Bonnie Bridgforth supported five children with an $8.50-an-hour job when she was told she no longer qualified for welfare in Maine. But the state — like so many others — was sitting on a huge stockpile of funds.

Arizona spends a majority of its welfare budget on the Department of Child Safety. The agency then investigates many poor parents, sometimes removing their children for reasons stemming from their poverty.

Following a ProPublica investigation, the New Mexico Child Support Enforcement Division is calling on the state Legislature to stop funding the agency with millions in child support confiscated from single mothers who previously received welfare.

Utah’s safety net for the poor is so intertwined with the LDS Church that individual bishops often decide who receives assistance. Some deny help unless a person goes to services or gets baptized.

Women who apply for welfare often have to identify who fathered their children and when they got pregnant, among other deeply personal details. State governments use that information to pursue child support from the dads — and then pocket the money.

Newly obtained reports show that Black children in Rutherford County are locked up more than twice as often as population size would suggest. And as the rest of the country has made progress on racial disparities, the county has gotten far worse.

Florida’s largest sugar companies say cane burns are safe and can’t be stopped without economic harm. But Brazil has successfully transitioned away from the controversial practice, and experts there say the U.S. can follow their lead.

Consolidation in the poultry industry may be fueling widespread salmonella outbreaks. Turkey companies worked with researchers to eradicate one. So why can’t the chicken industry do the same?

Charging nearly $200k, the firm promised to help Florida’s NICA program “win in the court of public opinion.” But in the end, state lawmakers insisted that administrators listen to parents and make changes.

To help us make sense of the opaque poultry supply chain, hundreds of ProPublica readers sent in details about their chickens and turkeys. Here’s what we learned.

The pandemic killed so many dialysis patients that their total number shrunk for the first time in nearly half a century. Few people took notice.

Nobody told Yaneli Ortiz’s family that the factory they lived near emitted ethylene oxide. Not when the EPA found it causes cancer. Not when she was diagnosed with leukemia. And not when Texas moved to allow polluters to emit more of the chemical.

The U.S. has one agency that regulates cheese pizza and another that oversees pepperoni pizza. Efforts to fix the food safety system have stalled again and again.