While some agencies have resisted efforts by Elon Musk’s team to access confidential records, HUD has opened the door. The potential harm to privacy could be significant.
Museums, universities and government agencies continued to make headway last year toward repatriating the remains of thousands of Native American ancestors to tribal nations after decades of slow progress drew national attention.
A federal law, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, was meant to help return human remains and sacred items taken from the graves of tens of thousands of Native Americans. But decades after its 1990 passage, many tribes are still waiting.
The emphasis on repatriation increased in tandem with reporting by ProPublica in 2023 about failures to comply with the law. Among the findings:
The U.S. Department of the Interior, including the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, collectively repatriated the remains of 1,366 Native American ancestors last year, more than a third of the number in its possession at the start of the year.
The Illinois State Museum, an institution that ProPublica has reported on in-depth, made the remains of more than 1,320 Native Americans available for return.
ProPublica has updated its repatriation database, which tracks institutions’ efforts on giving Indigenous peoples a way to reclaim their dead.
One of President Donald Trump’s most damaging strikes at the foundation of U.S. climate policy is buried deep in a sweeping Inauguration Day executive order focused on “Unleashing American Energy.” The order seeks to obliterate an obscure but critically important calculation: the “social cost of carbon,” which is used for things like creating fuel economy standards and regulating the amount of pollution allowed to flow from utilities’ smokestacks, reporter Abrahm Lustgarden writes.
Getting rid of this measure would upend energy and environmental regulations meant to address climate change and could have the long-term effect of shifting costs from polluting industries directly onto Americans as the expenses of climate change rise.
