad attack on the integrity of American elections by the Trump administration, which includes weaponizing the Department of Justice, dismantling voter protections, attempting to wrest control of election administration from states, and pushing an endless barrage of baseless conspiracy theories about voting in America.

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MOJO

This story was originally published by theGuardian and is reproduced here as part of the*Climate Desk*collaboration.}:

The Trump administration is breaking up a research center praised as a “crown jewel” of climate research after accusing it of spreading “alarmism” about climate change.

Russell Vought, the director of the White House’s office and management budget, said the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, would be dismantled under the supervision of the National Science Foundation.

“This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” he wrote in a social media post. “A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

The announcement was the latest in a series of climate-skeptic moves by the administration, which has vowed to eliminate what it calls “green new scam research activities.”

It drew fierce condemnation from climate experts, who said the Colorado center was renowned for advances in the study of weather patterns, including tropical cyclones.

Roger Pielke Jr, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute thinktank, told *USA Today*, which first reported the story, that the facility was “a crown jewel of the US scientific enterprise and deserves to be improved not shuttered.”

He added: “If the US is going to be a global leader in the atmospheric sciences, then it cannot afford to make petty and vindictive decisions based on the hot politics of climate change.”

The move was also criticized by Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, who said it put “public safety at risk.”

“Climate change is real, but the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science,” he said. “NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families.”

The center employs approximately 830 staff and includes the Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, which Vought said would be shut. It also operates two aircraft for atmospheric research and manages a government-owned supercomputing facility in Wyoming.

The decision to dismantle it is consistent with Donald Trump’s frequent characterisations of climate change as a “con job” or a “hoax.”

The White House has accused the centre of following a “woke direction” and identified several projects that administration officials say are wasteful and frivolous, USA Today reported.

These include a Rising Voices Center for Indigenous and Earth Sciences that seeks to “make the sciences more welcoming, inclusive, and justice-centered,” as well as research into wind turbines, an innovation that Trump has repeatedly denounced.

The administration has already proposed a 30 percent cut to the funding of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, slashing spending on its climate, weather and ocean laboratories, which work to improve forecasting and better understand weather patterns.

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OMFG PUBLIC HEALTH

an 11 25

When President Donald Trump posted a satirical music video on social media in early October depicting his budget director, Russell Vought, as the Grim Reaper lording over Democrats in Congress, public health workers recognized a kernel of truth.

Vought has exerted extraordinary control over government spending this year, usurping congressional decisions on how the nation’s money is used. His push for more layoffs during the government shutdown is only the latest blow, following months of firings, canceled grants, and withheld funds.

By cutting and freezing public health funds, in particular, the Trump administration has already begun to undercut efforts to provide medical care, outbreak response, housing assistance, and research across the U.S., according to health officials, nonprofit directors, and federal agency staffers interviewed by KFF Health News.

Since most federal funds for public health flow to states, Vought is rivaling the Department of Health and Human Services secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his ability to upend government-led efforts to keep Americans healthy. In Texas, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funds to stem a measles outbreak weren’t available until after the crisis had subsided and two children had died. A project to protect Alabamans from raw sewage and hookworm was abandoned. People with HIV have had to delay medical care as clinics scale back hours. Time-dependent surveys on HIV and maternal mortality were halted. Food banks have canceled events. Tobacco prevention programs lapsed. Initiatives to protect older adults at risk of falling have been harried.

No matter what budget Congress ultimately passes for next year, the Trump administration may continue to thwart financial support for such programs in ways that will harm people’s health. “The White House has shown that they are willing to unilaterally exert control over funding,” said Gillian Metzger, a constitutional law professor at Columbia University.

“This is a huge deal,” she added, “because the power of the purse is central to Congress’ ability to shape and direct policy.”

Before he was appointed to lead the White House’s Office of Management and Budget this year, Vought outlined budgetary strategies the executive branch could deploy to wrest power from Congress and federal agencies in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative blueprint.

Vought’s tactics unfolded this year, often below the radar. They include abrupt grant cancellations, extraordinary constraints on how funds can be spent, and excessive layers of review, agency officials say, at every step in the grantmaking process. Getting money out the door has been further complicated by layoffs that have gutted offices overseeing grants on chronic disease prevention, HIV, maternal mortality, and more.

Government employees have described these tactics to members of Congress, said Abigail Tighe, executive director of the National Public Health Coalition, a group that includes current and former staffers at the CDC and HHS. “We want Congress to act, because this is preventing states and communities from doing critical public health work to keep our country safe,” she said. “If they don’t have capacity, we all collectively suffer.”

Democrats on the House and Senate appropriations committees have pushed for transparency, but the extent to which money Congress appropriated for public health in 2024 and 2025 has gone unspent because of the administration’s disruptions is not yet known. “This is a sophisticated strategy to cause money to lapse and then say, ‘If they can’t spend it, they don’t need it,’” said Robert Gordon, a public policy specialist at Georgetown University and a former assistant finance secretary at HHS.

“No one thought this was possible or legal, but that is what’s happening,” he said.

Details on how the administration has subverted health spending have received little attention because many changes have been made quietly — and people who rely on federal funds fear retribution. The Trump administration has defunded and threatened federal offices that hold the government accountable and fired whistleblowers. It has abruptly revoked funds for local governments and organizations.

Vought and spokespeople at the White House and the OMB did not respond to queries from KFF Health News. However, Vought described his intentions in VID] aSept. 3 speech. He said that federal agencies and Congress had gained more power over spending since the 1970s and that their control became “woke and weaponized” under Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

“Thankfully, President Trump won,” he said. “And we have now been embarked on deconstructing this administrative state.”

Many Parts, Many Malfunctions

Like a car, the federal budget process has many components that can break down. Through the OMB and its partner, Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, the administration has intervened at various junctures. “There are so many ways in which money is not operating in the way it is supposed to operate,” said Bobby Kogan, the senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, and a former OMB adviser.

Typically, Congress passes a budget that appropriates money for the next fiscal year to federal agencies. For many public health programs, ranging from housing assistance to cancer screening, agencies then post open calls online for states, local governments, and organizations to apply for funding. Agency experts select winners and send notices of awards — or notices of ongoing funding to groups that previously won multiyear awards.

Next, the OMB, which administers the federal budget, activates money for agencies, like a bank activates a credit card, so that grantees can spend and get reimbursed rapidly. Auditors keep an eye on spending, but the government has in the past limited interruptions so that programs run smoothly.

Early on, the Trump administration canceled billions of dollars in awards granted in 2024 and early 2025 for research and global health. In March, it clawed back $11.4 billion in covid-era funds that Congress had earmarked for health departments that were using the money for disease surveillance, vaccinations, and more.

Although some funds have been restored because of lawsuits, the Supreme Court has allowed other cuts by the administration to stand while the cases move through the courts.

Beyond these “shotgun” cancellations, the administration has taken a quieter, “in-the-weeds, slowing, cutting, conditioning” approach that’s frozen funds for public health, said Matthew Lawrence, a law professor specializing in health policy at Emory University.

By August, the CDC’s center for HIV and tuberculosis prevention had doled out $167 million less than the historical average, according to an analysis by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a think tank focused on reducing inequality. The CDC’s funding for chronic disease prevention lagged by $259 million, the Ryan White HIV/AIDS Program had underspent by $105 million, and funds for mental health at the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration were more than $860 million behind what was expected.

An unknown amount of Congress’ 2025 funding for research and public health has yet to be awarded and will probably lapse this year, said Joe Carlile, an author of the center’s analysis and an associate OMB director during the Biden administration. The obstructions appear to be concentrated in areas where the White House proposed cutting the federal budget next year. “The administration may be executing their 2026 budget request through administrative controls,” Carlile said.

“This is boring but crazy-high stakes,” he added. “A one-branch veto of spending neuters the power of the purse in the Constitution that Madison said was the fundamental check on the executive branch.”

Incremental Chaos

A key tactic Vought described in Project 2025 occurs when the OMB activates funds for agencies in installments, called apportionments. Vought wrote that “apportioned funding” could “ensure consistency with the President’s agenda.”

Under Vought, the OMB shrank the size of apportionments, HHS and CDC staffers said. It’s illegal for agencies to let grantees withdraw money before the total amount is in the metaphorical bank, so that delayed agencies’ ability to greenlight spending.

The OMB and DOGE also placed conditions on apportionments through memos, footnotes, and spoken directives telling agencies to ensure that spending “aligns with Administration priorities,” according to reports and HHS employees who said that notices of funding opportunities and awards required excessive layers of sign-off. The CDC and other agencies circulated lists of priorities that reflect White House stances, including those targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts; immigration; and transgender rights. Public health efforts have been especially caught up in red tape, since many focus on populations bearing an unequal burden of death, disease, and injury.

Groups that rely on federal funds have largely been unaware of the reasons grants were held up, but they’ve fielded what they viewed as unsettling queries. For example, Kathy Garner, the head of a Mississippi nonprofit, said officials asked her to defend the exclusion of men from a program to shelter women who experienced domestic violence.

Delays were made worse by uncertainty. Grantees said they’ve been unable to reach program officers because tens of thousands of federal workers have been laid off. Agency officials said firings slow funding further.

“Everyone’s inbox is full of letters from grant recipients asking, ‘How do we proceed?’” one high-ranking CDC official told KFF Health News, which granted agency officials anonymity because of their fears of retaliation. “We just say, ‘Please wait.’”

Time was critical as a measles outbreak surged in West Texas early this year. The state asked for federal funding for the response in March, but it didn’t arrive until May, after the outbreak had largely faded in Texas, according to an investigation by KFF Health News. Apportionment control was a key reason, CDC staffers said.

In July, 81 HIV organizations sent a letter to Kennedy. “With every day of delayed FY2025 funding release, the delivery of essential HIV services is compromised,” said the letter, which was reviewed by KFF Health News. Because of delays and uncertainty, it said, HIV clinics had laid off case managers and reduced clinician hours, closed sites, and pared down hotlines that patients call with urgent questions. The funds arrived about a month later, but HIV providers remain shaken.

Lauren Richey, medical director at University Medical Center’s HIV clinic in New Orleans, backed out of hiring a sorely needed dentist she had recruited. “I was afraid to tell someone to move across the country for a job when I wasn’t sure if or when we’d get the funding for their salary,” she said. “The wait is now three to four months for dental services, when it was usually a couple of weeks at most.”

Tamachia Davenport, program director at the St. John AIDS outreach ministry in New Orleans, said that “a lot of us are having to rob Peter to pay Paul.”

When the group didn’t get CDC funds it expected this summer, Davenport had to decide between cutting staff or supplies. Concerned her top employees would take jobs elsewhere, she stopped buying the condoms they distribute throughout the city to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted infections.

Louisiana already has one of the highest rates of HIV, chlamydia, and gonorrhea in the country. Condoms cost far less than treating these diseases. For a person infected by HIV at age 35, such costs exceed $326,000.

Groups focused on cancer, diabetes, and heart disease also report lasting repercussions from delays, as well as ongoing fears that they will happen again. Louisiana State University’s Healthy Aging Research Center canceled some of its workshops to train health workers on caring for people with dementia. “There may be fewer people who have this very specific expertise next year in Louisiana and Mississippi,” said Scott Wilks, the director of the center. “That’s on top of the big shortage we have already.”

Nationwide surveys tallying maternal and infant mortality froze for about five months because of funding delays, causing an irrecoverable gap in data that had been collected continuously since 1987, CDC officials say.

“We are seeing the administration get their way with or without an approved budget,” one said. “It’s such a terrible shame to play with people’s health this way.”

DOGE also inserted itself into grant reimbursements this year, stalling the rapid turnaround that public health groups typically expect to cover salaries, rent, and other monthly costs outlined in budgets that have already been approved. In what’s now labeled Departmental Efficiency Review, itemized expenses must be regularly justified by multiple government officials, according to documents reviewed by KFF Health News.

DOGE posted on its website expense reports covering about a month’s span from April to May. Nearly 230 of the individual expenses filed to federal agencies during that period are for $1 or less. Other entries break down monthly salaries for individual employees and petty costs for postage or monthly subscriptions.

“Public funds deserve scrutiny, but this is different from audit practices I’ve been a part of,” Carlile said.

DOGE also stalled calls for applications for 2025 funding — and some calls never appeared as the fiscal year came to a close on Sept. 30. Among them are programs for groups that provide housing assistance. People will be evicted when these organizations run out of money left over from 2024, said Steve Berg, chief policy officer at the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

Other solicitations came out months behind schedule, leaving groups with a few weeks to put together complicated applications for multimillion-dollar awards, including for Alzheimer’s care, addiction recovery, senior support, and chronic disease management.

“They’ve set projects up to fail,” one HHS official said.

*KFF Health News is a national newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF—an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism. Learn more about KFF.

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an 12 24 pro pub

In states with abortion bans, ProPublica has found, pregnant women have bled to death, succumbed to fatal infections and wound up in morgues with what medical examiners recorded were “products of conception” still in their bodies.

These are the very kinds of cases state maternal mortality review committees are supposed to delve into, determining why they happened and how to stop them from happening again.

But panels in states that have recently imposed strict bans on abortion have done little to uncover whether the laws are contributing to maternal deaths, including tracking delays in care for pregnancy complications and making these problems known, a ProPublica investigation shows.

In fact, we found that in a few states, political leaders who backed the bans have stood in the way of measuring their consequences.

They have dismissed committees, slowing down their work. They have weeded out members openly critical of abortion bans and supportive of transparency.

Texas has gone as far as to legally prohibit its committee from reviewing deaths that are considered abortion-related. This could include some miscarriage care, health officials told ProPublica.

In two deaths of Texas women that ProPublica investigated, Porsha Ngumezi and Josseli Barnica had already miscarried when they were given misoprostol to help complete the process. The committee does not review cases that involve that drug because it’s also used for abortions, said committee chair Dr. Carla Ortique: “If they received medication, if they received any procedure, we will not get those records.” Chris Van Deusen, the spokesperson at the Texas Department of State Health Services, would not say whether Ngumezi’s and Barnica’s deaths would be reviewed.

Other state committees have not made changes to systematically examine the role abortion bans are playing in maternal deaths, officials acknowledged, though some said they might note it as a contributing factor if it appears in the records. “If the committee discovers a trend that raises a particular concern, it could decide to include that information in its reports,” South Carolina officials said.

Some noted that they follow guidelines from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and that those recommendations don’t direct committees to consider abortion access or delays in abortion care. Indiana’s law directs committee members to determine whether the person who died had an abortion and whether that contributed to their death; it does not focus on delays in access to abortion care.

States can direct their committees to look at any important health issue; Texas’ panel added new questions to its process to help capture the role of the coronavirus pandemic in deaths, for example.

ProPublica asked governors in 15 states with strict abortion bans whether committees should examine the impact of the laws on maternal deaths; most did not respond. None directly answered the question or advocated for specific changes. (Read their responses here.)

“We’re not acting like we want to know the answer to this question. And that concerns me,” said Caitlin Myers, an economics researcher at Middlebury College who is studying the impact of abortion access on maternal health. “However you feel about the ethics of abortion, we should want to understand how these policies are affecting women’s health.”

Experts interviewed by ProPublica say state maternal mortality review committees are uniquely well-positioned to examine the impacts of abortion bans on maternal health. The panels are often made up of practicing OB-GYNs, cardiologists and nurses, and they can also include doulas, medical examiners and experts in mental health, substance abuse and domestic violence. They review summaries of medical records to determine whether deaths were preventable and to identify contributing factors. This allows researchers and government officials to see patterns and come up with ways to improve the country’s poor maternal health outcomes.

Committees are not systematically tracking an issue that came up throughout ProPublica’s reporting on deaths in states with abortion bans: delays and denials of procedures, like dilation and curettage, which are used to empty the uterus during miscarriages to avoid hemorrhage and infection. The procedures are also used for abortions, and doctors face prison time for violating restrictions. Women have died after they could not access these procedures, ProPublica found.

Nevaeh Crain, a teenager whose organs were failing, was made to wait 90 minutes for a second ultrasound to confirm fetal demise. Amber Thurman suffered for 20 hours while sepsis spread. And Barnica was subjected to serious infection risks for 40 hours while doctors monitored the fetal heartbeat until it stopped.

Studying such delays “needs to be a part of these kinds of reviews,” said Dr. Daniel Grossman, a leading reproductive health care researcher and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of California San Francisco.

Grossman has collected dozens of accounts from health care providers detailing substandard treatment and poor outcomes in states that banned abortion. But he and others recognize who is ultimately in charge of state maternal mortality review committees.

“I can’t imagine the states that passed restrictions saying, ‘Now we want to know if that caused any deaths,’” said Eugene Declercq, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health who serves on Massachusetts’ maternal mortality review committee. “The clinicians and the public health people might want to know, but the political leaders would be aghast.”

Even if they start to pursue such answers, states are years behind in reviewing deaths, ProPublica found in a survey of 18 states with the most restrictive abortion laws. Most have not finished reviewing deaths from 2022, the year most bans became effective after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion. Two states are still reviewing 2021 deaths. Three states — Florida, North Dakota and South Dakota — did not respond.

Reviews typically lag years behind deaths because of the time it takes state health department employees to learn of cases, track down records and wrestle them free from hospitals and doctors before they summarize and redact them for review. “We have one person in the entire state that has to collect all that data. Literally one,” said Dr. Stacie Geller, a founding member of Illinois’ committee. “I live in fear of her retiring.”

The CDC, which has pumped tens of millions of dollars into helping states establish these committees and standardizing their work, has tried to reduce the backlog by setting a goal for committees that receive funding to review cases within two years. However, there’s no way to compel states to do so, and not all have caught up.

Such lags matter more in places where there has been a seismic shift in abortion access, experts told ProPublica, because there isn’t a full understanding yet of the laws’ effect on maternal health care.

Marian Knight leads the United Kingdom’s maternal mortality review program, widely seen as the world’s best. She said if there were a major legal shift like this in her country, she and her colleagues would adapt to track the impact in close to real time. “I would be monitoring that in the same way as I did during COVID, where we were analyzing data weekly and feeding it in,” Knight said.

As of last month, only five states — Iowa, West Virginia, Indiana, Georgia and Tennessee — had finished reviewing cases from 2022, ProPublica found. None had yet published a report on its findings for that year.

Seven other states were still examining 2022 cases: Alabama, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Mississippi, Missouri, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Idaho, Texas and Kentucky had not yet started looking at cases from that year.

Even though North Dakota did not respond to ProPublica’s survey, reporters found that its committee, formed by state legislation in 2021, has never met to review cases, according to two members.

In some instances, state officials are responsible for delays.

Idaho disbanded its committee in summer 2023 after a conservative group argued it was unnecessary and attacked members for recommending that the state expand Medicaid for postpartum patients. The move froze the group’s work until last month, when a reconstituted, smaller committee met for the first time. Two members who had spoken out against the ban’s impacts on maternal health, and are suing the state over it, were not brought back onto the committee. The state is defending its anti-abortion laws; the Idaho Attorney General has said he “will not stop protecting life in Idaho.”

It is unclear how long Georgia’s reviews will be stalled after state officials dismissed its committee last month, citing a violation of confidentiality rules after ProPublica reported on internal documents in stories about two preventable deaths examined by the group. The Georgia Department of Public Health said in a letter about the dismissal that this would not result in any delays to the committee’s responsibilities.

In a move that confused maternal research experts, Texas’ committee said it would not review data from 2022 and 2023 and begin with reports from 2024 to get a more “contemporary” view of deaths. The committee has skipped years in the past to address gaps, and at its recent meeting, Ortique, the chair, said that the decision had “absolutely no nefarious intent.” The period it plans to skip includes two of the preventable deaths ProPublica reported.

Dr. Romy Ghosh, an OB-GYN in Austin, Texas, pleaded with the maternal mortality review committee at a public meeting this month to reconsider its decision to skip those years.

“There’s been a lot of fear in my patients. They wonder, can I save their life if something goes wrong?” she said. “I think that this information will tell us there’s either nothing to worry about or it will be damning.”

Between the decision to skip years and the legal prohibition against examining cases involving abortion-related care, it appears Texas will not review any of the three preventable deaths ProPublica identified.

There is a limit to how much committee members can push back against state leaders.

When Texas delayed publishing its maternal mortality report in 2022, an election year, then-committee member Nakeenya Wilson, a community advocate, spoke out, saying “withholding data that does not make us look good is dishonorably burying those women.”

The next session, Texas lawmakers passed a bill changing the requirements for the position that Wilson held, effectively removing her from the committee. State officials appointed Dr. Ingrid Skop, a Texas OB-GYN who is the vice president of a prominent anti-abortion organization.

Wilson said maternal mortality review committees must be free to speak candidly about patterns they see in maternal deaths and to release information in a timely fashion.

“If it’s not the committee, then who is it?” she said. “There has to be increased accountability.”

Audrey Dutton, Anna Maria Barry-Jester, Lizzie Presser and Amy Yurkanin contributed reporting.