Many state and local governments, and community-based organizations have spent years preparing for this moment: The 2020 Census is finally here.

The decennial count officially started on January 21 in Alaska, and the majority of all households should expect to receive a census invitation in mid-March via the mail. Their responses — as well as follow-ups from the Census Bureau — will determine how more than a trillion dollars is distributed under federal programs such as Headstart, Medicaid, and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The count will also dictate how many seats a state gets for congressional representation — in 2021, state officials will once again redraw the boundaries of congressional and state districts, as they do after every decennial census. California could lose a congressional seat and Illinois could lose one or two, which could impact the balance of power in those states with less electoral college seats.

So there’s a lot at stake if there is an undercount. That’s why accurate, in-depth reporting on the 2020 Census is so important.

Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting is launching a nationwide collaborative reporting initiative, which we’re calling Seeing 2020. It’s connecting newsrooms around the country to resources they need for their own reporting on the 2020 Census.

Partnering with the Center for Cooperative Media, we will provide Seeing 2020 participants with training and webinars, assistance with community engagement efforts, access to an exclusive tip repository to seed stories, access to research experts and journalists, channels to facilitate collaboration with other reporters, opportunities to publish your work on Reveal and small reporting stipends.

This collaboration seeks to empower local and ethnic media outlets across the country to report on the census with three goals:

• Understand what local communities want to know about the census through a multi-pronged, multi-partner listening initiative.
• Help local reporters inform their audiences, so they can make educated decisions about participation in the census.
• Track and explain how the census’ potential implementation flaws may lead to disempowerment and disenfranchisement down the road.

Over the last couple of years, many news organizations started researching or holding workshops for reporting on the census. Poynter started training journalists last year on best practices for reporting on the 2020 census. The Center for Cooperative Media created a guide to organizing a 2020 census workshop for local journalists and continues to partner with many ethnic media in New Jersey. Southern California Public Radio wrote a report on what newsrooms should focus on for the census, published a guide to using census data and continues to collaborate with ethnic media around greater Los Angeles on census reporting. And journalism conferences held or plan to hold panels and discussions on reporting on the census.

Seeing 2020 exists to connect journalists across the country around initiatives and coverage like these, to share knowledge as the count gets underway and improve the level of coverage our communities have access to. The project will directly engage with residents and journalists nationwide to explore how the census will affect their communities and answer questions about the count.

To join Seeing 2020, please fill out this form. Got questions about how the 2020 census will affect your community? Ask them using this form. We’ll also be holding a kickoff webinar, on Feb. 12 at 11 AM PST, where we’ll talk more about the project, how to access crowdsourced information we’ve been gathering, and lots more.

For any other questions, please contact seeing2020@revealnews.org. We’re excited to add to the work of census reporting through this nationwide collaborative reporting initiative.

By Byard Duncan

In the spring of 2018, a small group of Reveal reporters and editors kicked off a series of meetings to address a problem none of us had anticipated: After asking for leads about work-based rehabs across the U.S., we’d received more than we could ever handle on our own.

Reporters Shoshana Walter and Amy Julia Harris had been covering the issue, tirelessly, for more than a year. Along the way, they used email, social media and digital tip forms to solicit readers’ stories. Even though the work had created major waves — it spurred investigations and lawsuits, and earned a Pulitzer finalist nod — Harris and Walter were still struggling to understand its scope nationally.

Our solution, Reveal’s Rehab Reporting Network, launched in August 2018. Its goal: connect local reporters with tips about exploitative work-based rehabs in their communities. Journalists who joined the network gained immediate access to dozens of leads from across the country, as well as an in-depth guide to investigating them, authored by our reporters.

In the month after it launched, the Rehab Reporting Network picked up more than 200 members who worked at a variety of outlets, from local public radio stations to national newspapers. They immediately got to work investigating facilities in Oklahoma, North Carolina, Washington and elsewhere.

For a moment, the network seemed to have done its job, creating an avenue to deliver substantive tips to reporters who could quickly and confidently chase them down. But in the middle of solving one problem, we’d also exposed another — this one dizzyingly large and endemic to investigative reporting as a practice: There’s always too much damn stuff.

What we found in our reporting on work-based rehabs applied to pretty much every story we covered: When investigative reporters dig deep into an issue, they collect massive amounts of information (data, documents, interviews), evaluate it, and then begin the daunting task of shaping it all into a coherent narrative. It’s nearly impossible — unless they are planning to write 40,000 words or produce a 16-hour documentary — to avoid narrowing their focus and shaving away intriguing details. As a result, important communities get neglected; important voices go unheard. This process, at its most extreme, is a bit like taking the first bite out of a watermelon slice, then throwing the rest away.

Soon, our new question became: How do we stop wasting watermelon? Our focus began shifting away from the singular problem of work-based rehabs and toward something larger. We started looking for the collaborative potential in nearly every investigation we produced.

As part of our November 2018 “Case Cleared” investigation with ProPublica and Newsy, which looked at rape clearance rates at police departments across the country, we shared dozens of datasets and hosted webinars to help local journalists interpret them. The initiative has produced local stories in Oakland, Baltimore and Louisville, with more on the way. Three months after that, in the lead-up to a Reveal radio episode about concussions among high school athletes, we built a customizable public records request that all listeners — parents, students, journalists and other community members — could easily download and present to their school board. You can download it too, if you’d like. So far, that has helped yield local stories in Denver and Santa Fe. And when our own Will Carless and Michael Corey reported that hundreds of active-duty and retired law enforcement officers from across the United States were members of Confederate, anti-Islam, misogynistic or anti-government militia groups on Facebook, we invited journalists to use our database to follow up with their departments. Reporters in Oregon and New Jersey did just that — and got some interesting responses.

What started as a stand-alone project has now morphed into a sustained approach — one that’s picking up steam among local newsrooms: As of this writing, there are more than 840 members of Reveal’s Reporting Networks, all of whom have access to resources that accompanied our major investigations.

Every day, we’re sharing a little bit more of the watermelon. We’ll add more resources connected to our investigations on immigration and tech by the end of the year. And we’re at work on an hourlong episode of our radio show and podcast dedicated to elevating these stories to a national audience. Expect that in December.

This model sometimes prompts questions. Why dedicate so much time and energy to simply giving away hard-earned leads and resources?

There are a couple of reasons. Primarily, we believe that local news outlets are best positioned to hold the powerful to account. They have the expertise, the community context and most importantly, the trust of their audience. But local news is in trouble. Some 1,400 towns and cities have lost a local newspaper in the past 15 years, according to an Associated Press analysis. Some areas have only one reporter doing the work of an entire paper. Investigative reporting, which is both time and resource intensive, can be difficult for many local outlets to undertake.

Much of the work we do at Reveal is collaborative; it’s a core value of our organization. For the stories that are part of our Reporting Networks, our newsroom has already taken major strides to uncover and elucidate wrongdoing. And since our goal is always focused on impact, we believe sharing the information we’ve uncovered can create a cascade of change, both at national and local levels.

We’ve seen it work before. In March 2018, when members of the U.S. House Financial Services Committee grilled Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell about modern-day redlining, Rep. Lacy Clay referenced our reporting as it appeared in his “hometown newspaper.” And after local news outlets in Austin followed up on our reporting about high rape clearance rates in the city, the Texas House unanimously voted to reform rape prosecutions in May 2019.

While Reveal cannot solve the local news crisis, we are committed to innovating and doing what we can. The Reporting Networks, alongside our Local Labs initiative, which supports investigative collaborations in cities such as San Jose and New Orleans, have provided concrete tools to help under-resourced journalists tell impactful stories in their backyards.

Our networks began with a narrow focus: disseminating tips about work-based rehabs that our reporters didn’t have time to chase down. Since then, they have evolved into a set of powerful tools, available to hundreds of people, whose central goal is bringing local journalists within striking distance of major, impactful stories. If you happen to be one of those journalists, we’ve got some good news: You’re invited to join.

Reveal is co-produced by PRX and the Center for Investigative Reporting.

How we built Reveal’s Reporting Networks was originally published in PRX Official on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Trump administration has quietly axed $213.6 million in teen pregnancy prevention programs and research at more than 80 institutions around the country, including Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles and Johns Hopkins University.

The decision by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services will end five-year grants awarded by the Obama administration that were designed to find scientifically valid ways to help teenagers make healthy decisions that avoid unwanted pregnancies.

Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and other top Trump appointees are outspoken opponents of federal funding for birth control, advocating abstinence rather than contraceptives to control teen pregnancies.

Among the programs that lost their funding: the Choctaw Nation’s efforts to combat teen pregnancy in Oklahoma, Johns Hopkins’ work with adolescent Apaches in Arizona, the University of Texas’ guidance for youth in foster care, the Chicago Department of Public Health’s counseling and testing for sexually transmitted infections and the University of Southern California’s workshops for teaching parents how to talk to middle school kids about delaying sexual activity.

The elimination of two years of funding for the five-year projects shocked the professors and community health officials around the country who run them.

Health officials say cutting off money midway through multiyear research projects is highly unusual and wasteful because it means there can be no scientifically valid findings. The researchers will not have the funds to analyze data they have spent the past two years collecting or incorporate their findings into assistance for teens and their families.

“We are just reeling. We’re not sure how we’ll adapt,” said Jennifer Hettema, an associate research professor at the University of New Mexico Health Sciences Center, which was finding ways to help doctors talk to Native American and Latino teens about avoiding pregnancy.

More than a quarter of U.S. girls become pregnant by 20. The teen birth rate has continually declined over the past 20 years, but it remains high compared with other industrialized nations, particularly among poor and minority girls.

Under the Trump administration, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Teen Pregnancy Prevention Program had two strikes against it: Former President Barack Obama started it, and social conservatives don’t want to give teens access to birth control.

Eighty-one projects were awarded five-year grants in 2015. But last week, they received annual grant award letters from the Office of Adolescent Health, which were obtained by Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting. Included was this sentence: “This award also shortens the project period to end June 30, 2018, at the end of this budget year.” In years past, the award letters said the project period would end June 30, 2020.

In addition, a $2.9 million annual grant split among Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles, the University of Michigan, the University of Massachusetts Donahue Institute, EngenderHealth in New York and Youth Catalytics in Vermont was eliminated immediately.

These five groups were unfunded after one year of their five-year projects. They were responsible for providing resources, such as training for recruiting and communication, to the other grant holders. The five groups received letters saying that the cut was due to changing program priorities and that the projects were no longer in the federal government’s best interest.

The elimination of funding was done outside the traditional federal budget process. Congress has begun negotiations on the spending bill, and on Wednesday, an appropriations subcommittee cut money for teen pregnancy prevention.

Pat Paluzzi of the Healthy Teen Network in Baltimore said the axing of the program, including her project to develop an app to answer teen girls’ health questions, is “part and parcel of the shift to abstinence-only dollars.”

“They don’t like to deal with the sexual reproductive health of teens,” Paluzzi said. “They frame it in this country as moral issues. Public health issues shouldn’t be political issues.”

Several grantees were told by officials at the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Adolescent Health that the decision to eliminate funding came from the office of the assistant secretary for health. Last month, President Donald Trump appointed a new chief of staff there, Valerie Huber, who favors abstinence as the solution to teen pregnancy.

The office of the assistant secretary for health on Thursday confirmed eliminating the final two years of funding for the 81 programs but declined to answer questions.

“All of these grantees were given a project end date of June 30, 2018, allowing the grantees an opportunity to adjust their program and plan for an orderly close out,” a Health and Human Services Department spokesman said.

The funded programs were exclusively involved in preventing youth pregnancies; no abortion counseling was provided.

Some grant holders were unaware that their final two years of funding was eliminated until they were contacted by Reveal this week. They had thought the letters were a routine authorization of 2017–18 funds and hadn’t noticed the line saying it was the final year of funding.

When Hettema contacted the Department of Health and Human Services for an explanation, staff in the Office of Adolescent Health “were extremely shocked and still trying to find out who made the decision and how this came about,” she said.

The University of New Mexico had been recruiting for a randomized study of 1,000 participants in a program created for doctors’ offices to help low-income Latino and Native American teens. Now they’ll probably end up with half that number, which would turn it into a pilot study with much less value for health providers, Hettema said.

“It’s kind of like building half a skyscraper and then saying, ‘Never mind,’ ” Hettema said. “And there are thousands of health care providers in this country who are winging it in terms of how to talk to teens about unintended pregnancies.”

Luanne Rohrbach, an associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, said the eliminated programs, including the one she directed, are scientifically based.

“We took decades of research on how to effectively approach prevention and have applied it on a large scale nationally,” she said. “We’re not out there doing what feels good. We’re doing what we know is effective. There are a lot of data from the program to show that it works.”

The USC program supports a sexual health education program in middle schools in the Los Angeles and Compton unified school districts and in an alternative high school system. Included are workshops that teach parents how to talk to kids about delaying sexual activity and where to find health services for preventing disease and pregnancy.

In the San Antonio area, Healthy Futures of Texas provides education on preventing teen pregnancies and uses a control group to assess the effectiveness of the program.

“Our research design is to follow young people for a year and see if the program is making a difference,” said Dr. Janet Realini, associate vice president of Healthy Futures of Texas. Without the funds, “it’s going to be very difficult for us.”

“The folks I’ve talked to who have had many federal grants say they would normally have had some notice,” she said.

In May, Congress approved $101 million for the third year of the 81 grants. But Trump’s proposed budget did not include any funding for fiscal year 2018.

Huber, the new chief of staff for the office of the assistant secretary for health, previously was the president of Ascend, which used to be named the National Abstinence Education Association.

In a 2014 paper on the history of sex education, Huber criticized Obama for creating comprehensive sex education programs at the expense of focusing on abstinence.

“Pro-sex organizations used every opportunity to attack abstinence education,” Huber wrote with co-author Michael Firmin. “This agenda was (and is) at least as much about destroying abstinence education as it is about supporting ‘comprehensive’ sex education. … The current Obama administration has used its fiscal scalpel to eliminate the growth of abstinence education within America’s school systems.”

Tom Price, an orthopedic surgeon who was a U.S. representative from Georgia, was confirmed by Congress as health secretary in February. He has been vehemently opposed to federal programs involving contraception.

In Congress, he voted to eliminate Title X, which subsidizes contraception for low-income women. He opposed an Affordable Care Act provision that requires insurance plans to cover contraception.

“Bring me one woman who has been left behind. Bring me one. There’s not one,” Price told a ThinkProgress reporter when asked about the provision in 2012. “The fact of the matter is this is a trampling on religious freedom and religious liberty in this country.”

The U.S. teen birth rate remains higher than many other developed nations despite a continuing decline.

In 1991, 62 out of every 1,000 females ages 15 to 19 gave birth, according to federal data. By 2014, it had dropped to 24. Health officials say the primary reason for the decline is more access to birth control because sexual activity has remained constant over the years.

Rohrbach and other grantees said they have evidence that certain programs are successful in reaching teens to prevent pregnancies.

Teen parents tend to have less education and are more likely to live in poverty and have chronic medical conditions. Thirty percent of teen girls who have dropped out of high school cite pregnancy or parenthood as a reason, according to the Congressional Research Service.

The unfunded programs are designed to focus on the highest-risk communities in the country.

“Yes, the teen pregnancy rate has gone down,” Rohrbach said. But “if you look at the kids that live in disadvantaged neighborhoods, you see that the decline in teen pregnancies is not as steep as it is nationwide. The rates of teen pregnancies are still relatively high.”

Reveal reporter Trey Bundy contributed to this story. It was edited by Marla Cone and Andrew Donohue and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Jane Kay can be reached at JaneKayEnvironment@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JaneKayNature.

As President Donald Trump signed one of his first executive orders, he was surrounded by smiling, clapping homebuilders, farmers and other supporters eager to see the new president rein in a 45-year-old law protecting the nation’s waterways.

The Environmental Protection Agency has “truly run amok” by saving “nearly every puddle or every ditch on a farmer’s land,” Trump told the gathering. Calling it a “massive power grab,” he added, “if you want to build a new home … you have to worry about getting hit with a huge fine if you fill in as much as a puddle — just a puddle — on your lot.”

But these so-called puddles and ditches, according to scientists across the country, are fundamental to the nation’s drinking water supplies and to wildlife, including many rare animals and plants.

In February, Trump ordered his EPA administrator, Scott Pruitt, to throw out a 2015 rule that protects seasonal streams and small isolated ponds, which would shrink the reach of the 1972 Clean Water Act by narrowing the definition of “waters of the United States.”

In its place, Trump asked for a new rule that, in effect, would eliminate protection for tens of thousands of wetlands from coast to coast. What’s at stake? Seasonal pools hidden in California grasslands and Maine forests, mountain streams in Arizona, freshwater marshes along the Gulf Coast, cypress swamps in Florida, glacial prairie potholes pockmarking the Midwest and more.

Based on the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wetlands Inventory, at least 20 million acres of vernal pools, potholes, salt flats, creeks and other isolated wetlands would be put at risk if the EPA follows Trump’s directions.

And as many as 60 percent of U.S. streams would lose protection, according to the agency’s own calculations. These headwaters and ephemeral streams and creeks contribute to the drinking water supplies of more than 117 million Americans.

The changes are on a fast track: Pruitt already initiated the process to overturn the existing rule and is drafting a new one, which he has promised to unveil by year’s end.

Powerful interest groups

For decades, developers, landowners, growers, energy companies, mines and other industries have tried to limit their obligations to preserve wetlands under the Clean Water Act.

Opposition to the Obama administration rule comes from business groups that are heavyweights in lobbying federal lawmakers and agencies on an array of issues, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which spent $104 million on all lobbyists last year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. The American Petroleum Institute spent $6 million in 2016, the National Association of Home Builders spent $4.4 million and the American Farm Bureau Federation, $3.8 million.

Granger MacDonald, whose companies have developed multi-family apartment projects in 25 Texas cities, and Georgia third-generation farmer Zippy Duvall attended Trump’s signing ceremony. MacDonald, chairman of the homebuilders association, commended Trump for taking the first step toward overturning a rule that “goes so far as to regulate manmade ditches and isolated ponds on private property.”

Duvall, a poultry, cattle and hay producer and president of the American Farm Bureau Federation, called the rule “reckless and unlawful.”

The golf industry also lobbied against the water rule, which suggests that Trump, who owns 12 golf courses in the United States, could benefit financially from killing it. Golf course owners worry that their ponds and drainage areas might be subject to provisions about pesticide runoff and filling of wetlands.

Trump didn’t mention effects on golf courses or his other property in his remarks, but he did say it’s a “very destructive and horrible rule” and he’s “been hearing about it for years.”

No projects have ever been affected by the 2015 rule. That’s because business groups — including the farm and homebuilder associations — joined 31 states and 91 members of Congress arguing in court that the EPA had overstepped its authority. They won a stay, so the rule has not been enforced as the legal wrangling continues.

Pruitt, as Oklahoma’s attorney general, led this multi-state lawsuit against the agency he now oversees. Under pressure, Pruitt has recused himself from the lawsuit. But he did not recuse himself from the rule revisions ordered by Trump. Pruitt’s former general counsel in Oklahoma, Sarah Greenwalt, is now a top EPA official involved in rewriting the rule. Her name also is on the lawsuit against the EPA, but she has not recused herself.

Paul Jones, a former EPA official who reviewed permits for filling wetlands in California, Nevada and Arizona for 27 years until he retired last year, said he was worried about the administration’s quick move to weaken the Clean Water Act.

“The minute we turn our backs,” Jones said, “the forces of industry, agriculture and real estate destroy the waters of the United States right under our noses.”

A rancher’s vernal pools

High above California’s Central Valley, winter rains and melting snow gush down the craggy face of the Sierra Nevada, turning the valley green. Rivulets trickle through creeks and pools, filling the often-dry San Joaquin River, which flows to the delta as a source of drinking and crop water before heading on to San Francisco Bay.

Vernal pools mark the Sierra foothills and valley floor, where land developers dream of subdivisions and growers of orchards.

Driving south on little roads east of Highway 99, orchards turn to natural grassland. From atop China Hat Ridge, the Chance Ranch encompasses 8,000 acres. Rainstorms ending the record drought inundated clusters of vernal pools here.

The pools slow runoff, store water and filter sediment before spilling into narrow swales that run to unnamed creeks, connecting to the Merced River and eventually the San Joaquin. Salamanders, frogs and other creatures rush to complete their lifecycles before the water dries up. Growing in the green pools are colorful wildflowers.

Rancher Jeff Chance has a fondness and appreciation for these pools that bloom in spring, saying: “The cattle can find water. They don’t have to walk too far.” His family keeps the pools natural in exchange for added rangeland from The Nature Conservancy, an environmental group.

“Ranchers are the best caretakers. We don’t like to mess up anything,” he said. “We like the horse and the gooseneck trailer. We don’t like the tractor and the plow.”

Seasonal pools such as these are living examples of Trump’s “puddles and ditches.”

The revised waters definition that Trump advised Pruitt to adopt likely would eliminate protection for pools and ponds, as well as streams that don’t run most of the year or are not continuously connected by surface water to navigable waters, such as bays, rivers and the Great Lakes.

Scientists say this definition is not scientifically sound and would leave important natural resources unprotected from bulldozers and plows. It also would change which waters would be protected from pollution from sewage plants, industries and farms.

“This new definition clearly would not be based on science,” said Ralph W. Tiner, a former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist and author of two textbooks and 200 scientific papers on wetlands. “A change like this would put in jeopardy the quality of the nation’s water and the fate of the nation’s wildlife.”

The EPA’s website says wetlands are “biological supermarkets,” among the world’s most productive ecosystems, comparable to coral reefs and rainforests. More than half of the country’s wetlands have been lost since 1780, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service, and losses continue, with recent mapping showing about 110 million acres in the contiguous United States.

Linking land and water, wetlands are essential for cleansing and recharging groundwater in underground basins, controlling flooding and providing life support for waterfowl and other wildlife.

“Like diamonds, they can be small, but extremely valuable,” the Society of Wetland Scientists wrote in a letter to Trump in March.

The Scalia definition

Trump specifically asked Pruitt for a new definition of “waters of the United States” that mimics language used by the late Justice Antonin Scalia in a Supreme Court split decision a decade ago. The EPA says that definition covers only “relatively permanent waters, and wetlands with a continuous surface connection to relatively permanent waters.”

Examples of what’s at risk are found throughout the country: Thousands of inland basins from New Jersey to Florida fill with rain and then evaporate. Prairie pothole wetlands in the upper Midwest mostly are connected by water underground. In the Southwest, 80 percent of streams flow only after rainfall, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

“In California alone, we have lost thousands of acres in the last two decades,” said Jones, the former EPA biologist, who worked on national science teams determining which wetlands should come under the Clean Water Act. “To adopt the Scalia definition would only further weaken the ability of agencies to regulate wetlands and streams.”

Deciding what qualifies should be a task for scientists, Tiner said, because understanding how various wetlands contribute to ecological and hydrological functions takes considerable expertise. For instance, headwaters linked to downstream waters only by seasonal flows and underground water would not meet the conditions of the Scalia definition.

“It makes little sense to try to maintain biological, chemical and hydrological integrity of our nation’s water and exclude the source of the streams,” Tiner said.

Also, potholes from North Dakota to Montana and Texas could be excluded because they are connected mainly by groundwater, not surface waters.

“Prairie potholes are the duck factories of the North American continent,” Tiner said.

During droughts, prairie potholes might be the only watery green places for wildlife, he added, including some species that are rare or endangered.

“Think of all the aquatic animals living in streams and adapted to the natural pulses of water,” Tiner said. “Let’s say you filled the intermittent streams or the headwater wetlands. If you didn’t have the high water flows, what would happen to the many species of fish that spawned on overflowed floodplains? They would vanish.”

Jeanne Christie, executive director of the Association of State Wetland Managers, said many state scientists are struggling with the proposed rule changes.

“The words used in the court decision are not terminology previously used by scientists,” Christie said. “So in order to have a scientific basis for identifying these streams, the EPA and the (Army) Corps (of Engineers) will have to do a crosswalk between science and these new words. For instance, what did Scalia mean by ‘relatively permanent waters?’ ”

‘Confusing and cumbersome’ rules

Under the Obama rule, property owners must seek federal permits if they want to dam, grade or fill vernal pools, potholes or other wetlands for construction or crops, and they must replace the lost wetlands elsewhere.

California Farm Bureau Federation attorney Kari Fisher calls the rule “confusing and cumbersome for farmers and ranchers.” For example, ditches are exempted under certain circumstances, “but the burden falls on the landowner, and it’s difficult to prove.”

Zippy Duvall of the American Farm Bureau Federation said last year that a Senate committee investigation found instances of farmers being told to stop plowing fields or planting trees and to preserve their own tire ruts as wetlands.

The Senate and congressional Western Caucuses, predominantly made up of Republicans, have said the regulation stymies economic growth.

“During the campaign, Donald Trump showed his familiarity with the complaints from the Republican wing that accuses over-reaching environmental protection of gobbling up private property,” said Reed Hopper, a senior attorney for the conservative Pacific Legal Foundation. “The rule is an abuse of regulatory power. It’s a prime focus of our regulatory rollback.”

Environmental groups are concerned about the rapid pace of the rollback: Trump’s executive order was issued Feb. 28. A week later, the EPA published its intent to rescind and replace the Obama rule. On April 19, Pruitt heard comments from local and state representatives. The rule to rescind was sent to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget on May 3, and the new one is expected to be proposed this fall.

“Donald Trump’s executive order had such high priority because it has the potential to broadly undermine Clean Water Act protections in one fell swoop,” said Jon Devine, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington. “As a result, it is being pushed by numerous and varying sectors that discharge pollution and are regulated by the law.”

The current rule was years in the making, with more than 1.1 million comments over seven months and 400 meetings with interested parties, plus a peer-reviewed EPA scientific report that prompted 130,000 comments. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club and 24 other environmental groups sent a letter to Pruitt seeking the same effort from the Trump administration. Pruitt, however, told Congress to expect a final rule early next year.

“We have every expectation the matter will be fast tracked,” Devine said, “with a brief comment period, to get the Obama rule off the books.”

This story was edited by Marla Cone and copy edited by Nikki Frick.

Jane Kay can be reached at JaneKayEnvironment@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter: @JaneKayNature.

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In filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, several oil and pipeline companies acknowledge that climate change — which the fossil fuel industry has contributed to significantly — could undermine their bottom line and threaten their most valuable physical assets, including pipelines, oil storage “tank farms” and export terminals.

“Climate change may adversely affect our facilities and our ongoing operations,” reported Phillips 66, in 2015 and 2016 annual risk assessments to the SEC. The threats, according to the company’s filings, “include rising sea levels at our coastal facilities, changing storm patterns and intensities, and changing temperature levels.”

“As many of our facilities are located near coastal areas, rising sea levels may disrupt our ability to operate those facilities or transport crude oil and refined petroleum products,” the company states in its SEC 10-K filings. “Extended periods of such disruption could have an adverse effect on our results of operation. We could also incur substantial costs to protect or repair these facilities.”

Fossil fuels produced by oil and gas companies are by far the leading contributor of greenhouse gases that are warming the planet. More than 5,000 million metric tons of carbon dioxide were emitted in the United States from the combustion of fossil fuels in 2014, out of the total greenhouse gas national inventory of about 6,900 million metric tons.

Mandated by the SEC, the companies’ annual 10-K reports are intended to warn investors about all future risks to their assets and income.

“Some climatic models indicate that global warming is likely to result in rising sea levels, increased intensity of hurricanes and tropical storms, and increased frequency of extreme precipitation and flooding,” states the 2014 10-K filing from oil infrastructure giant Kinder Morgan, which owns or operates 84,000 miles of pipeline.

“We may experience increased insurance premiums and deductibles, or a decrease in available coverage, for our assets in areas subject to severe weather,” the company added. “To the extent these phenomena occur, they could damage our physical assets, especially operations located in low-lying areas near coasts and river banks, and facilities situated in hurricane-prone regions.”

Some companies edge close to climate denial in their filings, while hedging their bets.

“As a commercial enterprise, we are not in a position to validate or repudiate the existence of global warming or various aspects of the scientific debate,” declared Enterprise Products, the $52 billion pipeline and oil storage company, in its 2016 10-K filing. “However, if global warming is occurring, it could have an impact on our operations. For example, our facilities that are located in low lying areas such as the coastal regions of Louisiana and Texas may be at increased risk due to flooding, rising sea levels, or disruption of operations from more frequent and severe weather events.”

Yet companies that, even cautiously, give a nod to the potential threat of climate change stand in contrast to the ongoing denial within the Trump administration and the president’s decision to quit the Paris accord.

Recently Trump has sent mixed signals on whether he thinks climate change is real and caused by human activity. But he has repeatedly called it a “hoax,” and reportedly cited inaccurate weather reports as reason to doubt climate science and to abandon the Paris deal. (This did not stop Trump’s business operation from explicitly citing global warming and sea-level rise in a 2016 application to build a seawall to protect Trump’s Irish golf course.)

Environmental Protection Agency Director Scott Pruitt, whose close ties with energy companies have been widely reported, said in March that he did “not agree” that human activity is “a primary contributor to the global warming that we see.” Last month Pruitt said that “human activity contributes to it in some manner.”

Some companies seem progressive compared with these comments from Trump and his administration. Royal Dutch Shell on its website acknowledges “the significance of climate change” and endorses various “pathways to decarbonisation.”

The green-sounding rhetoric of some oil companies may be largely for public consumption. Investigations show Big Oil continues to fund climate deniers, including key members of Congress. Exxon Mobil records from 2015 show continuing contributions to climate skeptics, including the American Legislative Exchange Council. Records from the Center for Responsive Politics also show energy companies were major donors to Pruitt during his campaign for Oklahoma attorney general.

Oil and pipeline companies in their public statements, annual reports and websites do not reveal the same kinds of concerns about the dangers of climate change as they declared in their SEC filings. But some do acknowledge the need to cut emissions.

“Phillips 66 is investing in its future by conducting research to manage water consumption, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and provide technology to change the future of power generation,” states a “stakeholder” letter from Chairman and CEO Greg Garland, posted on the company’s website. The letter also calls for additional fossil fuel energy to allow “people to go further, reach higher, and live better, safer lives.”

Kinder Morgan says that “addressing climate change is a global priority,” adding it “is proud to be part of the solution toward reducing emissions of carbon dioxide” by building natural gas pipelines.

Some companies’ concerns about the threat to profits date back several years in their SEC filings.

“Although our business operations are designed and operated to accommodate expected climatic conditions,” states a 2012 SEC risk assessment by ConocoPhillips, “to the extent there are significant changes in the Earth’s climate, such as more severe or frequent weather conditions in the markets we serve or the areas where our assets reside, we could incur increased expenses, our operations could be materially impacted, and demand for our products could fall.”

Other companies focus almost entirely on the risk of climate regulation to corporate profits. Chevron, in its 2016 SEC filing, underscores the “increasing attention to climate change risks” that “has resulted in an increased possibility of governmental investigations and, potentially, private litigation against the company.” Chevron makes only passing reference to “potential ranges of physical risks such as storm severity and frequency, sea level rise … and earthquake severity.”

Exxon Mobil, despite its public endorsement of the Paris climate accords, refers only briefly to the “risks” and “engineering uncertainties” of climate change. Instead the company’s latest SEC filing emphasizes the risk to its bottom line posed by the “potential impacts of climate related policies.”

Future risk assessment may be more explicit, however: This month, Exxon Mobil shareholders, in a rebuke to management, overwhelmingly approved increasingly transparent company statements on climate change.

Also, in December, a powerful group of bankers and regulators commissioned by the Group of 20 called on corporations to disclose the risks of rising seas and other climatic changes. The task force issued voluntary guidelines for “consistent climate-related financial disclosures that would be useful to investors, lenders, and insurance underwriters in understanding material risks.”

Environmentalists criticize oil companies that take a public stance doubting climate change, but then file reports for investors that warn them of the dangers.

“Apparently the only people that oil companies don’t get to lie to are their investors,” said environmental writer and climate change activist Bill McKibben, a founder of 350.org. “But the rest of the world? Absolutely.”

This story was edited by Marla Cone and copy edited by Stephanie Rice.

Sandy Tolan can be reached at sandytolan@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Sandy_Tolan.

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How did life begin? What’s the cure for cancer? What causes Alzheimer’s? Are we alone in the universe? When will we run out of water? Is our air safe to breathe? How much can we alter our environment and still survive?

Science cannot solve all of our mysteries. It is, after all, a human process — one often clouded in uncertainty. Yet science is more than a compilation of data and statistics. It is the pursuit of evidence-based answers to the questions that bedevil us, and even if we don’t ever have clarity, this pursuit brings us knowledge, shining light on what we know as well as what we still need to figure out. Silencing scientists plunges us back into darkness.

Yet today an anti-science attitude has infiltrated many aspects of our government and politicized its decision-making. In my 35 years of covering these topics as a journalist, I have never encountered such extreme dismay and alarm from scientists about the threats they encounter while they seek answers to critical questions.

One longtime public health researcher said that scientists feel under siege from “industrial-scale doubt promulgators,” extreme social media harassment and personal attacks.

“If you discover something important that requires an industry or industries to rethink their practices and products, you are guaranteed to invite a deluge of unwanted attention, and you will not have the resources to defend yourself,” this university scientist told me. “It is hard to have optimism that any important discovery I might make and publish will have a positive influence on potential policy implications.”

Defending science should not be a partisan issue. The gathering of evidence and the pursuit of truth should be at the core of every decision we make, every policy that is formulated, every effort to protect the health of people and the planet. Science will not always provide sensible solutions to the problems plaguing our world. But at the very least, politicians and policymakers must understand the facts, the correlations, the relationships, the data, the laws of nature, before they act, rather than molding the facts to suit their personal convictions, ignoring the science if they disagree or even eliminating the pursuit of science.

Science should be the starting point for most every discussion we have.

With this in mind, understanding science is more important than ever. “Science literacy is the artery through which the solutions of tomorrow’s problems flow,” said astrophysicist and science communicator Neil deGrasse Tyson.

“We must take science out of the labs and journals,” declared the scientists who championed the March for Science, “and share it with the world.”

At Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting, we share that common goal. We have assembled a team to reveal conflicts between science and government and investigate the politicization of decision-making and the misuse of science, which poses threats to our health, welfare and resources. Ideas are welcome; please send them to me, Senior Editor Marla Cone, at mcone@revealnews.org.

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The whoosh of the wind through the junipers, the whinny of horses in their stalls, the raspy squawking of ravens — those are the sounds Don and Jane Schreiber have grown to love on their remote Devil’s Spring Ranch.

The views are mesmerizing, too. Long, lonesome ridges of khaki-colored rocks, dome-like outcrops and distant mesas rise from a sea of sage and rabbitbrush.

The ranch and surrounding countryside are a surprising setting for an enduring climate change problem: a huge cloud of methane — a potent, heat-trapping gas — that is 10 times larger than the city of Chicago. The main sources, scientists say, are leaks from about 25,000 active and abandoned wells and 10,000 miles of pipelines that snake across the San Juan Basin, providing about $3 billion worth of natural gas per year.

Home to stunning prehistoric ruins, cathedral-like canyons and silt-laden rivers, this basin in the Four Corners region of the Southwest emits substantially more methane per unit of energy produced than most major gas-producing areas, according to a Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting analysis of industry data reported to the federal government.

ConocoPhillips has been the region’s largest source of methane emissions, mostly from thousands of gas wells drilled on public lands managed by the Department of Interior. BP America is the second largest source.

“This is the Land of Enchantment. I love this state,” said Don Schreiber, whose ranch and 5,760 acres of nearby public grazing land are dotted with more than 120 natural gas wells. “But it is a black mark on our reputation that we allow this to persist.”

Every year, an estimated half million tons of methane loft into the air over the basin, a geologic area located primarily in northwestern New Mexico, according to a recent study published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. That’s equivalent to the annual greenhouse gases emissions of almost 3 million cars, “a substantial amount of methane emitted from one region,” said Eric Kort, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Michigan and co-author of the study.

Although methane accounts for only 9 percent of U.S. greenhouse gases, it traps heat far more effectively than carbon dioxide. That’s why controlling it is considered essential to addressing climate change.

And while methane isn’t harmful to human health, other gases, such as benzene, that come from the wells are linked to cancer and other effects. Studies have linked the proximity of gas wells to a higher risk of birth defects in Colorado and increased hospital visits and respiratory and skin problems in Pennsylvania.

The San Juan Basin and Four Corners region — where Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona meet — are home to large expanses of Native American lands, including the 27,400-square-mile Navajo Nation, where some residents say the gases are making them sick, too.

“I feel nausea sometimes. I feel weak,” said Sam Dee, a 59-year-old rodeo announcer on the Navajo reservation in Utah just outside the basin. Near his home are gas and oil plants where pollution is flared into the air, contributing to the Four Corners methane cloud. “I am concerned for my grandkids, for their health and their climate.”

EPA suspends methane rules

Cleaner-burning than coal and oil, natural gas is touted as a steppingstone to a more climate-friendly future. Getting it out of the ground, though, isn’t easy. Imagine a pressure cooker filled with mud, water, crude oil, natural gas and other substances. That pressure cooker is the earth. When companies sink wells, the natural gas — which is mostly methane — comes hurtling out along with everything else.

Inevitably leaks happen. In addition, large amounts of gas are vented and flared into the air intentionally to relieve pressure and force water out of wells.

Controlling methane was a priority of the Obama administration in an effort to combat climate change and air pollution. But President Donald Trump has moved quickly to suspend, and perhaps rescind, rules he considers burdensome to the energy industry.

In May 2016, the Environmental Protection Agency adopted a regulation aimed at reducing emissions from new and modified wells on private land by a half million tons by 2025. A few months later, oil and gas groups sued the agency to block the rule, calling it “excessive, uneconomic and threatening to the long-term production of oil and natural gas.”

Two months after taking office, Trump issued an executive order directing federal agencies to reconsider restrictions on energy development. In response, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt suspended the methane regulation and launched a review. He also ended an effort to gather information about leaks from old wells.

Pruitt, who was Oklahoma’s attorney general for six years, has close ties to energy companies. Oil and gas companies donated more than $100,000 over the past two years to a political action committee tied to Pruitt, according to Federal Election Commission records. Documents and emails also show that Pruitt has had a long-time alliance with Devon Energy, the San Juan Basin’s second-largest oil and gas producer. Devon attorneys drafted a letter that Pruitt, as attorney general, sent to President Barack Obama’s EPA to challenge the methane rules.

Another Obama administration regulation targeted methane emissions from wells on public lands. But the Interior Department announced last month that it would “suspend, revise or rescind (the rule) given its significant regulatory burden that encumbers American energy production, economic growth and job creation.”

Nationally, added oil and gas companies would have to spend between $125 million and $161 million a year to reduce leaks and flaring on public lands, although the recovered gas would have offset much of that, according to the Bureau of Land Management.

Tracking down leaks

Methane is a stealth pollutant. You can’t see it. At Four Corners, the first hint of trouble came from space in 2003, when a spectrometer on a satellite detected an enormous cloud of methane northeast of the Grand Canyon, stretching across 2,500 square miles. Each time the satellite orbited the Earth, the cloud was there.

In 2014, scientists identified the oil and gas fields of the San Juan Basin as the possible source. Energy companies pushed back; there are other sources, they pointed out, including natural seeps. But the scientists weren’t finished. They mounted a device on a plane that could spot individual leaks. They drove to many sites and recorded videos.

Of 250 plumes, four were from natural geologic seeps. One was from a coal mine. Everything else was from oil and gas drilling.

The companies maintain that these studies are too narrow in scope to be conclusive.

Although the San Juan Basin produces just under 4 percent of the nation’s natural gas, it emitted 10 percent of all methane pollution from oil and gas operations in 2015, according to industry data. One reason why: The region is larger than most national parks. Reaching wells and pipelines to repair leaks takes time. A lot can go wrong: Gaskets freeze, valves malfunction and welds fail, according to reports filed with the New Mexico Oil Conservation Division.

Some venting and flaring is unavoidable. But around 40 percent could be captured “with currently available control technologies,” the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported in 2010.

To the north, in Wyoming, where state officials have enacted methane rules, the upper Green River Basin produces twice as much gas as the San Juan Basin but emits only about half as much methane, according to Jon Goldstein, senior energy policy manager at the Environmental Defense Fund.

New Mexico has no state regulation.

“We live under the largest methane cloud in the entire country thanks to over 35,000 wells that are just across the line in New Mexico,” said Gwen Lachelt, a La Plata County, Colorado, commissioner who lobbied in the U.S. Senate to retain the Bureau of Land Management’s methane measure for public land.

Dirtier here than elsewhere

Every year oil and gas companies report methane emissions and production data to the federal government. That information, obtained and analyzed by Reveal, identifies the polluters.

ConocoPhillips, the basin’s largest oil and gas producer with about 10,000 wells, emitted methane in 2015 at a rate more than three times higher than its rate for the rest of the country.

For BP America, its methane emissions rate in the basin was 17 times higher than its national rate. For Devon Energy, it was twice as high.

“The industry there is dirtier than the industry in the country as a whole,” said David McCabe, an atmospheric scientist with the nonprofit environmental group Clean Air Task Force. “You need standards so the public can have some assurance companies will take care of this.”

ConocoPhillips spokesman Daren Beaudo defended its San Juan Basin operations, which it sold in April to Texas-based Hilcorp Energy Co. and The Carlyle Group in Washington, D.C., for $3 billion. Nationwide, the company nearly halved the rate at which it emitted methane between 2012 and 2015, according to the data analyzed by Reveal.

“We’re concerned about emissions and we’ve been taking action to reduce them for more than eight years,” Beaudo said. “With a large number of operating wells, even small emissions add up.”

Living with gas wells

Few people are more familiar with the environmental costs of gas wells than Don and Jane Schreiber. Several wells are actually on their land courtesy of a federal “split estate” law that allows companies access to private land.

They’ve battled over road construction, dust, soil erosion, hazardous waste disposal and loss of wildlife habitat. “Never have I said, ‘Don’t drill,’” said Don Schreiber. “What I’ve said is, ‘Don’t drill this way.’ ”

“Natural gas is a fine fuel,” he added. “But it is finite. That we would allow ourselves to waste it, cause local health problems and global climate change, there is everything in the world wrong with that.”

Not long ago, he drove around the countryside in his pickup, pointing out drilling sites and scars. “We’re down to fighting for the air we breathe,” he said.

Driving past one well on public land, he stepped on the brake. Under cumulus clouds as white as pearls and surrounded by pinyon pine, juniper and sagebrush, the setting was majestic. The air smelled like a gas station.

This story was edited by Marla Cone and copy edited by Nadia Wynter.

Tom Knudson and Gayathri Vaidyanathan can be reached at tknudson@revealnews.org and vaidyg@gmail.com. Follow them on Twitter: @tomsplace and @gayathriv. Lead photo by Julie Dermansky

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As protesters are evacuated from camps near the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, we’re taking a look back at what drew tens of thousands of people there in the first place.

Reveal photographer-in-residence Camille Seaman spent weeks talking to protesters — asking them why they came and what they wanted for the future.

Images and footage courtesy of: Camille Seaman

Video edited by filmmakers-in-residence:

Emily Harger
Olivia Merrion
Débora Silva

Senior Digital Producer: Aubrey Aden-Buie

Executive Producer: Amanda Pike

Digital Editor: Julia B. Chan

A look back at the stand at Standing Rock was originally published in Reveal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Aaron Glantz / November 22, 2016

Two months after Donald Trump descended an escalator at his New York skyscraper to declare his candidacy for president, the billionaire real estate mogul was back at Trump Tower, signing a deal for his first resort in Asia: the Trump International Hotel and Tower Bali.

It had been a difficult week for Trump. Roundly excoriated for saying Fox News host Megyn Kelly had “blood coming out of her wherever,” fired as host of “The Celebrity Apprentice” and criticized by rival Chris Christie for not having the temperament or experience to be president, Trump was nonetheless all smiles during a signing ceremony with his new business partner, Indonesian media mogul Hary Tanoesoedibjo.

Hary Tanoesoedibjo on Twitter

Selamat atas kemenangan Donald Trump sbg Presiden AS ke 45. Hubungan Indonesia-AS akan lbh baik,produktif,membawa kemajuan bagi kedua negara

Trump’s comments cannot be heard in video of the event, broadcast by one of Tanoesoedibjo’s properties, Global TV Indonesia, but the two must have had a lot to talk about. Like Trump, Tanoesoedibjo — known as Hary Tanoe back home — is a politically ambitious purveyor of reality television. His wife, Liliana, serves as host, chairwoman and judge of the Miss Indonesia beauty pageant, which Hary Tanoe broadcasts on one of his channels. She also serves on the board of his holding company, the MNC Group, which oversees his development and media enterprises.

Like Trump, Hary Tanoe is an admirer of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

While Trump has weathered criticism for a lack of global experience, the Indonesian deal — and dozens of others — offer glimpses into his own brand of international relations and suggest how he might approach matters of foreign trade and diplomacy.

For veteran watchers of Indonesian politics, the timing of the deal — during Trump’s campaign for president — was disturbing and familiar.

“Until the rise of Trump, there had always been a significant gap separating the politics of oligarchy in the U.S. and a place like Indonesia,” said Jeffrey Winters, a political science professor at Northwestern University who specializes in Southeast Asia. “But now, the two countries are converging as a figure like Trump behaves in ways that mimic Southeast Asian oligarchs, who leverage their wealth power to gain high office, do things like threaten not to accept the outcome of the democratic process, and weave their children into their campaigns and involve them directly in politics.”

Three weeks later, as Trump fended off attacks from Republican rival Bobby Jindal that he was an “egomaniacal madman” and an “unstable narcissist,” he signed a second real estate deal with Hary Tanoe, this time for a 1,700-acre resort in the West Java town of Lido.

In a statement, Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. proclaimed the Lido project would be a “spectacular development,” with the “the first Trump golf course in Asia as well as a world-class spa, luxurious hotel and residences.”

Trump’s deals in Indonesia were part of a pattern of global expansion for the real estate mogul as he ramped up to run for president. He has refrained from taking his foot off the gas during the campaign and even after winning the election.

When he was already well ahead in the delegate count in April, Trump inked a deal to build an office tower in India. Since his triumph at the polls, Trump has met with Indian business partners and reportedly objected to the development of wind turbines near one of his golf courses in Scotland with British politician Nigel Farage.

Trump-branded luxury projects are currently under construction from Uruguay to the United Arab Emirates.

He downplayed it all on social media Monday evening: “Prior to the election it was well known that I have interests in properties all over the world,” Trump tweeted “Only the crooked media makes this a big deal!”

Yet these projects provide the president-elect with a unique set of connections to real estate developers, bankers and politicians around the world, wrapping him in political entanglements that far outpace those of any other U.S. president.

In Colombia, a Trump-branded 72-story development is being financed by Yun Capital, which the Miami Herald reports “primarily manages Asian money, including funds from the government of China” — China, the country Trump has vowed to subject to hefty new tariffs. In Brazil, Trump’s hotel project is at the center of an emerging corruption scandal.

With Indonesia awash in corruption, it’s quite possible Trump could end up enmeshed in a scandal there as well.

“It is obviously the case that Trump, through his hotel business, is up to his ears in the Indonesian business world and the politics to which that is connected,” said William Liddle, a professor emeritus of political science at Ohio State University who focuses on Indonesian politics. “Probably nobody, local or foreign, does business of this scale in Indonesia without paying bribes.”

Trump’s business links with Hary Tanoe also have implications for internal Indonesian politics and business, where the main resource moguls use “in the competition with each other is their political connections,” Liddle said.

Trump appears to be ignoring suggestions from government ethics experts that he liquidate his real estate and place his fortune in a blind trust to avoid potential conflicts of interest. Instead, the president-elect has said he plans to place control of the company in the hands of his children.

Trump’s transition team did not return email and telephone inquiries for this story. His Indonesian business partner, Hary Tanoe, and his wife, Liliana, also did not respond to requests for comment.

But, like other international business partners of Trump’s, Hary Tanoe was quick to tweet his congratulations Nov. 9, posting a picture of the two billionaires together and predicting improved U.S.-Indonesian relations under a Trump administration.

On the campaign trail, Trump’s business interests in Indonesia had surfaced regularly, sometimes in unusual ways.

A week before he inked his second resort deal with Hary Tanoe in 2015, Trump closed a campaign rally at Trump Tower by bringing the speaker of the Indonesian Parliament, Setya Novanto, up to the podium.

“This a very, an amazing man,” Trump told the crowd. “We will do great things for the United States,” he added, before asking Setya, “Is that correct?”

“Yes,” Setya replied.

In the Indonesian media, it was widely reported that Hary Tanoe had introduced Setya to Trump. But the appearance left many observers scratching their heads.

“It was a strange scene because Setya Novanto is widely regarded as being one of the most corrupt officials in Indonesia,” Liddle said.

Three months after appearing with Trump on the podium, Setya resigned amid scandal. He had been caught on tape demanding a $4 billion kickback from an official with an international mining company, Freeport-McMoRan Inc., in exchange for continued parliamentary approval for its gold and copper mining operations.

Now that Trump has won, his business relationship with Hary Tanoe might turn into a political one as well.

Hary Tanoe came to prominence in his country nearly 20 years ago, when he began scooping up television stations owned by the children of Gen. Suharto, Indonesia’s long-ruling dictator, overthrown in a popular uprising in 1998. His wealth expanded as he diversified into real estate, toll roads and financial services.

The Indonesian mogul has sought power for years, too, though he’s found it elusive, in part because he is an ethnically Chinese Christian in a country that is overwhelmingly Malay and Muslim.

In 2014, he ran for vice president of Indonesia on a ticket with Gen. Wiranto, the final military chief under Suharto, who has been indicted for crimes against humanity by a United Nations tribunal.

Hary Tanoe reportedly bankrolled the campaign, but the duo failed to garner more than 5 percent of the vote. So the following year, shortly before his dealings with Trump began, Hary Tanoe decided to found his own political party, called “Perindo,” which means “unity.”

Some observers expect he will continue to try to succeed in politics — especially now that he has a friend in the White House.

“He’s a very wealthy man who can fund his own political party,” Liddle said. Despite his failure to generate electoral support so far, Liddle added, “we can expect that he will contest for the presidency in 2019.”

Trump’s Indonesia hotel deals hint at his form of foreign relations was originally published in Reveal on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Amy Pyle / November 21, 2016

I jolted awake, or rather I was jolted awake, by the Northridge earthquake and drove bleary-eyed down the 210 freeway to the 118, careening off expansion joints that had become steps. Less than a mile from the epicenter, the San Fernando Valley office of the Los Angeles Times already was surrounded with yellow police tape. Off-limits. I was a newly minted editor on Jan. 17, 1994, suddenly in charge of a mass disaster without access to the normal tools of our trade: phones, computers, police scanners.

We worked in the hot sun of the Times’ parking lot for most of the day, sneaking inside to grab a battery-operated TV, laptops, pens and reporters’ notebooks. And from that day on, nothing was the same. For weeks, for months. Actually, for years.

The news was so big that we set aside all of our stories in progress and our future story pitches. Everything was dwarfed by the size and urgency of the quake, its aftershocks and its aftermath: the bodies sandwiched inside apartments, the jittery families camping in median strips, the tearing down and rebuilding that ushered in corrupt contractors and quake ghost towns.

It was overwhelming at first. Then we learned to pace ourselves, to start small, to begin with what we knew, ask questions and follow them.

These are lessons I am reflecting on frequently these days, because on Nov. 8, we were jolted awake again and now are bracing for aftershocks. So many of the stories we had in progress are eclipsed by the election of Donald Trump, so much of what we had planned now seems off-topic. So much of what we can do feels inadequate.

From this day on, nothing will be the same.

Unlike the L.A. Times, a daily newspaper then relied on by 1 million people for their daily news, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has a special niche: uncovering wrongdoing and injustices, focusing our efforts on those stories with the greatest potential to drive change.

That niche has never seemed more relevant.

We are a nonpartisan newsroom. So this pursuit is not about Republican versus Democrat, conservative versus liberal. In recent years, we have not shied away from stories critical of Barack Obama’s administration, including several taking the president to task for not living up to his promises to veterans. (Those veterans chose Trump over Hillary Clinton by a 2–1 margin, by the way.) We are independent in every way; none of our donors hold sway over what we cover, no matter how generous.

And change can be good — at a minimum, good for news. A new presidential administration, particularly one with a platform of disruption, offers unlimited fodder for investigative journalists.

So where do we start?

After I became editor in chief earlier this year, we defined three filters for our coverage: accountability, inequality and sustainability. That provides a crucial and topical framework now as we re-evaluate our stories and our plans, guided by an additional filter: How is this new administration likely to shift the foundation, and the response? Who will be hurt and helped?

We have no preconceived notions of what will happen in these areas beyond what we all learned about Trump and his plans during the campaign, much of it from the candidate himself. His post-election statements — such as telling Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” that he will deport millions of people who lack documentation to be in the U.S. — persuade us he intends to follow through. That kind of change deserves close scrutiny.

Already, we have many concerns and the tools to start to address them. Sexual harassment and assault are illegal, and not paying contractors and mistreating workers are, too. We have a track record of using our accountability filter to expose these problems, and we will continue to do so. Destroying our planet is unfathomable, just as we have begun to make some meager headway against climate change. That’s where our sustainability filter will come in handy. Intolerance is intolerable. The ugliness ignited by Trump’s campaign in terms of racism, sexism and ethnocentrism catches in our inequality filter.

But the bigger challenge for us as journalists is confronting another fault line of this election: that no one seems to care what we report, that no one trusts us. We don’t have 1 million subscribers like the L.A. Times did back in 1994, counting on us to help them recover. So we realize that rebuilding trust will be difficult — and essential. We’re just beginning to think about how to begin, but we already know that our work convening local and regional media around the nation as investigative partners — through Reveal Labs and our public radio program and podcast with PRX, Reveal — will be another powerful tool in meeting that challenge.

In a trending post on Twitter two days after the election, a man called one current narrative backward. It’s the rural residents and exurbanites who need to listen more to the urbanites, he said, not vice versa. I think it’s both, I tweeted back at him: We all need to assume less, listen more.

So in the coming months, watch for us to redouble our efforts to uncover wrongdoing and injustice. That draws on our core values, our mission, which will persist no matter who is president. But help us, too, as we learn to assume less and listen more.

We’ll start small, beginning with what we know, asking questions and following them. We are not judge and jury. We’re just a small but ambitious nonprofit newsroom, jolted awake.

Amy Pyle can be reached at apyle@revealnews.org. Follow her on Twitter: @amy_pyle.