Former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, who brought two federal indictments against President Donald Trump, told lawmakers on Tuesday that he "will not be silenced by continued threats of prosecution" from the Trump administration and that he believes the rule of law is being threatened like never before.
Smith also told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he stands behind the criminal cases he brought against Trump, a Republican, and that he and his team acted without regard to politics.
"I made those decisions without regard to President Trump's political association, activities, beliefs or candidacy in the 2024 presidential election," Smith said. "Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in serious crimes against our nation. If asked whether to prosecute a former president today based on the same facts, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat."
Republicans sought to cast the prosecution as a political fishing expedition, accusing Smith of bending ordinary procedures in an overzealous pursuit of the president.
"The Smith election case ultimately wasn't just about Trump," said Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, the chairman of the committee. "It was about partisan agents and prosecutors mapping out the Republican apparatus."
Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the committee, accused Republicans of spreading "baseless conspiracy theories" about Smith's investigations as part of an effort to "whitewash" the history of Trump's 2020 election loss and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by a mob of Trump's supporters on the U.S. Capitol.
"President Trump demonstrated a wanton disdain for the laws of the United States, the will of the people and our national security," Durbin said. "The aspersions cast on Mr. Smith, nonstop, are petty, personal and political. They are nothing but a smoke screen to distract from the president's own clear, unlawful conduct."
The hearing is expected to focus on subpoenas for phone records
In previous testimony, Smith has stood behind subpoenas that prosecutors issued for the phone records of Republican members of Congress who were in touch with Trump when violent supporters of the president rioted inside the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He has said that such subpoenas are a "common practice" in investigations and were necessary in this instance to understand the "scope of the conspiracy" between Trump and his Republican allies.
Nonetheless, the revelation that Smith's team secretly obtained the phone records during his investigation has animated some Republican lawmakers, who point to it as proof of overreach by the Biden administration Justice Department and a hard-charging prosecutor.
In July, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, referred Smith to the Justice Department for potential prosecution on allegations that he lied at a previous hearing about his collection of the records — something Smith's attorneys have vigorously disputed.
"I stand by my testimony before the House of Representatives," Smith said. "I will not be silenced by the continued threats of prosecution from the president or others."
Grassley, the Senate committee chairman, first disclosed last year that Smith's prosecutors had obtained what's known as "toll records" — data that reveals the date, length and time of phone calls between two parties but not the content of the communications.
Smith has repeatedly justified the move as necessary to document any contact that Trump or surrogates may have had with lawmakers on Jan. 6, 2021, as the president beseeched his supporters to halt the certification of the election results.
"My office didn't spy on anyone," Smith said during a hearing in January.
Smith is the subject of a criminal referral from Republicans
Smith was appointed in 2022 by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland to take over investigations into Trump's efforts to reverse his election loss and Trump's retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Both investigations resulted in felony indictments, but Smith abandoned the cases after Trump won back the White House in 2024, citing longstanding Justice Department opinions that say sitting presidents cannot be federally indicted.
Smith has remained a top target of retribution for Trump and his administration, which last year announced that it would revoke the security clearances of the lawyers representing the former special counsel. The Office of Special Counsel, an independent watchdog agency responsible for enforcing a law against partisan political activity by federal employees, also announced last year an investigation into Smith.
Jordan's referral to the Justice Department centers on a December 2025 exchange in which Smith was asked about subpoenas that prosecutors had issued for the toll records.
Smith said the records he requested did not include the content of the communications. But Jordan maintains that answer was misleading in light of records released by Grassley showing that Smith had obtained the contents of 44 lawmakers' text messages in a separate subpoena to the National Archives and Records Administration that sought the communications of various Trump advisers and aides.
In response, Smith's lawyers called his answers "unimpeachably truthful" and noted that he was responding to questions explicitly about toll records, which did not include the contents of any text messages.
MADRID — Protesters outraged by the eviction of an 87-year-old woman camped overnight in Madrid's historic Puerta del Sol plaza, where more demonstrators — including multigenerational families — joined them on Sunday for a second day of protests over Spain's housing crisis.
Tens of thousands marched through Madrid on Saturday to protest the eviction of María del Carmen Abascal from the apartment in the upscale Retiro neighborhood where she had lived for more than seven decades.
The demonstrators are demanding stronger tenant protections, measures to combat fraud and a ban on evictions when alternative housing is unavailable.
Many refused to leave after Saturday's march and pitched tents in Puerta del Sol for the night.
"The housing situation is unsustainable," said Natalia Navarro, a 27-year-old actress who was among those camping out at the plaza. "We are all out on the street because we are fed up."
"The wave of indignation and anger that has been unleashed is now unstoppable," said Alicia del Río, a spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants' Union, which led the protests.
"We will remain here" until the government passes new laws, including indefinite rental contracts, and stops evictions like Abascal's, del Río told journalists at the plaza on Sunday. Spain's Socialist-led government is expected to announce new measures in its weekly cabinet meeting next Tuesday.
Eviction 'sparked this social unrest'
On Sept. 23, Abascal was carried from her apartment on a stretcher and placed in an ambulance as supporters — who had tried unsuccessfully to stop the eviction — chanted her nickname, "Maricarmen."
"I haven't managed to defend my home, but I have fought so that others can learn to fight for what's theirs," Abascal said in a video recorded from her hospital bed after the eviction.
Images of the eviction spread widely across Spain, fueling outrage and criticism of public authorities and real estate investment companies accused of pricing residents out of their homes. Critics often refer to such companies as "vulture funds."
"Maricarmen has been, in a way, the last straw that sparked this social unrest," said Simón de la Riva, 43, a teacher who took part in Saturday's protests.
Speaking at a Socialist Party rally in Madrid, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez addressed Abascal directly: "I have a message for you, Maricarmen: the government is working around the clock to bring a Royal Decree on housing next Tuesday. And I ask parliamentary groups to make one last effort to have it validated in the National Parliament for Maricarmen."
Abascal has criticized Sánchez and blamed him for her ordeal.
"Does he not realize the quantity of evictions that there are daily?" she asked during an interview with Spain's state broadcaster RTVE the day before she was forcibly removed from her home. "Does he not realize, or does he not want to realize?"
A home for seven decades
Spanish media reported that Abascal's father first rented the apartment in 1956 and that she remained there as a tenant under rent controls after her parents died.
The building changed ownership in 2018, and Abascal was offered the opportunity to buy the apartment but could not afford it, according to the Madrid Tenants' Union.
Urbagestión, an investment fund that later bought the unit, raised her monthly rent from 500 euros ($570) to 2,650 euros.
It subsequently lowered the rent to 1,650 euros, which Abascal still could not afford on her pension, the union said.
Rising costs and a growing housing shortage
Rising costs and a housing shortage are pricing many Spaniards out of the market, despite strong economic growth in Europe's fourth-largest economy. Incomes have not kept pace with the rising housing costs, and analysts say tourism and immigration-driven population growth in cities have placed further pressure on the limited housing supply.
The Bank of Spain estimated that the country had a shortage of about 550,000 homes last year, with Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia accounting for a substantial share.
The demonstrations in the symbolic Madrid plaza this weekend reminded many in Spain of the historic demonstrations starting May 15, 2011, when members of the "indignados movement" camped for 28 days straight, sparking similar sit-ins across the country and the world. That movement was a reaction to evictions and other issues following a global economic crisis, including unemployment, austerity measures and corruption.
Estefania Molina, a political scientist and columnist, said the stakes of popular frustration are growing. In 2011, "people protested because they couldn't buy an apartment."
"Today, the protest is about not being able to rent a room in someone else's home," she told Spanish television.
Spain ranks near the bottom of countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for subsidized public rental housing, which represents less than 2% of the country's housing stock. The European Union average is 8%.
For over 60 years, the federal program Head Starthas helped children from low-income families get ready for elementary school through early childhood education and related support services, like speech therapy and developmental screenings.
This proposal comes after the Trump administration tried unsuccessfully to defund Head Start in 2025. Funding freezes and the government shutdown in 2025 also caused many Head Start centers to temporarily close. These closures caused some staff to resign and compelled some Head Start families to withdraw their children from the program.
The new rules would also mandate that all classes be taught in English, regardless of the language children and their families speak at home.
Not the same program
Some Head Start participants, workers and advocates have expressed concern that these changes would transform Head Start into a different program – from one that alleviates the effects of poverty to one that has a more generic emphasis on early childhood education.
As a doctoral candidate in economics, I’ve spent the past six years studying Head Start and its impact on local communities.
Head Start is a vital provider of childcare and other services for the poorest children and their families in rural, urban and suburban communities across the U.S. Reducing the number of federal rules governing Head Start will likely not enhance the quality or broaden the availability of the program to the children and families who need it most.
Eligibility for the program is generally determined based on household income, though there are some categories of children who are automatically eligible, such those who are unhoused or in foster care.
Head Start is notable among early childhood education programs because it provides more than just free childcare and education. Head Start is required to serve at least two meals per day to the young children who attend these schools, as well as offer speech therapy and other kinds of developmental support and health services when needed.
Many statesand cities have introduced or expanded their own free public preschool options in recent years. But Head Start continues to be an essential early childcare program for low-income children and their families across the country.
Head Start takes off
President Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration launched Head Start in 1965 as an eight-week summer preschool program.
So while Head Start primarily provides education and childcare services, the program also requires parents to participate in parent-child activities and other activities that engage families across their broader communities.
Since 1965, other programs have been introduced under the Head Start umbrella, including Early Head Start, which provides Head Start services to children from birth to 3 years old, as well as pregnant women.
Numerous studies have analyzed how Head Start affects children who participate in the program, as well as their families.
Much of the research has found that Head Start’s positive effects on its participants are sustained through the end of third grade. These effects include significantly improved educational and health outcomes.
Researchers have also found that participating in Head Start lowered the likelihood of being placed in special education or committing a crime, and it lowered child mortality rates, among other positive results.
Head Start’s longer-term impacts, meaning those measured over the course of a child’s lifetime, are less clear.
One notable study that Congress commissioned in 2010 found positive effects for Head Start participants in cognitive, social-emotional and health outcomes, though few of these impacts lasted through the end of first grade.
The Trump administration suggests that these changes will cut costs by $1.5 billion to $3 billion by 2031. Those savings would account for roughly 0.04% of any given year’s typical total federal budget.
I believe that these proposed changes fly in the face of Head Start’s goals, and changes to Head Start’s rules and standards will likely contribute to the existing issues of inconsistent access to Head Start across the country.
The Administration for Children and Families, an office within the Department of Health and Human Services, is accepting public comments on the changes, as required by federal law. It will review the comments after the Oct. 6, 2026, deadline.
As of late September, there were over 18,465 comments, most expressing serious concern about these changes.
In the final weeks of 2019, a top fundraiser for Sen. Susan Collins walked into a perilous meeting at a Corner Bakery in Washington, D.C.
For the first time in her two-decade Senate career, the Republican lawmaker from Maine was in danger of losing her seat. President Donald Trump’s dismal approval ratings were dragging her down in the polls, and she was falling behind her likely 2020 Democratic challenger in fundraising.
Scott Reed, head of the Collins super PAC, was on a mission to close that gap. Reed was meeting that day with three executives from a Hawaiian defense contractor, Navatek. A year earlier, Collins had helped their company land a multimillion-dollar Navy research contract in Maine. Now, seated at a coffee shop not far from the U.S. Capitol, Reed asked them for a $500,000 donation.
Government contractors are banned from making political contributions. More consequentially, for the company to offer donations to Collins in exchange for an official action, or for Collins to accept, would constitute criminal bribery.
But the company did have such a proposal: Navatek was hungry for more government contracts in Maine. If they cut a big check, the CEO told Reed, Navatek wanted Collins to guarantee tens of millions of dollars in additional federal funding.
To skirt campaign finance laws and conceal the source of the funds, Navatek planned to funnel the donation through a shell company. The CEO wanted assurance that Collins would know where the money came from. Reed confirmed that she would, the executive said — and that Navatek would get its government contracts.
After the Corner Bakery meeting, Navatek’s CEO, Martin Kao, sent an initial $150,000 to the Collins super PAC using the shell company. Two months later, he told Navatek executives thatCollins committed to getting the company $32 million in naval contracts, according to an internal company email reviewed by ProPublica.
Three years later, Kao holed up in a conference room to recount the Corner Bakery meeting to a group of four FBI agents and federal prosecutors. The FBI had seen through his shell company ruse, and in 2022 a grand jury indicted him for making illegal campaign contributions. No one working for Collins was charged.
Facing years in prison, Kao hoped to do less time by revealing the entire scheme.
What he told them has never before become public. The Corner Bakery meeting, he asserted, was just one episode in a sprawling pay-to-play operation that embroiled some of the most powerful figures in Congress.
Over three days at the U.S. attorney’s office in Honolulu, Kao laid out in devastating detail how his operation worked. He gave agents a 50-page document naming dozens of lobbyists, congressional staffers and members of Congress who he said helped him trade cash for contracts. Kao and his close associates had donated nearly $900,000 to dozens of politicians, allowing Navatek to establish operations in half a dozen states with over $40 million a year in government funding.
Most damningly, Kao told FBI agents and prosecutors, the company’s work for the government was of no real value. Navatek’s research under his stewardship never resulted in products the military wanted to buy, ProPublica found.
Kao’s tell-all interviews with the FBI lasted into late 2024. His confessions opened up an entirely new phase of the investigation. Agents sifted through hundreds of thousands of records seized during Kao’s arrest and found that many were consistent with his account of widespread influence peddling.
Kao had credibility issues. He was now a felon trying to avoid a lengthy prison sentence. And there were other challenges. Building a corruption case against elected officials requires extraordinary proof of a quid pro quo arrangement, in part because the Supreme Court has narrowed what counts as bribery.
Even so, by the end of 2024, the agents had enough evidence to pursue a sweeping bribery probe that could ensnare top lawmakers of both political parties. They asked their supervisors to approve a new investigation and contemplated using undercover operatives to gather more evidence. Although their effort was in its early stages, and it was unclear where it would lead, FBI agents asked Kao extensive questions about his dealings with Collins and her office.
Then Trump returned to the White House. Consumed by a campaign of vengeance, he stacked the Department of Justice with his personal lawyers and demanded a purge of anyone who had ever investigated him.
The specialized FBI and DOJ teams handling public corruption investigations, some of which were involved in Trump-related cases, were eviscerated. One of the agents who had taken Kao’s confession was pushed out as retribution for her role in investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Dozens of agents and prosecutors quit amid the department’s destruction, including the career attorney assigned to Kao’s case.
Trump’s Justice Department no longer takes on public corruption in any meaningful fashion, former officials said. The investigation sparked by Kao’s revelations is dead. And the government is no longer talking to an informant who had offered a road map to corruption in Congress.
The White House referred ProPublica to the FBI.
FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson said the agency had investigated claims against Collins years ago “and ultimately found nothing implicating Senator Collins or Senator Collins’ campaign. Any suggestion otherwise is totally false.” Williamson said the Trump administration has removed agents only “if they have been found to have acted unethically, undermined the mission, or engaged in weaponization of law enforcement.”
Williamson did not respond to questions about the new investigation launched in 2024 based on Kao’s previously unreported cooperation with the FBI.
ProPublica is revealing the existence of the case for the first time. We reviewed a trove of evidence gathered by the FBI and thousands of pages of legal records, and interviewed dozens of people familiar with Navatek, its Washington operations, and the FBI inquiry to conduct our own investigation. We independently corroborated much of Kao’s account. Whether or not Kao’s dealings with politicians amount to criminal bribery, the Trump Justice Department has little interest in finding out, and his sheer success reveals how easily influence is purchased in Washington today. This is the first in a series of stories drawn from our reporting.
Of all the politicians Navatek courted under Kao’s leadership, Collins was its most important patron. The senator’s office steered government contracts worth millions toward the company while her campaign was pumping Kao and his network for donations, according to emails seen by ProPublica. Sometimes they cut checks within 24 hours of the annual defense spending bill, which funds military contracts, clearing a key Senate hurdle.
Collins’ office did not specifically address questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the senator’s relationship with Kao and the millions she helped appropriate for Navatek.
Annie Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica in an email that Collins’ office “vigorously” denies allegations of bribery and pay-for-play made by Kao, calling his claims “outlandish.” Collins’ campaign was not part of the discussions between Kao and the super PAC, and her office “fully cooperated” with the FBI investigation, Clark said.
“The fact that the FBI and Biden-led Department of Justice thoroughly examined the Navatek matter demonstrates this,” Clark wrote. “These issues were resolved in 2021 and concluded when the Collins campaign disgorged the illegal contributions that Martin Kao had made without our knowledge.”
Collins is once again fighting to keep her seat, in a race that could determine control of the Senate. On the campaign trail, she spotlights the funding she directs to Maine while leading the appropriations committee, which she calls “the most powerful committee in the Senate.”
She demonstrated that power with Navatek. After the budgets became law, Collins’ office pushed the Navy to award specific contracts to Navatek, emails seen by ProPublica show, even though awards are supposed to be competitive.
“I spoke with Sen. Collins office regarding the $8M,” a naval official wrote in an email on Feb. 6, 2019. “The interested company is Navatek.”
In a meeting with Collins and two campaign officials, Kao said, the officials told him the senator expected his ongoing support. Collins told him: “You’ve seen me deliver,” Kao said.
Reed knew Kao was behind the $150,000 anonymous donation, emails showed, because Kao told Reed he planned to donate through a shell company. “Very smart,” Reed replied in an email viewed by ProPublica.
Reed did not respond to detailed questions about the Corner Bakery meeting, the $150,000 donation and Kao’s allegations. “I understand Martin Kao is now sitting in federal prison,” Reed wrote in a brief email. “I never had any communications with Senator Collins [or] her staff about Martin Kao and/or Navatek.”
But an email seen by ProPublica suggests that someone must have relayed the news of Kao’s donation to Collins, just like Reed promised to do in Kao’s recounting of the Corner Bakery meeting.
Seven days after the super PAC cashed the check from Kao’s shell company, one of Reed’s subordinates emailed a Navatek lobbyist asking for Kao’s phone number: “Senator Collins would like to call Martin to thank him.”
The Navatek Method
Before Kao’s doomed reign as CEO, Navatek was a sleepy Hawaiian engineering company with a few dozen employees. It was founded in 1978 by Steven Loui, a talented engineer and scion of a powerful Hawaiian shipping family. Navatek was not a profit center but a vehicle for Loui’s passion projects, like an experimental catamaran for navigating Hawaii’s choppy waters.
The company benefited from the largesse of the legendary Hawaii Sen. Daniel Inouye, multiple former Navatek executives and employees said, whose family had been close to the Loui family for generations. Inouye was a master of earmarks, a practice that allowed lawmakers to insert funding for specific companies by name in the federal budget. The self-styled “King of Pork” steered hundreds of millions in federal dollars to Hawaii. Former Navatek employees say he was affectionately referred to as “Uncle Dan.” “Before Inouye took an interest, Congress didn’t even know our companies existed,” a longtime Loui lieutenant wrote in a 1998 op-ed.
In response to ProPublica questions, Loui said that money appropriated by Inouye made up “a minority” of Navatek’s revenue.
Inouye’s death in 2012 made the company’s future uncertain. Not only was Navatek’s direct line to Capitol Hill gone, but Congress was doing away with the abuse-riddled earmark process. Now companies would nominally have to compete on the merits for government contracts.
Kao joined Navatek in 2008 as its chief financial officer. Loui charged him with replacing Navatek’s rainmaker and eventually named Kao CEO. He sold Kao the company in return for a share of the profits.
Kao was an unusual figure among the company’s low-key naval engineers and boat aficionados. He seemed to be aping a Wall Street tycoon, telling employees they could either be “a beast or a bitch,” a former executive said. He drove to work in a Ferrari and abruptly fired subordinates who displeased him — one time, in the middle of the night. “He had very little interest in the technology,” one former employee recalled. “Martin was only interested in dollar signs.”
Kao also exaggerated and lied. He told different people he had stepbrothers whose parents died in a fishing accident or an avalanche, a former employee recalled. He lied to Loui about having law degrees from both the University of California, Los Angeles and New York University. He once told a lobbyist who raised quarter horses that he owned a herd of polo ponies, just to one-up him.
Despite his erratic behavior, former employees agree Kao hit upon an effective way to replace the lost earmarks. If the company could not rely on a benefactor like Inouye, it would develop a stable of them.
Navatek targeted the powerful members who sat on the House and Senate appropriations committees. These members could no longer earmark money for specific military contractors. But they retained the power to budget millions of dollars for equipment orbespoke research and development. Because Pentagon budgets run thousands of pages and are largely prepared in secret, it is easy for appropriators to add a line item intended for a contractor like Navatek without leaving any fingerprints.
Soon, Kao had refined a playbook. Navatek would concoct a research project in partnership with a university in a member’s district or home state, and Kao would make a large initial campaign donation. Working with a team of pricey, well-connected lobbyists, Navatek would get meetings on Capitol Hill to pitch the research to congressional staff. Navatek kept spreadsheets, reviewed by ProPublica, that listed members of Congress as the “specialty” of certain lobbyists.
Separately, Kao later told the FBI, there would be a meeting of just the key players. One engineer, who traveled with Kao to D.C. to explain the technical side of a project, recalled being sent out of the room once the subject of money came up. Sometimes in these smaller meetings, members of Congress directly asked Kao for donations, he told the FBI. In other cases, he said, Navatek’s lobbyists would relay a request from an intermediary for a specific dollar amount.
Kao told the FBI that the lawmakers, lobbyists and Navatek brass understood these donations were bribes and that the payments were essential to the entire scheme. Kao believed he was buying Navatek’s way into the annual defense budget, not winning over members with innovative engineering proposals.
“I’m not red or blue, I’m green,” he would tell congressional staffers, a former Navatek employee recalled.
While a deal was being struck, Navatek and congressional staffers worked closely on the legislative process. Every year, Congress prefaces the defense budget with massive reports describing the purpose of inscrutable line items. Staffers would include a project description so specific that Navatek would be the only logical pick.
Often, Navatek composed language that ended up, word for word, in Senate funding requests, former employees said. In 2019, for example, Navatek’s priorities were tucked into page 185 of the 307-page report released by the Senate Appropriations Committee. The committee set aside $21.5 million for “hybrid composite structures research for enhanced mobility,” “electric propulsion for military craft and advanced planing hulls” and a “test bed for autonomous ship systems.” Although Navatek’s name does not appear on the page, these were all projects the company requested, according to internal documents and interviews with former employees.
Once the budget passed, lawmakers’ staff leaned on Navy officials to award Navatek the money. Former contracting officers told ProPublica they felt pressure to go along because money from those contracts funded their office — and because members of Congress had confronted dissenting naval officials in the past. “There’s only so many battles you can fight,” one said. So Congress sometimes got its way even when Navatek’s projects made little sense.
Inside Navatek, employees referred to this strategy as “the method.” And it enabled the company to string together tens of millions of dollars in contracts. The result was the same as getting earmarks: a reliable, growing revenue stream bankrolled by U.S. taxpayers.
“It was a simple enough play. Let’s find the small states that have complementary universities … [and] let’s get access to their senators,” Eric Schiff, a former Navatek executive, told ProPublica. “I’ve met Susan Collins. You can get access to Susan Collins. Once we got the first things working with Maine, then we said, ‘Well, let’s keep reaching.’ And so we did.”
In a statement to ProPublica, Navatek founder Loui said Kao’s “unethical and illegal method of winning contracts” was a departure from how he operated the company prior to Kao’s ownership.
Kao boosted Navatek’s annual revenue from $10 million around the time Loui sold him the company to almost $40 million when he was arrested in 2020. In the second half of 2019 alone, Navatek paid a roster of five lobbying shops more than $500,000.
Even Navatek’s executives were surprised at how far their money went in D.C. “It was eye-opening for me, frankly. ‘Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale,’” Schiff said.
The key players in Kao’s pay-to-play deals went to great lengths to meet in person and leave no trace of an actual quid pro quo, he told agents. “That is why I literally had to fly to D.C. almost every week,” Kao later told the FBI. “Sometimes for a 15-minute meeting.”
But the FBI compiled emails, which ProPublica reviewed, that were suggestive of illegal bargains. Navatek executives and lobbyists spoke openly as if they were buying lawmakers’ assistance. In one back-and-forth, a lobbyist and a company executive described another senator as “fundamentally transactional” and having “a reputation as a pay-to-play office.”
In another message, Andy Winer, who former executives said was Navatek’s chief strategist, reminded Kao to budget money for political contributions based on how much the company wanted in congressional funding the following year.
“Oh my God, all of it is for sale. It’s all for sale.”
Eric Schiff, former Navatek executive
Winer was his guide to the political underbelly, Kao said. A consummate insider, Winer had parlayed six years as chief of staff to Democratic Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii into a lucrative lobbying career with a firm called Strategies 360. One of Winer’s former colleagues compared him to the slick lobbyist on the Netflix show “House of Cards” who toggles between the political and corporate worlds.
In another email exchange scrutinized by the FBI, Kao asked Winer about making a $5,600 donation to nudge along a senator who seemed keen to work with Navatek: “Would that ‘help?’”
Winer, who had already donated himself, replied, “With my contribution, I think it sends the right message.” He suggested Kao split up his donation to be “less conspicuous.”
The method didn’t always work. Once, Kao complained that a senator had reneged on a deal and he ought to get his donations back.
“You should not feel aggrieved nor should you ever put that in writing,” Todd Webster, another lobbyist Navatek hired, replied. Webster did not respond to detailed questions.
Winer said he stopped working with Navatek following Kao’s arrest. “The political contributions I discussed with Kao were understood by me to be lawful political contributions. I never participated in, witnessed, or had knowledge of any illegal political contribution, bribe, or agreement to exchange a political contribution for an appropriation, contract, or other official action,” Winer said in an email to ProPublica. “I never advised Kao to make a contribution in exchange for official action.”
Strategies 360 has new ownership that did not oversee Winer while he represented Navatek, its CEO, John Oceguera, said.
Navatek employees began to notice members of Congress visiting their East Coast offices. “You would be like, ‘Oh, there’s this senator walking around,’ and we would get a picture with them,” one engineer recalled.
While some projects involved potentially meaningful research, Navatek’s bread and butter was R&D that went nowhere. As a slideshow prepared by an executive explained, “We thrive in the valley of death,” the term for the bureaucratic gap where research languishes without being developed into a product. The slideshow noted that none of the technology had ever actually been deployed.
The Office of Naval Research did not respond to a request for comment.
In Maine, Navatek was studying ways to modify small boats to reduce the “slamming” impact felt by passengers at high speeds. With the help of the University of Maine’s giant 3D printer, Navatek made a prototype and unveiled it at a press conference where a Guinness World Records representative declared it the world’s largest 3D-printed boat. But Navatek executives knew the Navy had no plans to use the new design, former employees said.
“[The work] got rolled into a few PowerPoint slides and a white paper, and that was the deliverable,” recalled one who worked on the project. “The boats weren’t delivered to the Navy — the Navy didn’t even want them.”
Kao to Collins: “Here to Help”
The first time Kao came face-to-face with Collins, in 2018, he told the FBI, he had to pay for the privilege.
Collins would not meet unless he agreed to donate to her campaign, he said. While it is not illegal for politicians to exchange face time for contributions — in this case, just a few thousand dollars — it was not the last time Collins would seek Kao’s support.
Navatek had been eager to expand beyond Hawaii, and Maine was a perfect beachhead — a small, coastal state hungry for high-tech jobs that happened to be represented by a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Collins, more than most appropriators, likes to trumpet the dollars she brings home.
To work with Collins, Navatek hired a lobbyist, Glen Mandigo, who also lobbied for the University of Maine and was tight with her office. Mandigo asked how much Navatek wanted in funding and how much Kao was willing to support Collins, Kao told the FBI. The University of Maine did not reply to a request for comment.
In that first meeting with Collins and her staff, Kao pitched an $8 million boat hull research project for Navatek and the university. Collins seemed supportive. Not long after, Mandigo called Kao and said Collins wanted him to bundle tens of thousands of dollars for her reelection, suggesting Navatek throw a fundraiser, Kao said.
In an email to ProPublica, Mandigo denied taking part in a pay-to-play arrangement.
“I did not advise Navatek officials, nor would I advise any client, that support from Sen. Collins was contingent on campaign donations,” Mandigo wrote. He said that in his 25 years of working with Collins and the Maine delegation, “I never saw or heard of such behavior from the Senator or her staff.” Clark, Collins’ deputy chief of staff, told ProPublica it was “wholly inaccurate” to say Mandigo was close to their office.
FBI agents had collected voluminous corporate records and email correspondence between Navatek and Collins’ inner circle. Much of that evidence aligned with the story they were now getting directly from Kao.
The FBI had spotted his out-of-the-blue donations in the summer of 2018, just before Collins included $8 million for Navatek’s proposal in the defense budget. Emails showed her staff made it clear to the Navy that it shouldsend the money to Navatek. FBI agents also had evidence of Kao and Mandigo planning a fundraiser starting in April 2019. Their emails — with her scheduler and her campaign’s finance director — freely mixed talk of Navatek’s Collins-backed contract with plans to raise money for her.
The principals settled on hosting Collins for a publicity event at Navatek’s Maine headquarters in August 2019, where she posed for pictures with Kao and a model of the company’s experimental boat. Behind the scenes, the FBI saw in emails and company records, Kao orchestrated over $40,000 in donations from extended family in advance of the event. To avoid the legal cap on individual campaign contributions, the emails show, he told Collins’ team to reallocate his excess contributions to his father — which an agent highlighted and noted is against election law in a presentation to prosecutors — and sent them his father’s full name and address.
“This is perfect,” Amy Abbott, the reelection campaign finance director, emailed Kao after discussing his father’s contribution. “We are so grateful for ALL the Kao support!”
Before the event, Kao said, Collins, Abbott and another staffer met with him in private. One of the staffers told Kao the campaign expected more donations. It was in this meeting that Collins said, “You’ve seen me deliver,” he told the FBI.
Less than one month after the event, the Senate released a draft of the defense budget containing $21.5 million for Navatek’s pet projects in Maine. Kao emailed a Collins campaign fundraiser — who would in theory have nothing to do with a government contract — four days later, saying, “Thanks again for all the support from Sen Collins.”
“I’ve been involved in many tight races in the past and understand last minute ‘needs’ come up,” he continued. “We are here to help anyway we can … financially or whatever.”
Kao’s desire to donate even more money led to the fateful Corner Bakery meeting with the head of the Collins super PAC, called the 1820 PAC, Kao told the FBI. Unlike Collins’ campaign, which could accept only $5,600 per election from individuals, the super PAC could accept unlimited contributions.
The super PAC emailed Kao a memo before the meeting stressing the need to raise money with “urgency.” At the meeting, Kao and Reed, the super PAC’s chair, hammered out a deal for a six-figure donation, Kao told the FBI. Over email, Kao informed Reed of his shell company scheme, saying he had clearedit with his lawyer. “They are super vague and very difficult to get any background info on,” Kao reassured him. “Thanks for doing this,” Reed replied.
The FBI spoke to the other Navatek executives at Corner Bakery, who confirmed the meeting took place. One, David Kring, the company’s top scientist, told ProPublica he had no memory of what was discussed.
The other, Duke Hartman, told an FBI agent it was just “a get to know you meeting” with the chair of the super PAC and they did not discuss the “particulars of a donation.” Agents, records show, came to believe Hartman was lying about his role in Kao’s pay-to-play operation and would name him as a formal subject of a future investigation. Hartman was not charged. He did not respond to a detailed request for comment.
A few weeks after the $150,000 check to the Collins super PAC cleared, in February 2020, Kao and his team met with Collins’ office and secured a new round of funding.
“We were very warmly received,” Kao reported to his colleagues in an email obtained by the FBI. “Excellent meeting. Total of $32M will be supported.” Records show the Senate allocated at least $10 million that year based on Navatek’s proposals.
Navatek’s ambitions peaked in mid-2020. As the company waited to see if Collins would survive her reelection campaign, executives prepared to ask their champion on the appropriations committee for even more funding the following spring, internal documents show.
Other documents from that time show the company was courting senators from seven additional states and gunning for more than $200 million in new appropriations. Navatek expected to have offices in more than a dozen states by the end of the following year, including a new 15,000-square-foot facility in the Portland, Maine, harbor.
Kao, meanwhile, closed on a $4.5 million beachside home in an exclusive Honolulu neighborhood; the backyard pool had a waterfall feature. He renamed the company Martin Defense Group after himself, joking that it would simplify his future takeover of Lockheed Martin.
“It was working well, and it would have continued to work well,” said Schiff, the former executive. “Martin got greedy. Just got damn greedy.”
Downfall, Cover-up
In early 2020, the Campaign Legal Center, a nonprofit good government group, noticed something strange in the public filings for the Collins super PAC. The PAC had received a $150,000 donation from a newly created LLC with a typo in its name: the Society of Young Women Scientist and Engineers, with no S at the end of “Scientist.”
This was the $150,000 Kao donated after the Corner Bakery meeting. The money had come from Navatek’s account, not Kao’s, violating a ban on government contractors making donations.
The center suspected the society was not a real group but a pass-through to hide the identity of a major political donor. It filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission. It took only a few days for a Hawaii journalist to discover Kao’s wife’s name on the society’s paperwork, linking the shell company to Navatek.
Inside Navatek, Kao shifted into damage control mode. He spoke to Reed and the super PAC’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, and began to hatch a cover-up. In an email released in civil litigation, Mitchell suggested the society make charitable donations — preferably in Maine — which would make it seem like a legitimate nonprofit. “I want to be sure that the LLC proceeds with the ideas we discussed — giving scholarships and recognition to women in engineering, etc.,” wrote Mitchell. “That would help both of us, I think.”
Mitchell added, “We should develop a plan and timetable, so there are some scholarships given over the next several months, and particularly, perhaps in Maine, where the bad press was.”
Mitchell, who later played a major role in Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, did not respond to requests for comment.
Kao and his team settled on donating scholarships to women in STEM. They offered between $5,000 and $25,000 apiece to state universities where they were angling to win government contracts — that way, the cover-up would benefit them politically, too.
But Navatek’s and Kao’s problems were just beginning. Undeterred by scrutiny from the FEC, Kao defrauded the COVID-era Paycheck Protection Program newly passed by Congress. He inflated Navatek’s payroll to amass loans of $13 million, according to a federal indictment. The Navatek founder, Loui, had long since soured on his chosen successor. This was the final straw. He reported Kao to federal authorities.
“This is not how Navatek behaved or conducted business before I sold the company to Martin Kao,” Loui wrote to ProPublica. He said Navatek was successful before Kao’s ownership and had many sources of government funding. After Kao’s arrest, he added, the company fully cooperated with law enforcement.
Loui has since regained control of the company and renamed it PacMar. He is dedicated to restoring its reputation and ability to execute government contracts, he continued. Loui said he fired employees hired during Kao’s tenure who were “not capable of performing quality, professional engineering and science tasks.”
“The company received no Collins-supported funding after Martin Kao’s arrest, nor should it,” Loui added. “What Martin Kao and his cabal did was wrong.”
On Sept. 30, 2020, law enforcement raided Navatek’s Honolulu offices and arrested Kao for fraud. Federal agents in windbreakers seized his laptop and ordered the company’s IT staff to copy the company’s internal servers.
Navatek’s public flameout attracted the attention of Michelle Ball and Kevin Gounaud, two experienced agents in the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit. Gounaud was a 20-year FBI veteran who had worked on elaborate undercover operations. Ball had made a name for herself taking on politically sensitive cases. In 2018, she led the investigation into Maria Butina, the Russian agent convicted of infiltrating the National Rifle Association in an attempt to influence the Trump campaign.
The agents began digging through thousands of records for details of Navatek’s lobbying operation, donation strategy and ties to politicians.
They zeroed in on Kao’s relationship with Collins. In a 60-slide presentation agents prepared for prosecutors, they highlighted contributions that Kao and his wife made to the senator in 2018, right before Collins placed the $8 million in research funding into the federal budget. Kao had also given Navatek money to various relatives to donate to Collins in 2019, sending her around $33,000 through these illegal straw donors, the indictment said. Kao’s wife and father did not reply to requests for comment.
The government charged Kao in two separate cases: one for defrauding the loan program and another for his campaign finance crimes. His love of talking like a wheeler-dealer — including over email — was a gift to investigators. In one email, he all but admitted the scholarships to young women were a diversion. “Whatever… just a pack of bitches getting free $,” he wrote.
In the face of overwhelming evidence, Kao pleaded guilty in both cases in the fall of 2022. Navatek by then was under court-ordered new management. Awaiting sentencing, Kao worked as a line cook at a Cheesecake Factory.
He began meeting with the same FBI agents and prosecutors who brought him down. For the agents, he was a rare witness: a contractor with deep ties to elected officials saying he would speak candidly about how Washington works.
Kao faced nearly a decade in prison. “My world and life imploded,” he would later recall in a letter to the Hawaii U.S. District Court. “I was fooled and foolish enough to believe that the power elected officials wielded, and [were] actively willing to sell to anyone wealthy enough to pay, was….‘smart business.’”
Over the next two years, Kao sat with agents for at least three dayslong interviews. He told them that politicians, Collins in particular, had been willing participants in his scheme. “It takes two to tangle,” he told them.
Taxpayers funded Navatek’s entire political operation, Kao said. “Most companies of our size do not have the resources to endlessly hire expensive lobbyists and make political donations,” he told the FBI. Navatek solved this by using money from government contracts to hire lobbyists and make campaign contributions, according to interviews, court testimony and internal company records. Diverting money from contracts for lobbying and political donations can be illegal.
For their final meeting, in September 2024, Kao handed the FBI the 50-page document detailing Navatek’s dealings with more than a dozen members of Congress and their staff. It was not only a confession but a road map, with the email addresses and phone numbers of people Kao thought agents ought to subpoena.
Last year, Kao was sentenced to 87 months in prison. The judge in his case offered no leniency based on his cooperation with the FBI. Loui is battling Kao in court to recover the millions he contends Kao stole from the company.
Both Scott Reed and Amy Abbott remain in Collins’ inner circle. Abbott is the finance director for her 2026 reelection effort, and Reed again chairs the main Collins super PAC. Abbott, who is married to Collins’ campaign manager, referred questions to the senator’s communications staff. Clark told ProPublica that Abbott and other campaign staff were interviewed by the FBI and that the campaign was never a target of the investigation.
Earlier this year, Kao agreed to meet a ProPublica reporter at the Federal Prison Camp in Yankton, South Dakota, where he is incarcerated. But on two occasions when guards summoned Kao over the intercom, he refused to enter the visitation room. Over email, he said he was no longer willing to meet, citing the ongoing litigation. He declined through his lawyer to respond to detailed questions.
By late 2024, Ball and Gounaud, the FBI agents, had come to believe there was enough evidence to warrant a broader investigation into bribery of members of Congress, according to a memo seen by ProPublica.
Before they could embark on their new mission, however, they became casualties of Trump’s retribution campaign.
Ball and Gounaud worked for the FBI’s elite anti-corruption unit known as CR-15, which specialized in investigating misconduct by elected officials. When Trump retook power, his new FBI director, Kash Patel, purged the unit agent by agent.
Ball was targeted for her work on the special counsel investigation of Trump’s failed bid to overturn the 2020 election. She was fired in October 2025 in a one-page letter stating she had “weaponized” the Justice Department. She is challenging her firing in a lawsuit. Gounaud was pushed out in early 2026. Both agents declined to comment through their attorney.
Trump also targeted the Justice Department attorneys who worked with CR-15. The team, known as the Public Integrity Section, collapsed spectacularly in February 2025 after staff were ordered to drop a case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Trump ally. The unit’s leadership quit en masse. Trump appointees ordered the remaining prosecutors to halt new corruption cases, just months after Kao made his detailed confession.
Before Ball was fired, however, she managed to take a key step forward.
Based on all the evidence, she persuaded her supervisors to approve a new investigation. It centered on South Carolina, one of the states Navatek eyed for a rapid expansion. The FBI had questions about a steak dinner Kao shared with Sen. Lindsey Graham.
The future of national climate assessments remains murky after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists.
More than a year after the Trump administration dismissed hundreds of scientists working on the National Climate Assessment, clouding the landmark publication’s future, many of those researchers and others released Tuesday the first installment of a special collection of climate change findings designed to fill the perceived gap left behind.
The new research commentary, published in scientific journals operated by the American Geophysical Union and American Meteorological Society, is meant to be something of a roadmap for what new climate research scientists should pursue and highlight to the public. As part of the special collection, the two organizations plan to publish additional research studies that state and local groups could use to build their own climate assessments.
“Scientists working on climate change are continuing to do the work,” said Melissa Kenney, a lead author of the report and the director of research at the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment. “We’re stepping in to ensure that we have the research that we need, and that that is going to be available when we’re working with our communities, with our states, and that it will be available if there are future U.S. national climate assessments.”
In April 2025, the Trump administration halted independent scientists’ work on the sixth national assessment — a congressionally mandated report that summarizes the effects of global climate change in the United States — telling hundreds of scientists who had volunteered to contribute that they were no longer needed. The administration also cut funding to the U.S. Global Change Research Program, whose staffers organized the report’s production. The USGCRP website is no longer online.
The new report, published in the journals Earth’s Future and the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, was produced by 175 independent climate scientists, including many who had taken part in previous national climate assessments.
The document outlines areas of climate research that the authors think deserve more focus, like the risks of compounding events — when a heat wave follows a hurricane, for example.
“We’ve seen this summer instances of high heat coupled with wildfire. We’ve seen extreme precipitation leading to flash floods and electricity outages, and those risks are commonly overwhelming legacy policies and infrastructures,” Kenney said.
The report also notes areas where scientists have made improvements since the fifth and last National Assessment, released in 2023, such as how to characterize flood risk with a better understanding of hurricane rapid intensification and U.S. coastal subsidence.
“It’s been a couple of years since the last U.S. National Climate Assessment, and a lot has progressed,” Kenney said. “We hear what our communities are saying, and they’re telling us they need scientific information. They need us to continue working so that they can better understand the impacts that they are experiencing and what we expect will happen in the future.”
The future of national climate assessments remains murky.
he Global Change Research Act of 1990 requires the USGCRP to submit a report — the National Climate Assessment — to the president and Congress every four years. It has typically contained a summary of science about the physics of climate change, its effects on the United States and how society is adapting. The assessments also contained localized climate predictions for different regions of the United States, which are meant to give the public a better idea of the risks facing their communities.
Earlier this year, the Trump administration appointed Matthew Wielicki to direct the USGCRP. On his personal blog, titled “Irrational Fear,” Wielicki has criticized the scientific consensus on climate change and has criticized media coverage of heat waves being intensified by climate change as “hysteria.”
Wielicki and the White House Office of Science and Technology did not respond to multiple requests for comment about the special collection, the future of the National Climate Assessment and whether the publication would continue.
The Trump administration has also proposed to edit the content of the National Climate Assessment from 2023 to remove discussion of a high-emissions scenario it considers unlikely. Scientists said it was unusual to propose editing a three-year-old report that was produced by hundreds of scientists and already subjected to peer review and public comment — especially when a new version was due so soon.
It's a complete violation of basic scientific best practice,” said Rachel Cleetus, a senior policy director with the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate and energy program, describing the proposed amendment as “politically motivated” editing. “They’re just advocating coming and proposing to make changes to a report that they were not even authors on.”
It’s not clear what prompted the Trump administration to seek to edit the 2023 climate report. In its public proposal to amend it, the administration said it sought to clarify that federal agencies should not use the high-emissions scenarios to inform planning processes. Wielicki did not respond to questions.
“There’s no requirement for anyone to take any action based on anything in the NCA5. It’s an informational document. It’s intended to help state local governments, corporations and citizens,” said Phil Duffy, the chief scientist at Spark Climate Solutions, who was an adviser to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy during the Biden administration.
The Trump administration has not said whether or not it would produce a sixth assessment. The congressional mandate would suggest the next report is due in 2027, but previous administrations haven’t always met that obligation.
“There’s precedent for not putting out congressionally mandated national climate assessment,” Duffy said. “We would be up to the ninth national climate assessment if they had been put out every four years.”
Since the authors of the sixth assessment were released from duty, large nonprofit science organizations have been preparing for the report’s absence, which they think will leave an information gap for policymakers.
When it first announced the special collection, AGU president Brandon Jones said it was designed not to replace the National Climate Assessment, but an opportunity for researchers to pursue new research that could underpin future assessments in the U.S.
The consequences of climate change are coming into sharper view.
Extreme heat has baked much of the world this summer. July was the hottest month on record in the U.S., according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many locations set all-time records. Overall, the three months from June through August were the warmest ever recorded for the contiguous United States.
Last year was the third-hottest in modern history, according to Copernicus, the European Union’s climate monitoring service. The past 11 years have been the 11 warmest on record, Copernicus data shows.
With striking speed, the widespread debate around data centers has become a fault line in American communities, cutting across political parties, splitting constituencies and forging unexpected alliances.
In city halls and county commission chambers, east to west and north to south, people are squaring off against their local representatives.
It starts with distrust
Data centers have "upended politics as we know it," says Darrell West, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. It's more than a not-in-my-backyard issue, he says — it also reflects existential fears that artificial intelligence will take jobs or eliminate humanity entirely.
"People just feel like they no longer have control over the technology, [and] that worries them," West says. "This is a real grassroots movement. It's ordinary people all across the country, both Republicans and Democrats."
For this story, NPR traveled to data center hot spots and spoke to dozens of activists, politicians, developers and everyday Americans.
The picture that emerges is complicated. Data centers have been an economic boon for some communities, helping to lower land taxes and providing jobs. At the same time, the proliferation of secretive deals that often involve elected officials signing nondisclosure agreements has exacerbated suspicions.
A recent poll by The Economist and YouGov of nearly 1,600 adults found that about two-thirds of Americans oppose new data center construction in their communities. A rare cocktail of concerns has fueled the opposition, according to Chris Borick, a political science professor at Lehigh University.
"It's aligning interests in ways that aren't traditional," he says. "If you're in power right now and you are dealing with this issue, you have a target on your back."
Elected officials have had to scramble to recalibrate. "It's a recognition that the ground shifted under their feet and they were not ready for that to happen," Borick says.
Parties are divided
In Loudoun County, Va., data centers are driving a wedge between fellow Democrats.
On one side is Juli Briskman, a member of Loudoun County's Board of Supervisors, who has led efforts to slow further data center development. On the other is Phyllis Randall, also a Democrat and the board's chair, who has argued in favor of data centers for the tax revenue they bring into the county, even while acknowledging they are "a double-edged sword" for nearby residents.
Briskman is running to unseat Randall in next year's primary. She says her opposition to data centers dates back to 2020, when the board was seeing land-use cases seeking to convert residential and flex-industrial properties into the centers.
"I feel like I have been singing this song for a while, and now all of a sudden everyone's grabbing my music and singing along with me," Briskman says. Randall did not respond to NPR's request for comment.
Briskman is tapping into a sentiment in her area.
Kasey Hatch lives near Loudoun County's Vantage VA2 data center, which is powered by eight natural-gas-fired turbines. Residents say the turbines produce a constant low-pitched rumble along with a high-frequency whine that has become a major source of noise complaints in the surrounding neighborhoods.
Hatch, an IT infrastructure engineer for a bank who uses AI in her job, says she and her staunchly Republican cousin "never saw eye to eye on politics." But to her surprise, the last time they met, they were "on the same page about everything" when it came to data centers.
At the grassroots level, that translates into Democrats and Republicans working together on an issue of mutual interest. Nusheen Farahani also lives near VA2 and is part of a group of women organized against the facility who regularly show up at public hearings.
I'm a liberal and I'm a Democrat, and the people that are in our little team … not all of them are liberals or Democrats," Farahani says.
A similar story is playing out in Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Indiana, to name just a few, where locally organized groups are uniting against data centers — and elected officials.
According to the Data Center Opposition Report, which tracks grassroots nonprofits on the issue, some 640,000 people are active in the anti-data center movement and 220 new groups sprang up in just the three months from June through August.
They are driven by a feeling that government is part of the problem, according to Ben Green, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan's School of Information. With that comes a real sense of abandonment, he says.
"If the policymakers, if my city council or zoning board or township board and governor, if they're on the side of the companies, who's standing up for me?"
The economic impact
Data centers have been around for a lot longer than the recent AI hype, quietly humming along in the background of the modern internet, powering cloud computing and storing vast amounts of data. AOL set up in Loudoun County, for example, back in the 1990s, giving the tech industry an early beachhead in the county that has only grown due to demand from government agencies in nearby Washington, D.C.
To be sure, these facilities have brought economic benefits to the counties where they are located by creating billions of dollars in private investment, construction jobs and a limited number of well-paying positions at the data centers themselves, all the while providing an infusion of tax dollars that have stabilized and even lowered the tax burden for ordinary property owners.
And among the many people NPR spoke to for this story who oppose data centers, nearly all acknowledge using AI in their daily life. Farahani, for example, says she "begrudgingly" uses chatbots for certain tasks "to make things easier."
"I really make a concerted effort not to use it very often," she says, adding: "I don't like it to micromanage my life."
"We've seen property taxes go down two years in a row, as well as the vehicle tax rate in the county go down," says Dan Diorio, who oversees state policy and government affairs for the Data Center Coalition, the main trade association representing the industry. "That's money directly back into people's pockets made possible by the revenue from the data center industry."
Loudoun County confirms that over the past decade its Board of Supervisors reduced the real property tax rate by about 30% as a result of data center revenue, and that vehicle taxes are also down.
However, these facilities come with enormous electricity requirements, and their on-site systems for keeping countless racks of microprocessors cool can also require substantial quantities of water, a particularly sensitive issue in areas facing population growth or periodic drought.
And the tides are turning. It wasn't long ago that state and local governments competed for data centers by offering generous tax incentives, but now several have reversed course. In many places, the burden has suddenly shifted to the data center developers to prove that they are a benefit to the communities where they want to locate.
Just last Friday, Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger — who campaigned in 2025 on qualified support for data center expansion — signed an executive order that seeks to put far greater limitations on development.
Across the U.S., at state and local levels, restrictions and moratoriums on data center developments are being put in place.Meanwhile, incumbents of both major parties on county boards in places such as Virginia, Maryland, Missouri, Wisconsin, Michigan, Texas, Tennessee and California are finding themselves on the defensive — or, in some cases, voted out of office — as residents accuse them of putting the interests of data center developers ahead of their communities.
Secrecy and NDAs take a toll
In an industry known for going fast and breaking things, Diorio acknowledges it's paying the price for an early lack of transparency.Andwhat NPR heard from officials, political analysts and local residents is that it's the secrecy that has surrounded some developments that has galvanized opposition.
In several states, local elected officials signed nondisclosure agreements with data center developers that have muddied the waters even more.
A study led by Eric Bonds, a sociology professor at the University of Mary Washington, found that in 31 Virginia localities where there was an existing, approved or proposed data center, nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) had been signed for 25 of them.
Vantage Data Centers' senior vice president for public policy, John Stephenson, says he understands that people are angry and says that in hindsight, it would have been better to engage "earlier and more proactively" with residents on issues such as noise and air quality.
"I wish we could have had some of the conversations back then, but to be perfectly honest, we had no reason to think that there would be an issue because we've been building these for a long time," he says.
In Bessemer, a suburb of Birmingham, Ala., secrecy has bred voter suspicion. The city's mayor, a four-term incumbent, has been forced into a runoff after he, his chief of staff and the city's attorney signed NDAs that included a clause requiring them to destroy communications considered "confidential" by developers, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center.
In Wisconsin, a grassroots campaign sprang up last year to oppose a $12 billion hyperscale data center in the Madison suburb of DeForest that would cover more than 2 square miles. Ed Morganroth Jr., a member of that campaign, says that the Village Board had negotiated with the developer behind closed doors and that most residents learned of the plan only after hearing that local farmers had agreed to sell their land for the project.
"People have put in a lot of effort and written a lot of emails and met with a lot of board members and posted a lot of things on Facebook and inquired a lot [at] village meetings," Morganroth says.
In Virginia's Loudoun County, it's too late for citizens to reverse course on the dozens of projects already in the pipeline. However, just last week the board voted to pause new data center applications.
For Briskman, of the Board of Supervisors, Loudoun County is on the front line of the fight. "We are the case study, not just for the region, but for the nation," she says.
Just across the state border, in Maryland's Frederick County, there are also signs of distrust — literally. They're scattered across front lawns and street corners proclaiming "no data centers" and chastising state and county officials for their past support of data centers.
Frederick County is trying to learn from the lessons of its neighbor. The county executive has issued a freeze on new data center development until the state can finish a cost-benefit analysis on their impact.
But a sprawling, 2,100-acre hyperscale data center campus north of Adamstown that was once home to an Alcoa aluminum-smelting plant is already well underway. For now, the noise it's producing comes from heavy construction equipment, as beeping cranes and earthmovers erect massive concrete and steel structures.
Quantum Frederick is destined to dwarf the relatively tiny, 18-acre Vantage VA2 campus just across the state border.
Steve Black's tree nursery is located about a mile from the incomplete facility. Like Briskman, he views Loudoun County as something of a canary in the coal mine when it comes to unchecked data center development.
"The [Frederick] county government now is square in the middle of a demanding developer and an outraged citizenry," he says.
Black is a key figure in anonprofit that has filed requests for documents and even won a lawsuit against the county to get access to emails, letters and documents related to the Quantum Frederick project.
He says he has invested an enormous amount of personal time fighting data center expansion. "When I have to go to some council meeting and stay there till midnight … that is all on my time," he says.
Such commitment tracks with what Kathy Cramer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has found. Cramer leads a team of graduate students who attend public hearings and community group meetings and who conduct one-on-one interviews with people about data centers. She says the concerns she's hearing reflect a deep suspicion of government, Big Tech and the economic fairness of such projects.
"Data centers have become … a way for people to channel their discontent and resentment about bigger things in society that they're really not happy about," she says.
And for people like Black, this has solidified as political action.
"I have become a single-issue person," he says, but not in a partisan way. "I will help you in your campaign and give you talking points and answer your questions and help you be smart on this.
"Some people are Democrats that I'm supporting and some are Republicans, and it no longer matters to me."
