The request comes amid concerns that DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking highly restricted private information about taxpayers, public employees and federal agencies.
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In today’s newsletter: Treasury IG probes if DOGE, Trump sought private taxpayer info; school wars in Idaho; fentanyl from China; and more from our newsroom.
The request, spelled out in an email obtained by ProPublica, comes amid concerns that DOGE has overstepped its bounds in seeking highly restricted private information about taxpayers, public employees or federal agencies.
In our latest story on how battles over school vouchers, book bans and public funding for religious schools are harming public education, we go to Idaho. Just weeks after creating a $50 million tax credit for private schools, the state has shut down a $30 million grant program that helped public school students pay for laptops, school supplies, tutoring and other expenses.
“We couldn’t get the Chinese on the phone to talk about fighting child pornography, let alone fentanyl.”
— Jacob Braun, a senior official at the Biden-era Department of Homeland Security
For at least eight years, Shijiazhuang prison in the northern province of Hebei owned a chemical company called Yafeng, the hub of a group of Chinese firms and websites that sold fentanyl products to Americans, according to a U.S. congressional investigation, as well as Chinese government and corporate records obtained by ProPublica. To examine the role of the Chinese state in the drug trade, ProPublica reporter Sebastian Rotella interviewed more than three dozen current and former national security officials for the U.S. and other countries. The prison administration did not respond to requests for comment.
