I’m a Master’s graduate in Interpreting & Translation (Russian and Spanish) based in the UK, looking to pivot into corporate intelligence, EDD, or threat analysis (targeting firms OSINT/corporate risk consultancies).
I see mixed advice on certifications. My current plan is to combine my language abilities with formal training—specifically looking at practical OSINT courses (TCM Security / SANS SEC487) and potentially a compliance credential (ICA AML) to cover financial risk context.
For those currently working in corporate investigations or private sector intelligence:
Would a recruiter in this space value a candidate who combines high-level Russian/Spanish OSINT with an entry-level compliance cert like ICA, or is a public portfolio of research briefs (e.g., GitHub/Medium) far more effective?
How are entry-level candidates with strong regional/linguistic skills typically evaluated in your teams?
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center and the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
JOHANNESBURG, SOUTH AFRICA — When it opened in early 2024, Engage Men’s Health Clinic served as a free, one-stop shop for sexual health, gender-affirming medical care, and HIV prevention, testing, and treatment. Located within a short distance of seven universities, it was a place where many college students came before “they’d even had sex for the first time,” a former worker told The Intercept. This made Engage a “high-impact” clinic for distribution of the HIV prevention drug PrEP.
The building, on a tree-lined stretch of Reserve Street in Johannesburg, was adorned with the logo for the President’s Plan For AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR; a rainbow-colored mural of Simon Tseko Nkoli, the gay anti-apartheid activist who helped start one of Africa’s first Pride celebrations and who died of AIDS in 1998; and a sign for USAID saying the site was a gift “from the American people.”
Today, it would be very hard to get help here, despite the welcoming-but-outdated signage. The clinic, once staffed full-time by professionals, closed abruptly during the first hours of the second Trump administration. Its replacement, an unrelated volunteer clinic called USpace, is open a mere four hours a week. They can do HIV tests here. But they have no HIV treatment, HIV prevention, or gender-affirming medication to distribute.
South Africans account for about a fifth of the 41 million people living with HIV around the world. Out of a population of nearly 64 million, some 8 million people in South Africa are living with HIV, which is roughly 1 in 8. Managing their healthcare is a matter of international concern and requires global coordination and an immense local network. In a nation with such high rates of HIV, public health workers can’t just wait for people to walk into clinics; they must proactively go to them.
Yet over the last year and a half, this crucial work has been stymied. By Jacqueline Pienaar’s count, HIV prevention groups have lost track of approximately 20,000 people with HIV in the Johannesburg and Pretoria region alone since U.S. President Donald Trump came back to the White House. “It used to be if someone didn’t show up to get their medication, you’d go to them,” said Pienaar, a principal investigator and global health specialist at the Aurum Institute, an NGO that offers medical care and contact tracing for the region’s massive HIV-positive population.
For years, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funded her work. Many of her patients were homeless, unemployed, and extremely poor. If they are unaccounted for and unmedicated, their viral loads will spike, all but assuring large transmission increases in a country that is already home to 20 percent of the world’s HIV-positive population.
With U.S. funding vanished, South Africa now finds itself at risk of unmitigated HIV spread.
Now, at organizations like the Aurum Institute, interviews with Pienaar and other workers reveal how funding cuts have devastated the care apparatus. Employment in HIV care and prevention has become precarious, and resources to slow HIV transmission are increasingly scarce. As elsewhere in the world, this is creating a crisis of unemployment for Black LGBTQ+ workers, which itself creates higher risk for HIV. Gender-affirming care, which is a crucial tool for preventing HIV, has disappeared almost entirely.
Until the second Trump administration, the United States government sent a bit more than half a billion dollars a year to the Republic of South Africa. Of the $580 million the U.S. sent in 2024, 78 percent ($455 million) went towards HIV/AIDS.
But this money from America was hardly charity or lacking in self-interest. Because viruses know no borders, what happens with AIDS in the country with the most infections affects everyone on Earth. Controlling HIV in South Africa makes the entire world safer by preventing the emergence of dangerous viral mutations, reducing the global burden of infectious diseases, and strengthening health systems that detect future pandemics. Because viruses mutate rapidly when allowed to replicate unchecked, poorly controlled epidemics anywhere pose a direct threat to global health security.
South Africa also leads the world on another important front: medical research to address HIV. The republic is home to more clinical trials than any other country for seeing how medications of all kinds (including Covid vaccines) impact those with HIV. The profits of American drug companies depend on South Africans undergoing research trials.
And after a year-and-a-half of dialing down HIV funding and only allowing it with many caveats which have caused major harm, the United States announced in June — during America’s LGBTQ+ Pride Month — that it will end all HIV funding in South Africa.
The ramifications of this will be felt globally for years to come.
They are already being felt by the millions of South Africans for whom HIV care has become harder and harder to find. And the effects are most severe for those already on the margins of South African society: those already living with HIV/AIDS, immigrants, trans women, and the poor, including thousands of newly unemployed HIV prevention workers.
Laboratory technician Nozipho Mlotshwa works on samples at the Antiviral Gene Therapy Research Unit, at University of the Witwatersrand Medical School, in Johannesburg on May 22, 2025. Photo:Themba Hadebe/AP
On January 20, 2025, Trump signed two executive orders: 14169, “Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid,” and 14168, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
Within hours of Trump taking the oath of office, the vast majority of workers for OUT LGBT Well-Being, which ran the Engage clinic, were told not to come in to work the next day nor to even open their work laptops again. According to one, 82 of 86 workers were let go. They would become part of the one-third of South Africans who are already unemployed.
Trump executive order 14155 formally pulled the U.S. out of the World Health Organization in January 2026. Trump’s cuts came after the outgoing administration of President Joe Biden reportedly failed to pay some $130 million in 2024 WHO dues, leaving the organization with a $1.9 billion gap. As a consequence, WHO implemented a 30 percent reduction in its workforce.
South Africa’s response to HIV has been shaped by its two most famous citizens: Nelson Mandela and Elon Musk.
During Trump’s first term, with Musk merely cheering from the sidelines, U.S. funding for LGBTQ+ health and HIV did not decrease significantly, at home or abroad. But ahead of Trump’s second term, it was Musk who first recommended a U.S. “government efficiency commission” to Trump in 2024, planting the seeds for what was to come.
HIV funding nationally and globally have plummeted in Trump’s second term through cuts largely enacted at the behest of Musk’s short-lived Department of Government Efficiency. (These have been paired with an immigration policy so racist, over the last six months, literally the only refugees to enter the U.S. have been white South Africans.)
Musk quit just a few months into his tenure in 2025, before DOGE shut down entirely. He reportedly took a swath of DOGE data with him, saw his wealth skyrocket, and became the world’s first trillionaire. Reporting on mathematical projections about how many people have been or will be killed by the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, cuts he pushed have ranged from hundreds of thousands to about 10 million to even tens of millions. (When Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., accused Musk of executing “a death sentence for an estimated 4.5 million children around the world,” Musk threatened to sue him.)
“We have rights for trans women only on paper.”
But not all harm results in immediate, quantifiable fatalities. HIV-related deaths usually take many years to occur, and South Africans who die of HIV, or due to an increasingly transphobic healthcare system, are unlikely to be mourned in any numerically comprehensive database.
In South Africa, being trans is not a crime — it’s legally protected thanks to its 1996 constitution shaped by Mandela. And yet, as one trans HIV-prevention worker put it, “we have rights for trans women only on paper.” Because trans care was largely being financed largely by USAID, PEPFAR, and CDC research, when U.S.-money disappeared, trans care went away — along with a lot of the much-needed HIV prevention for everyone.
Patients watch a soccer game on TV in the hospice at Hillcrest AIDS Centre on Nov. 29, 2025, in Hillcrest outside of Durban, South Africa. Photo: Per-Anders Pettersson/Getty Images
In South Africa, LGBT Pride celebrations happen in the fall to connect gay history to the September 24 Heritage Day national holiday.
At last year’s Soweto Pride in the all-Black township where Winnie Mandela once lived, there were no corporate sponsors and zero presence from the U.S. Embassy or any U.S.-based NGOs.
It was here The Intercept first met Sibonelo Ncanana Trower, the worker at OUT LGBT Well-Being which had run the now-shuttered Engage clinic. He and his partner were wearing matching rainbow sweaters. Nearly nine months after being laid off, he was still looking for work — and it was one of his first times going to a gay event.
Though he was no longer getting paid, Sibonelo still was doing a lot of public health work for free, out of a sense of communal responsibility.
“If you go on Grindr — and I don’t suggest that you do, it’s too dangerous,” Sibonelo said, “you will see many of my former colleagues offering services.” People who had been trained as social workers and peer educators to provide care to sex workers were now working as sex workers. In an email to The Intercept, Sibonelo said he is back to working at OUT as of early June.
As the festivities continued, the almost entirely Black crowd danced to a mix of hip hop, rap, and dance hall on a grass field, bordered on one side by tents. Under the banner “The Queer Nation Has No Borders,” a group of volunteers and workers at the SafePlace International tent welcomed LGBTQ+ migrants and refugees and offered help for finding housing and work.
While Europeans are routinely worried about African refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean to Greece or Italy, SafePlace explained that most migrants in Africa are not trying to leave the continent at all — and most queer and African migrants fleeing legal persecution head down to South Africa. They try to go south because they’ve correctly heard that South Africa is legally good for queer Africans and that they can claim asylum. But they also come because they’ve heard — rather incorrectly — that South Africans welcome migrants. (In recent decades, migrants have faced great hostility in South Africa, especially in the lead-up to 2025’s G20 summit in Johannesburg, which Trump boycotted, and in increasingly bold xenophobic protests in 2026.)
Mpho is a lesbian from rural South Africa, and she spoke about a kind of refugee status few Westerners consider. Mpho explained that people who come from within South Africa to Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria or Johannesburg are often called immigrants, for their distinct cultures, languages (South Africa officially has 12 languages), and understandings of sexuality, gender, and being intersex. She herself knew she was different; but in her township, where there is not constant connectivity with mass media, she didn’t know anyone like her until she came to a big city.
Masi has had an even more challenging route. He is a trans man born in Zambia who made his way to South Africa, after surviving an arranged marriage and a community shunning.
Mpho and Masi have both known trans people who have experienced extreme body dysmorphia, including trans men who have started to have periods again once they lost access to hormone replacement therapy due to the Trump–Musk cuts. They know someone who has gone into the public health system, had their doctor leave the room in the middle of a genital exam — and then return with a group of colleagues to laugh at their body.
This has led to a wave of depression and suicides among their friends. Masi has made the difficult decision to only “socially transition.” He has chosen to dress and live as a man without hormonal or surgical intervention, because he does not want to begin any process that he can’t finish, or which could be taken away from him for any time.
A 36-year-old HIV-positive sex worker and mother of one who requested anonymity shows a antiretroviral drug bought illegally on the black market in Johannesburg on June 20, 2025. Photo:Louise Dewast/AP
A few days later, Masi and Mpho drove into Johannesburg in a car early on a Saturday morning, decked out in “the queer nation has no borders” swag. With them was Mandi, a trans woman from Uganda. While Mandi waits for surgeries she plans to have, she has found a way to get estrogen — and stay on it — despite “the cuts.”
The three friends were on their way to perform an “Act of Kindness,” a part of SafePlace’s program where queer and trans people perform service projects which confer dignity upon each other. (SafePlace is privately funded, and like other privately funded NGOs, its work and workers are stressed in trying to meet the profound additional need in the wake of U.S. and WHO cuts.) Masi, Mpho, and Mandi would be serving lunch at a shelter for displaced queer women in the Vaal area, south of Johannesburg.
Mandi grew up assigned as a boy but knew she liked other boys. Uganda only made being gay a capital offense in the last couple of years, but it has been illegal in various forms since at least 2014. As in many places, Mandi’s legal problems did not come from random government surveillance; rather, she kissed a friend, whose parents found out, who told their school, who told the authorities, who arrested them both. This, in turn, outed Mandi to her family, who threw her out on the street. (She has never seen them again.)
Eventually, she made her way 5,000 kilometers by land to South Africa.
Mandi had an idea that South Africa “accepted people like me,” and while living on the streets of Cape Town (and then in the back of a restaurant where she did unpaid labor), someone pointed her to SafePlace. They found her a home, helped her get healthcare, and supported her in starting to live as a woman.
After crossing the Mandela Bridge, the roads shifted from highway to unpaved, red-clay-earth roads. They arrived in the Vaal and approached Orange Farm, an area well known to AIDS researchers for its high prevalence of HIV and for hosting many research studies, including the world’s first trial to see how circumcision could affect rates of HIV transmission.
Mpho, Masi, and Mandi pulled up to a nice home, double wide in size, which had a rainbow flag on its fence. This was the shelter where they’d be serving lunch.
The group set up a precarious gas stove in the garage and began cooking massive amounts of chicken, vegetables, and pap, the South African grain dish that is akin to Cream of Wheat in America or polenta in Italy.
Before the meal, Mandi got up in front of important community elders from the neighborhood and told her story. She implored them that the most important thing about having an LGBTQ+ child is to not kick them out and to stay connected. As a cautionary tale, she warned them that her elders now wanted her to return to Uganda to take care of them in old age — even after they’d abandoned her.
Gwendolyn Dube lives in the Orange Farm section of the Vaal, in a tin-roofed shack with no running water or electricity, not far from the Steve Biko Elementary School.
At 35, she has lived with HIV for more than 20 years; she was infected when she was raped as a child. She was among the first cohort of South African children to receive antiretroviral medication, or ARVs, in the early 2000s.
For many years, she received free medical care and ARVs at a clinic across the street from Eyethu Orange Farm Mall. It encompasses many buildings across a large campus, and its rooms are simple and very crowded. A small pride flag hangs on a poll beside the South African flag — both are at half mast, for no discernible reason.
While this is not officially an HIV clinic, Orange Farm has one of the highest rates of HIV anywhere in the world, and HIV is part of most medical care here. In a room with racked, connected plastic chairs like a bus terminal, signs read: “Are you or your child on ARVs? Do you know your VIRAL LOAD?”
Moving through the hall full of hundreds of mothers with children carried on backs in baby wraps, Gwendolyn recalled how difficult it’s become to get medicine. She used to get three months of treatment at a time, then two, then one. Then she was told there was no file for her.
“I think they say that when they’re overworked,” she said.
One of the workers behind the check-in desk told The Intercept that things have gotten much harder since the cuts: “We don’t turn people away. But we don’t have enough staff. People will come here and wait for 8, 10, even 12 hours — and sometimes they don’t even get to see someone about what they need.” (For people living in abject poverty, the loss of a day’s earnings can be devastating — especially if they have HIV and have to face this risk regularly.)
Another clinic worker shared that since the cuts, many visiting healthcare workers on U.S.-funded grants not only left, but also took their equipment with them.
“I used to send teams out every day. Now, it’s maybe once a week.”
The nurses of the clinic move with a military precision, even wearing military rank epaulets on their shoulders. The head of them is the “matron,” who, when asked by The Intercept, denied that they’ve run out of any medication, or that they turn people away (a claim Gwendolyn and others disputed). The matron conceded that sometimes people have to wait so long “they will leave” — and maybe don’t come back. She acknowledged that the clinic doesn’t always have the specific medication people need when they need it. She also bemoaned that it’s hard to keep staff, burnout and turnover are high, and that her mobile teams, which would go out into the townships, are severely limited.
“I used to send teams out every day,” she said. “Now, it’s maybe once a week.”
A pharmacist holds a vial of lenacapavir at the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation’s Masiphumelele Research Site in Cape Town, South Africa, on July 23, 2024. Photo: Nardus Engelbrecht/AP
Shon, a Black trans woman living with HIV, is still working at the Aurum Institute — at least for now. Unlike at the shuttered Engage clinic in Johannesburg, some staff remain in Aurum’s Pretoria office, but they decreased in number. As a result, Aurum is offering fewer services and steering patients to the public health system, where trans people receive little necessary care.
Aurum used to be a “one-stop shop” for trans women, Shon said. But now, after the cuts, doctors visits are no longer free and hormone drugs aren’t available at Aurum’s popular Pop Inn clinics. “The ladies do come to get [HIV medication], others come to get PrEP, but they cannot get hormones,” Shon said. “They’re told to go to a public clinic,” but “they don’t know anything about trans women!” Shon added that patients will be addressed with derogatory and incorrect terminology at such locations.
The stigma is too high to go to a public clinic, so Shon goes to a private doctor herself, when she can afford it. But getting hormones is now tough. While patients aren’t being blackmailed as they are in Uganda, “a pharmacist might say, ‘What do you need this for? No, I’m not giving it to you for that. I have other patients who really need it,’” Shon said.
Trans women are struggling, Shon said, recalling how she knew two “who were suffering from depression. One couldn’t take hormones, became really religious,” stopped hormones, and became suicidal. Another was suffering from liver problems after buying hormones on the contraband market, without the supervision of doctors.
Whenever transgender patients are taking contraband hormones via syringes which might not be sterile, they are being exposed to increased risks of contracting HIV and hepatitis — all because DOGE cuts took sterile medical care away from them.
Amid the devastating cuts to global HIV care, a potential breakthrough treatment is just beginning to reach patients. Lenacapavir, a new medication, promises to prevent HIV for six months with just one injection. But it comes with a prohibitively expensive $28,000-a-year price tag, making it out of reach for those who need it most.
Recently, the Global Fund for HIV, Tuberculosis, and Malaria struck a deal with pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences to produce the shot for $40 in limited quantities. Small amounts are headed to South Africa.
At an outdoor cafe under a massive tree in the picturesque city of Cape Town, Fatima Hassan, a legal and HIV scholar, blasted the pilot study coming to the republic.
The government’s approach was “making the same mistake” of excluding those who were most affected: sex workers and men who have sex with other men.
The plan is to bring a one-time shipment of 40,000 doses — a woefully inadequate number for a country of more than 60 million people where about 1 in 5 adults is living with the virus is living with the virus.
Worse, only a tiny fraction — 5 percent, or 2,000 doses — is to be set aside for testing on men who have sex with men.
None are going to be set aside for sex workers.
And another problem: So many of the people who would be needed to distribute lenacapavir to the people who need it most — to the gay college students who used the shuttered Engage clinic on Joburg’s Reserve Street, to the trans women who went to the Pretoria Pop Inn clinic — have been fired. Without those workers, can South Africa even distribute the medication?
Steps from the cafe, within sight of well-appointed apartments topped with electrified razor wire and the Desmond Tutu Health Foundation, there is a shantytown of cardboard-and-wood dwellings, home to some 100 Black adults without anywhere else to live.
A conservative estimate means that probably at least 20 of them were living with HIV, if not more.
And because of Trump and Musk, the people who used to find them and treat them have been fired — and are at higher risk of HIV themselves.
Rev. Frederick D. Haynes III speaks to the crowd during the We the People TX interfaith service, “A Night of Moral Resistance,” in Dallas, on Sept. 9, 2026.Photo: AP Photo/Gabriela Passos
“Why do you wanna have a pep rally when people are hurting?”
That was the question Rev. Frederick Douglass Haynes III posed at a September food drive in South Dallas, where volunteers were collecting groceries for struggling families. Across town, Republicans were holding a midterm convention. Haynes, a longtime Baptist pastor and Democratic congressional nominee, was introducing James Talarico, the party’s candidate for U.S. Senate in Texas.
A month later, speaking at a Dallas megachurch, Talarico offered his own interpretation of Christian duty.
“I try to love my neighbor through public policy,” the Presbyterian seminarian told the congregation. “I’m trying to make my neighbor’s life easier, better, less stressful.”
Both men are making a deceptively simple argument in some of the staunchly staunch red-as-hell, Republican territory in America, one that might transcend the conventional wisdom about national campaigns and the millions poured into competing campaign war chests: When far-right policy translates into actual pain, at what point does intervening become a spiritual obligation?
Amid the big-ticket ad buys, fundraising appeals, and armies of political consultants, Talarico and Haynes are tapping into a political tradition that has long sustained communities across the South: showing up.
At Haynes’s Friendship-West Baptist Church, the ministry extends to legal services, immigration advocacy, counseling, economic justice, and food policy. It is an example of how churches often form the connective tissue of communities suffering under economic and political strain.
When far-right policy translates into actual pain, at what point does intervening become a spiritual obligation?
That strain is measurable. Texas is home to four of the nation’s 10 most financially distressed major cities, including Houston, which ranks second nationwide, according to a 2026 analysis. Feeding America estimates that nearly 1 in 5 Texans experienced food insecurity in 2024. Meanwhile, federal analysts project that changes to Medicaid eligibility enacted last year will increase the number of uninsured Americans by 7.5 million by 2034.
While Democratic Party leaders publicly debate how to punish Donald Trump politically, allege corruption, or navigate the ideological divide between moderates and democratic socialists, a different argument is emerging from Southern pulpits.
The Underground Church
From Quaker abolitionists to the Social Gospel’s challenge to industrial exploitation, progressive religious institutions have helped drive some of America’s most consequential political transformations. Christian farmworker ministries supported migrant laborers before joining the United Farm Workers’ California grape boycotts in the 1960s. And while Black churches overwhelmingly led, sustained, and suffered the brunt of violence in the fight for equal civil rights in this country, a handful of white denominations joined them.
Of course, churches also defended slavery, segregation, and exploitation. The blunt reality is that throughout American history, Christianity has always been political and has been used to justify a wide variety of competing political ends.
But Republicans have deftly exploited the perception that they alone speak for American Christians. The Trump administration has readily embraced religious iconography, from evangelical leaders praying over the president in the Oval Office to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s frequent invocations of the medieval Crusades.
There is no way around the fact that Republicans have built a formidable religious coalition, particularly among white evangelicals. Last year, the nonprofit, nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, or PRRI, found a majority of Republicans qualified as either Christian nationalist adherents or sympathizers in 2025, compared with 17 percent of Democrats.
But Republicans don’t have a monopoly on Christian voters. Pew Research Center polling this month found 73 percent of white evangelical Protestant registered voters preferred Republican House candidates, while 74 percent of Black Protestants and 59 percent of Hispanic Catholics preferred Democrats. None of that is particularly surprising on the surface.
Nor is this some newly discovered religious awakening. According to PRRI’s Census of American Religion, which was published in April, 57 percent of Democrats identified as Christian in 2025, a significant drop from 70 percent in 2013. The white Christian left isn’t necessarily growing, but it’s far from insignificant. Much of it has simply been politically overlooked.
It’s a perception the GOP has routinely capitalized on, often spending a great deal of their election campaigns attacking opponents on religious ground.
“My faith is my moral compass,” Hinojosa told the National Catholic Register in September. “It grounds me in purpose and gives me the courage to do what is right regardless of obstacles or consequences.”
Faith Without Works Is a Dead End
For those who have spent years watching their faith become synonymous with a politics they don’t recognize, frustration may finally be giving way to something else: a determination to be heard.
There are signs that this long-overlooked religious tradition is finding a more public voice. An August study by PRRI documented progressive Christians organizing against Christian nationalism in eight states, including Texas and Louisiana, channeling local meetings, religious discussions, and community networks into political action. Elsewhere, hundreds of members of the clergy have joined protests against immigration enforcement, and some have been trained in direct action and civil resistance. While the movement may not be growing in numbers, its willingness to challenge political power is increasingly visible.
As retired Texas Rev. Kathleene Card, who has thrown her support behind Talarico, told the Houston Chronicle, “faith should influence how people respond to poverty, human rights, the environment, and the well-being of their community.”
Whether any of this will translate into winning on Tuesday is still an open question. An October Fox News poll put Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton at 49 percent apiece among likely voters, but newer polls show Talarico with a small lead. Abbott led Hinojosa by 5 percentage points in that Fox poll, and most polls in the race show the governor with a slim lead.
No matter the result, the Texas campaigns offer a different, more nuanced way of understanding political persuasion. They also challenge a long-standing assumption among national Democrats: that their voters are a monolith, moved by the same issues, values, and appeals.
There is something to be said for people willing to put boots on the ground, to do the work instead of endlessly debating how to begin and whether it matters, in the name of service.
It’s a moral code not too dissimilar to a Western: When confronted with injustice, you stand for what’s right, even if you stand alone and are ridiculed for what you believe. It’s a mode of Christianity that harkens back to Abraham Lincoln (and maybe even John Brown.)
That might be a more enduring political proposition than many Democrats’ feigned, helpless aggrievance to the latest Republican spectacle. Campaigns come and go; so do their promises, if they existed in the first place. But the obligation to one’s neighbors remains.
An alleged Turkish crime syndicate leader who survived an assassination attempt some two weeks earlier was fatally shot inside a Spanish hospital room early Thursday in a highly coordinated hit.
Catalonia’s regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra, announced they are investigating the fatal shooting of an admitted patient at a hospital in Tarragona. While police placed the case under a judicial secrecy order, a law enforcement source confirmed to OCCRP that the victim was Mekin Büyükdeniz, a member of the Ten Brothers criminal group.
According to Turkish media, the Küçükçekmece Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office formally named Büyükdeniz in prosecutorial filings as the operational leader of the so-called “10 Brothers” gang. In the organizational hierarchy documented in the prosecutor’s investigation, the syndicate was identified as a family-centered armed network directed by the Büyükdeniz brothers.
The meticulously timed execution occurred around 3:15 a.m., just ten minutes after Büyükdeniz was transferred from intensive care to a regular room on the hospital’s fifth floor, Sabah reported. To create a diversion, an accomplice allegedly distracted hospital security by sexually harassing a nurse. This allowed a helmeted gunman on an electric scooter to slip through the emergency room entrance, go directly to Büyükdeniz’s room, and shoot him three times in the head and body in front of his wife. Following the attack, his wife was placed under police protection, the outlet noted.
Büyükdeniz was recovering at the Joan XXIII Hospital following an October 16 drive-by shooting in the nearby coastal town of Salou, where a gunman fired 10 shots and wounded him in the legs. According to Sabah, Büyükdeniz had refused to give a statement to police and brought in a private bodyguard from Turkey. Assessing that the security risk had dropped, local law enforcement removed his police protection just before the attack.
Following Thursday’s assassination, the hitman reportedly escaped through the hospital’s garbage collection area. Catalan police immediately activated an emergency protocol, setting up roadblocks across Tarragona and Catalonia to hunt for the suspects, Sabah reported.
The Mossos d’Esquadra confirmed that their Criminal Investigation Division (DIC) has taken over the probe. Emergency services also activated a psychological support team for the hospital staff.
Early voting for the midterm elections in Los Angeles this month Grace Hie Yoon/Anadolu via Getty Images
Ahead of next week’s midterm elections, President Donald Trump has systematically demolished institutional guardrails that prevented him from overturning the 2020 presidential election, ProPublica’s reporting has shown.
Our reporters have spent much of this year covering Trump’s efforts to exert more federal control over elections. Here are five takeaways from their reporting.
1. The Trump administration has sought greater federal control over elections.
In April, Doug Bock Clark and Jen Fifield reported on Trump’s efforts to “take over” the midterm elections, detailing how the administration has discarded or diminished endeavors across the federal government to protect the voting process or block foreign interference. Those efforts have included cutting staff on election-related teams at federal law enforcement agencies and finding ways to exert greater federal control over voting.
Our reporting led by Peter Elkind revealed that the Trump administration harnessed Homeland Security Investigations’ personnel, technology and legal authority to try to back up Trump’s unproven claim that illegal voting by noncitizens is tilting elections toward Democrats. Administration officials insisted the effort spearheaded by HSI was producing meaningful results. Our analysis of Justice Department data found, as of May, 41 alleged noncitizens were charged with voting illegally or other election-related crimes. Earlier this month, CBS reported 156 people have been charged since the beginning of the second Trump administration.
“Paper Trail” Podcast
Learn more about this story on ProPublica’s podcast “Paper Trail.”
As part of that effort, the Justice Department has demanded states turn over unredacted voter rolls, which contain confidential information on millions of Americans and have historically been managed by states. Since September 2025, the department has sued 30 states and the District of Columbia for the confidential data. Wary of federal overreach, state officials — including some Republicans — have fought back, and so far every DOJ lawsuit that’s been decided by a federal judge has been dismissed. (The Trump administration has appealed most of its losses to federal appeals courts and has said it will consider taking its fight to the Supreme Court. A Justice Department spokesperson said its “attorneys are skilled, principled advocates who argue every case honestly and in good faith.”)
In a March executive order, Trump instructed the U.S. Postal Service to create new regulations for mail voting. The rules would have put the Postal Service in the unprecedented role of deciding whether to send or deny the delivery of voters’ mail-in ballots. The Supreme Court in September blocked the rules, at least until after November.
The Trump administration has said its actions will make U.S. elections fairer and more secure — and keep those prohibited from voting, such as noncitizens, from doing so. Spokespeople for the DOJ and Department of Homeland Security emphasized that their departments are focused on ensuring elections are free and fair, and that they are working closely with the states to achieve those goals. Contentions to the contrary, they say, are false.
2. Trump has pushed out career officials — and is coordinating with a conservative grassroots organization to transform elections.
At least 75 nonpartisan career officials who’d held roles at federal agencies related to election integrity and safety have been fired or left the government.
Two dozen Trump appointees — including many from the election-denial movement — have been hired. Ahead of the midterms, current and former government officials and election security experts have expressed concerns that once-fringe actors who’ve espoused debunked conspiracy theories about elections are now in positions to control the narrative around the voting process. (A DHS spokesperson said it hires “experts with diverse backgrounds who go through a rigorous vetting process.”)
At least 25 administration appointees have close ties to Cleta Mitchell, a lawyer who leads Election Integrity Network, a grassroots conservative group focused on transforming America’s voting system. This month, Clark profiled Mitchell — and detailed how, despite not holding a formal role in the White House, she’s played a key role in shaping the Trump administration’s elections agenda. The White House has appointed her associates to help hunt for noncitizen voters and investigate accusations of voting fraud in 2020. (Mitchell declined multiple requests to speak with ProPublica, but wrote in an email: “You’re my opponent. … You’re never going to write in any objective, non-judgmental way about the election integrity movement.”)
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Mitchell, who played a role in helping Trump challenge his loss in the 2020 presidential election, has been leading efforts to pass state and federal iterations of the SAVE Act. The 2026 version of the bill, known as the SAVE America Act, would require voters nationwide to provide proof of citizenship to register and present a photo ID to vote, and would compel states to turn over their voter rolls to DHS. Trump has repeatedly called the measure his top legislative priority, but it has been blocked in the Senate.
In July, Trump also pushed out the remaining members of the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission, a four-member board designed to be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats that sets standards for state voting systems. (At the time, a White House official wouldn’t confirm the moves but said the president “reserves the right to remove individuals that may not be totally aligned with the important task of securing America’s elections and ensuring every legal vote is counted.”)
3. Trump officials asked a cybersecurity agency to secretly acquire a voting machine — and hack it.
A few months into Trump’s second term, political appointees at DHS asked its Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure a voting machine, hack it and report the findings so they could be given to the White House, two former administration officials with knowledge of the request told Clark and Andy Mannix.
CISA employees told the political appointees their request was impossible, in part because the agents capable of pulling off such an operation had just been laid off by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. (One of Trump’s first actions when he returned to the White House was to dismantle the agency’s election security work.)
Though not acted on, the request shows how the Trump administration has tried to use the agency for its own ends while draining it of resources for one of its critical missions: protecting the nation’s voting systems. Since CISA became an agency in 2018, it has come to provide crucial support to thousands of local election officials grappling with increasingly sophisticated attacks.
But some state election officials said CISA provided them with little help as they planned for the 2026 midterms. And other state authorities told Clark and Mannix that they no longer trusted the agency and feared it had been compromised by the Trump administration. (A DHS spokesperson told us in April the “claim that DHS has a broken partnership with states and made our elections less secure is simply false.”)
DHS did not respond to questions for our October investigation, but a DHS spokesperson previously told ProPublica that the changes at CISA were in response to “a ballooning budget concealing a dangerous departure from its statutory mission,” which included “electioneering instead of defending America’s critical infrastructure.” A White House spokesperson declined an interview request but said, “President Trump has done more than any other President to ensure we have free and fair elections.”
4. The White House floated an idea that would’ve shut down virtually all mail-in voting.
The White House initially proposed a change for the Postal Service that would’ve been even more disruptive than the rule the Supreme Court rejected in September.
As Fifield and Elkind reported, the Trump administration suggested all ballots be delivered through certified mail, meaning voters would need to be home to sign for delivery of their ballots. The Trump administration dropped this plan after the USPS said it would be too difficult to execute. It instead proceeded with the executive order that would’ve forced postal workers to serve as gatekeepers, deciding which ballots would be delivered and which wouldn’t.
In an emailed statement, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis denied the administration had interfered improperly with the Postal Service, an independent agency whose governance structure is specifically designed to protect it from political influence.
The Supreme Court’s order in September means that voting by mail can proceed as planned for the midterms, with states left to decide the rules for mail-in ballots.
5. The Postal Service’s cost-cutting measures have led to delays and more rejected ballots in rural areas.
Amid the increased attention on the Postal Service’s role in elections, a ProPublica analysis found that delays resulting from the agency’s cost-cutting measures in recent years have endangered the validity of ballots cast in rural areas.
The Postal Service has consolidated processing of first-class mail into regional hubs, and the agency cut the frequency of mail pickups in half at many post offices 50 miles or more from those processing plants. The changes often added a day or more to delivery time and pushed back postmarking, an official mark confirming an envelope has been received by the Postal Service.
Across five states where the best data was available — Washington, California, Ohio, North Carolina and Oregon — the delays during this year’s primary elections have had the most substantial effect in areas that voted for Trump in 2024.
Postal Service leaders say such delays are less likely in the Nov. 3 general election because of “extraordinary measures” the agency puts in place for these votes, when there’s typically far more turnout.
During his first term in office, U.S. President Donald J. Trump drew criticism for profiting from events held at Trump-branded golf courses and housing foreign delegations at his pricey Washington hotel.
But upon his return, he has blown past all precedents on personal enrichment while also overseeing the systematic unraveling of American anti-corruption laws, institutions, and norms.
While many of these moves have been enforced by the U.S. government’s executive branch, the Republican-led Congress has done little to stop the slide — and, in some cases, has even encouraged it.
So when U.S. voters head to the polls on November 3 for midterm elections, it is not just control of the House of Representatives and the Senate that is at stake, but the future of efforts to contain corruption at home and abroad.
On the eve of the election, OCCRP spoke to experts to take stock of the state of U.S. corruption — and the fight against it — today, whether Democrats have a plan to reverse course, and what the repercussions of Trump’s actions have been at home and abroad.
The White House did not respond to requests to comment in time for publication.
How has the U.S. approach to fighting corruption at home changed under Trump?
Since returning to the White House in January 2025, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to anti-corruption programs and policies that have long been a source of bipartisan consensus.
One of the president’s first moves involved the mass firing of 17 inspectors general — non-partisan officials whose job it is to investigate misconduct, waste, fraud, and abuse across different government agencies and report back to Congress.
At least 22 inspectors general were removed during Trump’s first 18 months, and as of a week before the midterm elections, 27 posts remained vacant.
The administration didn’t provide a reason for their firing or notify Congress at the time, which a federal judge later ruled was unlawful.
The administration has also paused and weakened several key pieces of anti-corruption legislation, including a landmark 2021 law that sought to combat the flow of illicit finance through the U.S. by requiring companies to report their ultimate beneficial owners, known as UBOs.
Known as the Corporate Transparency Act, the law was meant to prevent criminals and kleptocrats from secretly stashing their wealth behind anonymous shell companies.
But this past August, the Treasury Department issued a new rule that dropped the disclosure requirement for U.S. companies and individuals, calling it a “burdensome reporting requirement.”
(This week, more than 20 U.S. states sued the administration over the rollback, arguing that laws passed by Congress can’t be undone by rulemaking.)
Erica Hanichak, co-director of the FACT Coalition, which advocates for rules to combat financial crime, describes the curtailing of the law as one of the ways the U.S. has “undeniably stepped back its fight against dirty money” over the past two years.
The consequences are far-reaching — and run contrary to the goals of law enforcement and other national security officials, she said.
When UBO information is kept secret, it makes it “harder for law enforcement and intelligence officials to follow the proceeds of financial crime, thereby handing a major win to cartels, U.S. adversaries, corrupt politicians, and fraudsters.”
In one recent example, the U.S. watchdog on federal spending noted that the lack of such data is hampering the ability to detect fraud in government contracting, leaving “hundreds of billions of federal dollars” vulnerable to “beneficial ownership-related fraud risks.”
Last year, the Justice Department prosecuted 11 people tied to a Russian transnational criminal organization that exploited the weak ownership reporting requirements to fraudulently bill the Medicare system, stealing almost $1 billion.
The Trump administration has also watered down the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), a 1977 law that makes it illegal for American businesses to bribe foreign officials, and which has also allowed the U.S. government to prosecute and fine foreign companies engaging in bribery if they list their stocks or debt instruments in U.S. financial markets.
Arguing that the restriction put U.S. companies at a competitive disadvantage, the administration initially paused enforcement of the law and then later published new guidelines that called for focusing on cases that undermine U.S. interests.
According to Richard Nephew, a scholar at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, the real danger goes beyond what he notes has been a significant decrease in fines and convictions.
More worrying, he has written, is what “the overall picture signals about whether the United States takes bribery seriously, and how that signal changes the risk calculus for companies deciding whether to comply.”
He pointed to Trump’s own embrace of controversial gifts while in office — the most notable of which has been a $400 million jet from Qatar set to serve as Air Force One.
“When the President of the United States is accepting a gold bar as a gift, it is reasonable to ask whether similar gifts given to other foreign heads of state will be seen as grounds for investigations, much less prosecutions,” Nephew wrote in the law and policy journal Just Security.
What about U.S. anti-corruption efforts abroad?
Dating back to the 1960s, successive U.S. administrations have pioneered transparency, good governance, and programs to combat corruption around the world, even if their implementation was uneven and imperfect. But the Trump administration has actively retreated from efforts to curb graft abroad in ways both big and small.
For instance, it quickly dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), one of the main instruments for funding anti-corruption efforts overseas, and froze the disbursement of foreign funding.
(OCCRP formerly received grants from USAID, and became a plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Trump administration for illegally terminating funding that had been allocated by Congress.)
The State Department’s Office of the Coordinator on Global Anti-Corruption — a post created in 2021 to integrate anti-corruption efforts with Washington’s foreign policy goals — was also eliminated soon after Trump took office, as was the Task Force KleptoCapture, a unit created by the Justice Department in 2022 to go after sanctions evaders, especially Russian oligarchs. The Justice Department said the latter was part of a policy realignment to focus on fighting cartels.
The administration has also stepped away from smaller but symbolic efforts to stamp out corruption overseas, such as no longer including information about corruption in the State Department’s annual country reports on human rights. (The State Department did not respond to requests to comment).
And then there’s the controversial use of the Magnitsky Act, which was passed in 2012 to allow the U.S. government to sanction foreigners who engage in corruption or human rights abuses.
The president shocked anti-corruption crusaders last year when he used the Magnitsky Act to sanction a Brazilian Supreme Court justice who oversaw the trial of Brazil’s former president Jair Bolsonaro, a Trump ally later convicted of plotting a coup after losing the 2022 election.
(The conviction prevented Bolsonaro from running for office, leading his son Flavio to take up the family mantle and narrowly lose a presidential runoff election this past Sunday. Facing a money laundering investigation in Brazil, Flavio fled the country for the U.S.)
“Global Magnitsky was a huge win when it passed … and the human rights community and the anti-corruption community celebrated,” said Gary Kalman, director of Transparency International U.S.
“Never in our wildest imagination would we have dreamed that a president of the United States would use the Global Magnitsky Act to go after a judge in another country for enforcing anti-corruption laws.”
What about Trump and his family? Have they engaged in corrupt behavior?
U.S. presidents have historically stepped away from their personal business interests to avoid conflicts of interest, or even the perception of a conflict.
Yet Trump’s latest annual financial disclosure — which runs 927 pages long and covers his first year back in office — shows a significant increase in his income while president. Last month, Forbes estimated he was $2.7 billion richer than when he won the 2024 election.
The source of this wealth comes from cryptocurrency enterprises, Trump-owned resorts and real estate, his social media platform Truth Social, and a range of other business ventures, many of which are rife with potential conflicts of interest.
“I don’t think that there’s any president who has so brazenly used their office to create a web of foreign entanglements that enriches himself, his family, and some of his closest advisors and their families,” said Matthew Dallek, a historian specializing on presidential politics at George Washington University.
The examples to choose from are numerous. For instance, the collective Trump fortunes soared earlier this year when an investment firm reportedly connected to the United Arab Emirates’ ruling family bought nearly half of a Trump family-connected cryptocurrency company.
A company backed by Trump’s sons has also sought to sell drone interceptors to Gulf countries while they were under attack by Iran following a war started by their father.
Trump and other officials’ frequent visits to the president’s properties, meanwhile, generate advertising and revenue for those businesses — and open up avenues through which others can use their wallets to try to curry favor with the president.
Taken together, experts have described it as an unprecedented level of political profiteering that raises the risk of the president putting his business interests ahead of those of the country.
It’s also a problem that won’t be easy to fix.
Trump’s second term has exposed just how much the U.S. presidential system depends on “an adherence to norms and a set of expectations and values…rather than strict rules and laws preventing a president from corrupt actions,” Dallek said.
In previous comments to the press, a White House spokesperson has stated that “neither the president nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest.” When asked about his lucrative year following the release of his financial disclosures this June, Trump attributed the profits to the stock market “going up” and said he never spoke to the people who manage his money.
“We are experiencing what happens when you have an individual who dismisses ethical norms,” said Kalman of Transparency International. “People are now trying to figure out how you close these kinds of gaps in our ethics rules at the highest levels of our government.”
One avenue, he said, is to secure the roles of state actors that could provide a counterweight to the Justice Department, whose independence has been called into question as it has pursued investigations against the president’s opponents and dropped cases involving allies.
“I think there’s a lot of district attorneys and law enforcement officials that are concerned about what they’re seeing as the weaponization of the Justice Department,” said Kalman. “If the U.S. Justice Department gets taken over by the executive, you have what we have now, which is a lack of accountability or unwillingness to enforce any of the violations that we’ve seen happen.”
The Justice Department did not respond to requests to comment.
Democrats are trying to take back Congress. What is their plan if they succeed?
Polls show voters cite corruption as a major concern, and Democrats have pledged to investigate corruption if they regain control of one or both chambers of Congress.
Should they win back at least the House of Representatives, they would be in a position to legislate and hold oversight hearings. They’ve already signaled plans to spotlight the business entanglements of the Trump family and friends, and say they won’t be shy about using their power to subpoena witnesses.
“We can bring in members of the Cabinet and ask them questions and perhaps see if there’s any way we can get rid of some of them,” Rep. Dina Titus, a Nevada Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, told OCCRP. Her panel will “look at some of this corruption that’s going on around the rest of the world involving the administration and some of their buddies and relatives,” she added.
Much of what Democrats will be able to do hinges on the size of their victory, and some of their plans have yet to be spelled out in detail.
“Democrats are running on corruption, but they’re not running on a specific platform of how they’re going to reform or fix the system or address many of Trump’s egregious acts,” said Dallek, the historian.
In a recent interview with the TV outlet MS Now, New York Democrat Hakeem Jeffries, the current House minority leader, outlined plans for the first 100 days of the next Congress that included empowering two committees to look into corruption.
He has said the Judiciary Committee and the House Oversight Committee would be tasked with accountability and looking into the Trump family business entanglements.
“We’re going to follow the facts, apply the law, be guided by the Constitution and then let the chips fall where they may,” he said.
Congressional Republicans, for their part, have prominently used their oversight powers to investigate people named in or associated with the Epstein files, including Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. The committee has also investigated tax breaks given to politically opposed non-profit organizations, while their anti-corruption agenda has largely been focused on reversing the “Censorship Industrial Complex,” a term used to describe those they say are suppressing right-wing viewpoints online under the pretense of limiting disinformation.
Hanichak, from the FACT Coalition, called on the next Congress — regardless of who holds the reins after Tuesday — to “strengthen guardrails to prevent public officials from profiting from power.”
“We are what we tolerate: in most cases, the recent reticence of both Republicans and Democrats to denounce corruption by colleagues in their own parties has bred public distrust about the sincerity of reform,” she said.
“We need more transparency and accountability — in elections, in our financial system, in government contracts and services — to restore faith that democracy can deliver for ordinary people.”
Shortly after taking office in early 2025, the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump paused the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA), the nearly 50-year-old law that prohibits American citizens or companies from bribing foreign officials for business.
When the FCPA was resumed six months later, the U.S. Department of Justice was ordered to narrow its focus to limit “undue burdens” on American companies operating outside the country. That action was in line with the Trump administration’s “America First” unilateral approach to foreign policy, which has seen the U.S. withdraw from dozens of international organizations on the grounds that they are inefficient and not in line with the country’s priorities.
Lorenzo Crippa, a lecturer at the University of Strathclyde who quantitatively studies how recorded instances of corruption affect financial flows, discusses the repercussions of these changes and worrying trends that have emerged under the new U.S. approach to global anti-corruption enforcement.
The U.S. has changed the way it applies the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, and last month it was announced it will officially withdraw from GRECO, the Council of Europe’s anti-corruption body. U.S. officials reportedly said the government would instead use unilateral tools like sanctions and visa restrictions to fight corruption, which they described as more effective. Based on your research, do you think the rejection of collaborative global standards in favor of mechanisms a country controls itself can be more effective?
I would say hardly so. In the anti-corruption space, likely the opposite is true. It’s just enough to look at history: the U.S. adopted the FCPA (Foreign Corrupt Practices Act) in 1977, and for 20 years, the law was basically silent until a global regime on anti-corruption was passed at the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) with the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.
The law was on the books, but it was effectively not enforced, because the fear was that enforcing the law would disadvantage American companies at a time when German competitors and French competitors could even deduct bribes from tax statements.
That all changed with the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. At the end of the ‘90s, that’s the moment we see enforcement of the FCPA, effectively for the first time.
The same could be said when we think of other areas of governance, more generally. There’s research in political science and international relations that clearly shows that coordination among countries is the most effective way to address global issues, rather than unilateral actions. So, I’m at the very least skeptical that that could be the case.
In unrelated research of mine with some co-authors, we looked at the effect of American sanctions on financial markets, and we find that they can actually backfire for American firms that are connected to the sanctioned entities. So there’s even evidence that a multilateral solution could probably be more desirable.
You co-authored an article in Foreign Affairs this year on how Washington may now be weaponizing anti-corruption law. Many critics of the U.S. say that its laws were hardly neutral before, and often applied for geopolitical or economic leverage, or even amounted to a form of imperialism. How would you respond to that line of argument?
Certainly it’s true that the FCPA had been enforced in the past also for geopolitical reasons. I’m sympathetic to these claims. What has changed is that the approach of the Trump administration seems to be one where American firms get a free pass, and non-American firms would be subject to harsher enforcement. Or at least the expectation seems to be this one. And if that’s the case, this is a significant change from the past.
If we compare it from the past situation, [despite] the fact that non-U.S. firms might have been significantly charged under the FCPA, American firms were still subject to this policy to a full extent. Whereas here, what we’re observing is the possibility of a double standard. That could genuinely be concerning, because that would be outright weaponization.
Like I said, I’m sympathetic with these critics of the FCPA but it did manage to get some massive cases of corruption brought to justice — even of American firms. I think the largest fine in FCPA history is Goldman Sachs. It was certainly far from ideal, but probably closest to the best that was realistically adoptable as an anti-corruption policy. So its reshaping under the Trump administration is, to me, concerning.
What are your specific concerns? What could be the broader effects on corruption around the globe if they don’t target U.S. firms and selectively target non-U.S. firms?
When Trump initially halted enforcement of the FCPA in 2025, I was initially puzzled. The FCPA has been used as a tool of foreign policy as well, so getting rid of this or pausing it altogether, was puzzling to me.
But when the period of pause was over and enforcement resumed, under new revised guidelines, what seems to be the case is that it’s going to be enforced primarily with the purpose of defending American foreign interests. At the moment we just have a handful of new cases after this change in enforcement, which makes it a little bit difficult as of now to understand if that’s really the direction that this is going.
What my co-authors and I found was that at the very least markets seem to have priced in that expectation. We found that the moment the FCPA was suspended, firms that had been targets of FCPA actions in the past significantly experienced a boost in their stock price, which reflects the idea that probably investors expected a lax enforcement environment coming, for the rest of the Trump administration at least. That essentially means putting a bonus on the possibility of corrupt activity. It’s a very robust change that we observe from the moment enforcement was made laxer.
In the past decades, we got used to the idea that corruption was bad for business, that investors would prefer a cleaner firm. These results, at least in this historical moment, seem to indicate the opposite: That these market actors would be willing to bet on more corruption. This is somewhat of a step change when it comes to corporate governance and good governance of business. Then again, this gain in stock price was concentrated on American firms. Non-American firms saw no improvement to their valuation, which seems to reflect this idea that there’s going to be weaponization going forward.
With those same co-authors, you published another paper this year studying the effects of the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention, finding that the drop in bribery by companies who comply with the convention was basically offset by an increase in bribery from non-signatory competitors. What can we conclude from this? Is it casting doubt on whether the OECD convention or any “supply side” treaty targeting bribers can work?
That’s a tricky question, because that paper clearly shows two faces of the same coin. On the one hand, it shows that these treaties are working because they generate strong incentives for those outside the treaty to make the most out of the advantage that they can get. That shows firms covered by the treaty that cannot bribe with impunity. The other face of the coin, that this is offset by corruption from firms outside the treaty, is really concerning. It means that something should be done.
We had a meeting with the OECD working group on bribery about this when we were disseminating the results of our findings. I think they’re very aware of this problem. My main takeaway from this is that the solution is [an] expansion of these treaties. As long as there are double standards, as long as there are firms outside of the treaty who can bribe with impunity, the risk of this leakage (that’s what we call it where corruption sort of leaks to the group of firms outside of the treaty) becomes larger.
Historically, the way this has been solved was by trying to expand participation to the treaty. In the ‘90s, that meant having France, Germany, and Japan in the treaty. Right now, probably that means trying to expand to China, Singapore, Taiwan — jurisdictions with firms that are very heavily involved in business, but who can bribe with impunity. I understand that calling for more multilateralism these days seems idealistic, but really that’s the only way that we can ensure that these supply side treaties can work in a sense.
My research doesn’t do much on this, but existing research of others does show that in the past a strategy has been to use domestic anti-corruption needs of countries. When the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention was signed, the U.S., who was heavily pushing for this treaty, managed to sort of exploit the fact that European countries were facing their own domestic corruption scandals. In Italy, for example, the Mani pulite [“clean hands”] scandal was a big thing in the ‘90s, and that was a significant reason why the U.S. managed to put pressure on this treaty to exist. So if treaty members were able to exploit the fact that, domestically in other parts of the world, there might be a need for more anti-corruption reforms, this could be one lever to try and extend participation.
I wouldn’t be certain that these [multilateral treaties] are the ideal solutions, but of the ones that have been tried, they seem to have been quite effective. At least in the shape that they used to have, with a multilateral agreement, and within that agreement, the United States playing a significant role in enforcement, for the good and bad that that was. This role as a global sheriff, in a sense, has managed to reduce corruption and bring large cases of bribery to justice. Now, whether that is the ideal solution, I’m not sure. There certainly is evidence that this was working, and jeopardizing that with the recent moves of the Trump administration makes me somewhat worried.
Could the U.S. look to resume its role as “global sheriff” if U.S. President Donald Trump’s Republican Party suffers the kind of losses currently being predicted in polling for next week’s U.S. midterm elections?
There’s a group of senators led by Elizabeth Warren who are trying to propose a bill called the FCPA Reinforcement Act. The idea is to extend the statute of limitations of the FCPA so that it could effectively be protected by future political decisions to halt enforcement again. This specific bill is very unlikely to pass — it’s mostly like a signalling device.
But under a flip [of congressional power in next week’s elections] … that’s a hypothetical. [but] Mmy expectation would be that it would counteract the negative effect that we saw on stock market movements at least. By protecting the FCPA from political swings it should reinforce the idea that enforcement is going to happen, and that good anti-corruption governance is the expectation, and that companies and investors shouldn’t deviate from that. So at the very least, I would expect it should reassure markets of that and prevent investors from betting on corruption. I’m not sure this would do much to change this idea of enforcing the FCPA more strongly on non-American companies. I’m not sure that would be something that the bill itself could address. But at the very least, it should remove part of the problem.
A Cairo court on Tuesday ordered the closure of news outlet Mada Masr and convicted its editor-in-chief Lina Attalah of managing an unlicensed website. The ruling sparked outrage among press freedom advocates, who warned it marked a significant escalation in ongoing attacks against independent media in Egypt.
Attalah was briefly detained and ordered to pay the maximum penalty of 3 million Egyptian pounds, equivalent to more than $50,000, according to Mada Masr. Upon her release, Attalah learned a one-year prison sentence was issued against her in absentia in 2024 on separate charges of publishing false news and operating an unlicensed website. Her lawyers challenged the ruling, and a retrial is scheduled for Nov. 11, Mada Masr reported.
“If Egypt can put in custody one of its most respected editors and shut down her newsroom, no independent journalist in the country is safe,” Sara Qudah, regional director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said in a public statement.
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In the spring of 2005, the United Nations convened more than 100 of the world’s top scientists in the medieval town of Oviedo, Spain. They were there to finish writing a paradigm-shifting report about a technology that they hoped could help stop climate change.
To celebrate the report’s impending completion, the meeting’s hosts handed out bottles of cava, Spanish sparkling wine, with tongue-in-cheek labels stating that they were to be opened only by those who truly believed it could work.
Belief was necessary because the technology — carbon capture and storage, or CCS — had barely been tested. The idea was simple: strip carbon dioxide from smokestacks before it could flow into the air and warm the planet. Then pump it into a porous part of the Earth’s crust and leave it there. Forever.
The experts in Oviedo had stacks of papers proving that parts of the process worked. But major questions remained about how much space exists inside the Earth to store the CO2, how effectively it could be monitored and whether the poisonous, concentrated gas would reliably stay underground.
Tasked with wrangling roughly three dozen of those scientists toward consensus was Sally Benson, a geoscientist from Lawrence Berkeley National Lab who was co-leading the report’s chapter on underground storage of carbon. After a quarter-century of studying how fluids and gases move beneath Earth’s surface, she was an unimpeachable authority on the subject. She was also a savvy and diplomatic leader, skilled at managing rooms full of big egos and big tempers. It was proving handy in a process that had at times devolved into unruly debate.
The scientists had clashed for years over what the report should say, first at a meeting in Canada, then in Norway, Australia and Brazil. The evidence was scant. Three large-scale experiments were underway, but only one — a Norwegian operation that captured carbon from a natural gas field and pumped it under the bed of the North Sea — had rigorously tested permanent storage. There, the injected CO2 astonished engineers when it floated 700 feet upward through a series of geologic formations. To their relief, it hit a ceiling of shale that kept it underground, and the project was deemed a success. But with so little to go on, the scientists warned in their first draft that any broad statement about leakage risk would be “almost meaningless.”
The researchers were in Oviedo only because Saudi Arabia and other oil-exporting countries had pressured the U.N. to write the report despite the paucity of evidence, according to U.N. officials and records. The oil, gas and coal industries had spent years casting doubt on climate change while quietly fretting that policies to address it would one day put them out of business. The industry, documents show, saw CCS as a way to forestall that outcome, allowing the world to keep burning fossil fuels while simply burying the pollution underground. A U.N. report would bring the technology into the mainstream.
In turn, the U.N. hoped such a report would draw the oil-producing nations into its search for climate solutions. So despite objections from some nations and environmental organizations, which warned that the report would distract from the imperative to phase out fossil fuels, the U.N.’s preeminent climate science authority, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, went ahead. And for the first time, it invited a large contingent of industry researchers to join the scientists in writing the report, as well as several representatives from environmental groups. Benson’s chapter included authors and editors from Shell, Chevron and Saudi Aramco.
The process that followed would make some of the chapter’s scientists uneasy. The IPCC’s procedures stated that reports should assess the existing research on a topic based on peer-reviewed literature and that exceptions must be reviewed and clearly cited.
Bert Metz, one of the highest-ranking U.N. officials at the meeting, was pressing the group to come up with more definitive language about CCS’ potential. The report would be better if it could offer hard numbers, even where none existed in the literature: Precisely how many gigatons of storage capacity did the planet likely have? How long would a well-designed reservoir hold the CO2 injected into it? More than a year? A thousand years?
With so little evidence to work with, David Keith, a Canadian physicist, proposed a workaround: The authors could conduct an “expert elicitation,” taking an anonymous survey about what they expected the evidence to eventually show.
At first, not everyone was willing to go along. Some scientists worried that making what amounted to educated guesses would mislead the public, they told Drilled and ProPublica. Benson and Metz, though, both argued that on such an important matter informed advice was better than nothing.
In the end, the group agreed to take the survey and to keep it off the record — they would “burn it afterward,” Keith recounted, making no mention of it in the official report. When the meeting concluded, some of the scientists popped their bottles of cava in celebration.
“It’s not the hard science that you would prefer, obviously,” Metz would later tell Drilled and ProPublica.
Five months later, the IPCC published its special report, which would help legitimize CCS for a generation.
The 431-page document portrayed CCS as a potential savior for the climate that could enable countries “to continue to include fossil fuels in their energy mix.” It stated that using CCS could lower the cost of stabilizing global CO2 concentrations by at least 30% and that if fully supported by policy, it could account for as much as 55% of the world’s efforts to limit climate change through this century.
It acknowledged that there were still gaps in research and experience with the technology — offering extensive detail deep within its pages about the challenges and uncertainties of piecing together separate but proven steps in the CCS process. But its summary stated that “there are no major technical or knowledge barriers” to storing captured CO2 underground.
All of those assertions, however, rested on the critical determinations made by the scientists handling the storage chapter.
Benson’s group wrote that the planet offered vast CO2 storage capacity. Storage sites that were well selected and well managed, they said, were likely to retain 99% of the carbon pumped into them for at least 1,000 years.
Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica
A Consequential Decision
The scientists’ conclusions that day in Spain have had profound, compounding consequences.
The special report has been cited in thousands of academic papers, in legislative testimony and in media coverage validating carbon capture and storage as a realistic solution to global warming.
When climate forecasters built models, their calculations assumed CCS would work. When governments and corporations began making so-called “net zero” pledges, promising to subtract as much CO2 from the atmosphere as they add, they assumed CCS would work. When policymakers gave energy companies billions of dollars in public funds to develop “clean coal,” they assumed CCS would work.
These presumptions shifted the world’s discourse from how to limit carbon pollution to how to remove it from the atmosphere after the fact.
Enthusiasm for the technology has only grown. This spring, California embarked on one of the world’s largest carbon burial endeavors yet. While President Donald Trump eviscerated most programs addressing the climate, he has expanded subsidies for CCS. There are more than 100 applications for storage sites pending in the U.S. alone. U.N. analyses suggest that to achieve environmental goals, a CCS industry the size of the entire global oil production industry would have to be built by 2050.
But 21 years after Oviedo, a staggering gap lies between expectations for the technology and its operational reality. Since 1996, just 12 large-scale geological storage projects have been constructed. Collectively, they bury less CO2 than a single power plant can emit in a year, according to our analysis of sites listed in an International Energy Agency database. Seven of them have faced technical, financial or performance issues. An investigation by Drilled and ProPublica found there’s reason to doubt carbon capture and storage will ever succeed at the scale needed to offer a significant climate solution.
History is full of audacious technological leaps — moments when visionary engineering solved seemingly intractable problems. Scientists told Drilled and ProPublica that they have devoted themselves to studying CCS in that spirit, hoping a grand techno-fix could help the world solve the climate crisis without a painful overhaul of the global energy system.
But that ambition did not exist in isolation. It was bankrolled in large part by companies that stood to profit from its success.
Industry documents show that oil company executives have long seen CCS as a way to hedge against climate regulation, greenwash their brands and preserve their core business. Internal Exxon documents obtained by Drilled and ProPublica show that in 1988, the company determined that any climate research Exxon supported should serve the dual purposes of protecting the value of its oil, gas and coal while preserving the company’s business options; the company would eventually become one of the world’s major funders of CCS research.
Later, the American Petroleum Institute would write in internal communications that the industry’s “license to operate” depended on companies lowering climate pollution, and CCS, it wrote, “enables the use of petroleum and natural gas by providing an opportunity to capture and/or offset emissions.” And at a 2023 prominent oil industry conference in Houston, the CEO of Occidental Petroleum, Vicki Hollub, would explain that a novel form of CCS that sucks carbon directly from the air “is going to be the technology that helps to preserve our industry over time.”
For many university faculty, the rewards for studying the industry’s favored climate solution have been numerous, opening opportunities, funding papers and raising their profiles. Benson is a clear example. When the IPCC was awarded in 2007 with the Nobel Peace Prize for its climate work, she and her co-authors were recognized among the scientists who contributed. When Stanford University sought a new director for its ExxonMobil-funded climate research center, it tapped her. When President Joe Biden prioritized climate policy, he brought Benson into the White House.
Keith, the Canadian physicist, benefited from oil industry interest in a different way: He developed technology to capture CO2. Occidental Petroleum paid more than $1 billion to buy the company he founded.
There is no evidence that Benson, widely described by colleagues as scrupulous, skewed her scientific findings to suit the interests of her industry patrons, and Benson has described CCS’ flaws in her publications.
However, in speeches, presentations and even congressional testimony, she has been a dogged champion of CCS technology, time and again describing it as safe and ready for large-scale deployment, despite having a ringside view to its many setbacks.
She has frequently referenced the most affirmative statements from her group’s work in Oviedo as evidence. But the methodology Benson and her co-authors used to reach those conclusions 21 years ago has not been generally understood. When Drilled and ProPublica told prominent climate researchers about the expert elicitation process, several were disconcerted to learn that there was so little scientific basis for the report’s conclusion that 99% of CO2 was likely to remain underground.
A survey, said Oliver Geden, a vice chair of the IPCC’s forthcoming climate assessment, was “an inappropriate way of assessing the literature.”
Authors “are not supposed to do original research. They’re supposed to just collect what’s out there,” said Roger Cooke, who was a lead author on a subsequent IPCC report. Cooke said expert elicitation, done rigorously, can be valuable, but “just asking a bunch of experts to give their best guess is one of the worst things you can do.”
In a detailed written response, Benson said she did not believe that the survey undertaken in 2005 violated IPCC norms and said the group’s leadership was aware of the process. She disputed that the approach amounted to an informed guess and said that “there was an enormous amount of data” to draw on. The group was trying to agree on the best language to synthesize evidence detailed deeper in the report. She rejected the notion that her research or career were influenced by industry funding, writing that she has worked “tirelessly for 30 years on CCS and other climate solutions” in a sincere effort to combat an escalating planetary crisis. And, she offered, she views CCS as one valuable tool among many needed to address climate change.
Keith said the goal of the expert elicitation was not to seek precision, but to provide a sense of the orders of magnitude of the capacity and risks, “because that’s what’s relevant to public policy.” He said even sites with problems haven’t leaked large amounts of CO2 and that the report’s broad statements “have stood the test of time.” The chapter authors’ confidence in CCS doesn’t suggest “that a bunch of us are tools of the fossil fuel industry.”
The IPCC declined to comment on specific questions about how the report came about. “We are not in a position to comment on individual recollections,” a spokesperson wrote about the expert elicitation. However, they said that the group’s process was in keeping with the organization’s procedures at the time and that it reflected contemporaneous understanding of the technology. The IPCC did not directly respond to the assertion that the authors conducted what amounts to new research during the writing process, and it did not provide requested records that would detail the scientists’ vote. “The IPCC’s role is to assess the full range of available scientific knowledge,” the statement said. Metz referred to the IPCC’s response.
Chevron, Shell and Saudi Aramco did not respond to requests for comment.
Drilled and ProPublica spoke with more than 100 experts on carbon capture, climate modeling and influence in academia, including a dozen people who attended the Oviedo meeting. We compiled records of geologic storage tests and surveyed an extensive body of peer-reviewed literature. This investigation is part of a broader examination into how fossil fuel industry funding of climate research has shaped climate policy, solutions and public understanding. It follows our report in June about a BP-funded program at Princeton University and the oil company’s role in crafting one of the program’s most influential climate papers.
Since Benson and her co-authors met in Oviedo, weather catastrophes have multiplied, oceans have acidified and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has soared. In September, the U.N. released an urgent new report declaring that the race to avert disruptive warming has been all but lost. It concluded that “overshoot” — the notion that temperatures will rise above the world’s adopted goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming — is now a certainty.
Carbon capture and storage, it said, is one of the only ways to bring those temperatures back down.
Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica
Looking at a Failure and Calling It Triumph
Just a few days before the meeting in Oviedo, BP put Benson and a handful of other scientists on a chartered flight from London to Algeria. Their destination: the world’s second major geologic carbon storage experiment, in the Sahara.
The British oil giant, along with the state-owned oil companies of Algeria and Norway, had begun to drill for gas at a new field named for a nearby oasis called In Salah. Most natural gas comes out of the ground as a cocktail of methane and CO2. The CO2 must be stripped out and is usually vented into the sky. But at In Salah, the companies saw an opportunity to try out a greener process — one that could become big business.
Earth’s crust is a layer cake of rock. Some layers, like sandstone, contain honeycombed pores capable of holding CO2, while others, like mudstone, can act as impermeable seals, trapping the buoyant gas underground.
That layer cake is impossible to precisely chart from the surface, but engineers sent sound waves into the ground and interpreted what echoed up into rough maps. They learned their target sandstone reservoir sat below a 3,000-foot-thick brick of mudstone they believed would be impermeable. They also learned the sandstone was “tight” — less honeycombed than they had hoped — but still capable of holding gas. So they had begun to inject the CO2.
The plane landed on a sand-strewn strip circled by jeep tracks and rocky plateaus. A photograph shows Benson, medium height, her blond bob tucked beneath a hard hat, standing in the desert alongside a BP-funded physicist from Princeton named Robert Socolow and seven other men in front of a well that was pushing CO2 under the desert. In Salah had been operating for less than a year but seemed to be going smoothly.
Afterward, Benson traveled to Oviedo to finish drafting the special report, which listed In Salah among key sites that “indicate that it is feasible to store CO2” underground at significant scale.
That assessment has not held up.
Energy companies had first begun pumping CO2 into the ground commercially in the 1970s, when they realized it would loosen up stubborn crude oil, sometimes doubling an oil field’s output. They called it “enhanced oil recovery,” and though they didn’t try to lock the CO2 in place, much of it seemed to stay underground.
The idea to use carbon injection as a climate fix came a few years later from an Italian physicist named Cesare Marchetti, who suggested disposing of carbon deep in the ocean or underground. In the 1980s Exxon tried, and gave up on, efforts to develop the idea. And it wasn’t until 1996 when the first large-scale CCS project — the operation in the North Sea — began.
In a recent interview inside her narrow, fluorescent-lit office at Stanford University’s earth sciences building, Benson said it was shortly after that that she first heard of CCS. A colleague at the Department of Energy had sent her a slide deck by Princeton’s Socolow about the technology. “I was like, ‘I think this is nuts,’” she told Drilled and ProPublica.
Sally Benson, fourth from the left, and others tour the In Salah carbon dioxide injection site in Algeria in 2005.Photo courtesy of Robert Socolow
“I just couldn’t really picture it working at scale.”
But, as both an idealist and a pragmatist, she was drawn to the potential for science to solve difficult environmental problems. She made a crude calculation of how much CO2 might fit beneath California and was surprised by the answer: a lot. At least in theory. And it changed her mind.
As Benson became one of CCS’ leading experts and champions, she increasingly found herself in rooms full of oil industry veterans. In 2000, she helped establish a partnership between the Department of Energy and companies including Chevron, Texaco and BP. That program had a focused mission: make large-scale geological storage an operational reality by 2015.
In 2002, Benson was asked to sit on the advisory council of a new BP and Ford Motor Co.-funded climate research center at Princeton University. At a summit there the following year, Benson expressed concern that focusing on leaks could undermine public support for CCS, according to meeting records and the account of another person in attendance.
“Need to present optimistic estimates,” the minutes recapping her presentation say.
By 2007, Benson was helping to run her own industry-funded research center. A few years earlier, ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, a thunderous voice of climate denial, had put up $100 million of the company’s money to fund climate and energy work at Stanford University. With another $125 million from three other companies, Stanford’s Global Climate and Energy Project became one of the best-funded climate research centers in America.
The donation came with strings: ExxonMobil and the other sponsors had veto power over which research projects received funding.
Students and activists protested the funding structure, accusing ExxonMobil of retracing the path of tobacco companies, which paid for scientific work on obscure causes of cancer as a distraction from their culpability.
Benson defended the arrangement ardently and often. ExxonMobil and the other sponsors approved every grant that Stanford recommended, never exercising their veto power, she said. Reporting by Drilled and ProPublica did not contradict that assertion. Benson also pointed to the fact that the program funded an array of research, including on renewable energy.
In an interview and written response, Benson said researchers who take funding from oil companies are motivated not by corporate agendas, but by genuine interest in the work. The funding underwrites the inquiry, she said, not its conclusions. Where there’s “alignment,” she added, the industry support can be “amazingly catalytic and helpful.”
In response to a request for comment, Stanford University directed Drilled and ProPublica to former law school dean Paul Brest, who led a committee that reviewed energy research funding at the school. Brest said that faculty have a right to seek any funding they choose, so long as sponsors cannot direct the work.
Most important to Benson was that scientists and their students have the opportunity to research matters of great consequence. She has published more than 50 papers on geologic carbon storage since joining Stanford, most of them highly technical evaluations of CCS that reiterated its importance to reducing emissions, and many underwritten by ExxonMobil and other industry sources. “I don’t know anybody else,” she told Drilled and ProPublica, “who would eventually provide, you know, $225 million of funding” to study climate solutions.
But whether researchers intended to serve their funders’ agenda on CCS or not, some say the effect has been undeniable. “It seems like a credible solution because you have credible people at credible institutions working on it,” said Naomi Oreskes, a Harvard historian of science and an expert in corporate influence.
Benson was still getting settled into her new job at Stanford when the project in Algeria ran into major problems.
On a 118-degree day in 2007, In Salah’s inspectors heard CO2 whistling through the top of an abandoned oil well nearly a mile from the nearest injection site. Engineers had believed it would take years before the CO2 plume could spread so far underground, but the gas had cracked through the sandstoneand found a new path.
To stop the leak, workers poured cement into the well, plugging it permanently. But soon a second problem arose: Satellite data revealed the desert floor above the injection sites had bulged. When project engineers again used sound waves and other tools to map the layers underground, they arrived at an alarming discovery: Pressurized CO2 had sent cracks a quarter of the way up through the 3000-foot-thick layer of mudstone. If it breached the rest, it could leach into the pan-Saharan aquifer, acidifying a source of drinking water millions of people depend on.
BP and its partners eventually summoned Benson and the other science advisers to London. The dangerous gas, they could now see, was moving in ways they had predicted it could not. Nonetheless, the advisers suggested that injection proceed temporarily to see whether it could safely be done under lower pressure and with careful monitoring.
But the Algerians had had enough. In 2011 BP and its partners stopped injection, and in 2012 they quietly scrapped the project.
Benson would later describe In Salah as a technical failure but a triumph of detection. “It was monitored and people found a problem,” she told Drilled and ProPublica.
“Then,” she added, they “learned from it.”
MIT professor Charles Harvey likens small-scale geologic storage to putting a pea on a bridge, then assuming it can scale. “But will this bridge collapse if I set an aircraft carrier on it? Yeah. It probably will.”Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica
More Problems, More Dependence
As she did in Oviedo, Benson still maintains that the fundamental mechanics of CCS are well enough understood to know that it can work.
As proof that geologic formations can handle high-pressure gas, she points to the natural gas industry, which injects large amounts of its product back underground for temporary storage.
She also points to enhanced oil recovery. Over the last 40 years, American companies have injected 100 times more CO2 into drilling fields as a way to extract more oil than they have into what CCS industry insiders call “dedicated” CO2 storage reservoirs. There are few reports of accidents or leaks at these sites.
Unlike dedicated CO2 storage, though, enhanced oil recovery is less likely to cause pressure to build up underground, because the CO2 pumped in fills space left by the oil that’s forced out. (These sites also can result in a net addition of CO2 in the atmosphere, since they wind up producing still more oil.)
The record of the industry’s largest CCS sites — ones designed solely to help the climate — has been far more troubled.
Around the time In Salah shut down, the world’s third large project — a Norwegian site named Snøhvit several hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle — also met critical obstacles. When injection began in 2008, engineers had calculated the site would have an 18-year capacity. But they had radically overestimated how much CO2 it could absorb and had to relocate the project after just three years.
In the U.S., a decadelong effort to build a “clean coal” power plant outfitted with CCS proved impossible within a reasonable budget and was abandoned in 2015 — but not before the government had spent $378 million in taxpayer money. Benson was on the project’s advisory board for part of that time.
That year in Canada, Shell opened a $1 billion carbon capture and storage facility — also largely paid for by the country’s taxpayers — connected to open-pit oil sands mines. The industry routinely promises that plants like this one, called Quest, capture at least 90% of emissions. But at Quest, once the energy required for the capture process itself is accounted for, the capture rate instead has hovered around 68%, according to a report by the research group Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. It has also caused hundreds of microearthquakes.
Shell did not respond to a request for comment.
As one carbon storage project struggled after another, Benson and other academic researchers continued to insist they could flourish.
In a keynote speech at a 2018 conference in Sweden, Benson showed a slide with a map of CCS facilities across the world, most of which were enhanced oil recovery sites. Her map included In Salah, which had shuttered. And it included another project, in Australia, which had yet to open. “The operations have been very good at all of these projects. And they’ve gone well in terms of safety,” she said.
She also showed a slide pointing to the 2005 U.N. special report’s statement that an “appropriately selected,” well-managed reservoir would likely retain 99% of its carbon for more than 1,000 years. “This was an expression that if you find the right site, the CO2 should be permanently stored,” she said.
In a written response, she said she continues to cite the 21-year-old special report’s conclusions on leakage because “the methodology was sound then and remains so.” Benson said that she is careful to qualify her characterizations and show evidence in her presentations, and that during her presentation in Sweden she did so. She did not directly address the status of projects portrayed in her map.
When the Australian project, called Gorgon, did open the following year, it turned out to be the biggest CCS fiasco yet. Australia had allowed Chevron, ExxonMobil and Shell to drill a major new natural gas field there with the requirement that the companies buried at least 80% of the CO2 that came out of the ground with it. It was billed as the world’s largest CCS operation.
Instead, it has been plagued by clogged injection wells and underground pressure spikes. In their operating year ending in 2025, the companies were able to inject just a quarter of the CO2 collected there. Since they vent the remainder, Gorgon, once billed as a model for climate solutions, became the largest single source of industrial carbon pollution on the continent.
“Like any pioneering endeavour, it takes time to optimise a new system to ensure it performs reliably over 40-plus years of operation,” a Chevron spokesperson wrote in an emailed response. “We realise that people refer to the challenges at Gorgon in an attempt to discredit CCS, however, as we have shown, we can capture and store greenhouse gas at scale.” Shell and ExxonMobil did not respond to requests for comment.
Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica
An Idea Takes Root
While operators struggled to prove CCS could be viable, the world became dependent on it working.
As soon as the IPCC published the 2005 report, climate modelers that help assess the most economic ways to limit global warming began folding CCS into their calculations.
They projected not only that CCS could stop billions of tons of emissions from reaching the sky, but that it could suck old carbon pollution out of the atmosphere. They adopted a theory that supposed vast fields of switchgrass or fast-growing willow could absorb carbon into their stalks and leaves, and when those plants were harvested and burned for electricity, their emissions, too, would be captured and buried.
The modelers incorporated this subtractive approach so prodigiously that, on paper, they could reverse climate change. Global temperatures could overshoot targets in the short term, so long as enough carbon was eventually sucked back out of the air to bring those temperatures back down.
World leaders embraced the wiggle room this theory provided them. When they signed the U.N. Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, pledging to keep warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, they counted on these so-called negative emissions among the key tools that could make it possible. In 2018, when the IPCC published a special report on how to reach that goal, 89 out of its 90 scenarios included using large-scale CCS.
Now, in its latest report, the U.N. says that it is virtually impossible to still get to a 1.5 C future — or anything close — without removing carbon from the atmosphere. There are several ways to do that — reforestation and the use of minerals spread on fields to absorb carbon, for instance. But these methods are either small scale or even less proven than CCS.
By 2015, the tantalizing idea of “negative emissions” was showing up in new, mainstream ways. “Net zero” pledges to one day offset carbon emissions began rolling in from most of the world’s nations, as well as cities like Omaha, Nebraska; the band Coldplay; ice cream chains; funeral homes; and even ExxonMobil.
But real-world CCS projects have not met the moment.
To scale the technology as much as U.N. analyses suggest is needed to limit warming to 2 C would require not only a technological feat but almost unimaginable resources, Drilled and ProPublica found. Carbon dioxide injection would have to almost immediately increase by more than 400 times. That would require more than 2,000 new geological waste sites to be established — a new large-scale CCS project put into operation every four days, on average, for the next 25 years.
To move the CO2 to those sites would require 68,000 miles of specialized pipeline in the U.S. alone. Globally, at least 85 custom-built tankers would be needed to carry the high-pressure gas safely across oceans. Just four exist.
And if all of that were accomplished, the effort would come at an almost inconceivable cost: tens of trillions of dollars.
Illustration by Chris W. Kim for ProPublica
“Fuck, OK, It’s Harder Than We Thought”
At Benson’s office at Stanford, in a building where rocks painstakingly collected from field sites fill cabinets in the halls, the Society of Petroleum Engineers hosts Friday socials — beer and snacks provided — and the adjacent courtyard is named after the oil company Arco.
Inside, propped on a stack of boxes, is a framed copy of Biden’s keystone climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act. On it, national climate adviser Ali Zaidi scrawled in blue sharpie, “Thank you, Sally, for helping truly transform our energy & climate future!”
Benson returned to Stanford after a nearly two-year stint in Biden’s White House as the head of the energy division of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she says she provided periodic scientific advice as the act was being pushed through Congress. One of the most ambitious climate policy efforts in history, it offered a large set of incentives for CCS, which the fossil fuel industry had lobbied for intensely.
But even while oil industry leaders have pushed the world to embrace CCS, behind closed doors, they have remained skeptical of its potential as a climate solution.
In 2007, as ExxonMobil funded Benson’s center at Stanford, its former CEO Raymond told a room full of industry leaders that carbon storage might be considered “kind of the Holy Grail.” Executing it, though, would be “a whole different animal” than injecting carbon underground for enhanced oil recovery. “You can’t assume that’s going to happen. And the cost is going to be very, very significant.”
A 2011 internal slide deck from BP stated that while carbon storage would allow fossil fuels to remain the world’s dominant source of energy, “the pace of CCS development has been slow and the future pace remains uncertain.” And in a 2018 internal presentation, ExxonMobil predicted hardly any CCS would be deployed by 2050, even as it modeled that global CO2 emissions from energy production would continue to skyrocket.
Yet the industry saw brand value in encouraging CCS anyway. An ExxonMobil document from 2021 describes a public relations campaign to persuade the political and financial “elites” to “believe ExxonMobil is committed to helping solve climate change,” in part by proving its efforts on CCS will “play an indispensable role” in a greener economy.
For her part, Benson still has faith in the technology’s viability, despite the failures. “These are big projects, right? The idea that everything goes exactly according to plan, especially for these first-of-a-kind projects — it’s unrealistic.”
When ProPublica and Drilled reviewed that same data, however, and excluded the enhanced oil recovery projects, we found just eight operating large-scale carbon burial projects on that list (10 using the group’s more recent data), and half the increase in annual injections that Benson stated.
Experts interviewed for this story insisted — often in an anguished timbre — that CCS simply must work because decades of delay have foreclosed other paths to a stable climatic future.
But just because the world now needs CCS to work doesn’t mean it can.
“It’s always some issue,” said Glen Peters, a senior researcher at the Cicero Center for International Climate Research in Oslo, Norway. “I think there’s been a lack of willingness for the community to say, ‘Fuck, OK, it’s harder than we thought.’”
The latest CCS effort got underway this spring, in California, when the oil company California Resources Corp. began injecting CO2 beneath the state’s Central Valley.
California — long a vanguard of environmental policy — has embraced the technology. In 2021, as it was formulating a plan for how the state should reach its climate targets, the California Air Resources Board invited Benson to give a presentation on the role CCS could play.
“The fraction of CO2 retained underground is likely to be very high,” she told the board, again pointing to the 2005 special report: “This study said 99% over 1,000 years.”
The board set the ambitious goal of burying more than 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045, more than all the carbon that has ever been geologically stored around the world combined. Since it opened in May, the new project has injected just 7% of its advertised capacity, but California Resources Corp. is now seeking permits for eight more CCS projects across California, and other oil and gas companies have proposed four more, including two that Stanford is directly involved with.
California Resources Corp., in a written response, said the company is injecting the amount it had planned for early operations and will increase to capacity as the project develops.
Could California truly be burying 100 million tons of CO2 a year by 2045? For the first time, in an interview, Benson was hesitant to commit. “I think it’s very challenging,” she said. “That’s a lot of infrastructure, a lot of money, a lot of projects.”
Asked a second time, she once again demurred. “Oh gosh. If we really set our mind to it. If we could wave a wand.”
