Heather Vogell, ProPublica

Trump admin looks to slash rocket launch rules in apparent gift to Elon Musk

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The Trump administration is considering slashing rules meant to protect the environment and the public during commercial rocket launches, changes that companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX have long sought.

A draft executive order being circulated among federal agencies, and viewed by ProPublica, directs Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy to “use all available authorities to eliminate or expedite” environmental reviews for launch licenses. It could also, in time, require states to allow more launches or even more launch sites — known as spaceports — along their coastlines.

The order is a step toward the rollback of federal oversight that Musk, who has fought bitterly with the Federal Aviation Administration over his space operations, and others have pushed for. Commercial rocket launches have grown exponentially more frequent in recent years.

Critics warn such a move could have dangerous consequences.

“It would not be reasonable for them to be rescinding regulations that are there to protect the public interest, and the public, from harm,” said Jared Margolis, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity, a nonprofit that works to protect animals and the environment. “And that’s my fear here: Are they going to change things in a way that puts people at risk, that puts habitats and wildlife at risk?”

The White House did not answer questions about the draft order.

“The Trump administration is committed to cementing America’s dominance in space without compromising public safety or national security,” said White House spokesperson Kush Desai. “Unless announced by President Trump, however, discussion about any potential policy changes should be deemed speculation.”

The order would give Trump even more direct control over the space industry’s chief regulator by turning the civil servant position leading the FAA’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation into a political appointment. The last head of the office and two other top officials recently took voluntary separation offers.

The order would also create a new adviser to the transportation secretary to shepherd in deregulation of the space industry.

The draft order comes as SpaceX is ramping up its ambitious project to build a reusable deep-space rocket to carry people to Earth’s orbit, the moon and eventually Mars. The rocket, called Starship, is the largest, most powerful ever built, standing 403 feet tall with its booster. The company has hit some milestones but has also been beset by problems, as three of the rockets launched from Texas this year have exploded — disrupting air traffic and raining debris on beaches and roads in the Caribbean and Gulf waters.

The draft order also seeks to restrict the authority of state coastal officials who have challenged commercial launch companies like SpaceX, documents show. It could lead to federal officials interfering with state efforts to enforce their environmental rules when they conflict with the construction or operation of spaceports.

Derek Brockbank, executive director for the Coastal States Organization, said the proposed executive order could ultimately force state commissions to prioritize spaceport infrastructure over other land uses, such as renewable energy, waterfront development or coastal restoration, along the coastline. His nonprofit represents 34 coastal states and territories.

“It’s concerning that it could potentially undermine the rights of a state to determine how it wants its coast used, which was the very fundamental premise of the congressionally authorized Coastal Zone Management Act,” he said. “We shouldn’t see any president, no matter what their party is, coming in and saying, ‘This is what a state should prioritize or should do.’”

SpaceX is already suing the California Coastal Commission, accusing the agency of political bias and interference with the company’s efforts to increase the number of Falcon 9 rocket launches from Vandenberg Space Force Base. The reusable Falcon 9 is SpaceX’s workhorse rocket, ferrying satellites to orbit and astronauts to the International Space Station.

The changes outlined in the order would greatly benefit SpaceX, which launches far more rockets into space than any other company in the U.S. But it would also help rivals such as Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin and California-based Rocket Lab. The companies have been pushing to pare down oversight for years, warning that the U.S. is racing with China to return to the moon — in hopes of mining resources like water and rare earth metals and using it as a stepping stone to Mars — and could lose if regulations don’t allow U.S. companies to move faster, said Dave Cavossa, president of the Commercial Space Federation, a trade group that represents eight launch companies, including SpaceX, Blue Origin and Rocket Lab.

“It sounds like they’ve been listening to industry, because all of those things are things that we’ve been advocating for strongly,” Cavossa said when asked about the contents of the draft order.

Cavossa said he sees “some sort of environmental review process” continuing to take place. “What we’re talking about doing is right-sizing it,” he said.

He added, “We can’t handle a yearlong delay for launch licenses.”

The former head of the FAA’s commercial space office said at a Congressional hearing last September that the office took an average of 151 days to issue a new license during the previous 11 years.

Commercial space launches have boomed in recent years — from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year. With more than 500 total launches, mostly from Texas, Florida and California, SpaceX has been responsible for the lion’s share, according to FAA data.

But the company has tangled with the FAA, which last year proposed fining it $633,000 for violations related to two of its launches. The FAA did not answer a question last week about the status of the proposed fine.

SpaceX, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab and the FAA did not respond to requests for comment.

Currently, the FAA’s environmental reviews look at 14 types of potential impacts that include air and water quality, noise pollution and land use, and provide details about the launches that are not otherwise available. They have at times drawn big responses from the public.

When SpaceX sought to increase its Starship launches in Texas from five to 25 a year, residents and government agencies submitted thousands of comments. Most of the nearly 11,400 publicly posted comments opposed the increase, a ProPublica analysis found. The FAA approved the increase anyway earlier this year. After conducting an environmental assessment for the May launch of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 9 from Texas, the FAA released documents that revealed as many as 175 airline flights could be disrupted and Turks and Caicos’ Providenciales International Airport would need to close during the launch.

In addition to seeking to cut short environmental reviews, the executive order would open the door for the federal government to rescind sections of the federal rule that seeks to keep the public safe during launches and reentries.

The rule, referred to as Part 450, was approved during Trump’s first term and aimed to streamline commercial space regulations and speed approvals of launches. But the rule soon fell out of favor with launch companies, which said the FAA didn’t provide enough guidance on how to comply and was taking too long to review applications.

Musk helped lead the charge. Last September, he told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.” He called for the resignation of the head of the FAA, who stepped down as Trump took office.

Other operators have expressed similar frustration, and some members of Congress have signaled support for an overhaul. In February, Rep. Brian Babin, R-Texas, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif., signed a letter asking the Government Accountability Office to review the process for approving commercial launches and reentries.

In their letter, Babin and Lofgren wrote they wanted to understand whether the rules are “effectively and efficiently accommodating United States commercial launch and reentry operations, especially as the cadence and technological diversity of such operations continues to increase.

The draft executive order directs the secretary of transportation to “reevaluate, amend, or rescind” sections of Part 450 to “enable a diversified set of operators to achieve an increase in commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by an order of magnitude by 2030.”

The order also directs the Department of Commerce to streamline regulation of novel space activity, which experts say could include things like mining or making repairs in space, that doesn’t fall under other regulations.

Brandon Roberts and Pratheek Rebala contributed data analysis.

An agency tried to regulate SpaceX — now Musk could control its fate

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When SpaceX’s Starship exploded in January, raining debris over the Caribbean, the Federal Aviation Administration temporarily grounded the rocket program and ordered an investigation. The move was the latest in a series of actions taken by the agency against the world’s leading commercial space company.

“Safety drives everything we do at the FAA,” the agency’s chief counsel said in September, after proposing $633,000 in fines for alleged violations related to two previous launches. “Failure of a company to comply with the safety requirements will result in consequences.”

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s response was swift and caustic. He accused the agency of engaging in “lawfare” and threatened to sue it for “regulatory overreach.” “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” Musk wrote on X.

Today, Musk is in a unique position to deliver that change. As one of President Donald Trump’s closest advisers and head of the newly created Department of Government Efficiency, he’s presiding over the administration’s effort to cut costs and slash regulation.

While it’s unclear what changes his panel has in store for the FAA, current and former employees are bracing for Musk to focus on the little-known part of the agency that regulates his rocket company: the Office of Commercial Space Transportation, known as AST. “People are nervous,” said a former employee who did not want to be quoted by name talking about Musk.

The tech titan and his company have been critical of the office, which is responsible for licensing commercial rocket launches and ensuring public safety around them. After the fines in September, SpaceX sent a letter to Congress blasting AST for being too slow to keep up with the booming space industry. That same month, Musk called on FAA chief Mike Whitaker to resign and told attendees at a conference in Los Angeles, “It really should not be possible to build a giant rocket faster than paper can move from one desk to another.”

FAA leadership seems to have heard him. The day of Trump’s inauguration, Whitaker stepped down — a full four years before the end of his term. And experts said the pressure is almost certain to grow this year as Musk pursues an aggressive launch schedule for Starship, the most powerful rocket ever built.

Whitaker did not respond to requests for comment.

Part of the problem for AST, experts say, is bandwidth.

The office has seen a sixfold increase in launches in the past six years, from 26 in 2019 to 157 last year — with SpaceX leading the pack. At the same time, AST’s staffing and budget have not kept pace. The agency has roughly 160 people to oversee regular flights by private rocket companies — sometimes more than one a day — bringing satellites to orbit, giving rides to astronauts, assisting with national security surveillance efforts and carrying tourists to the edge of space.

Launch traffic “has increased exponentially,” said George Nield, who led the office from 2008 to 2018. “No signs that that’s turning around or even leveling off.”

For each launch, AST’s staff calculate the risk that “uninvolved” members of the public, or their property, will be harmed. They also consider whether the launch will cause environmental damage or interfere with other airspace activities like commercial flight, as well as make sure a rocket’s payload received the proper approvals. The office licenses space vehicle reentries, too, though, as yet, there are far fewer of them.

The process, on average, takes five months. “It takes a certain amount of time to do the work to protect the public, and you do want to do that right,” Nield said. The consequences of shrinking the office or eliminating it altogether could be devastating, he said. “If a rocket goes off course, and nobody’s double-checked it, and so you have a major catastrophic event, that’s going to result in a huge backlash.”

But Musk has criticized AST for focusing on “nonsense that doesn’t affect safety.” He’s also emphasized that his company moves quickly and must have failures to learn and improve. Within SpaceX, this approach is known as “rapid iterative development.” And it is not without risk. Last month, when Starship blew up shortly after liftoff, dozens of airplanes scrambled to avoid falling debris. Residents of the Caribbean islands of Turks and Caicos reported finding pieces of the craft on beaches and roads, and the FAA said a car sustained minor damage.

SpaceX has said it was reviewing data to determine the cause, pledging to “conduct a thorough investigation, in coordination with the FAA, and implement corrective actions to make improvements on future Starship flight tests.”

Musk, however, downplayed the explosion as “barely a bump in the road.” Moreover, he seemed to brush off safety concerns, posting a video of the flaming debris field with the caption, “Success is uncertain, but entertainment is guaranteed!” He also said nothing suggested the accident would push plans to launch the next Starship this month — even though the FAA investigation was still pending.

Moriba Jah, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas, said that Musk’s response was “recklessness … at a minimum,” given that people were alarmed by the falling rocket debris, which streaked fire and smoke across the sky before landing in and around the islands.

“That he now gets to provide government oversight over the things that he is trying to get permission to do is one of the most significant conflicts of interest I’ve seen in my career, and it’s inexplicable to me,” said Jah, who served on a federal advisory committee for AST.

The White House did not answer questions from ProPublica about DOGE’s plans for AST. Officials referred to comments by Trump, who said last week that if a conflict arises for Musk between one of his businesses and his government work, “we won’t let him go near it.” Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, also said Musk “will excuse himself from those contracts” if needed.

Musk and SpaceX did not respond to questions.

Jah said Musk and others advocating for less regulation have what he called a “launch, baby, launch mentality” that could push the FAA office in the wrong direction.

Industry representatives and members of Congress have accused the FAA of being more risk averse than necessary, stifling innovation.

“With nations like China seeking to leapfrog our accomplishments in space, it is even more imperative that we streamline our processes, issue timely approvals, minimize regulatory burdens and advance innovative space concepts,” said Rep. Brian Babin, a Republican from Texas and the incoming chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, at a hearing in September. He said he was concerned the FAA’s regulations could result in the mission to return astronauts to the moon being “unnecessarily delayed.”

Babin did not respond to a request for an interview about AST.

Sean Duffy, Trump’s new transportation secretary, has already indicated his department will take a more business-friendly approach.

Last month during his confirmation hearing, when Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas criticized the FAA’s enforcement action against SpaceX and asked Duffy whether he would “commit to reviewing these penalties and more broadly to curtailing bureaucratic overreach and accelerating launch approvals,” Duffy said he would. “I commit to doing a review and working with you, and following up on the space launches and what’s been happening at the FAA with regard to the launches.”

Duffy has since said he’s spoken to Musk about airspace reform and is looking to DOGE to “help upgrade our aviation system” — a move that drew a quick rebuke from Sen. Maria Cantwell of Washington last week. She called Musk’s involvement in FAA matters a conflict of interest.

The Department of Transportation did not make Duffy available for an interview, and the FAA did not answer written questions provided by ProPublica, despite multiple requests for comment.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, the top Democrat of the Science committee, said streamlining the regulation of commercial space launches has bipartisan support.

Still, she said, the safety of crews and launchpads’ neighbors, as well as noise and pollution, need to be managed. “There needs to be a traffic cop here,” she said, especially given increased launches and issues such as space debris. “This can’t just be the Wild West, right?”

The $42 million allocated annually to AST is less than 1% of the FAA’s budget.

Astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks space launches at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, said the office needs the resources and authority to hold companies accountable as the industry grows and has more impact. “Government will need to play a role,” he said, “and they’re going to have to sort it out.”

Last year, a government advisory committee recommended the AST move out of the FAA and become a standalone agency within the Department of Transportation.

Proponents argue the move would help AST get more attention, and potentially resources. Industry supporters also say the FAA’s culture of allowing no failures — a bedrock of its oversight of the commercial airline industry — is culturally a bad fit for what AST does, given how young the space industry is.

AST does not require that each mission succeed in the conventional sense, said Caryn Schenewerk, an industry consultant who sat on the advisory committee. “They can’t,” she said. Launching rockets is still so new, the office’s goal is to make sure failures don’t hurt anyone — not to prevent them altogether, she said.

As launches have become more common, though, so too have problems like the Starship explosion. A report from the Government Accountability Office found that in the three years before its 2023 review, commercial space launches experienced roughly two dozen mishaps, the industry’s term for “catastrophic explosions and other failures.”

While the report noted that none of those incidents resulted in fatalities, serious injuries or significant property damage to the public, there have been other impacts. Starship’s first launch in April 2023, for example, blew a cloud of dust and grime that stretched miles across Texas. Debris like concrete and shrapnel rained down on an environmentally sensitive migratory bird habitat near the company’s Boca Chica launchpad. Residents have complained, Jah said, but “citizens of that community aren’t feeling that they’re being heard.” A report in The New York Times noted egg yolk staining the ground near a bird’s nest.

In response, Musk wrote on X: “To make up for this heinous crime, I will refrain from having omelette for a week.”

SpaceX’s plans to launch the next Starship this month are part of the accelerated schedule the company has been pushing AST to approve. The company launched four of the vehicles in 2024, and officials said it wants to launch 25 this year.

DOJ accuses nation's largest landlords of scheme to rip-off tenants

The Department of Justice on Tuesday sued six of the nation’s largest landlords, accusing them of using a pricing algorithm to improperly work together to raise rents across the country.

The lawsuit expands an antitrust complaint the department filed in August that accused property management software-maker RealPage of engaging in illegal price-fixing to reduce competition among landlords so prices — and profits — would soar. Officials conducted a two-year investigation into the scheme following a 2022 ProPublica story that showed how RealPage was helping landlords set rents across the country in a way that legal experts said could result in cartel-like behavior.

Together, the six landlords manage more than 1.3 million apartments in 43 states and the District of Columbia. Prosecutors have already negotiated a settlement with one of them.

“While Americans across the country struggled to afford housing, the landlords named in today’s lawsuit shared sensitive information about rental prices and used algorithms to coordinate to keep the price of rent high,” said acting Assistant Attorney General Doha Mekki of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division. The suit seeks to end “their practice of putting profits over people” and to make housing more affordable.

The legal action is the latest development to follow ProPublica’s initial investigation. Since 2022, senators have introduced legislation seeking to ban the use of rent algorithms similar to RealPage’s, and tenants have filed dozens of ongoing federal lawsuits. Cities around the country, including San Francisco, Philadelphia and Minneapolis, have also moved to bar landlords from using similar algorithms to set rents.

RealPage’s popular software was collecting nonpublic pricing information from multiple property managers and feeding it through a common algorithm, which then recommended an optimal rent level to those who used it — in violation of rules that prohibit such coordination, federal prosecutors alleged. They also accused the landlords of improperly communicating directly about their pricing through calls, emails and participation in “user group” forums hosted by RealPage.

The company pushes landlords to use an “auto-accept” feature on its software, authorities said, and makes it onerous for property managers to reject its suggestions.

RealPage Senior Vice President Jennifer Bowcock called the federal case “flawed” and said the company is “committed to vigorously defending ourselves and our customers against the DOJ’s accusations.” RealPage has already changed its software to remove nonpublic data, despite its view that its technology was legal and “pro-competitive,” she said.

“It’s past time to stop scapegoating RealPage — and now our customers — for housing affordability problems when the root cause of high housing costs is the undersupply of housing, which we have been saying from the beginning,” she said.

Three of the landlords sued in this week’s action appeared in ProPublica’s 2022 story, including the nation’s biggest landlord, Greystar, and Camden Property Trust.

Camden CEO Ric Campo told the news organization at the time that the apartment market in Houston, where the company is headquartered, was so big and diverse that “it would be hard to argue there was some kind of price fixing.”

But when Camden adopted the nascent rent-setting technology in 2006, the company found that its profits grew even though more tenants were moving out.

“The net effect of driving revenue and pushing people out was $10 million in income,” Campo told a trade publication then. (He later said that quote doesn’t reflect how he or Camden views renters today.)

Neither Campo nor Camden responded to a request for comment.

Greystar, the biggest manager and owner of rentals in the U.S., said in a statement that it was “disappointed” that the Justice Department added the company to the suit.

“At no time did Greystar engage in any anti-competitive practices,” the statement from the South Carolina-based company said. “We will vigorously defend ourselves in this lawsuit.”

ProPublica’s 2022 data analysis also found Willow Bridge Property Company (formerly Lincoln Residential) managed dozens of buildings in markets that had seen fast growth in rent. The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the Justice Department lawsuit.

One property owner and manager, Cortland, has already agreed to stop using competitors’ nonpublic data to train or run pricing models under a settlement with federal prosecutors. The proposed agreement has been submitted to the court for consideration.

Atlanta-based Cortland manages over 80,000 rentals in 13 states. A related federal criminal investigation that led to a May 2024 search of its headquarters has been closed, a spokesperson said.

The spokesperson said the company is “pleased” to announce the settlement.

“We believe we were only able to achieve this result because Cortland has invested years and significant internal resources into developing a proprietary revenue management software tool that does not rely on data from external, nonpublic sources,” the spokesperson said.

Revenue management software can help landlords manage rents “efficiently” and avoid discrimination, said a spokesperson for defendant Cushman & Wakefield, which also owns defendant Pinnacle. The spokesperson said that as a manager only, the company does not “set strategy, pricing, or occupancy targets,” decide which software to use, or whether to accept any software’s recommendations.

The lawsuit also named as a defendant Blackstone’s LivCor. Blackstone did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

In addition to naming landlords as defendants in the claim, it also added the attorneys general of Illinois and Massachusetts as co-plaintiffs, bringing the total number of participating states to 10. The states include the country’s most populous — California, which has 17 million renters.

RealPage said that “fewer than 10% of all rental housing units in the U.S. use RealPage software to suggest rental prices, and our software recommendations are accepted less than half the time.”

But a White House report in December said that number could be higher. It said RealPage and census data suggest that as many as 1 in 4 rentals nationwide use a RealPage pricing algorithm. And the company’s penetration is higher in some markets, it said.

Using models of what competitive markets would look like, researchers found that algorithmic pricing costs renters in units where it is used $70 more a month, or 4% of rent, on average. In six major metro areas, the cost exceeds $100 a month, the report found.

The report estimated the total added cost to renters from the use of such algorithms in 2023 to be roughly $3.8 billion.

RealPage said that the analysis is “riddled with flawed assumptions,” and that the White House never contacted the company about the report.

The fate of the Justice Department’s lawsuit under the incoming administration is unclear. President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Gail Slater, a veteran antitrust attorney and economic advisor to JD Vance, to lead the department’s antitrust division.

A handful of rural Georgia counties could exclude enough votes to affect the 2024 race

An examination of a new election rule in Georgia passed by the state’s Republican-controlled election board suggests that local officials in just a handful of rural counties could exclude enough votes to affect the outcome of the presidential race.

The rule was backed by national groups allied with former President Donald Trump. It gives county boards the power to investigate irregularities and exclude entire precincts from the vote totals they certify. Supporters of the rule, most of whom are Republicans, say it’s necessary to root out fraud. Critics, most of whom are Democrats, say it can be used as a tool to disenfranchise select buckets of voters.

An analysis by ProPublica shows that counties wouldn’t have to toss out many precincts to tip the election if it’s as close as it was in 2020, when Trump lost Georgia by less than 12,000 votes. Based on tallies from that year, an advantage of about 8,000 Democratic votes could be at risk in just 12 precincts in three counties under the new rule, the analysis found. There are 159 counties in Georgia.

A judge is expected to decide soon whether the rule will stand.

The three counties — Spalding, Troup and Ware — voted for Trump in 2020. But each has small yet significant concentrations of Democratic votes clustered in specific precincts. All three also have local election boards that have become stacked in recent years with partisans who’ve voiced support for the false claim that Trump won the 2020 election or have cast doubt on the integrity of the election process.

In Spalding, about 40 miles south of Atlanta, a man who is now county election board chair had previously alerted Trump’s attorneys to what police later determined was false evidence of voter fraud. More recently, he has tweeted that President Joe Biden is a “pedophile,” made sexually degrading comments about Vice President Kamala Harris and, this August, accused a top state elections official of “gaslighting” for saying there was no evidence of fraud in 2020.

In Ware County, in the southeast corner of the state, the election board chair is tied to far-right groups and has called democracy “mob rule.” In Troup County, which borders Alabama, the election board chair maintains that debunked “statistical anomalies” in the 2020 vote still haven’t been explained.

The legality of the rule was debated on Oct. 1 during back-to-back bench trials for two lawsuits. One was brought by the Democratic National Committee and others against the State Election Board, seeking to invalidate the rule. The other was brought by a Republican local board member against her county, the Democratic National Committee and others, seeking a judgment that she had the discretion not to certify election results.

During the trial, Judge Robert McBurney said to the lawyer representing the Republican board member, “You have very successfully pulled me down an intriguing rabbit hole about, well, maybe you could certify some of the votes, but not all of the votes.”

The boards’ new power is the culmination of ground-level efforts in Georgia that began the day Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 election. After Trump lost — and after Georgia’s Republican secretary of state rebuffed his demand to “find” him the 11,780 votes he would have needed to win — GOP state legislators launched an effort to reshape county election boards, paving the way for removing Democrats and stacking them with Trump backers. Boards are supposed to administer elections in a nonpartisan manner, and some of these changes broke with the norm of having equal numbers of Republican and Democratic members, plus an independent chair to break ties.

The legislature also removed the secretary of state as head of the State Election Board and replaced members of the board — stacking it, too, with Trump partisans. At an August rally in Atlanta, Trump praised three of them by name, calling them “pit bulls fighting for honesty, transparency and victory.” The three board members did not respond to requests for comment.

With the addition of its newest member, the state board was able to do in August what the previous iteration of it wouldn’t: Pass rules giving the county boards unprecedented power.

What’s more, the rule allowing county boards to exclude specific votes was secretly pushed by Julie Adams, a leader of a group central to challenging the legitimacy of the American election system. That group’s founder joined Trump on the call in 2020 during which he pressured the secretary of state to hand him victory.

Adams, a Fulton County election board member, was the plaintiff in one of the two lawsuits. She did not respond to requests for comment or a list of detailed questions.

The State Election Board and attorneys representing parties in both lawsuits did not comment.

A lawyer representing the Democratic National Committee referred ProPublica to the Harris-Walz campaign. “For months, MAGA Republicans in Georgia and across the country have been trying to lay the groundwork to challenge the election results when they lose again in November,” deputy campaign manager Quentin Fulks said in a statement. “A few unelected extremists can’t just decide not to count your vote.”

During one of the bench trials, Richard Lawson, a lawyer for Adams and the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank aligned with Trump, argued that county board members should have the authority to exclude entire precincts’ votes if they find something suspicious.

A lawyer for the Democratic National Committee, Daniel Volchok, warned that board members making “individual determinations about if a ballot is fraudulent or otherwise should not be counted” is “a recipe for chaos.”

“It is also a recipe for denying Georgians their right to vote.”

Spalding County has for years played a prominent role in Trump supporters’ efforts to challenge election results.

In 2020, Trump’s allies trying to overturn the election quickly realized that the weakest points in America’s election system are its thousands of counties, where the day-to-day work of running elections is done. Previously unreported emails and messages show that one of the first places they targeted was Spalding County.

In the days after the election, Ben Johnson, the owner of a tech company who in 2021 would become chair of the Spalding County election board, began tweeting repeatedly at a team of lawyers challenging the election results on behalf of Trump, including Sidney Powell and Lin Wood, a ProPublica review of his deleted but archived tweets found. Johnson also advocated on social media for overturning the election. The Daily Beast reported in 2022 on other Johnson tweets, including one suggesting that Wood investigate claims of election fraud in Spalding County.

About two weeks after the election, a hacker emailed Wood and others to say that that he and another operative were “on ground & ready for orders” near Spalding County, outlining in a series of attachments how they were seeking to acquire voting machine data to prove the election was stolen in Spalding and another Georgia county. (Wood previously told ProPublica, “I do not recall any such email” and that he did not give the hacker any orders, though he did say he recalled the hacker “leaving one night to travel to Georgia.” The hacker did not previously respond to requests for comment.)

Messages obtained by ProPublica show that about an hour later, the operative messaged the hacker: “Woot! We have a county committing to having us image” voting machine data.

The hacker and operative were able to help their allies access voter machine data elsewhere, which became a central pillar in a long-running conspiracy theory that voting machines were hacked. That theory was key to justifying attempts to overturn the 2020 election. In Spalding County, however, their plan fell apart after the secretary of state made clear in a memo that accessing such data would be illegal. “Our contact wants to give us access, but with that memo it makes it impossible,” the operative wrote, without “her getting in a lot of trouble.”

After Trump’s loss, the Republican-controlled state legislature passed a massive bill “to comprehensively revise elections” in response to “many electors concerned about allegations of rampant voter fraud.” And Republican state legislators began writing bills to revamp local election boards, one county at a time. Since 2021, the reorganizations of 15 boards have brought a wave of partisan Republicans, ProPublica found.

As a result of the 2021 reorganization in Spalding, the election board lost three Black Democrats. Three new white Republicans became the majority — including Johnson, who became chair.

In 2022, after news outlets reported that Johnson had supported the QAnon conspiracy theory on social media, he tweeted an open letter emphasizing that he “took an oath to serve in the interests of ALL eligible voters of Spalding County” and “There’s no room for politics in the conducting of Elections.”

Since then, Johnson has continued to share social media content questioning the integrity of Georgia’s elections.

Reached by phone, Johnson said, “I don’t want to talk to any liberal media” and “You’re going to spread lies.” He did not respond to a detailed list of questions subsequently sent to him.

The new rule says that if there are discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of people recorded as having voted in a given precinct, “The Board shall investigate the discrepancy and no votes shall be counted from that precinct until the results of the investigation are presented to the Board.” If “any error” or “fraud is discovered, the Board shall determine a method to compute the votes justly.”

Minor discrepancies between the number of voters and ballots are not uncommon. For instance, ballots can become stuck in scanners, voters can begin filling out a ballot and then stop before submitting it, or election systems can be slow to update that a provisional ballot has been corrected.

In counties like Spalding, Ware and Troup — with Republican-leaning boards and at least a few Democratic-heavy precincts — the conservative majority has the power to determine how to “compute the votes justly.” At the trial and in court documents, Democratic lawyers argued this could mean not certifying Democratic votes, with one arguing in a brief that county board members “will attempt to delay, block, or manipulate certification according to their own political preferences” by invoking the rule “to challenge only certain types of ballots or returns from certain precincts as fraudulent.”

Democratic voters in many conservative rural counties are packed into a small number of precincts. In 2020, Spalding had five precincts with Democratic majorities, which provided about 3,300 more votes for Biden than Trump. Troup had five such precincts totaling about 3,000 such votes, and Ware had two such precincts totaling roughly another 1,600 votes.

Troup County removed two Black women and two men — all Democrats, one said — from its elections board when it restructured in 2021, shrinking the board from seven to five members.

“They definitely wanted us off the board,” said former member Lonnie Hollis, who is worried the new board will behave partisanly this election. She said Republican officials in Troup have connections to the state party.

The board’s new chair, William Stump, a local banker, said that he believes Troup got its vote totals right last presidential election but that “there were some fairly significant statistical anomalies” elsewhere in Georgia.

“It didn’t pass the smell test,” he said. Stump recently appeared at a GOP luncheon in LaGrange with State Election Board member Janelle King, whose ascension to the board cemented its MAGA majority and enabled the passage of the rules.

Stump said he was at the luncheon, where the GOP handed out Trump gear, to answer questions about the election process. “We don’t have, I don’t think, outwardly partisan folks on the board,” he said. “Everybody’s concern is to get the numbers right and get them out on time.”

When Ware County reconstituted its election board in 2023, it removed two Black members who were Democrats and installed Republican Danny Bartlett as chair. Bartlett, a retired teacher, served as executive director of the Okefenokee chapter of Citizens Defending Freedom, a Christian nationalist group the Southern Poverty Law Center calls “anti government” and “part of the antidemocratic hard-right movement.”

Bartlett also started a Facebook group in 2022 called Southeast Georgia Conservatives in Action that asks potential members. “Are you ready to take action against the assault upon our country?” Bartlett sought to raise money for the group through a raffle that offered as a grand prize a “Home Defense Package” that included $2,000 worth of guns, gear and a “Patriot Pantry 1-week Food Supply Ammo Can.”

Bartlett did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Carlos Nelson, Ware’s elections supervisor, said he opposed the board’s restructuring but said that Bartlett hasn’t gone along when conservative activists have demanded measures such as hand-counting ballots. “He has been a really good chair,” said Nelson, who is a Democrat. He said he didn’t know about Bartlett’s outside political affiliations but that they were “totally different from his participation on the board.”

Shawn Taylor, one of the Black board members who was removed, said she’s concerned that the new election leaders are too partisan and may try to sway the election results.

“These MAGA Republicans are putting things in place to try to steal the election,” she said, adding she did not think all Republicans supported those attempts. “I believe that it’s going to cause major conflict within a lot of these counties.”

The Ware County commission in July removed a new conservative election board member, Michael Hargrove, who had complained about the “Biden/Harris Crime Syndicate” on social media, after he entered a polling site’s restricted area during spring elections and got into a confrontation with a poll worker. Hargrove said in an email that he “had, as an Elections Board member, EVERY right to be in that location at that time. Any other issue related to that event is juvenile nonsense.”

His replacement, Vernon Chambless, is a local lawyer who told ProPublica that he believes Trump should have been declared the winner in 2020. “We’re going to make sure that everything’s kosher before we certify,” he said.

Alex Mierjeski, Amy Yurkanin, Mollie Simon, Mariam Elba, Kirsten Berg and Doris Burke contributed research.

DOJ opens investigation into tech company accused of collusion with landlords

The Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division has opened an investigation into whether rent-setting software made by a Texas-based real estate tech company is facilitating collusion among landlords, according to a source with knowledge of the matter.

The inquiry is being launched as questions have arisen about a 2017 merger between RealPage and its largest pricing competitor. The source told ProPublica some DOJ staff raised concerns about the merger but were overridden by political appointees of former President Donald Trump.

Congressional leaders have pushed for an investigation into RealPage in three letters to the DOJ and the Federal Trade Commission, which were sent after a ProPublica report on the software’s use in mid-October.

The letters raised concerns that RealPage’s pricing software could be pushing rents above competitive levels and allowing big landlords to coordinate their pricing in violation of federal antitrust laws.

“We are concerned that the use of this rate setting software essentially amounts to a cartel to artificially inflate rental rates in multifamily residential buildings,” three senators said in a letter in early November. They included Sen. Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota Democrat who chairs the Senate Subcommittee on Competition Policy, Antitrust and Consumer Rights.

The Capital Forum first reported the existence of the investigation and some details on Tuesday.

RealPage’s software works by collecting information from property managers who are the company’s clients, including what rents they are able to charge tenants. That information is fed into an algorithm that then recommends prices daily for each available apartment.

Though RealPage says the information is aggregated and anonymized, some experts have said using private data from competitors to set rents could run afoul of antitrust laws, allowing property managers to illegally coordinate their pricing.

ProPublica found the software is widely used in some markets: In one downtown Seattle ZIP code, 70% of more than 9,000 apartments were controlled by just 10 property managers — every one of which used RealPage’s pricing software in at least some of its buildings.

RealPage did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The company has said RealPage “uses aggregated market data from a variety of sources in a legally compliant manner.” The company said its software prioritizes a property’s own internal supply and demand dynamics over external factors like competitors’ rents. The company also said its software helps reduce the risk of collusion that would occur if landlords relied on phone surveys of competitors to manually price their units.

The DOJ’s investigation represents the second time the federal law enforcement agency has looked into RealPage’s rent-setting software. In 2017, the DOJ flagged a proposed merger in which RealPage sought to buy its biggest competitor, a company called Rainmaker Group, which made rent-setting software known as LRO, or Lease Rent Options.

RealPage’s then-CEO, Steve Winn, said the $300 million purchase would allow RealPage to double the number of apartments it was pricing, from 1.5 to 3 million units.

After the acquisition was announced in early 2017, the DOJ requested additional information from the companies involved. Federal regulators scrutinize mergers above a certain size — right now, it is transactions valued at $101 million — and typically allow them to proceed after only a preliminary review.

But the government can request more information from companies and even seek to block the merger in court if it believes it could substantially harm competition.

A paralegal specialist who worked on the original DOJ probe into RealPage said it was narrowly focused on the impact on competitors who made software with a similar purpose. The paralegal said she was unaware of any complaints by those companies about the proposed merger.

Merger review guidelines used by both the DOJ and FTC say the agencies “normally evaluate mergers based on their impact on customers,” which include both direct customers and final consumers. But the paralegal said the investigation did not involve talking to tenant advocates or renters.

“The focus of the investigation was ‘talk to competitors, talk to large rental companies,’” said the paralegal, who did not want to be named because she was not authorized to speak about the investigation. “That was the limited focus.”

ProPublica found that in the Seattle ZIP code it examined, some of the 10 largest property managers used RealPage’s original pricing software and others were clients of the competitor it acquired.

Though some career DOJ staff members were concerned about the merger, political appointees leading the agency at the time under Trump chose not to challenge it in court, according to the source with knowledge of the matter.

The investigation fell at a time when the DOJ’s Antitrust Division was preparing to sue to block a proposed merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which promised to take up a lot of the division’s resources. “It was a resource constraint issue he was trying to balance,” the source said of Makan Delrahim, the former assistant attorney general charged with overseeing the division at the time. In addition, RealPage did not have the same reach then as it does today, the source said.

Delrahim declined to comment on Tuesday about the first RealPage investigation, saying he was bound by government ethics restrictions from discussing nonpublic aspects of the case and referring questions to the current administration.

He said that given that it had been almost five years, his “memory is fuzzy at best.” But he added that in general, “as evident from my past record, I was not shy about greenlighting cases that I felt were meritorious even if difficult or unprecedented.”

Antitrust prosecutions by the division fell to historic lows under Trump.

The DOJ declined to comment on Tuesday.

Klobuchar’s recent letter to the DOJ mentioned the 2017 merger, saying that such consolidation can make markets “more susceptible” to collusion and encouraging the department to consider looking at RealPage’s past behavior to see if any of it was anticompetitive.

RealPage says its customer base across all its products — which also include other types of software, such as accounting — has exceeded 31,700 clients.

Marketing materials dated 2021 on the company’s website said its so-called revenue management products, formerly called Yieldstar and LRO, are “trusted by over 4 million units.”

ProPublica also detailed how RealPage’s User Group, a forum that includes landlords who adopt the company’s software, has grown to more than 1,000 members, who meet in private at an annual conference and take part in quarterly phone calls. Klobuchar’s letter raised specific questions about the group, saying the senators were “concerned about potential anticompetitive coordination” occurring through it.

In addition to the letters from congressional lawmakers, renters have filed three lawsuits in federal court in Seattle and San Diego since mid-October, alleging RealPage and a slew of large landlords are engaging in anticompetitive behavior through the company’s software.

After the San Diego lawsuit was filed, a RealPage representative said the company “strongly denies the allegations and will vigorously defend against the lawsuit.” It has not responded to requests for comment on the other two lawsuits.

A property manager named in one of the Seattle lawsuits, Campus Advantage, said in a statement that it “strongly disagrees with the unsubstantiated allegations in the lawsuit and intends to vigorously defend against the claims. Campus Advantage is proud of its track record creating successful communities.”

Other property management firms named in the three lawsuits either did not respond to requests for comment or declined to comment. One could not be reached.

Startling details of possible Trump Organization crimes revealed in new legal filing

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A new legal filing by New York’s attorney general this week accused former President Donald Trump’s company of misleading lenders about the financial health of its landmark downtown Manhattan skyscraper, 40 Wall Street, while seeking to renew the building’s mortgage.

Though the Trump Organization called 40 Wall Street “one of the great success stories post 2008,” lender Capital One found the company’s estimates of the building’s worth so unbelievable that the bank declined to refinance the tower’s loan in 2015, the filing alleges.

“Capital One harbored great skepticism regarding the Trump Organization’s valuations,” says the filing, which was submitted by Attorney General Letitia James in response to Trump’s efforts to block her from questioning him and his children as part of an ongoing investigation by her office.

The new accusations offer startling details about possible financial fraud involving 40 Wall Street — one of the subjects of a 2019 ProPublica story that highlighted conflicting financial documents the Trump Organization had filed for the building.

ProPublica’s story documented how income, expense and occupancy numbers cited in the eventual refinance for 40 Wall Street and another Manhattan building sometimes didn’t match those the company had filed with city tax authorities. A lower valuation for the city would produce a lower tax bill, while a higher valuation for lenders would make it easier to get a new mortgage.

One expert said it appeared like the Trump Organization was keeping “two sets of books.”

“It feels like a set of books for the tax guy and a set for the lender,” said Kevin Riordan, a financing expert and real estate professor at Montclair State University, at the time.

In her filing, James asserts that Trump Organization employees, including Trump’s children, took part in a pattern of deception in which they misled lenders, insurers and the Internal Revenue Service by vastly overstating values for 40 Wall Street and a host of other Trump properties, including golf courses in Scotland, Los Angeles and Westchester and his buildings on Fifth and Park avenues.

The Trump Organization on Thursday lashed out at James, a Democrat, via a statement emailed by a spokesperson, saying, “The only one misleading the public is Letitia James.

“She defrauded New Yorkers by basing her entire candidacy on a promise to get Trump at all costs without having seen a shred of evidence and in violation of every conceivable ethical rule,” the organization’s statement said. It asserted that James “has no case” and that the “allegations are baseless and will be vigorously defended.”

Alan Futerfas, a lawyer for Trump’s children Donald Jr. and Ivanka Trump, also criticized James, accusing her of making “repeated threats to target the Trump family” and ignoring legal protections for “the very people she is investigating.”

James is seeking to compel testimony and obtain documents from Trump, Donald Jr. and Ivanka, who she said have not cooperated with her investigation.

The filing says that property valuations formed the heart of statements of financial condition that the Trump Organization used to demonstrate its net worth. The statements, which James said contained inaccuracies, were compiled by an outside accounting agency from a data spreadsheet and backup material provided by the Trump Organization.

Trump’s personal guarantees to some banks and insurers required him to certify that his financial statements were correct, according to James’ filing. The documents say her office has evidence Trump was “personally involved in reviewing and approving” the statements.

If the company or its employees are found to have deliberately provided misleading valuations, they could face civil or criminal penalties. The company is under investigation by both James and Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

With its classic Gothic Revival style and signature green spire, 40 Wall Street gave Trump a presence in the most famous financial district in the world. His company doesn’t own it, but rather purchased in 1995 the right to act as the landlord for its office and retail space. Finding tenants for that space, however, particularly in the building’s narrow tower, proved a challenge, especially after 9/11, when occupancy sagged and the entire financial district struggled, the ProPublica investigation found.

James’ filing says that as early as 2009, Capital One, which held the mortgage on the property, “raised substantial concerns about cash flow” at 40 Wall Street, prompting in-person meetings with Trump, longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg and others. Donald Trump Jr. was also involved in the discussions, the filing says.

The conversations led to a loan modification in 2010, with bank personnel harboring doubts about the Trump Organization’s representations of the building’s financial standing. During those discussions, the Trump Organization provided the bank with profit numbers for 2010 of $12.3 million, which bank personnel described as “very optimistic.”

More startling were the differences between valuations that appeared on Trump’s statements of financial condition and those prepared by appraisers for Capital One. The Trump Organization set the value of the building at $601.8 million in 2010, while the appraisals for Capital One done by Cushman & Wakefield set it at just less than one-third of that, $200 million.

Weisselberg shared one of the company’s higher valuations for the building with the bank in early 2015, boasting of “considerable capital investment” and “a much improved cash flow.” He wanted Capital One to restructure its loan and waive a principal payment of $5 million due in November.

But Capital One declined to refinance the mortgage, referencing its own internal estimate that the building was only worth $257 million in the fall of 2014.

That year, 40 Wall Street’s $160 million mortgage was a thorn in Trump’s side, representing his then-largest single debt as he launched his campaign for the presidency.

After Capital One’s rejection, the Trump Organization turned to Ladder Capital Finance, where Weisselberg’s son Jack was a director. Ladder commissioned its own appraisal. Though Ladder used the same Cushman & Wakefield team that had estimated the building was worth $220 million in 2012, the team this time more than doubled the value to $540 million, legal filings said. Ladder approved the refinance.

James’ filing said that evidence her office obtained suggests the 2015 Cushman valuation “appears to have used demonstrably incorrect facts and aggressive assumptions” to arrive at the higher estimate, which the document said “did not reflect a good faith assessment of value.”

On Thursday, Cushman & Wakefield defended its practices, saying it took “great issue with mischaracterizations concerning the work performed and believe they are not supported by the evidence.

“The referenced Cushman & Wakefield appraisals were undertaken and completed in good faith based upon the material information made available,” the company said in a statement emailed by a spokesperson. “We stand behind the appraisers and the referenced appraisals which reflect fair valuations based upon the underlying facts and market dynamics.”

In 2015, the Trump Organization’s statement of financial condition listed the value of the building as $735.4 million.

Ladder Capital and Capital One did not immediately respond to requests for comment Thursday. Allen Weisselberg and Jack Weisselberg could not immediately be reached.

ProPublica’s 2019 story found several instances of the Trump Organization reporting much lower expenses to its lender, Ladder Capital, than to city tax authorities — including 40 Wall Street’s insurance costs and ground lease. Jack Weisselberg declined to comment at the time on Ladder’s loans or his relationship with the Trump Organization. Executives with Ladder also declined to be quoted for the story then.

In 2019, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen testified before Congress that the Trump Organization inflated valuations at times to appear more profitable and deflated them to achieve a lower real estate tax bill.