Tiny house villages are increasingly responding to the homeless crisis in America’s fast‑growing cities

 By Yetimoni Kpeebi &Brandon Marc Finn 

 

Recent population estimates show that Charlotte, North Carolina, is the fastest-growing large city in the United States. The city added more than 20,000 residents between 2024 and 2025 and is rapidly approaching a population of 1 million.

Charlotte has become a magnet for businesses and residents seeking opportunities and a lower cost of living.

But as Charlotte grows, its infrastructure is becoming increasingly strained. The pressures of population growth are evident in the city’s housing crisis. In 2026, 2,018 people were experiencing homelessness, up from 444 the previous year.

As urban researchers studying housing insecurity and urban development, our work examines what happens when rapid urban expansion outpaces cities’ ability to shelter their most vulnerable residents.

Charlotte’s housing pressures are not unique. They reflect a broader American urbanization in which rapid economic growth and concentrated wealth coexist with persistent housing inequality.

And we’ve found that communities across the U.S. are increasingly responding to this affordability crisis with resident-led alternatives.

 

The housing crisis

For Charlotte renters, housing costs have risen considerably. Median rent in the city increased from US$1,146 a month in 2019 to $1,627 in 2024.

Meanwhile, longtime residents in historically Black neighborhoods face mounting displacement pressures, as redevelopment and rising property values make it increasingly difficult for low-income residents to remain in their communities.

For households already living on the economic margins, these pressures can mean the difference between remaining housed and becoming homeless. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg area has about three extremely low-income households for every rental unit affordable to them. And for people already experiencing homelessness, finding a way out has become harder: The share of people leaving the homeless services system for permanent housing fell from 38% in 2020 to 25% in 2024.

The problem is not that Charlotte and many other American cities are growing. It’s that these cities often treat growth itself as the policy objective, while paying little attention to who benefits from it and who doesn’t.

Tiny house villages

Our research shows that when infrastructure and housing markets cannot accommodate unhoused populations, resident-led alternatives often fill the gap.

Tiny house villages, for example, represent a community-driven mechanism for people to find housing and community amid poverty and exclusion. These villages typically consist of clusters of small homes that provide people experiencing homelessness with shelter within a shared community.

Depending on the village, residents may also have access to shared facilities and services, such as bathrooms, kitchens and healthcare. These villages vary considerably in how they operate: Some provide temporary shelter, and others offer longer-term housing and pathways toward permanent housing.

A 2024 study that one of us conducted and that built on an earlier national study has allowed us to examine how tiny house villages across the country have increased over five years. The growth was striking: The number of villages nearly quadrupled, from 34 in 2019 to 123 in 2024.

This growth is particularly notable because the villages – often spurred by nonprofit and faith-based groups – have emerged outside conventional housing systems and are tailored to local circumstances. In the U.S, these models are increasingly supporting communities that are self-reliant out of necessity.

 

Portland’s Dignity Village

Dignity Village in Portland, Oregon, illustrates what this bottom-up response looks like. Housing some 60 residents, it grew out of an encampment established by homeless activists in 2000.

Dignity Village initially emerged as a tent city on vacant city land beneath a downtown bridge. Today, it has evolved into a self-governed community of tiny homes. Residents manage the village and maintain shared spaces.

People seeking to live at Dignity Village must be experiencing homelessness when they apply. Once admitted, residents become members of a community with its own rules and elected leadership. Residents are generally required to contribute at least 10 hours of work a week toward operating and maintaining the village. Exemptions are available for people who work, attend school or are unable to participate.

The City of Portland provides the land, but residents contribute to the costs of running the community through monthly program fees. Dignity Village also relies on private donations, grants and income from microbusinesses to pay expenses like electricity and waste removal.

Austin’s community and beyond

A very different tiny house model has emerged in Austin, Texas.

A nonprofit developed Community First Village to provide permanent, affordable housing for people coming out of chronic homelessness. Unlike Dignity Village’s relatively small, resident-governed community, Community First operates on a much larger scale.

As of June 2026, more than 500 people lived there. That included more than 455 people who had experienced chronic homelessness, and nearly 50 “intentional neighbors” who chose to live in the community alongside them.

The larger nonprofit model has attracted substantial private and public investment, including $35 million in federal COVID-19 pandemic-relief funds allocated by Travis County toward an additional Community First site.

Similar communities are emerging across the United States. Just a few examples include Seattle, Los Angeles and Springfield, Missouri.

Access to all

For much of the late 20th century, the dominant challenge facing American cities was managing population decline. Urban policy focused on attracting residents and investment back to places hollowed out by suburbanization and deindustrialization.

Today, many of the country’s fastest-growing metropolitan areas confront a different reality. The proliferation of tiny house villages across the U.S. is occurring at a time when many cities are attracting new residents and investment, while struggling to provide housing that remains accessible to all. 

 This is evident in Charlotte and in other fast-growing cities such as Austin and Phoenix, where population growth has occurred alongside persistent challenges around housing affordability and homelessness.

 

Dolly Parton’s legacy is a rebuke to RFK Jr.’s anti-vaccine crusade by Chris Hayes

 The anti-vaccine attacks on the country superstar are a grim reminder of who Trump put in charge of America’s public health. 

 

The entire country, if not the world, is united in mourning the loss of Dolly Parton, who died at 80 years old on Tuesday. It is the kind of unity that I was not even sure a public figure was still capable of inspiring in red states and blue states and beyond. 

Murals honoring the country music legend immediately popped up in Nashville, in Parton’s home state of Tennessee. In New York, the Empire State Building lit up pink in tribute. And across the country, flags are flying at half-staff at the order of President Donald Trump.

You cannot spend five minutes on social media without encountering all sorts of tributes and memorials. Eminem, Mariah Carey, Sen. Ted Cruz, Barack Obama, Turning Point USA and the Democratic Socialists of America all posted publicly in memory of Parton. As The New York Times put it, “In an age of division, Dolly Parton was one person everyone loved.”

But no, not everyone, it seems. There was one notable exception in the outpouring of love: a post from an organization called Children’s Health Defense that read, “How many people did Dolly Parton kill pushing vaccines?” It was a baffling reference to Parton’s support for vaccine research, and of course they pulled it down almost immediately.

This isn’t just some small group. For years, Children’s Health Defense was run by none other than Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

I will admit there have been times, especially during the first Trump administration, when the most dire warnings of what this president might do did not come to pass. We have, in some instances, avoided the worst-case scenario. 

But Kennedy’s handling of public health is not one of those situations. It is exactly as bad as his most ardent critics warned it would be. The only silver lining is that we have not seen another massive pandemic like Covid-19 under his watch (yet).

We are, however, seeing a variety of other catastrophes come to bear. This week the Pennsylvania Department of Health announced two measles-related deaths in Lancaster County, including an infant. (On Thursday, a Lancaster County coroner said he disagreed with the health department’s assessment and that while the infant did test positive for measles, he did not believe the disease was a contributing factor in their death, concluding that the baby died of a ruptured spleen. The death is under investigation.)

In either case, Pennsylvania has its first measles death in 35 years, because we had eliminated the virus in this country until anti-vaccine cranks like Kennedy got involved. And lest you think that is an unfair connection to draw, Kennedy literally went to Lancaster County back in 2021 to laud them for their low-vaccination rates and to downplay the severity of the disease, telling the crowd that the “cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A.”

People have died because of that sentiment, which Kennedy has dedicated his life to promoting. Now he serves as the nation’s top health official and principal adviser to the president on health matters.

 

Kennedy was Trump’s gift to the anti-vaccine members of his base, something of a mea culpa for promoting the Covid shots back in 2020, which was one of the only good things he ever did as president.

But Kennedy’s completely unscientific and dangerous views did cause some minor headaches during his confirmation process. He had to insist, for example, that his trip to Samoa back in 2019, which preceded a deadly measles outbreak there, had absolutely nothing to do with vaccines.

On Thursday, The Associated Press and The Guardian published a letter reportedly sent from Kennedy to the prime minister of Samoa ahead of that trip, in which he wrote, “I would propose my team conduct [a] detailed health informatics assessment in Samoa of what happened with your [measles-mumps-rubella] vaccines.”

Even when Kennedy isn’t actively promoting an ideology that can kill children, his sheer incompetence is making everyone less safe. Have you noticed the influx of headlines about foodborne illnesses across the U.S.? That the bread has pieces of metal in it, the blueberries have E. coli, and lettuce is giving folks diarrhea?

Guess who oversees food safety in this country? Kennedy. 

This is a guy who is completely unqualified to hold this position and who is putting the entire country’s health in danger. You have him to thank for the state of public health in this country.

JIMMY CARTER Energy and the National Goals: A Crisis of Confidence Delivered 15 July 1979White House, Washington, D.C

 

Good Evening:

This a special night for me. Exactly three years ago, on July 15, 1976, I accepted the nomination of my party to run for President of the United States. I promised you a President who is not isolated from the people, who feels your pain, and who shares your dreams, and who draws his strength and his wisdom from you.

During the past three years I’ve spoken to you on many occasions about national concerns, the energy crisis, reorganizing the government, our nation’s economy, and issues of war and especially peace. But over those years the subjects of the speeches, the talks, and the press conferences have become increasingly narrow, focused more and more on what the isolated world of Washington thinks is important. Gradually, you’ve heard more and more about what the government thinks or what the government should be doing and less and less about our nation’s hopes, our dreams, and our vision of the future.

Ten days ago, I had planned to speak to you again about a very important subject -- energy. For the fifth time I would have described the urgency of the problem and laid out a series of legislative recommendations to the Congress. But as I was preparing to speak, I began to ask myself the same question that I now know has been troubling many of you: Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?

It’s clear that the true problems of our nation are much deeper -- deeper than gasoline lines or energy shortages, deeper even than inflation or recession. And I realize more than ever that as President I need your help. So, I decided to reach out and to listen to the voices of America.

I invited to Camp David people from almost every segment of our society -- business and labor, teachers and preachers, governors, mayors, and private citizens. And then I left Camp David to listen to other Americans, men and women like you. It has been an extraordinary ten days, and I want to share with you what I’ve heard.

First of all, I got a lot of personal advice. Let me quote a few of the typical comments that I wrote down.

This from a southern governor: “Mr. President, you are not leading this nation -- you’re just managing the government.”

“You don’t see the people enough anymore.”

“Some of your Cabinet members don’t seem loyal. There is not enough discipline among your disciples.”

“Don’t talk to us about politics or the mechanics of government, but about an understanding of our common good.”

“Mr. President, we’re in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears.”

“If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow.”

Many people talked about themselves and about the condition of our nation. This from a young woman in Pennsylvania: “I feel so far from government. I feel like ordinary people are excluded from political power.”

And this from a young Chicano: “Some of us have suffered from recession all our lives.”

“Some people have wasted energy, but others haven’t had anything to waste.”

And this from a religious leader: “No material shortage can touch the important things like God’s love for us or our love for one another.”

And I like this one particularly from a black woman who happens to be the mayor of a small Mississippi town: “The big shots are not the only ones who are important. Remember, you can’t sell anything on Wall Street unless someone digs it up somewhere else first.”

This kind of summarized a lot of other statements: “Mr. President, we are confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis.”

Several of our discussions were on energy, and I have a notebook full of comments and advice. I’ll read just a few.

“We can’t go on consuming forty percent more energy than we produce. When we import oil we are also importing inflation plus unemployment.”

“We’ve got to use what we have. The Middle East has only five percent of the world’s energy, but the United States has twenty-four percent.”

And this is one of the most vivid statements: “Our neck is stretched over the fence and OPEC has a knife.”

“There will be other cartels and other shortages. American wisdom and courage right now can set a path to follow in the future.”

This was a good one: “Be bold, Mr. President. We may make mistakes, but we are ready to experiment.”

And this one from a labor leader got to the heart of it: “The real issue is freedom. We must deal with the energy problem on a war footing.”

And the last that I’ll read: “When we enter the moral equivalent of war, Mr. President, don’t issue us BB guns.”

These ten days confirmed my belief in the decency and the strength and the wisdom of the American people, but it also bore out some of my longstanding concerns about our nation’s underlying problems.

I know, of course, being President, that government actions and legislation can be very important. That’s why I’ve worked hard to put my campaign promises into law, and I have to admit, with just mixed success. But after listening to the American people, I have been reminded again that all the legislation in the world can’t fix what’s wrong with America. So, I want to speak to you first tonight about a subject even more serious than energy or inflation. I want to talk to you right now about a fundamental threat to American democracy.

I do not mean our political and civil liberties. They will endure. And I do not refer to the outward strength of America, a nation that is at peace tonight everywhere in the world, with unmatched economic power and military might.

The threat is nearly invisible in ordinary ways.

It is a crisis of confidence.

It is a crisis that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.

The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.

The confidence that we have always had as a people is not simply some romantic dream or a proverb in a dusty book that we read just on the Fourth of July. It is the idea which founded our nation and has guided our development as a people. Confidence in the future has supported everything else -- public institutions and private enterprise, our own families, and the very Constitution of the United States. Confidence has defined our course and has served as a link between generations. We’ve always believed in something called progress. We’ve always had a faith that the days of our children would be better than our own.

Our people are losing that faith, not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy. As a people we know our past and we are proud of it. Our progress has been part of the living history of America, even the world. We always believed that we were part of a great movement of humanity itself called democracy, involved in the search for freedom; and that belief has always strengthened us in our purpose. But just as we are losing our confidence in the future, we are also beginning to close the door on our past.

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.

As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning.

These changes did not happen overnight. They’ve come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy.

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973 when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil.

These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.

Looking for a way out of this crisis, our people have turned to the Federal Government and found it isolated from the mainstream of our nation’s life. Washington, D.C., has become an island. The gap between our citizens and our government has never been so wide. The people are looking for honest answers, not easy answers; clear leadership, not false claims and evasiveness and politics as usual.

What you see too often in Washington and elsewhere around the country is a system of government that seems incapable of action. You see a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.

You see every extreme position defended to the last vote, almost to the last breath by one unyielding group or another. You often see a balanced and a fair approach that demands sacrifice, a little sacrifice from everyone, abandoned like an orphan without support and without friends.

Often you see paralysis and stagnation and drift. You don’t like it, and neither do I. What can we do?

First of all, we must face the truth, and then we can change our course. We simply must have faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future of this nation. Restoring that faith and that confidence to America is now the most important task we face. It is a true challenge of this generation of Americans.

One of the visitors to Camp David last week put it this way: “We’ve got to stop crying and start sweating, stop talking and start walking, stop cursing and start praying. The strength we need will not come from the White House, but from every house in America.”

We know the strength of America. We are strong. We can regain our unity. We can regain our confidence. We are the heirs of generations who survived threats much more powerful and awesome than those that challenge us now. Our fathers and mothers were strong men and women who shaped a new society during the Great Depression, who fought world wars and who carved out a new charter of peace for the world.

We ourselves are the same Americans who just ten years ago put a man on the moon. We are the generation that dedicated our society to the pursuit of human rights and equality. And we are the generation that will win the war on the energy problem and in that process, rebuild the unity and confidence of America.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility. It is a certain route to failure.

All the traditions of our past, all the lessons of our heritage, all the promises of our future point to another path -- the path of common purpose and the restoration of American values. That path leads to true freedom for our nation and ourselves. We can take the first steps down that path as we begin to solve our energy problem.

Energy will be the immediate test of our ability to unite this nation, and it can also be the standard around which we rally. On the battlefield of energy we can win for our nation a new confidence, and we can seize control again of our common destiny.

In little more than two decades we’ve gone from a position of energy independence to one in which almost half the oil we use comes from foreign countries, at prices that are going through the roof. Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people. This is the direct cause of the long lines which have made millions of you spend aggravating hours waiting for gasoline. It’s a cause of the increased inflation and unemployment that we now face. This intolerable dependence on foreign oil threatens our economic independence and the very security of our nation.

The energy crisis is real. It is worldwide. It is a clear and present danger to our nation. These are facts and we simply must face them.

What I have to say to you now about energy is simple and vitally important.

Point one: I am tonight setting a clear goal for the energy policy of the United States. Beginning this moment, this nation will never use more foreign oil than we did in 1977-- never. From now on, every new addition to our demand for energy will be met from our own production and our own conservation. The generation-long growth in our dependence on foreign oil will be stopped dead in its tracks right now and then reversed as we move through the 1980s, for I am tonight setting the further goal of cutting our dependence on foreign oil by one-half by the end of the next decade -- a saving of over four and a half million barrels of imported oil per day.

Point two: To ensure that we meet these targets, I will use my presidential authority to set import quotas. I’m announcing tonight that for 1979 and 1980, I will forbid the entry into this country of one drop of foreign oil more than these goals allow. These quotas will ensure a reduction in imports even below the ambitious levels we set at the recent Tokyo summit.

Point three: To give us energy security, I am asking for the most massive peacetime commitment of funds and resources in our nation’s history to develop America’s own alternative sources of fuel -- from coal, from oil shale, from plant products for gasohol, from unconventional gas, from the sun.

I propose the creation of an energy security corporation to lead this effort to replace two and a half million barrels of imported oil per day by 1990. The corporation will issue up to five billion dollars in energy bonds, and I especially want them to be in small denominations so average Americans can invest directly in America’s energy security.

Just as a similar synthetic rubber corporation helped us win World War II, so will we mobilize American determination and ability to win the energy war. Moreover, I will soon submit legislation to Congress calling for the creation of this nation’s first solar bank which will help us achieve the crucial goal of twenty percent of our energy coming from solar power by the year 2000.

These efforts will cost money, a lot of money, and that is why Congress must enact the windfall profits tax without delay. It will be money well spent. Unlike the billions of dollars that we ship to foreign countries to pay for foreign oil, these funds will be paid by Americans, to Americans. These will go to fight, not to increase, inflation and unemployment.

Point four: I’m asking Congress to mandate, to require as a matter of law, that our nation’s utility companies cut their massive use of oil by fifty percent within the next decade and switch to other fuels, especially coal, our most abundant energy source.

Point five: To make absolutely certain that nothing stands in the way of achieving these goals, I will urge Congress to create an energy mobilization board which, like the War Production Board in World War II, will have the responsibility and authority to cut through the red tape, the delays, and the endless roadblocks to completing key energy projects.

We will protect our environment. But when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.

Point six: I’m proposing a bold conservation program to involve every state, county, and city and every average American in our energy battle. This effort will permit you to build conservation into your homes and your lives at a cost you can afford.

I ask Congress to give me authority for mandatory conservation and for standby gasoline rationing. To further conserve energy, I’m proposing tonight an extra ten billion dollars over the next decade to strengthen our public transportation systems. And I’m asking you for your good and for your nation’s security to take no unnecessary trips, to use carpools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit, and to set your thermostats to save fuel. Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense, I tell you it is an act of patriotism.

Our nation must be fair to the poorest among us, so we will increase aid to needy Americans to cope with rising energy prices. We often think of conservation only in terms of sacrifice. In fact, it is the most painless and immediate ways of rebuilding our nation’s strength. Every gallon of oil each one of us saves is a new form of production. It gives us more freedom, more confidence, that much more control over our own lives.

So, the solution of our energy crisis can also help us to conquer the crisis of the spirit in our country. It can rekindle our sense of unity, our confidence in the future, and give our nation and all of us individually a new sense of purpose.

You know we can do it. We have the natural resources. We have more oil in our shale alone than several Saudi Arabias. We have more coal than any nation on earth. We have the world’s highest level of technology. We have the most skilled work force, with innovative genius, and I firmly believe that we have the national will to win this war.

I do not promise you that this struggle for freedom will be easy. I do not promise a quick way out of our nation’s problems, when the truth is that the only way out is an all-out effort. What I do promise you is that I will lead our fight, and I will enforce fairness in our struggle, and I will ensure honesty. And above all, I will act.

We can manage the short-term shortages more effectively, and we will; but there are no short-term solutions to our long-range problems. There is simply no way to avoid sacrifice.

Twelve hours from now I will speak again in Kansas City, to expand and to explain further our energy program. Just as the search for solutions to our energy shortages has now led us to a new awareness of our nation’s deeper problems, so our willingness to work for those solutions in energy can strengthen us to attack those deeper problems.

I will continue to travel this country, to hear the people of America. You can help me to develop a national agenda for the 1980s. I will listen; and I will act. We will act together.

These were the promises I made three years ago, and I intend to keep them.

Little by little we can and we must rebuild our confidence. We can spend until we empty our treasuries, and we may summon all the wonders of science. But we can succeed only if we tap our greatest resources -- America’s people, America’s values, and America’s confidence.

I have seen the strength of America in the inexhaustible resources of our people. In the days to come, let us renew that strength in the struggle for an energy-secure nation.

In closing, let me say this: I will do my best, but I will not do it alone. Let your voice be heard. Whenever you have a chance, say something good about our country. With God’s help and for the sake of our nation, it is time for us to join hands in America. Let us commit ourselves together to a rebirth of the American spirit. Working together with our common faith we cannot fail.

Thank you and good night.

Homeland Security Paid $464 Million for Airplanes. Then It Parked Them. by Parked Them.: TIMES exclusive Fahrenthold, David A ; Fuller, Andrea ; Tate, Julie ; Nehamas, Nicholas ; Aleaziz, Hamed .

 

The agency used a no-bid contract to buy 10 used jets, saying they were urgently needed for deportation flights. But the fleet has largely sat idle for months.

Starting last fall, the Department of Homeland Security spent $464 million on a no-bid contract to buy 10 used airplanes from a firm in Northern Virginia.

That was an enormous price tag, but the department said it had no time to consider other offers. The planes were needed urgently for deportation flights.

But since then, the department has barely used this new fleet — for deportations, or anything else.

Three of the aircraft are luxury business jets. Just months after acquiring them, the department sought to loan or lease two to other agencies, including one for the use of F.B.I. director Kash Patel, according to a letter to the department sent Wednesday by top Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The other seven are older Boeing 737 passenger jets, which the government has left parked at an airport in Lake Charles, La., for months at a time. An internal government document, obtained by The New York Times, said the agency did not have the staff necessary to operate them.

The acquisitions were part of a surge of rushed contracts handed out recently by the Homeland Security Department, which has repeatedly used the need for “urgency” to bypass regular contracting procedures. The idled planes highlight the risks of that approach. The agency rushed headlong to spend nearly half a billion dollars, only to end up with planes it did not fly.

The contract also illuminated a broader trend within the second Trump administration: no-bid contracts awarded to people with connections to Mr. Trump or his cabinet secretaries. The company that received this contract, Daedalus Aviation Corporation, is led by a chairman who had donated to a political committee supporting the previous Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem.

The department’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has long outsourced its deportation flights by chartering planes from private companies. It also uses military and Coast Guard aircraft. Because of that, former immigration officials said there seemed to be little need for the department to take on the expense of buying and maintaining a significant number of its own aircraft.

“If you asked me to write a list of the things ICE needed to increase the number of deportations, buying its own fleet of airplanes would absolutely not make the top ten,” said John Sandweg, a former acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.

In a written statement, the Homeland Security Department sought to shift responsibility for the contract to Ms. Noem. President Trump fired her in March, and appointed Markwayne Mullin, a Republican Senator from Oklahoma, as secretary.

“The contract for Daedalus was made and approved by department leadership before Secretary Mullin was sworn in,” the department said in a statement. The agency said it “reserves the right to adjust course in an environment with evolving requirements and demands.”

A spokeswoman for Ms. Noem sought to place the responsibility on Mr. Mullin instead, saying the purchase was “finalized” under his leadership.

Contracting records show that the size of the contract increased by $303 million on the day that Mr. Mullin was sworn in as secretary.

The agency said that the idle 737 passenger jets had been undergoing maintenance checks, and that there were plans for two of them to begin deportation flights later this month.

The situation with the planes was reminiscent of the department’s about-face on a plan to acquire warehouses to hold detainees. The department spent heavily on those when Ms. Noem was secretary, but reversed itself just months later under Mr. Mullin. The department is now giving away or selling seven warehouses that it bought for more than $700 million.

A letter sent to the department Wednesday by Democratic senators Patty Murray of Washington and Christopher Murphy of Connecticut, who sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee, said Homeland Security officials had already conceded to the committee that most of the planes would not be used for deportations.

“The American people deserve a full accounting of this gross misuse of their tax dollars,” the letter, which was reviewed by The Times, said.

The senators asked for details about the purchase price of each plane and how they would be used.

Federal law generally requires government agencies to seek competing bids before awarding a contract, to ensure taxpayers get the best deal. But the department sidestepped that requirement for the planes contract, by invoking an exemption for cases of “unusual and compelling urgency.”

That exemption can be used only when delaying the contract would result in “serious injury, financial or other,” to the government. Historically, it has been used during natural disasters, war and the coronavirus pandemic.

The department declined to answer questions about what serious injury it was trying to prevent. Contracting regulations require agencies to publish the rationales for no-bid contracts, but the department refused to release this one, saying it “would compromise national security or create other security risks.”

The department has invoked the urgency exemption to justify more than $29 billion in spending across about 500 contracts awarded during Mr. Trump’s second term, according to an analysis of federal data by The Times. Much of that total came from border wall spending. Urgency claims were also used to justify projects like the $220 million in media contracts awarded to firms tied to Ms. Noem and her allies, scrutiny over which contributed to her ouster.

The exemption accounts for nearly two-thirds of the $34 billion that the department has spent on contracts signed in 2026. That’s up sharply from past years. In 2025, the figure was about one-quarter. In 2024, it was less than 1 percent.

No other major agency has used the exemption for urgency as frequently as Homeland Security, even in an administration that has turned to no-bid contracts repeatedly — for event planning, fountain repair and the troubled makeover of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

Lorna Tedder, a retired contracting expert who spent more than three decades at the Defense Department, said that, “Some things truly are urgent — people are going to die if you don’t do this.” But if agencies claim the exemption all the time, “it will eventually be abused.”

The contract for the planes was first awarded in late November. At the time, the government was already paying other contractors hundreds of millions to operate a network of charter flights called “ICE Air.”

The immigration agency has chartered about 25,800 flights in Mr. Trump’s second term, shuttling immigrants between detention centers domestically and deporting them abroad, mainly to Latin America and the Caribbean, according to the ICE Flight Monitor tracking project at Human Rights First, a nonprofit advocacy group. The department sometimes has 25 or more planes in the air in a day, according to the nonprofit’s tracking.

But at the time, the Homeland Security Department said it still needed its own planes.

Last fall, Tricia McLaughlin, a department spokeswoman, told The Washington Post that purchasing the planes would allow “ICE to operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” Ms. McLaughlin has since left the agency. The department did not respond directly to a question asking about her comments.

Daedalus, the Arlington, Va.-based company the government hired to find the planes, had not previously held a federal contract. However, a company spokesman said it had worked as a subcontractor to other companies evacuating Afghans who had done work for the U.S. government.

Daedalus’s chairman is William Walters, a doctor who until 2021 led a State Department office that evacuated Americans from outbreaks of Ebola, Covid-19 and other crises. In 2024, after leaving government, Mr. Walters donated $10,000 to a political committee connected to Ms. Noem, then the governor of South Dakota.

Last year, with Ms. Noem in charge, the agency gave a separate company run by Mr. Walters a contract worth nearly $700 million to encourage immigrants to leave the U.S. voluntarily.

A Daedalus spokesman said that Mr. Walters was unaware that the political committee was tied to Ms. Noem.

Daedalus declined to say how much each of the 10 planes had cost, or what its profit margin was for acting, essentially, as a broker. It provided a written statement that it was proud to provide “the best value to the American taxpayer.”

One of the planes is a Boeing 737 luxury jet, now painted in the color scheme of Mr. Trump’s new Air Force One. Two others are smaller Gulfstream business jets, each seating about 14 people.

Those planes flew only sporadically after the agency acquired them, according to flight records from airplanes.live, an independent flight tracking service. And the department soon moved to jettison two of them to other agencies, according to the account from Senate Democrats and the internal document reviewed by The Times.

One of the luxury jets “has already been leased to the F.B.I. for 12 months to support director Patel’s travel — despite the fact that the F.B.I. already has its own jets to support the director’s travel,” the Senate Democrats wrote.

The F.B.I. confirmed that it is using one of the Gulfstream jets, saying it was paying the Homeland Security Department significantly less than it had paid a private company to lease a similar plane and that the aircraft was being used to support a range of agency operations, in addition to Mr. Patel’s travel.

The Homeland Security Department also wanted to lend the larger Boeing luxury jet to the Pentagon, according to the senators’ letter and the internal document. But a Pentagon spokesman said no agreement had been signed.

One Gulfstream jet will remain with Homeland Security, for the use of its top leaders, according to the letter.

The other 737s seemed more suited for deportation flights. Flight records show they had been in active use by Avelo Airlines, a low-cost carrier that also flew charter flights for ICE.

But when the government bought them, it parked them.

Daedalus said that two were used briefly to evacuate Americans from the Middle East at the outbreak of the Iran War in early March.

Senate Democrats said they were told by Homeland Security staff that four of the 737s were no longer expected to fly detained immigrants. The senators said the department said it would use them to fly members of Congress on overseas trips, a job now handled by commercial carriers or military aircraft.

For the long term, the agency said it needs a contractor to provide crews and mechanics to operate its new fleet. A recent solicitation said that contract would start next summer.

Trump’s vaccine plan would require millions of individual shots last used decades ago by MATTHEW PERRONE

 

Public health experts have been quick to condemn an executive order from President Donald Trump aimed at upending childhood vaccinations in the U.S., but the biggest obstacles may be the unprecedented financial and logistical challenges it would impose on parents, health providers and drugmakers.

Monday’s announcement by the Republican president calls for separating combination shots — including the measles, mumps and rubella, or MMR, vaccine — into separate injections. Appointments for that and other vaccinations should be spaced out whenever possible, the order states.

To accomplish that, drugmakers would need to revive a slate of individual vaccines that have not been widely used in the U.S. for decades. They would also have to build new manufacturing plants capable of producing millions more vaccine doses than the nation currently uses.

 

For parents, unbundling the MMR vaccine and spacing out the shots would mean returning to the doctor’s office many more times than is currently needed. Those appointments could also strain pediatricians who typically administer the shots, while driving up costs tied to syringes and other medical supplies.

Studies in the U.S. and other countries have shown that combination vaccines increase the likelihood that children will be fully protected from infectious diseases before starting school

 

Health experts say there is no scientific basis for changing course.

“We do things that are less convenient and more expensive if there’s a good reason to do it,” said Dr. Anna Durbin, of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “There is no good justification for this. I think it’s very bad public health policy.”

Trump’s plan would require vaccine manufacturing overhaul

Under Trump’s executive order, federal officials are instructed to develop within 90 days plans for breaking up the MMR shot and spacing out other vaccines.

But pharmaceutical scientists and former regulators say those changes would likely take years and require drugmakers to spend tens of millions of dollars on new studies and manufacturing facilities.

 

Currently, there are no individual vaccines in the U.S. for measles, mumps or rubella. All the vaccines approved for those viruses by the Food and Drug Administration are combination shots. That three-in-one approach has been the standard in the U.S. since the 1970s.

Dr. Jesse Goodman, a former FDA vaccine chief, said companies would have to conduct large studies showing new individual shots produced immune system-boosting reactions in children similar to the current versions.

Companies might also have to demonstrate the safety of new manufacturing facilities and procedures, given that individual measles shots haven’t been widely produced in the U.S. for roughly a half-century.

“The question is how much has changed since then and how comfortable will the FDA and the companies be relying on those comparisons?” said Goodman, who is now a professor at Georgetown University.

Designing, constructing and getting federal sign-off for new vaccine plants typically takes about five years, according to industry experts.

Additionally, Goodman said the FDA would have to review and license each unbundled vaccine separately, a process with no precedent.

 

“I don’t think there’s any comparable example of removing hugely effective public health measures that protect babies for no documented scientific reason,” he said.

Individual shots for measles and related diseases tend to be used by lower-income countries that can’t afford the MMR shot. Merck, GSK and the handful of other companies that supply U.S. childhood vaccines make only the combination shot.

In separate statements, Merck and GSK said they stand by the safety and effectiveness of their products. Neither discussed plans to unbundle their shots.

“To date, there has been no published scientific evidence that shows any benefit in separating the combination MMR vaccine into three individual shots,” Merck said in an emailed statement.

Parents would need to make many more trips to the doctor

The MMR shot is currently delivered in two doses — the first at the age of 1 and the second dose after age 4. Splitting up the shot into its three separate components would mean six office visits. Spacing out other shots for pertussis and other infectious diseases could multiply the number of visits many more times.

 

As the number of visits goes up, parents are more likely to miss appointments or stop making them, according to Durbin.

“It’s going to be less convenient, more expensive and you’re going to have fewer people getting vaccinated,” she said.

For well over a decade, Trump has expressed his view — against medical groups’ guidance — that childhood vaccines should be administered in smaller doses over a long period of time. Last year he called on called on Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to look at reducing the number. Kennedy and other officials have pointed to smaller countries, such as Denmark, that recommended slightly fewer vaccinations than the U.S.

But breaking up combination shots will result in kids receiving many more individual shots than other comparable nations, Durbin notes.

White House spokesman Kush Desai said the Trump administration’s efforts on the MMR vaccine “will give parents more options on timing and frequency for their children, which ultimately will increase vaccination rates for all three diseases.”

 

Vaccine order is not legally binding

Despite the precedent-breaking nature of Trump’s order, some experts are skeptical it will result in meaningful changes.

Neither the White House nor the FDA can compel drugmakers to develop and seek approval for new vaccines. And from a business perspective, companies have little incentive to develop individual versions of vaccines they already sell in combination shots.

“They’d be competing against themselves, and there’s no reason to do that,” said Dr. Paul Offit, a Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia vaccine researcher and former government adviser.

While Trump’s order calls for more federal research and recommendations, only state governments have the legal authority to require vaccinations for schoolchildren. The order simply advises states to consider updating their laws to reflect the Trump administration’s approach.

“I think states will ignore this,” Offit said. “I think that bottom line is that we don’t need to look to Donald Trump for our medical advice.”

Starwashing’: How space companies use the greenwashing playbook while engaging in environmentally damaging practices by Marissa E. Yingling

 

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From launchpads to low Earth orbit and beyond, space companies and their affiliates are deploying a familiar marketing tactic – with a new twist. In a space economy projected to reach US$1.8 trillion by 2035, they sell space exploration narratives by appealing to a desire to expand humankind beyond Earth – while downplaying or omitting the negative repercussions for Earth and the space environment. Welcome to the age of starwashing.

You may have heard the term greenwashing, which describes when companies falsely claim that their practices or products are more environmentally friendly than they are, or when their green efforts are insignificant compared to their harmful environmental practices.

Some examples range from auto companies claiming that dumping cars into oceans benefits fish to plastics companies asserting that their products are more easily recycled than they are.

Today, greenwashing often disguises the true nature of corporate activity by appealing to the increasing number of people who care about environmental sustainability.

But greenwashing practices don’t end with those who care about the Earth. As a social work researcher interested in the consequences of commercialism both on and off Earth, I’ve studied how space companies are using similar strategies. Instead of appealing only to a sense of environmental responsibility, however, they also appeal to your sense of cosmic wonder. I call this practice starwashing.

Starwashing can also appeal to an interest in learning about life’s origins, Earth’s place in the universe, or the desire for humans to explore places beyond our planet. For example, positioning a space-related idea, activity, product or policy as a benefit to “all humankind,” even if it could damage Earth or the larger cosmic environ

For the benefit of Earth?

Blue Origin is a leading space technology company. Its mission states that it aims both to colonize space and “restore and sustain Earth.”

 

The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, envisions building space habitats that could house billions as a solution to environmental catastrophes on Earth. He’s also outlined a vision for moving industry off Earth, most immediately to the Moon.

Bezos’ other company, Amazon, has a carbon footprint larger than dozens of nations, including Ireland, Bolivia and Norway. At face value, moving some of Amazon’s activities into space to lessen its carbon footprint may seem environmentally desirable.

But even if having a fraction of the human population live and work in space one day far in the future were possible, it would not fix pressing environmental crises such as wildfires or climate change in the near term.

Blue Origin also makes misleading claims about its rocket fuel. Its New Shepard rocket, it says, is “for the benefit of Earth,” with the company claiming that nearly all the rocket fuel’s dry mass is reused. Its engine’s combustion results only in water vapor, with no carbon emissions. But water vapor can amplify atmospheric warming that other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide cause, which the statement omits, and on which Blue Origin did not respond to a request for comment.

Mining the Moon

Companies are also racing to extract resources from the Moon for what some, including Blue Origin, say will enable lunar development by reducing trips to and from the Moon. Other companies aim to harvest valuable resources such as helium-3.

These activities will require more frequent rocket launches, which will increase demand for launch sites that use more coastal land and, potentially, ocean waters.

Such ventures will also affect the environment of the Moon. The lunar surface area is less than the combined surface area of North America and South America, and desirable resources are restricted to certain locations – far from limitless. Prime landing locations are also priceless scientific sites that human ventures could endanger.

At an annual Space Resources Week event in Luxembourg, businesses have publicly discussed how to make mining other celestial bodies, including the Moon, more palatable for the public. While the host has suggested coming up with a word that sounds “more beneficial,” venture capitalists have proposed a marketing campaign to divert the focus from environmental damage off-Earth by espousing space’s promises for pharmaceutical research and wireless connectivity.

A crowded low Earth orbit

Artificial intelligence, referred to by financial experts as a “key” ingredient for space economy growth, is also relevant.

Bezos and Elon Musk both have companies that build and rely on resource-intensive data centers based on land. They’ve espoused plans to construct solar-powered orbital data centers and to help other companies such as Google do the same. They frame these plans as environmentally beneficial because an orbital data center wouldn’t require the same amount of water or electricity as a data center on Earth.

But orbital data centers, made up of satellite clusters, would add to an already-crowded space environment.

 

Blue Origin has already launched thousands of new internet satellites to keep pace with Musk’s company SpaceX, which has launched tens of thousands of satellites and plans to launch 1 million to power AI data centers. These satellites can threaten Earth-based astronomy, pollute Earth’s orbit with debris and damage the ozone layer when they burn up in the atmosphere.

In February 2026, Musk admitted that terrestrial AI data centers impose unsustainable “hardship on communities and the environment.” But his company continues to build them, and analysts suggest that he took SpaceX public to fund AI ambitions, not space travel. While the SpaceX brand relies on exciting notions of sending people into space, the company leases unused computing power to AI competitors at its Colossus data complex in Memphis, Tennessee, where environmental groups have alleged the center’s emissions violate the Clean Air Act.

Star appeal

Companies sometimes use “stars” – as in celebrities – in these starwashing practices. In 2021, SpaceX partnered with businessman Jared Isaacman, who is now the NASA administrator, to advertise seats on the first all-civilian flight to orbit, Inspiration4. They ran a Super Bowl commercial that showed the Earth reflected in an astronaut’s helmet, accompanied by singer Celeste’s soulful rendition of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.”

Blue Origin transformed celebrities into space tourists to display its launch capabilities. On April 14, 2025, it helped an all-female crew, including pop star Katy Perry, fly to suborbital space for four minutes. W

Benefiting ‘all humankind’

The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 obligates nations to explore space for the benefit of all countries as the “province of all mankind.”

SpaceX, for instance, purportedly aims to save humanity from future environmental catastrophes, like the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs, by colonizing the Moon and Mars.

This philosophy bypasses intersecting environmental crises such as climate change and biodiversity loss that are more probable near-term threats to Earth’s inhabitability than the kind of catastrophic asteroid impact estimated to occur once every few million years.

As U.S.-based space companies, principal among them SpaceX, receive billions in taxpayer-funded contracts, their environmental effects both on and beyond Earth will grow. An open question is whether all of humankind will reap the benefits of space, as the Outer Space Treaty asks.

A new movement?

In 1968, the Apollo 8 crew captured the first color photograph of Earth from space: “Earthrise.” It helped inspire the environmental movement of the last century, which included holding companies accountable for greenwashing.

This past April, the Artemis II crew captured the earlier photo’s counterpart, “Earthset.” This image of our blue marble setting behind the Moon captivated people across the world.

Whether it will motivate an off-Earth environmental movement – one that holds space companies accountable for starwashing practices – is yet to be seen.

hile Blue Origin showed off its New Shepard rocket, Perry promoted her upcoming tour. 

 

Democracy, climate and justice Samuel Alito by Dharna Noor

 Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from oil and gas assets since joining supreme court, analysis shows

Critics argue US high court justice should recuse himself from upcoming fossil fuel firms’ climate accountability case

 

The supreme court justice Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9m from his fossil fuel interests between 2005 and 2024, a new review of financial disclosures shows.

The analysis from the non-profit advocacy group and judicial watchdog Court Accountability, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that even at the lowest range of estimates, Alito gained almost $400,000 from his oil and gas interests since being tapped for the high court by George W Bush in 2005.

The findings come as the supreme court prepares to take up a case in which the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel producers for the climate-warming effects of their products.

 

The supreme court said this month it will hear oral arguments in the case on 5 October, the opening day of its new term. The Trump administration, which is siding with the oil companies, has asked for 10 minutes of argument time. Court Accountability and other groups have called for a Senate committee to investigate Alito, the sole supreme court justice with holdings in energy companies, and said he should recuse himself.

He and the court rejected those calls.

Supreme court ethics rules focus specifically on investments in companies named in court cases. In May, a supreme court spokesperson told NBC News that Alito was not required to recuse himself from the Suncor lawsuit as his holdings do not include the companies directly named in the case, Suncor and ExxonMobil.

But Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability who authored the new analysis, said Alito’s oil-tied wealth provides grounds to question whether Alito can impartially weigh in on cases affecting the entire fossil fuel sector.

“You might have real appreciation for how that industry has helped make it possible for you to perhaps buy a second home on the water, or live a [certain] lifestyle,” she said.

The Guardian has contacted the supreme court and Alito for comment.

Mineral rights

Alito’s financial disclosures show his reported assets – excluding his home and other personal property – grew from about $1.1m in 2005 to between $3.4m and $8.4m by 2024. Federal financial disclosures report assets in broad value ranges.

During that period, his oil and gas holdings made him between $390,000 and $2.9m, Court Accountability’s review shows. Most of those gains came from a property in Grady county, Oklahoma, in which Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, holds a mineral interest.

Graves said Alito may have undervalued the worth of this property, because in 2017, a relative of the Alito family sold an adjacent plot for $800,000. “It’s reasonable to assume that means the value of the Alito property would have increased to around $800,000,” said Graves, but he continued to report its value at $100,000 to $250,000.

The justice reported two windfalls from rental income on the property in 2019 and 2022, with gains of between $100,000 and $1m in both years.

Alito’s wife agreed to lease the plot of land to the private oil and gas company Citizen Energy in 2022, the Intercept first reported. In 2024, that company was acquired for more than $2bn by Validus Energy, in which the hedge fund Elliott Investment Management holds a majority stake. Elliott was founded by Paul Singer, who ProPublica found had paid for a private jet ride Alito took in 2008 that the justice did not disclose. Alito later defended the trip, saying ethics rules did not require its disclosure.

No reporting or public documents indicate that a well has been drilled on the property, but a lease agreement shows the owners would have received three-sixteenths of the money from any oil extracted from the land.

“It raises concerns because you have a sitting justice who is hoping to get richer based on oil exploration of this land,” said Graves.

Singer’s Elliott Investment Management also owns more than 52m shares of Suncor, which are worth more than $2.3bn, watchdog groups have noted.

Another large portion of Alito’s fossil fuel gains came through inheritance. In 2004, the justice disclosed that he obtained a bequest of ExxonMobil stock valued between $100,000 and $250,000.

The Exxon stock was the highest value of any single liquid investment listed by Alito “by a good margin”, Graves said.

Alito appears to have since sold his stock in ExxonMobil, as indicated by the supreme court’s May statement to NBC News.

“But my view is that you shouldn’t be able to sell a stock just so you can sit on a case, even though that company’s profits have benefited you,” said Graves.

Alito is the only justice who has not yet submitted his 2025 disclosure document. The filing was due on 15 May. Justices can obtain a 90-day extension; if Alito received one, he should file the document this Thursday. Last year, he filed his disclosure in August.

Alito has had a variety of smaller investments in more than a dozen oil firms, including ConocoPhillips and its predecessor Phillips 66, Chevron and the energy infrastructure company Kinder Morgan.

“A reasonable person would think if you’re invested in the industry that could benefit from the outcome of a lawsuit, then you could personally stand to benefit from the outcome, even if you don’t hold the stock in the specific company that happens to be the named plaintiff,” said Graves.

Alito’s record

Alito has a history of voting in favor of fossil fuel interests. In the landmark 2007 case Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he was one of four dissenting justices who argued greenhouse gas emissions could not be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Then in June 2022, when the supreme court decided West Virginia v EPA, Alito joined Neil Gorsuch’s majority in arguing that the EPA lacked broad authority under the Clean Air Act to mandate a shift away from fossil fuels.

More recently, he joined the majority in two 2024 decisions that overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine and could make it harder for agencies to defend expansive environmental regulations.

Alito has recused himself from other environmental cases. In January, he stepped away from a lawsuit focused on whether energy companies could be held responsible for Louisiana coastal degradation because he owns stock in ConocoPhillips, the parent company of a defendant in proceedings tied to the litigation.

In 2023, Alito also recused himself from considering a petition in the Suncor lawsuit, brought by the company and Exxon. That request was denied.

Later in 2023, the supreme court adopted its first-ever formal ethics code amid a slew of scandals involving senior rightwing justices. It states that justices should recuse themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned”, though it allows them to make that decision themselves.

 

Though Graves harshly critiqued that ethics code, saying it was “toothless” and “not worth the paper it’s written on”, she said it should in theory prevent Alito from weighing in on Suncor v Boulder in October.

“His impartiality may be reasonably questioned in terms of his affinity towards the industry that has helped build his nest egg,” she said.

 

Full TextNewspaper How the Reflecting Pool Mirrored Trump's Administration:Joselow, Maxine ; Fahrenthold, David A ; Pager, Tyler ; Williams, Clarence .

 

n January, the World of Concrete trade show drew 47,000 people to the Las Vegas Convention Center. One of them was the manager of a Trump Organization golf club in New Jersey, who had come seeking help with an enormous, unfamiliar task.

The manager, David Schutzenhofer, wanted ideas for how to fix the leaking, algae-ridden Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool in Washington.

Several vendors told him they knew just the guy to call: Rodney Jarboe, the president of the Missouri-based company Creative Polymers. Mr. Jarboe had worked on a bridge at another federal landmark, the Gateway Arch in St. Louis.

In an interview, Mr. Jarboe said he first spoke in March with Mr. Schutzenhofer, who made clear that the work would be rushed. President Trump, Mr. Jarboe said he was told, wanted the renovation project done in time for the country's 250th birthday on July 4.

''For this thing to be done in the time frame that was required, we almost had to have a contract and start manufacturing by the first week of April,'' Mr. Jarboe said. ''So it was a very tight deadline to make a decision.''

Those initial conversations about the Reflecting Pool, which have not previously been reported, kicked off an ad hoc plan by the Trump administration that involved coating the pool with a sheet of blue polyurea, which the president promised would make it beautiful. Within months, though, the pool was drained and ugly -- the butt of jokes and memes.

Many of the details of the saga are reported in this article for the first time. They show that the pool, which was supposed to reflect the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument, became a striking reflection instead of the second Trump administration's willingness to skirt laws, expend millions of dollars, ignore facts and punish truth tellers in service of the president's demands to put his mark on the capital.

The Interior Department, led by Doug Burgum, handed out no-bid contracts and squelched doubts about the costs and risks. An employee from Mr. Trump's private business life, Mr. Schutzenhofer, played an off-the-books role in government decisions. A top federal housing official, Bill Pulte, brought Mr. Trump memes that encouraged him to keep going.

And when Mr. Trump sought to blame the project's failure on shadowy vandals, Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, backed him up by charging members of the public with crimes, only to have the cases fall apart.

Then, in place of accountability, there were falsehoods on top of falsehoods, part of Mr. Trump's longtime strategy of not admitting mistakes and treating concessions of error as signs of weakness.

To understand how the Reflecting Pool repairs veered off course, The New York Times reviewed dozens of internal government documents, including confidential reports raising concerns about the project's costs and workmanship, and spoke to more than 20 people familiar with the project.

Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, did not answer a list of emailed questions, but said in a statement: ''For years, the Reflecting Pool sat neglected, plagued with algae and leaking millions of gallons of water. Fixing it was common sense. It's another example of President Trump restoring our nation's capital for the American people.''

The Interior Department has also defended its handling of the project, saying that it followed the law and used expedited processes to meet a tight deadline. ''President Donald J. Trump is an expert builder who fixed the Reflecting Pool permanently before deranged people vandalized it,'' Katie Martin, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement.

A Novel Solution

At the start of Mr. Trump's second term, the Reflecting Pool had two longstanding problems. It leaked tens of millions of gallons every year. And it turned green, especially in the summer, as algae thrived in its stagnant, shallow water.

But neither Mr. Trump's first administration nor the Biden administration had treated these issues as a crisis. They made plans to fix it, but never carried them out.

That changed last fall. The day before Thanksgiving, Mr. Trump suggested on social media that the Park Service would overhaul the Reflecting Pool after workers finished a routine cleaning.

To lead that effort, Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Schutzenhofer, who had run the president's club in Bedminster, N.J., since 2006 -- and had a background in hospitality but no formal training in engineering or architecture.

After attending the World of Concrete, Mr. Schutzenhofer settled on a plan to coat the pool's concrete slabs with a polyurea liner, Mr. Jarboe said. Though the Park Service had not previously contemplated such a plan, it later described the liner in contract documents as a ''seamless, monolithic, waterproof, antimicrobial and anti-algae system.''

But there was a problem of Mr. Trump's making: The president's steep tariffs on resins from China and other countries had limited the availability of polyurea coatings.

''Tariffs were reducing the amount of materials that could come into the U.S. to make this stuff,'' Mr. Jarboe said.

To address this problem, Creative Polymers partnered with Rhino Linings, a California-based company that made large quantities of polyurea coating at its factory in Texas. Rhino was also attractive because it made a coating in a shade called ''American flag blue,'' and the patriotically named hue delighted Mr. Trump.

In turn, a sales manager at Rhino called Atlantic Industrial Coatings, a Virginia-based company that had never won a government contract, and enlisted its help with applying the coating, according to a statement on the company's website.

Put more simply: documents and interviews establish how a first-time contractor was paid millions of dollars to apply a novel solution designed by a golf club manager to a national landmark.

''It's like asking the museum guard to restore a painting in the Met,'' said Charles Birnbaum, the president of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, a nonprofit that has sued unsuccessfully to stop the work.

Neither Rhino Linings nor Mr. Schutzenhofer answered questions about their roles in setting up the Reflecting Pool repairs or in choosing Atlantic for the application.

Mr. Schutzenhofer also communicated in January and February with Greenwater Services, an Ohio-based company owned by a Trump donor's investment firm, about installing water-treatment equipment called nanobubblers to kill algae, according to emails reviewed by The Times.

Federal law required the project to face reviews from nonpartisan, career employees, to ensure that taxpayer money was not wasted and national icons were not damaged. The Interior Department swept those hurdles aside.

It approved a no-bid contract for Atlantic, even though multiple companies had expressed interest in bidding. It issued another no-bid contract to Greenwater, even though other firms could have supplied the nanobubblers.

It bypassed consultations with preservationists and other experts, even though a career employee said the project was significant enough to require it.

And it approved Atlantic's request to be paid a 20 percent profit margin, even though a Park Service procurement employee found that number ''inflated'' and ''excessive.'' The contractor got all it asked for, plus more than $1 million on top of that, for a total of $14.7 million.

In each case, the Interior Department cited the fast-approaching deadline as a reason to block any scrutiny. It was a neat act of bureaucratic jujitsu: Because the government started the project so late, it declared that no one else could further delay it by asking questions.

Otherwise, the department said, the pool might not be in good shape by Independence Day. In internal documents, the department called that possible outcome ''mission failure.''

On April 23, Mr. Trump introduced Mr. Schutzenhofer's plan to the public with an elaborate story. In this telling, Mr. Trump said he had found the contractor himself.

''What we're going to do is: I'm going to call all three of these people that have worked for me in the past doing swimming pools,'' he said in the Oval Office. He described how he had solicited offers from vendors to the Trump Organization before picking one that had worked on his golf club in Northern Virginia.

In fact, Atlantic, the main contractor, had never worked there, nor at any other Trump property, and the president later said he did not know the company.

Perhaps more important, Mr. Trump seemed not to realize that the 2,000-foot-long Reflecting Pool might not operate like a recreational swimming pool.

The 100-Year Liner

Soon after Atlantic began applying the blue coating to the Reflecting Pool, problems began to appear.

Government documents obtained by The Times showed that the firm's first efforts to plug the leaky gaps between the pool's concrete slabs failed. Blisters and small holes appeared in the blue lining.

Mr. Trump continued to defend the project. He was encouraged by Mr. Pulte, a bulldog for the president who oversees the low-profile Federal Housing Finance Agency, and who seized on Mr. Trump's fixation with the Reflecting Pool, sharing images of how it had decayed under past presidents. Mr. Pulte did not comment to The Times on his role.

The president loved the images and posted a flurry of them on Truth Social, his social media site. He wanted to fix what his predecessors had not.

The renovation was declared finished in early June.

''This was highly sophisticated material, industrial strength, that could last for 100 years,'' Mr. Trump wrote on social media on June 5.

It began peeling within the week, according to a recent court filing. (Atlantic has declined to comment beyond saying that the damage affected a ''very small part'' of the liner.)

Making matters worse, the algae returned with a vengeance, turning large portions of the pool bright green. One reason: The nanobubblers had been removed when the Lincoln Memorial hosted a promotional event for the Ultimate Fighting Championship bouts at the White House, another pet project of the president's.

Mr. Trump responded by falsely claiming that vandals armed with a ''box cutter or a knife of some kind'' had cut a 300-foot gash in the coating. He added that people also ''threw a little fertilizer in the water,'' though the government never provided evidence to support this dubious explanation for the algae.

The Park Service had reported an incident of vandalism at the pool to the police, but it involved cuts in a 20-foot section of gray caulking around the pool's rim. An Interior Department spokeswoman later said that the cuts to that caulking actually totaled 350 feet. But that was not the kind of damage that Mr. Trump alleged -- long man-made gashes in the blue lining.

Mr. Burgum, a billionaire former North Dakota governor, pushed the narrative about vandals damaging the blue lining publicly, but also privately to Mr. Trump, according to two White House officials who were granted anonymity because they were not authorized to speak about internal matters. It fit in neatly with Mr. Trump's view that Washington was overrun with crime.

Ms. Martin, the Interior Department spokeswoman, declined to answer questions about the damage to the liner, but said in an email that ''Secretary Burgum never misled the president and was very clear in all of his comments on the pool.''

These might not have been the most consequential misrepresentations the administration has made, but in a way, they were some of the boldest. The proof was not in some secret file, but on the National Mall, where anyone could look. And look they did.

As videos of the peeling blue liner circulated online, the gap between reality and the Trump administration's account grew obvious. Late-night comedians told jokes. Bartenders whipped up Reflecting Pool cocktails, with matcha for the algae and blue fruit roll-ups standing in for the liner. A local activist, Nadine Seiler, began patrolling the Mall with a sign that said ''Team Algae.''

Then the administration began to arrest people.

Sophie Dennison-Gibby, a 49-year-old veterinarian, was walking along the side of the pool on June 20, enjoying a rare afternoon off. She said she stopped at a section where there was no more lining visible -- the pool had peeled down to bare concrete -- and spotted a free-floating piece of lining about the size of her palm.

Worried that an animal would eat it, she reached in to remove it. Then an officer wearing a vest that identified him as a deputy U.S. Marshal approached and asked if she had put her hand in the water. She said yes.

''He said, 'Now I'm going to have to arrest you,''' Ms. Dennison-Gibby recalled. She thought she was being stopped for littering, and tried to explain: ''I took it out. I didn't put it in.''

She was charged with a misdemeanor count of destruction of property, which carried a possible penalty of up to six months in jail. As a result of the charge, she had to pay $6,000 in legal fees and worried about the impact on her business and her veterinary licenses. She struggled with what to tell her school-age daughter.

Ms. Dennison-Gibby, a naturalized citizen who came to the United States from Britain 22 years ago, was aghast when she saw a video of Mr. Trump celebrating her arrest.

''The most powerful person in the world, sitting there, very pleased that there have been arrests over vandalizing of the Reflecting Pool, one of which was me,'' Ms. Dennison-Gibby said.

At least seven people were charged with vandalizing the pool. The most serious charge was filed against David Hearn, a former U.S. Olympian who was arrested on June 19 after he allegedly yanked up a piece of the liner two feet square. He was indicted on a felony charge of destroying federal property worth more than $1,000. He faced up to 10 years in jail if convicted.

Ms. Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, announced Mr. Hearn's indictment at a fiery news conference, saying she was in a fight against ''unchecked vandalism and civil disorder.''

A Remarkable Filing

The new charges meant that the Reflecting Pool mess had moved from the realm of the political to the courtroom, where Mr. Trump's success has been less assured.

In a court hearing that had been scheduled for this week, Mr. Hearn's lawyers planned to show that Park Service employees knew the pool had been badly damaged before Mr. Hearn had reached into the water.

Ahead of that showdown, Ms. Pirro reversed course.

In a remarkable court filing on Friday evening, Ms. Pirro wrote that the Interior Department had misled her prosecutors about the extent to which vandals had caused the pool's problems. Instead, she wrote, ''the damage was the result of a botched installation.''

The filing provided a far more detailed accounting of the pool's problems than the Interior Department ever had, saying the coating application became ''rushed and flawed'' as workers raced to make up for weather delays.

Ms. Pirro moved to dismiss the cases against Mr. Hearn, Ms. Dennison-Gibby and at least two others. On Thursday, a federal judge granted prosecutors' request to dismiss the case against Mr. Hearn.

But there was a consequence for such a public denouncement of Mr. Trump's project.

The president seethed at Ms. Pirro, a longtime friend who had left a cushy job at Fox News to fulfill the president's promise to clean up the city. Mr. Trump slammed her publicly, telling reporters that she was ''folding like an umbrella'' and ''choking.''

On Tuesday, Mr. Trump brought Ms. Pirro and Mr. Burgum together for a meeting in the Oval Office, along with Susie Wiles, the chief of staff, and David Warrington, the White House counsel.

Ms. Pirro, raising her voice, confronted Mr. Burgum and accused him of misleading the president to protect himself and his department. Mr. Burgum did his best to defend himself, but spoke less than the loquacious Ms. Pirro.

Ms. Pirro left the White House later that evening with her job still safe, at least for the moment. Mr. Trump told reporters this week that he had not decided whether he would fire her.

By then, the Reflecting Pool was in a sorry state.

It was fenced off in late June, ahead of the 250th anniversary, exactly the ''mission failure'' that the administration had wanted to prevent.

The Reflecting Pool was then drained so it could be repaired again. Atlantic said in a statement that it would honor its warranty.

Then, instead of a giant mirror, visitors looking out from the Lincoln Memorial saw only a dry expanse of American flag blue, covered in dead algae, with torn pieces that waved in the wind