Vernal Coleman, ProPublica

What Happened: A trio of lawmakers demanded transparency from the Department of Veterans Affairs on Tuesday, saying the Trump administration continues to “stonewall” requests for details on the agency’s recent cancellation of hundreds of service contracts.

The group, which included Sens. Richard Blumenthal and Angus King, as well as Rep. Mark Takano, said that despite repeated requests, the agency has disclosed incomplete and inaccurate lists that failed to specify exactly which contracts have been canceled. Blumenthal and Takano are Democrats, and King is an independent. They made their comments at a special forum in Washington.

A review by the Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs identified 655 contracts canceled by the VA, where previous lists disclosed by the agency included dozens less and contained significant errors.

The lawmakers cited a recent ProPublica investigation into the agency’s use of a flawed artificial intelligence tool to assess VA contracts. That analysis was conducted by a staffer from the Department of Government Efficiency with no health care or government experience. The VA uses contractors for a range of services, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.

What They Said: Lists of contracts previously disclosed to the committee are “gobbledygook” and filled with errors, the lawmakers said. “This hearing shouldn’t even be necessary,” said King, who sits on the VA oversight committee. “The simplest thing is to send us a list.”

Senators highlighted the harm caused by canceling the contracts, including one that resolved glitches between VA systems preventing veterans from receiving benefits. Without this contract, said Benjamin Ambrose, whose job it was to resolve these errors, there is nobody left at VA to do this work. “In this case veterans are being locked out forever,” he said.

Scott Amey, general counsel with the bipartisan Project on Government Oversight, said: “There’s a lot of fallout. There’s a lot of dominoes that go with canceling just one contract.”

Amey expressed doubt that the necessary work was done to ensure canceled contracts were duplicative or wasteful. “From the stonewalling that we’ve heard from the VA, you can’t have any confidence that that work was done,” he said.

The lawmakers also questioned the VA’s use of AI to assess contracts for possible cancellation, referring to ProPublica’s investigation. Blumenthal said AI holds promise, but it “has to be used thoughtfully.”

Background: ProPublica reported on Friday that the VA used an error-prone AI tool to identify contracts for possible cancellation. The tool, written by former DOGE staffer Sahil Lavingia, used outdated AI models to “munch” contracts based on conflicting instructions and produced glaring mistakes, a ProPublica analysis found.

Experts in AI and government procurement agreed that the DOGE analysis of VA contracts was flawed, with one calling it “deeply problematic.” Lavingia acknowledged that there were problems. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

ProPublica identified at least two dozen contracts on DOGE’s list that have been canceled so far. Among them is a service agreement to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was with Columbia University for blood sample analysis to support a VA research project. Others still were related to addressing nursing issues, including one to develop social media tools to recruit nursing staff and another to help assess and improve the care they provide.

Democrats in Congress have been seeking more information from the VA on the canceled contracts in an attempt to assess whether the cuts have put veterans’ well-being in jeopardy.

Response: VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz has defended DOGE’s work on reviewing contracts, saying that the vetting sets a “commonsense precedent.” He and Lavingia have said that VA staffers reviewed everything on the DOGE “munchable” list before deciding which contracts to cut.

In a statement on Tuesday, Kasperowicz said that the agency’s contract review has been a careful process aimed at benefiting veterans and using taxpayer money efficiently. “Decisions to keep, cut or descope contracts are based on careful and methodical multilevel reviews by VA employees, including career subject-matter experts who are responsible for the contracts, as well as VA senior leaders and contracting officials,” he said.

He disputed any suggestion from legislators that the contract review might diminish essential services. “Terminating or not renewing these contracts will not negatively affect veteran care, benefits or services,” he said. “In fact, these decisions will allow VA to redirect billions of dollars back toward health care, benefits and services for VA beneficiaries.”

Why It Matters: Over 9 million veterans across the U.S. rely on the VA for health care through its network of 170 hospitals and 1,200 clinics. One of the nation’s largest health care providers, it is a training ground for doctors and nurses and an engine for medical research. Since returning to office in January, the Trump administration has set about a massive overhaul of the agency, seeking an increase in its overall budget while announcing layoffs that could claim the jobs of around 80,000 employees.

The VA is examining all of its estimated 76,000 contracts as part of that overhaul and in accordance with the Trump administration’s push towards tech. ProPublica’s analysis identified over 2,000 contracts flagged by AI for termination. It’s unclear how many more from that list are on track for cancellation. The Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box.

As the Trump administration prepared to cancel contracts at the Department of Veteran Affairs this year, officials turned to a software engineer with no health care or government experience to guide them.

The engineer, working for the Department of Government Efficiency, quickly built an artificial intelligence tool to identify which services from private companies were not essential. He labeled those contracts “MUNCHABLE.”

The code, using outdated and inexpensive AI models, produced results with glaring mistakes. For instance, it hallucinated the size of contracts, frequently misreading them and inflating their value. It concluded more than a thousand were each worth $34 million, when in fact some were for as little as $35,000.

The DOGE AI tool flagged more than 2,000 contracts for “munching.” It’s unclear how many have been or are on track to be canceled — the Trump administration’s decisions on VA contracts have largely been a black box. The VA uses contractors for many reasons, including to support hospitals, research and other services aimed at caring for ailing veterans.

VA officials have said they’ve killed nearly 600 contracts overall. Congressional Democrats have been pressing VA leaders for specific details of what’s been canceled without success.

We identified at least two dozen on the DOGE list that have been canceled so far. Among the canceled contracts was one to maintain a gene sequencing device used to develop better cancer treatments. Another was for blood sample analysis in support of a VA research project. Another was to provide additional tools to measure and improve the care nurses provide.

ProPublica obtained the code and the contracts it flagged from a source and shared them with a half dozen AI and procurement experts. All said the script was flawed. Many criticized the concept of using AI to guide budgetary cuts at the VA, with one calling it “deeply problematic.”

Cary Coglianese, professor of law and of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies the governmental use and regulation of artificial intelligence, said he was troubled by the use of these general-purpose large language models, or LLMs. “I don’t think off-the-shelf LLMs have a great deal of reliability for something as complex and involved as this,” he said.

Sahil Lavingia, the programmer enlisted by DOGE, which was then run by Elon Musk, acknowledged flaws in the code.

“I think that mistakes were made,” said Lavingia, who worked at DOGE for nearly two months. “I’m sure mistakes were made. Mistakes are always made. I would never recommend someone run my code and do what it says. It’s like that ‘Office’ episode where Steve Carell drives into the lake because Google Maps says drive into the lake. Do not drive into the lake.”

Though Lavingia has talked about his time at DOGE previously, this is the first time his work has been examined in detail and the first time he’s publicly explained his process, down to specific lines of code.

Lavingia has nearly 15 years of experience as a software engineer and entrepreneur but no formal training in AI. He briefly worked at Pinterest before starting Gumroad, a small e-commerce company that nearly collapsed in 2015. “I laid off 75% of my company — including many of my best friends. It really sucked,” he said. Lavingia kept the company afloat by “replacing every manual process with an automated one,” according to a post on his personal blog.

Lavingia did not have much time to immerse himself in how the VA handles veterans’ care between starting on March 17 and writing the tool on the following day. Yet his experience with his own company aligned with the direction of the Trump administration, which has embraced the use of AI across government to streamline operations and save money.

Lavingia said the quick timeline of Trump’s February executive order, which gave agencies 30 days to complete a review of contracts and grants, was too short to do the job manually. “That’s not possible — you have 90,000 contracts,” he said. “Unless you write some code. But even then it’s not really possible.”

Under a time crunch, Lavingia said he finished the first version of his contract-munching tool on his second day on the job — using AI to help write the code for him. He told ProPublica he then spent his first week downloading VA contracts to his laptop and analyzing them.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz lauded DOGE’s work on vetting contracts in a statement to ProPublica. “As far as we know, this sort of review has never been done before, but we are happy to set this commonsense precedent,” he said.

The VA is reviewing all of its 76,000 contracts to ensure each of them benefits veterans and is a good use of taxpayer money, he said. Decisions to cancel or reduce the size of contracts are made after multiple reviews by VA employees, including agency contracting experts and senior staff, he wrote.

Kasperowicz said that the VA will not cancel contracts for work that provides services to veterans or that the agency cannot do itself without a contingency plan in place. He added that contracts that are “wasteful, duplicative or involve services VA has the ability to perform itself” will typically be terminated.

Trump officials have said they are working toward a “goal” of cutting around 80,000 people from the VA’s workforce of nearly 500,000. Most employees work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.

The VA has said it would avoid cutting contracts that directly impact care out of fear that it would cause harm to veterans. ProPublica recently reported that relatively small cuts at the agency have already been jeopardizing veterans’ care.

The VA has not explained how it plans to simultaneously move services in-house, as Lavingia’s code suggested was the plan, while also slashing staff.

Many inside the VA told ProPublica the process for reviewing contracts was so opaque they couldn’t even see who made the ultimate decisions to kill specific contracts. Once the “munching” script had selected a list of contracts, Lavingia said he would pass it off to others who would decide what to cancel and what to keep. No contracts, he said, were terminated “without human review.”

“I just delivered the [list of contracts] to the VA employees,” he said. “I basically put munchable at the top and then the others below.”

VA staffers told ProPublica that when DOGE identified contracts to be canceled early this year — before Lavingia was brought on — employees sometimes were given little time to justify retaining the service. One recalled being given just a few hours. The staffers asked not to be named because they feared losing their jobs for talking to reporters.

According to one internal email that predated Lavingia’s AI analysis, staff members had to respond in 255 characters or fewer — just shy of the 280 character limit on Musk’s X social media platform.

Once he started on DOGE’s contract analysis, Lavingia said he was confronted with technological limitations. At least some of the errors produced by his code can be traced to using older versions of OpenAI models available through the VA — models not capable of solving complex tasks, according to the experts consulted by ProPublica.

Moreover, the tool’s underlying instructions were deeply flawed. Records show Lavingia programmed the AI system to make intricate judgments based on the first few pages of each contract — about the first 2,500 words — which contain only sparse summary information.

“AI is absolutely the wrong tool for this,” said Waldo Jaquith, a former Obama appointee who oversaw IT contracting at the Treasury Department. “AI gives convincing looking answers that are frequently wrong. There needs to be humans whose job it is to do this work.”

Lavingia’s prompts did not include context about how the VA operates, what contracts are essential or which ones are required by federal law. This led AI to determine a core piece of the agency’s own contract procurement system was “munchable.”

At the core of Lavingia’s prompt is the direction to spare contracts involved in “direct patient care.”

Such an approach, experts said, doesn’t grapple with the reality that the work done by doctors and nurses to care for veterans in hospitals is only possible with significant support around them.

Lavingia’s system also used AI to extract details like the contract number and “total contract value.” This led to avoidable errors, where AI returned the wrong dollar value when multiple were found in a contract. Experts said the correct information was readily available from public databases.

Lavingia acknowledged that errors resulted from this approach but said those errors were later corrected by VA staff.

In late March, Lavingia published a version of the “munchable” script on his GitHub account to invite others to use and improve it, he told ProPublica. “It would have been cool if the entire federal government used this script and anyone in the public could see that this is how the VA is thinking about cutting contracts.”

According to a post on his blog, this was done with the approval of Musk before he left DOGE. “When he asked the room about improving DOGE’s public perception, I asked if I could open-source the code I’d been writing,” Lavingia said. “He said yes — it aligned with DOGE’s goal of maximum transparency.”

That openness may have eventually led to Lavingia’s dismissal. Lavingia confirmed he was terminated from DOGE after giving an interview to Fast Company magazine about his work with the department. A VA spokesperson declined to comment on Lavingia’s dismissal.

VA officials have declined to say whether they will continue to use the “munchable” tool moving forward. But the administration may deploy AI to help the agency replace employees. Documents previously obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials proposed in March consolidating the benefits claims department by relying more on AI.

And the government’s contractors are paying attention. After Lavingia posted his code, he said he heard from people trying to understand how to keep the money flowing.

“I got a couple DMs from VA contractors who had questions when they saw this code,” he said. “They were trying to make sure that their contracts don’t get cut. Or learn why they got cut.

“At the end of the day, humans are the ones terminating the contracts, but it is helpful for them to see how DOGE or Trump or the agency heads are thinking about what contracts they are going to munch. Transparency is a good thing.”

Earlier this year, doctors at Veterans Affairs hospitals in Pennsylvania sounded an alarm. Sweeping cuts imposed by the Trump administration, they told higher-ups in an email, were causing “severe and immediate impacts,” including to “life-saving cancer trials.”

The email said more than 1,000 veterans would lose access to treatment for diseases ranging from metastatic head and neck cancers, to kidney disease, to traumatic brain injuries.

“Enrollment in clinical trials is stopping,” the email warned, “meaning veterans lose access to therapies.”

The administration reversed some of its decisions, allowing some trials to continue for now. Still, other research, including the trials for treating head and neck cancer, has been stalled.

President Donald Trump has long promised to prioritize veterans.

“We love our veterans,” he said in February. “We are going to take good care of them.”

After the Department of Veterans Affairs began shedding employees and contracts, Trump’s pick to run the agency, Secretary Doug Collins, pledged, “Veterans are going to notice a change for the better.”

But dozens of internal emails obtained by ProPublica reveal a far different reality. Doctors and others at VA hospitals and clinics across the country have been sending often desperate messages to headquarters detailing how cuts will harm veterans’ care. The VA provides health care to roughly 9 million veterans.

In March, VA officials across the country warned that a critical resource — databases for tracking cancer — would no longer be kept up to date. As officials in the Pacific Northwest explained, the Department of Government Efficiency was moving to kill its contract with the outside company that maintained and ran its cancer registry, where information on the treatment of patients is collected and analyzed. DOGE had marked it for “immediate termination.”

The VA in Detroit raised a similar alarm in an email, warning of the “inability to track oncology treatment and recurrences.” The emails obtained by ProPublica detail a wide variety of disruptions. In Colorado, for instance, layoffs to social workers were causing homeless veterans waiting for temporary housing to go without help.

The warnings, sent as part of a longstanding system at the VA to alert higher-ups of problems, paint a portrait of chaotic retrenchment at an agency that just three years ago was mandated by Congress through the PACT Act to expand care and benefits for veterans facing cancer and other issues after exposure to Agent Orange, burn pits or other toxins.

Doctors and other health care providers across the VA have been left scrambling and short-staffed amid an ever-shifting series of cuts, hiring freezes and other edicts from the White House.

The upheaval laid bare in the emails is particularly striking because the cuts so far would be dwarfed by the dramatic downsizing in staff and shift in priorities the administration has said is coming.

The VA has cut just a few thousand staffers this year. But the administration has said it plans to eliminate at least 70,000 through layoffs and voluntary buyouts within the coming months. The agency, which is the largest integrated health care system in the U.S., currently has nearly 500,000 employees, most of whom work in one of the VA’s 170 hospitals and nearly 1,200 clinics.

Despite an expanded role mandated by Congress through the PACT Act, administration officials have said their goal is to trim the agency to the size it was before the legislation passed.

“The Biden Administration understood what it meant to pay for the cost of war; it seems the Trump Administration does not,” said Rep. Mark Takano, a California Democrat and chief author of the PACT Act.

Documents obtained by ProPublica show DOGE officials working at the VA in March prepared an outline to “transform” the agency that focused on ways to consolidate operations and introduce artificial intelligence tools to handle benefits claims. One DOGE document proposed closing 17 hospitals — and perhaps a dozen more.

VA press secretary Pete Kasperowicz told ProPublica that there would be no hospital closures. “Just because a VA employee wrote something down, doesn’t make it VA policy,” he said in a written statement. But he did say that use of AI will be a big part of what he called VA’s “reform” efforts.

Kasperowicz dismissed the idea that the emails obtained by ProPublica show chaos.

“The only thing these reports show is that VA has a robust and well-functioning system to flag potential issues and quickly fix them so we can provide the best possible care to Veterans,” he wrote.

DOGE did not respond to requests for comment.

The White House released a budget proposal last week that calls for a 4% increase in the VA’s budget. That total includes more money for medical care, though a portion of that would be used to pay for veterans to seek care outside the VA medical system.

More answers to the VA’s larger plans may come today, when Collins is scheduled to testify before the Senate Veterans Committee, his first hearing on Capitol Hill since coming into office.

David Shulkin, who headed the VA in Trump’s first term, said the administration is too focused on cuts rather than communicating a strategy for improving care for vets.

“I think it’s very, very hard to be successful with the approach that they’re taking,” Shulkin told ProPublica.

One way local VA officials have tried to limit the damage has been by sending warnings — formally known as an issue brief — to higher-ups. And sometimes it works.

After officials in Los Angeles warned that “all chemotherapy” would stop unless Washington backed off killing a service contract, the VA reversed its decision.

And, amid growing scrutiny, the administration also made some researchers in Pennsylvania and elsewhere exempt from cuts. The laid-off social workers who helped homeless vets in Colorado were also brought back after about a month away from their jobs. Kasperowicz said that four social workers were affected but “their caseload was temporarily redistributed to other members of the homeless team.”

The warnings from officials across the country underscore how the comparatively modest cuts so far are already affecting the work of the VA’s medical system, with the study and treatment of cancer cited in multiple warnings to agency leadership.

“We have absolutely felt the impact of the chaos all around us. We’re already losing people,“ said one senior researcher, who spoke to ProPublica anonymously for fear of retaliation.

Referring to studies, he added: “We’re going to be losing things that can’t restart.”

And while Kasperowicz told ProPublica that the issues in Pennsylvania have been resolved, locals there said that’s not the case and that the impact is ongoing.

In Pittsburgh, two trials to treat veterans with advanced head and neck cancer, which officials in March had warned were at risk because of hiring freezes, have still not started, according to Alanna Caffas, who heads a Pittsburgh nonprofit, the Veterans Health Foundation, that partners with the VA on research.

“It’s insane,” Caffas said. “These veterans should be able to get access to research treatments, but they can’t.”

A third trial there, to help veterans with opioid addiction, wasn’t halted. Instead, it was hobbled by layoffs of key team members, according to Caffas and another person involved in the research.

Regarding the issues with cancer registries, Kasperowicz said there had been “no effect on patients.” He added that the VA is moving to create a national contract to administer those registries.

Rosie Torres, founder of Burn Pits 360, the veterans advocacy group that also pushed hard for the legislation, called the emails showing impeded cancer treatment a “crisis in the making” and “gutwrenching.”

That the decisions are being made without input from the communities of vets they affect is worse, she added.

“If they are killing contracts that may affect the delivery of care, then we have a right to know,” she said.

Last week, as the second Trump administration marked its first 100 days in office, Collins celebrated what he described as its achievements.

In a recorded address, he said that under his stewardship the VA processed record numbers of benefit claims, ended “divisive” spending on diversity initiatives and redirected millions of agency dollars from “non-mission-critical” programs back toward services to benefit veterans.

“We will not stop working to put veterans first,” he wrote in an accompanying op-ed.

Others say Collins has done no such thing. Instead of focusing on veterans, said one VA oncologist, “we’re spending an enormous amount of time preparing for a staffing catastrophe.”

“Veterans’ lives are on the line,” the doctor said. “Let us go back to work and take care of them.”

Republicans in Indiana’s legislature passed a bill this year intended as the final blow to a long-running lawsuit filed by the city of Gary against gun manufacturers seeking to hold them accountable for local illegal gun sales.

The lawmakers even included language making the bill retroactive to ensure that it would apply to the Gary suit, which was filed nearly a quarter century ago.

On Monday, that effort failed.

Indiana Superior Court Judge John Sedia ruled that while the law barring cities from pursuing lawsuits against the gun industry is constitutional, applying it retroactively would “violate years of vested rights and constitutional guarantees.” It was a rare courtroom setback for makers of firearms in the U.S.

On Tuesday, Gary Mayor Eddie Melton applauded the judge. “This ruling reinforces the importance of the independence of each branch of government,” he said in a written statement. The ruling, he added, ensures that the city’s rights are “protected and upheld.”

State Rep. Ragen Hatcher, whose father served as Gary’s first Black mayor, was similarly pleased. “This is a major win that our community deserves,” the Democratic legislator said in a statement.

Gary’s case is the last of a generation of civil suits that made similar claims against the gun industry. Attorneys for gun manufacturers and retailers filed for the case to be dismissed based on the new Indiana law, which placed the power to sue solely with the state’s attorney general.

The bill’s backers made no secret that the Gary case was the bill’s target. It included language to make it retroactive to Aug. 27, 1999 — three days before the city filed its lawsuit. But that decision appears to have doomed the industry’s challenge.

The defendants, which include Glock, Smith & Wesson and several other of the nation’s largest gunmakers, argued in a hearing before Sedia last week that the city no longer has the authority to pursue its claims that gunmakers have failed to address an epidemic of illegal gun sales associated with violence in and around Gary.

Philip Bangle, arguing for Gary, countered that, in practical terms, the bill was “special” — specifically aiming at Gary’s suit — and not allowed under the state constitution.

Bangle, an attorney from the Brady center, a nonprofit centered on gun violence prevention, told the judge that similar suits from other towns were not an issue. “There’s none being contemplated; there’s none being threatened; and frankly, looking at what Gary has had to endure these last 25 years, I doubt that any of these bodies would want to,” he added.

In siding with Gary, Sedia cited a 2003 Indiana Supreme Court decision that says a state law cannot be applied retroactively if it violates constitutionally protected rights.

The General Assembly can bar cities from bringing lawsuits against gun manufacturers, but it cannot end this lawsuit, Sedia wrote. “To avoid manifest injustice, the substance of this lawsuit must be taken to its conclusion.”

A representative for the gunmakers said an appeal is coming. “Respectfully, the Superior Court got it wrong,” said Lawrence Keane, senior vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade association representing several of the defendant gunmakers. “The defendants will immediately appeal to the appellate court to correct this error.”

State Rep. Chris Jeter, author of the bill aimed at disrupting the lawsuit, disagreed with Sedia’s assertion that applying the law retroactively would violate the state constitution. “Municipalities are a creature of state law,” he said. “They aren’t people; they have no rights.”

But Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University and critic of legislators’ efforts to kill the lawsuit, was thrilled by the judge’s ruling. The main takeaway is clear, she said: State lawmakers “cannot use legislative hoodwinking” to disrupt the lawsuit and Gary will get its day in court.

For now, the ruling thwarts the latest attempt by the gun industry and its allies to disrupt the case. Filed in 1999, the suit was one of several that decade from major cities against the nation’s most successful gunmakers.

Recognizing the threat the flood of lawsuits posed, the gun industry gathered its political influence to lobby federal lawmakers. They supported federal legislation strong enough to effectively immunize the industry from civil suits. Once passed, the suits fell one by one. All except Gary’s.

The case had notably approached a significant milestone that similar lawsuits had not. As the year began, it was nearing the end of the discovery phase, where the two sides would continue an exchange of thousands of records, providing plaintiffs a chance to glimpse inside the internal decisions and policies of gun manufacturers. It is unclear when or if that process will resume.

Twenty-five years ago, Scott King, then mayor of Gary, Indiana, spoke solemnly as he described a new strategy the city was taking to deal with the flow of illegally purchased guns fueling violent crime there.

Undercover Gary police officers had fanned out across the area for Operation Hollowpoint, successfully purchasing guns and ammunition at federally licensed firearm retailers despite representing themselves as suspicious buyers. King presented surveillance footage in an 18-minute video produced by the city.

Inside one pawn shop, a bespectacled clerk and two undercover police officers are shown discussing a 9 mm pistol. After the male officer admitted he did not have the permit required to buy the gun, the female officer accompanying him told the clerk she did. The clerk then suggested she buy the gun on her partner’s behalf in violation of federal gun restrictions.

“Might as well put it in your name then so I don’t have to make a call,” the clerk responded. “The feds are constantly screwing with people.”

The footage, which documented four suspicious purchases at different retailers selling guns, showed “how easy juveniles, felons and other prohibited purchasers can acquire guns from legitimate gun dealers through the use of a straw purchaser,” King said in the video.

The stings formed the basis of the city’s historic lawsuit seeking to hold local gun retailers and major gun manufacturers, such as Smith & Wesson, Glock and others, responsible for illegal sales like those uncovered in the investigation. As part of the suit, the city sought monetary damages and changes in industry practices.

Relentless legislative and legal efforts across the country have eliminated a flurry of lawsuits initiated by cities against the industry two decades ago. A bill approved by the Indiana legislature and signed into law this month by Gov. Eric Holcomb may be the final blow to Gary’s suit, the last one standing from that original group of cases.

But the problem of illicit gun sales outlined by King and detailed in that grainy footage remains and continues to contribute to violence in northwest Indiana, nearby Chicago and beyond.

Over the years, Gary’s lawyers have sought to keep the suit going by arguing that negligence plagues the firearms industry, not just in the city but across the region, creating an ongoing public nuisance. To emphasize that point in court filings, they’ve included long lists of federal indictments of gun traffickers and their ties to illegal purchases at northwest Indiana retailers.

Combing through the suit’s voluminous records, ProPublica found and then analyzed over 100 separate criminal cases involving straw sales — transactions where suspects participated in schemes to buy guns from federally licensed retailers and resell them to people barred by law from purchasing guns themselves.

The federal gun cases represent a small but illustrative sampling of the nation’s illegal gun trade, whose contours are well known to law enforcement but shrouded in mystery to the public because of industry-backed laws that keep a tight lid on data involving illicit gun sales.

Some of the cases examined by ProPublica involve just one transaction for a single firearm. Others are part of elaborate and organized schemes, where prolific traffickers use others with clean records to purchase multiple guns from one retailer, then head to the next gun shop and repeat the process over and over again. Most can be tied back to at least one northwest Indiana gun retailer.

One of the cases involves three guns purchased in 2020 that ended up in the hands of a wanted fugitive. He later turned one of those pistols on two police officers in Wisconsin, seriously injuring both. “I knew that at some point I may die that night,” one officer later testified.

But just as those examples showcase the scope of the straw sale problem in the United States, the vigorous effort by the firearms industry to quash the suit shows its commitment to the push back against stepped-up regulation and legal threats.

The defendants have countered Gary’s claims at every turn, arguing that manufacturers have no part in the illegal gun trade and denying responsibility for criminal acts committed by buyers. In a 2000 joint response to the city’s allegations, attorneys for the defendants wrote that after manufacturers sell firearms to licensed retailers, they have no control over “the subsequent negligent or unlawful transfer, possession, ‘availability’ or use of firearms.”

In 2021, after years of legal wrangling, the Gary suit reached a crucial stage. The Lake County, Indiana, judge overseeing it ordered the sides to finalize agreements for turning over thousands of pages of internal records as part of a legal process known as discovery.

Gary’s attorneys have for years sought those documents as they try to prove that manufacturers are aware of the straw sales occurring at the Indiana retailers they supply. But the discovery process might never be completed, now that the Indiana legislature has passed a bill making the Gary lawsuit and any like it illegal. The intent of legislators was clear: The law was made retroactive to Aug. 27, 1999 — three days before Gary filed its lawsuit.

The legislative maneuver, and explanations for it, have frustrated the current mayor of Gary, Eddie Melton. Some proponents of the bill suggested that for as long as the lawsuit was allowed to continue, the firearms industry would pass over Indiana to do business in other states.

“I’ve looked at that as a slap in the face in terms of the law, the lives that have been lost and the reason that the city has been fighting this fight for so long,” he said in an interview. “We just want that fair day in court.”

In February, Melton arrived at the state Capitol with the political fight over the gun industry bill in full swing. The legislation targeted the Gary lawsuit directly by restricting the power to bring such action to the Indiana attorney general. The House had passed its version just days before, and the Senate began its deliberations.

Melton, himself a former state senator, strode to a podium inside a meeting room at the Statehouse and made his pitch. “I’m asking you to think about what kind of precedent this will set,” he said. “Local governments have the right to fight back against bad actors. What message will this send across our state and nation if Indiana were to pass a bill that allows the state to inject itself in an active lawsuit and effectively eliminate this right?”

Aaron Freeman, a Republican and one of the bill’s chief backers, was unmoved. The power of such legal action should, as the bill dictates, rest in the hands of the state’s attorney general, he said.

“This one is out of bounds,” he said of Gary’s lawsuit. “It’s a 25-year-old situation. There’s other municipalities that could do this, and I think only the state of Indiana should.”

The Senate eventually passed the bill by a vote of 33 to 15, along party lines.

More than two decades ago, when its suit was filed, Gary joined a wave of American cities that included Detroit and Chicago seeking solutions to gun violence problems through legal action. Under pressure, the firearms industry then turned to its political allies for relief.

In 2003, Congress passed a law known as the Tiahrt Amendment, which prevents the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives from publicly releasing information identifying the retailers who originally sold guns confiscated by police during criminal investigations.

Two years later, Congress passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, which radically altered the nation’s relationship with guns. It gave manufacturers and retailers broad protections against civil litigation. Following passage of the act, lawsuits against the industry began to crumble.

In 2015, the Indiana legislature passed its own law granting additional protections to firearm manufacturers, dealers and retailers. After then-Gov. Mike Pence signed the bill into law, defendants in the Gary suit all moved to have the case thrown out.

But an appeals court ruled that the city’s suit could proceed via a narrow exception in the law. The straw sales documented by the city provided sufficient basis for a nuisance lawsuit, the court ruled.

The reprieve freed Gary to continue pursuing financial damages for the unlawful sales and to make a case that manufacturers had turned a blind eye to the deadly problem. Since then, Gary’s attorneys have sought tightly guarded industry documents, including any internal studies or reports monitoring how guns are used or if they’re involved in shootings and plans for how products are marketed.

In September 2021, the case reached a milestone that similar lawsuits had not, as the presiding judge set a final date to complete the discovery phase. With the passage of the bill, signed into law on March 15 by Holcomb, attorneys for the city expect that process to come to a standstill.

King, the former mayor, no longer remembers even making the video on Operation Hollowpoint, but he still recalls the immediate pushback from the industry and Indiana politicians. To him, the latest effort to kill the suit is a testament to the influence of the firearms industry, which he said has for years pushed Indiana’s lawmakers toward “meddling in the operation of local government.”

“I don’t think there’s too many legislators whose first thought after jumping out of bed in the morning is: ‘What can I do to make it easier for more people to get guns?’” he said. “I think their motivation in many circumstances is from who’s lobbying, and unfortunately those lobbyists have proven more effective than lobbies on behalf of local government, people in cities and towns throughout the state, that are the first line that have to deal with the reality of this violence.”

Financial disclosure records reveal that the National Shooting Sports Foundation, which conducts political lobbying on behalf of the firearms industry, began ramping up its work at the state legislature last year.

The group spent around $143,000 on lobbying efforts in 2023, a huge uptick from previous years. The bill aimed at killing Gary’s lawsuit was authored by Rep. Chris Jeter, a Republican who was an attorney at the law firm that handled lobbying for the NSSF until 2015.

Jeter said no one at the law firm approached him about the measure.

The bill had another backer in Attorney General Todd Rokita, who once it went into effect became the only official in the state with the power to sue the gun industry.

As the bill began to wind its way through the Indiana Statehouse in January, Rokita, a champion of gun ownership rights, was in Las Vegas for an NSSF trade show. Speaking in an on-camera interview with one of the group’s top officials, Rokita made clear he has little intention of ever filing a suit like the one out of Gary.

“That’s not gonna happen on my watch,” he said.

The gun cases cited in the Gary suit and examined by ProPublica provide a chilling tour of illegal activity and crime in the region and beyond.

Take for instance, the case of Nathanael Benton, who was on the run in 2020 when he fired on police officers in Wisconsin. He had already shot a man in Fargo, North Dakota, in an argument over money, as he’d later admit during his trial, and had gotten rid of the gun he used in that shooting. Arriving in Indiana with police on his tail, Benton decided to obtain another one.

As a convicted felon, Benton couldn’t buy a gun for himself from a licensed dealer. So, after fleeing to Indiana to lay low, he got a friend’s estranged girlfriend to make the purchases.

Surveillance video taken from a now-shuttered gun retailer in Warsaw, Indiana, shows Benton’s friend appearing to steer the woman toward particular firearms to purchase. Later, the pair approached a car with two handguns — a Taurus .380 and Smith & Wesson .40 — and then handed the firearms through the car’s rear window to Benton. On the required federal form asking if she was purchasing the guns for herself, the woman checked “yes,” court records state.

That same day, Benton and his accomplices traveled to ADT Firearms, a tiny gun shop in Syracuse, Indiana, run out of the basement of the owner’s home. Anthony Tilson, the owner, told ProPublica that he remembered showing a man and a woman several guns before they finally settled on a Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol.

Watching the two as they browsed, Tilson said, he felt uneasy. But the woman was familiar, a previous customer, Tilson said. And so he went through with the sale.

Two days later, outside a hotel in Delafield, Wisconsin, two police officers detained Benton as part of an investigation into a hit-and-run accident. As one of the officers frisked him, Benton pulled the Smith & Wesson .40 from his waistband and began firing, according to court testimony and other records.

Bullets hit one officer in the pelvis. The other officer was struck three times — two bullets hitting his back, while another struck him in the pelvis and pierced his abdomen, causing severe internal damage that forced him to undergo four separate surgeries. At Benton’s trial, the officer testified that the bulletproof vest stopped two of the bullets that struck him, saving him from additional injuries. Both men have left law enforcement.

Benton fled the hotel but was captured at 11 on the morning following the shooting, eight hours from when officers first confronted him, following a massive police search. He was later tried and convicted on multiple charges, including attempted murder and reckless use of a dangerous weapon.

Tilson found out about the Wisconsin shooting from a newspaper article. The 9 mm Smith & Wesson pistol Benton’s friends had purchased at ADT had been recovered at the scene.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Tilson said.

Police eventually arrested the Indiana woman Benton paid to buy guns for him. She was found guilty of one count of providing false information during the purchase of a firearm, and after a year in federal prison she was released for time served.

Tilson said that if given a second chance he would have trusted his instincts and rejected the sale. But to Tilson, retailers like himself should not be held liable for straw sales.

“We cannot control what somebody else does,” he said.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has identified straw purchases as among the most common ways in which guns fall into the wrong hands across the country.

ProPublica’s analysis of straw-purchase cases cited in the Gary suit found that guns obtained unlawfully have been linked to crimes and mayhem throughout the Midwest.

Andrew Thompson, for example, had a clean record, and that made the Fort Wayne, Indiana, resident an ideal middle man for straw purchases. Thompson bought at least 20 guns between 2017 and 2020, several of which were later recovered amid crimes in Chicago, Peoria, Illinois, and as far away as Pennsylvania and Missouri, according to court records. One gun purchased by Thompson was recovered by Kansas City police officers from a suspect who held them at bay in an armed standoff.

Court records show that in at least one case, Thompson, who a federal judge would later sentence to just over five years in prison, offered to include incendiary ammunition as part of a sale to an informant.

Upon impact, the bullet would explode into a ball of “burning magnesium that burns so hot it goes right through bone like butter and it’s burning at up to 3,000 degrees so it can LITERALLY SMOKE SOMEONE,” he wrote to one customer.

Nearly all of the manufacturers and retailers sued by Gary already have moved to dismiss the case, given the new legislation, leaving the suit’s proponents struggling to determine a way forward.

Even if the case stays alive through a potentially lengthy appeal, the discovery process will once again be on hold. Attorney Philip Bangle of the nonprofit Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which represents the city in the suit, is just as frustrated as Melton by the legislature’s action.

“This is not about the merits of Gary’s case, which have been found valid by the courts no less than three times on appeal,” he said.

In passing the bill, he said, the legislature invited “any person or corporation with ample resources or special interest” to seek legislative intervention to fend off a legal threat.

Bangle said the Brady Center plans to appeal if Gary’s lawsuit is dismissed. But Melton would have to sign off and is not yet ready to commit. Melton said that he needs to weigh what’s in the best interests of the city, along with counsel of the city’s attorneys, and that he would wait to decide until the courts rule.

Meanwhile, across the border, Chicago continues to pursue remedies to gun violence through the courts. Last week, the city filed a lawsuit against gun-maker Glock over the company’s alleged refusal to alter the design of pistols the city claims are being cheaply and easily converted into “machine guns.”

Company officials have not responded to requests for comment.

The move follows efforts by the city to revive its lawsuit against Indiana gun retailer Westforth Sports. Owned and operated by the Westforth family for decades, the now-shuttered Gary retailer was the source of hundreds of guns recovered amid investigations by Chicago police. Between 2011 and 2021, federal authorities indicted 53 people on charges related to illegal sales made at the shop, according to a filing in the original suit, which was dismissed by a judge in May 2023. The city appealed the decision later that year.

Timothy Rudd, attorney for Earl Westforth, the now-retired owner of Westforth Sports, said the court “properly dismissed the City of Chicago’s claims against Westforth last spring, and we are confident that the appellate court will uphold that decision.”

He declined to comment on the Gary lawsuit. Westforth was among the stores originally sued by the city and reached an undisclosed settlement. Nonetheless, Gary’s attorneys have continued to seek records from Westforth about its sales history.

Amid these prolonged court battles, police and prosecutors remain as busy as ever dealing with the aftermath of straw sales occurring in the region. On Feb. 22, as the Indiana Senate had begun its deliberation on the bill barring Gary’s suit, a federal judge sentenced a 25-year-old former school custodian to 18 months in federal prison for charges related to straw purchases. Federal prosecutors accused him of buying at least 19 handguns illegally from Indiana gun retailers over the course of a year.

Most of those guns have been recovered. Five remain missing.