What ProPublica’s Reporters Are Covering During Donald Trump’s Second Presidency — and How to Contact Them
From Trump’s relationships with billionaires to immigration, here are some of the issues and topics our reporters are watching during his second presidency.
Now that Donald Trump is the president for the second time, we will once again turn our focus to the areas most in need of scrutiny at this moment in history. As our editor-in-chief wrote in November, that’s what our more than 150 working journalists do.
We will watch closely as the Trump/Vance administration takes shape and makes plans. To find stories, we will, as always, rely on insights from people closest to the issues. Concerned public servants are some of our most important sources. If you are a federal employee, is there unfinished business — a sensitive project, a little-known but key policy, an important lawsuit — you worry will be quashed or left to molder? Are there records, research or databases you feel strongly should be preserved?
We appreciate the difficult situations people weigh as they decide whether to reach out to us, and we take source privacy very seriously. Read more about ProPublica’s approach to investigative journalism in our ethics code. If you have tips, documents, data or stories the public should know about, you can contact all of our journalists at propublica.org/tips. Here’s information on how to do so securely. And if you don’t have a specific tip or story in mind, we could still use your help. Sign up to be a member of our federal worker source network to stay in touch.
We will tell you more about our whole team and about our coverage plans in the months to come. We work across a number of beats and disciplines, from tax policy to education to health care. We have data reporters who can handle complicated datasets and public records specialists eager to strategize.
Here are just a few examples of the topics we’re thinking about, plus contact information for some reporters on the beat:
Rule of Law
Trump’s Business Interests
Immigration
Trump and Billionaires
Consumer Finance
Foreign Affairs/Policy
Environmental Regulations
Public Records and Government Data
Civil Rights
Technology and Cybersecurity
Regulation of the Space Industry
Reproductive Health
Federal Poverty Policy
Housing and Transportation
Health Care Policy
Drug Safety and Regulations
Counterterrorism and Surveillance
Education and Schools
This is just a small sample of our reporting team. We will continue to share our areas of interest as the news develops. You can hear more from our journalists about their work by signing up for our Dispatches newsletter.
What We’re Watching
During Donald Trump’s second presidency, ProPublica will focus on the areas most in need of scrutiny. Here are some of the issues our reporters will be watching — and how to get in touch with them securely.
I cover justice and the rule of law, with a focus on the Justice Department, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia and the federal courts.
If you don’t have a specific tip or story in mind, we could still use your help. Sign up to be a member of our federal worker source network to stay in touch.
While investigative journalists immerse themselves in minutiae to identify waste and fraud, Elon Musk’s team has taken a chainsaw approach to spending based on cursory examinations. That might help explain some of their well-publicized stumbles.
The move — along with the CDC’s explanation — is a sign that the nation’s top public health agency may be falling in line under HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime critic of vaccines.
The National Institutes of Health is canceling grants that are seen as conflicting with the Trump administration’s priorities. We want to hear from researchers who have been affected.
The administration’s research funding and DEI cuts present an existential threat to regional public universities like Southern Illinois University, the economic backbone of the conservative rural region it serves.
Companies may avoid consequences for alleged wrongdoing as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau drops lawsuits against Capital One and Rocket Homes and pauses investigations into Meta and others — including providers of medical credit cards.
As a U.S. military contractor, SpaceX sees allowing Chinese ownership as fraught. But it will allow the investment if it comes through secrecy hubs like the Cayman Islands, court records say. “It is certainly a policy of obfuscation,” an expert said.
“It was like a heavyweight sparring featherweights,” the attorney said about his time representing companies owned by Trump’s in-laws, whose apartments were known for shoddy maintenance and aggressive legal tactics.
Current and former flight attendants for GlobalX, the private charter airline at the center of Trump’s immigration crackdown, expressed concern about their inability to treat passengers humanely and to keep them safe.
Owen’s 15-year-to-life prison term follows a 2023 investigation by The Salt Lake Tribune and ProPublica that uncovered a range of sex abuse allegations against the ex-therapist, who claimed to be a specialist for struggling gay Latter-day Saints men.
The decision to strip chapters from books that had already won the approval of the state’s Republican-controlled board of education represents an escalation in how local school boards run by ideological conservatives influence what children learn.
The “King of Debt” promised to reduce the national debt — then his tax cuts made it surge. Add in the pandemic, and he oversaw the third-biggest deficit increase of any president.
Thank you for your interest in republishing this story. You are free to republish it so long as you do the following:
You have to credit ProPublica and any co-reporting partners. In the byline, we prefer “Author Name, Publication(s).” At the top of the text of your story, include a line that reads: “This story was originally published by ProPublica.” You must link the word “ProPublica” to the original URL of the story.
If you’re republishing online, you must link to the URL of this story on propublica.org, include all of the links from our story, including our newsletter sign up language and link, and use our PixelPing tag.
If you use canonical metadata, please use the ProPublica URL. For more information about canonical metadata, refer to this Google SEO link.
You can’t edit our material, except to reflect relative changes in time, location and editorial style. (For example, “yesterday” can be changed to “last week,” and “Portland, Ore.” to “Portland” or “here.”)
You cannot republish our photographs or illustrations without specific permission. Please contact mediarights@propublica.org.
It’s okay to put our stories on pages with ads, but not ads specifically sold against our stories. You can’t state or imply that donations to your organization support ProPublica’s work.
You can’t sell our material separately or syndicate it. This includes publishing or syndicating our work on platforms or apps such as Apple News, Google News, etc.
You can’t republish our material wholesale, or automatically; you need to select stories to be republished individually. (To inquire about syndication or licensing opportunities, contact licensing@propublica.org.)
You can’t use our work to populate a website designed to improve rankings on search engines or solely to gain revenue from network-based advertisements.
We do not generally permit translation of our stories into another language.
Any website our stories appear on must include a prominent and effective way to contact you.
