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More than five decades ago, a flight carrying Doug Groothuis’ father crashed while taking off from the northernmost community in Alaska. Labor leader Harold Groothuis was killed, as were the plane’s pilot and five other passengers.

Doug Groothuis, who was 11 at the time, remembers being in his bedroom that November 1968 night and watching Walter Cronkite mention his father by name in a CBS Evening News report on the fatal accident in Barrow, now known as Utqiagvik.

Groothuis’ mother went back to work and raised him in Anchorage, far away from relatives in California and New York. Sometimes Groothuis, an only child, wonders what his life would have been like if his father hadn’t died.

“Most Alaskans, Alaskan boys, love to hunt and fish, and they can fire guns and cut up fish and cut up moose and go trapping and all these things. I was kind of on that road with my dad because he was a great outdoorsman,” Groothuis said. “But when he died, there was nobody to take over to help me learn how to do those Alaska-specific kinds of things.”

Crashes involving small commercial aircraft, like the one that carried Groothuis’ father, have long drawn the attention of federal officials. Though decades have passed, these accidents persist at high rates.

In June, KUCB and ProPublica reported that Alaska makes up a growing share of the country’s fatalities from crashes involving commuter, air taxi and charter flights. As deaths in crashes involving these operators have plummeted nationwide, Alaska’s share of fatalities in such crashes has increased from 26% in the early 2000s to 42% since 2016, our analysis showed. Many experts told us that the Federal Aviation Administration hadn’t done enough to improve aviation safety in the state. The FAA oversees air travel in the country and carries much of the responsibility for making Alaskan air travel safer.

We spoke with experts in government, regulation and aviation safety, as well as Alaska flight operators, to ask what could be done to improve Alaska aviation. They offered a range of solutions: bolstering weather information for aviators, expanding the use of collision avoidance technology, and providing more opportunities for pilots to use technology for flying through poor weather. Below are details on their recommendations.

A need for better weather information

Alaska is bigger in area than Texas, California and Montana combined, but it is the nation’s most sparsely populated state. More than 80% of communities cannot be accessed by the road system. Planes are essential to everyday life, but flying conditions in Alaska are more challenging than almost anywhere else. Weather conditions change rapidly.

In general, pilots are guided in flight by one of two ways: when the weather is clear — without clouds or storms — pilots can rely on their vision to spot other airplanes and terrain they want to avoid. But at higher elevations or in bad weather, electronic instruments and controls in the cockpit are vital; a pilot cannot fly without them.

In Alaska, instrument flight is hampered by two obstacles: inadequate access to weather information and a lack of FAA-approved approaches that pilots could use to fly with instruments into and out of many of the state’s airports.

The equipment necessary to monitor weather patterns and relay them to pilots isn’t as robust as in the lower 48, and there are places where there isn’t any weather information available. In these areas, flying with instruments isn’t permitted at the low altitudes where most smaller planes fly, leaving pilots reliant on what they see out of their cockpits or grounded when the weather is bad.

When weather conditions deteriorate rapidly, pilots flying without instruments can become disoriented, lose track of where they are and crash. Between 2010 and 2020, there were at least six fatal commercial crashes in Alaska in which investigators listed weather as a cause or factor, according to data from the National Transportation Safety Board. (The federal agency, which investigates transportation accidents, was founded a year before the crash that killed Groothuis’ father.)

Over the years, the FAA has worked to increase access to weather information, through both weather cameras and systems that transmit automated broadcasts to pilots. The FAA is also currently testing a new technology that can provide weather bulletins plus video of the current weather directly to pilots’ mobile devices or through flight service stations. These new systems cost about half as much as the older stations because they are easier to set up and their sites take up less space on the ground. Some pilots say they are equally as effective if not more so.

Despite that, the FAA does not currently provide sufficient weather information for many villages. Only half of Alaska’s publicly owned airports have the FAA-approved weather reporting necessary for instrument flight.

Some operators are tired of waiting for the FAA.

“We have spent a ton of money putting in advanced avionics in all of our aircraft — glass cockpits and everything — that make everything safer,” said Dan Knesek, vice president of operations at Grant Aviation, an airline that serves the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, Bristol Bay and the Aleutian Islands. “We would love to be able to operate to the majority of our villages under instrument flight rules, which is a much safer and controlled environment. But we cannot.”

Scott Van Valin is the co-owner and director of operations for Island Air Express, a small commuter air carrier offering scheduled service between Ketchikan and Prince of Wales Island, as well as charter service. Van Valin said Island Air Express installed its own weather station at El Capitan Lodge on Prince of Wales Island, something the FAA has approved under a program that allows operators to create their own company weather programs. It cost Island Air Express about $90,000 and Van Valin said it took about six months for the FAA to sign off on the routes his company developed to fly into and out of the city of Klawock. The route, known as an approach, was specifically tailored to their aircraft to let them fly with instruments at lower altitudes than typically allowed.

Island Air Express is currently working to build up to 18 instrument approaches across southeast Alaska; Van Valin hopes they will be finished in the next year.

The FAA acknowledges in an interim report from its new Alaska Aviation Safety Initiative that “many if not most” small commercial aircraft are not equipped to fly using instruments and that Alaska’s mountainous terrain and weather “underscore the need for reliable infrastructure” that supports both instrument flight at low altitudes and flights where pilots go by what they can see out the window.

In a written statement, the FAA added that for the last two decades improving Alaska aviation safety through expanded flight tracking and increased access to real-time weather information has been one of the agency’s top priorities.

Technology can prevent collisions, but it’s not always used

Collision avoidance technology can alert pilots to the presence of other aircraft flying nearby. Automatic Dependent Surveillance Broadcast systems, or ADS-B, and their associated ground infrastructure were hailed as a marked improvement over traditional radar systems when they launched in the 1990s.

A joint industry and FAA research project called Capstone equipped 388 aircraft in southeast Alaska and the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta in the western part of the state with ADS-B systems between 1999 and 2006. The project found crash rates in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta decreased after the planes were equipped with the technology.

That led the FAA to introduce rules in January 2020 to mandate the use of ADS-B for nearly all of the lower 48. But the rule only applies to most controlled airspace, which the agency defines in a way that excludes most of Hawaii and Alaska.

Many planes in Alaska are not equipped with ADS-B, in part because it is only required at very high altitudes and around the Ted Stevens International Airport in Anchorage. And even for planes that are equipped, there is limited ground station coverage: under half the state at 3,000 feet above ground level is covered and even less than that at lower altitudes, although the FAA says the stations cover most popular flight paths. Ground stations provide weather and traffic information to planes; planes with the proper equipment can also see each other’s location without ground stations.

“There are black holes in the state,” said Knesek, of Grant Aviation. “We move aircraft around all the time between bases, and I see it all the time. I see in the Aleutian chain, when they drop below a certain altitude, we do not see them on ADS-B anymore.”

Four aviation groups wrote to the FAA and Alaska’s congressional delegation in October 2019 asking for additional ground stations. “Filling these gaps should also encourage more aviation businesses and aircraft owners who fly in Alaska to equip, as they will obtain the benefits in the areas they operate.”

The NTSB, on the other hand, believes use of ADS-B should be mandatory in more areas. The agency investigates accidents and makes safety recommendations, although it has no authority to enact them.

In its final report on a May 2019 midair collision in Ketchikan, where six people were killed and 10 were injured, the NTSB included recommendations that ADS-B be required for all aircraft in high-traffic air tour areas, like Ketchikan.

The FAA would not say if it plans to expand the areas in Alaska where ADS-B is mandated. In a written statement, the FAA said it has worked with the Alaska aviation industry to provide enhanced coverage. For now, the agency said, it is focused on encouraging operators to voluntarily equip themselves with the technology.

Not all pilots want ADS-B in their aircraft. On pilot Facebook groups, some have raised concerns that it would function as a surveillance tool “used by big brother to watch you, and potentially violate you,” according to one pilot.

Jens Hennig, vice president of operations at the General Aviation Manufacturers Association and a member of several FAA rule-making committees, said he doesn’t understand why that stops people from using the technology.

“The FAA will not be conducting enforcement actions unless you’re out there doing something that is questionable, illegal or against the rules,” Hennig said. “And based on their resources these days you pretty much have to be out there doing something pretty egregious for the FAA to go after you.”

Another reason some pilots say they aren’t interested in ADS-B is the cost, which would likely be borne by operators or plane owners. Garmin sells full ADS-B devices — which transmit a plane’s location and show where other aircraft are — for $5,395; it has partial units, for $1,795, that broadcast an aircraft’s location to other ADS-B systems and ground stations.

Mandating additional safety plans a priority for some, not for others

The NTSB’s latest Most Wanted List, which highlights the safety board’s highest priority recommendations, includes two aviation-related measures. One would mandate commercial operators that carry passengers to have a formal safety management system. For example, prior to a flight, an operator might fill out a risk assessment form, recording information on such items as the weather conditions, a pilot’s emotional state and the weight of the aircraft. Then, another person could review the form and determine whether it is safe to fly under those conditions.

Since 2015, the FAA has required large commercial airliners such as United, American, and Delta to use these safety systems. But the FAA does not require them for smaller commercial operators, many of which operate in Alaska. Some experts say they should be required.

A week before the NTSB declared that safety plans were a top priority, Richard McSpadden, senior vice president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a national nonprofit aviation group, wrote a letter to then-NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt opposing the effort. He wrote that when the plans are “thrust upon operations without regard to the size, and type of operation,” they “can be a deceiving facade, expensive and time-consuming to develop with no real impact on operations.”

The NTSB said the safety management system mandate would look very different for a large airline like Southwest than it would for a single-pilot operation. Across the board, though, it requires operators to write down what they are doing to manage risk.

Matt Atkinson, the co-owner of Northern Alaska Tour Company, Warbelow’s Air Ventures and Wright Air Service, said his companies, which together have nearly 40 planes, are currently developing safety management programs, even though they are not required to do so. He said the companies, which conduct flights around Fairbanks and the North Slope, are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their programs up and running, with a staff member dedicated to the effort.

But Atkinson said the systems might be challenging for smaller operators, who already do many of these safety checks in their heads.

“I think that for smaller operators, the concepts that are trying to be conveyed by SMS are quite difficult to capture — at a single pilot or a very small pilot operation — because they’re just so ingrained, you know,” Atkinson said. For a company his size, he said, SMS does make sense in order to “capture some things that are going to make us safer and catch or capture a trend and prevent something from happening.”

The FAA is expected to announce a proposed rule regarding these safety systems in September 2022, though the agency wouldn’t say what it would cover.

Another top NTSB recommendation would require commercial operators to install devices on their planes to collect data about their flights, and then analyze it. Flight data monitoring programs are separate systems meant to identify anomalies in past flying. Experts say the insights from analyzing this data can help prevent accidents.

In Alaska, Atkinson says some operators already do limited flight data monitoring by paying for satellite tracking of their planes.

‘There is a place for the law’

To this day, Doug Groothuis, who splits his time between Colorado and Alaska, has never flown on a small plane. Recently, a friend — who is a pilot — invited him on a flight, but Groothuis declined the offer because it would have been purely for enjoyment. For him, the risk of injury or death is too high unless the trip were part of his livelihood or to help others.

“Maybe I’m not a very good Alaskan, because I don’t really like risks a whole lot, at least risk to life and limb, you know,” Groothuis said. “I’m not a big hunter or mountain climber or anything like that.

Even as a self-proclaimed political conservative, Groothuis hopes for serious discussion of what possibilities exist for better aviation safety in Alaska and that elected officials will look at, if applicable, appropriate legislation.

“Alaskans have this real independent streak. And that can be good. Be self-reliant. Not want to sponge off other people. Be hardy. Live off the land. That’s all terrific, but we’re still part of a state and a nation,” Groothuis said. “There is a place for the law to try to minimize unnecessary injury and fatalities.”

Alex Mierjeski contributed reporting.

This article was produced in partnership with ProPublica as part of the ProPublica Local Reporting Network.

A week ago, one of Alaska’s most powerful executives abruptly resigned from his job leading the largest tribal health organization in the state. Neither the outgoing president nor the group said why.

Earlier that day, his former assistant had delivered a scathing three-page letter to the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium that described a pattern of abusive behavior, harassment and coerced sexual encounters by president Andy Teuber, according to the document, obtained by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica.

The woman, Savanah Evans, who is 27, delivered her own resignation letter on Feb. 23, describing workplace abuse, harassment and intimidation at the hands of Teuber, who is 52.

“Andy unrelentingly coerced, forced, and required sex of me,” Evans wrote in her letter. In a phone interview Monday, she told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica that much of the abuse took place in ANTHC offices, and that it derailed her personal and professional life.

Evans gave her permission to be named in this article, saying she wants to end a cycle of abuse.

“If I don’t speak up,” she wrote in her resignation letter, “I will be no less guilty than those who have done nothing but swept it under the rug.”

Teuber’s departure follows the recent resignations of two consecutive Alaska attorneys general, Kevin Clarkson and Ed Sniffen, and of Anchorage Mayor Ethan Berkowitz, all following allegations of inappropriate interactions with women. Clarkson apologized for sending hundreds of text messages to a junior state employee, including some inviting her to his home. Sniffen has not responded to requests for comment about allegations that three decades ago he had sex with an underage high school student when he was her mock trial coach. Berkowitz acknowledged “unacceptable personal conduct” after a TV news reporter disclosed that he had sent her nude selfies.

In an email Monday, Teuber denied the allegations, saying he had a “completely consensual personal relationship.” In a separate email, Teuber said that Evans often initiated the sexual encounters between them. Evans, in turn, says that Teuber is the one who insisted their sexual relationship continue even after she wanted it to stop.

Teuber wrote that he couldn’t respond to some specific allegations about ANTHC, its employees or its practices because of strict confidentiality provisions he agreed to as part of his former position.

“I have never, and would never, engage in a non-consensual or ‘quid pro quo’ personal relationship with anyone,” he wrote. “The allegations of wrongdoing that I have been made aware of are false, and these allegations and their timing appear designed to portray me unjustly and falsely; to damage my personal and family relationships; but especially to sabotage my recent engagement and new marriage; and to undermine my professional prospects.”

Evans and her attorney, Jana Weltzin, said they were not aware that Teuber was engaged or had gotten married.

ANTHC spokesperson Shirley Young said the tribal health organization is conducting an “independent outside” investigation, but that the organization could not comment on specific allegations, citing personnel confidentiality rules.

Alaska law does not prohibit sexual relationships between supervisors and subordinates, and ANTHC’s policies do not explicitly prohibit them either. The organization’s policy on personal relationships in the workplace requires supervisors to disclose any sexual relationship with “an individual within their chain of command or area of influence” to the human resources department. It also requires employees who are in a relationship to behave professionally “during work hours and within the working environment.”

Teuber was not Evans’ direct supervisor even though she was his direct assistant, Weltzin said. Young said she could not comment on whether Teuber disclosed any kind of relationship with Evans, as would be required by the rule, citing personnel confidentiality rules.

Rebecca G. Pontikes, a Boston attorney who specializes in representing workers in gender-based employment discrimination and sexual harassment cases, said some companies go further and ban sexual relationships between supervisors and subordinates. Such relationships, if they aren’t consensual, would amount to sexual harassment, which is illegal in the workplace under federal employment law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sex, she said.

Teuber wrote that he would participate in the investigation and planned to offer “evidence refuting the allegations of wrongdoing made against me.” Evans said she possesses a “massive” number of text messages and one or more recordings that substantiate her claims. Teuber said he would forward video files and a “volume of exchanges” to the news organizations, but he had not done so as of Tuesday afternoon. Evans and her attorney declined to provide a copy of an audio recording that had been provided to board members, and did not respond to requests to see the text messages.

For more than a decade, Teuber was the president of the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium and one of the most powerful executives in Alaska.

ANTHC is “the largest, most comprehensive Tribal health organization in the United States,” according to its website, and it has a far-reaching impact in Alaska: The organization co-owns and manages the Alaska Native Medical Center, a major trauma hospital in Anchorage, as well as providing health services to more than 170,000 Alaska Native people and communities across the state.

The organization has more than 3,000 employees, making it one of the largest health employers in Alaska.

Teuber was paid a salary of more than $1 million per year to oversee ANTHC, at the same time serving as chief executive of the Kodiak Area Native Association, a regional tribal health provider. He served on other powerful boards, including the Alaska Federation of Natives, and he was a member of the University of Alaska Board of Regents. He resigned both of those roles last week as well.

Alaska has the highest rate of sexual assault in the United States, particularly among Alaska Native women.

A sexual relationship

Soon after she started work as Teuber’s special assistant in October 2019, Evans said she received a request for an “inappropriate photo” while on a work trip to Kodiak with Teuber, which she refused to provide. Their sexual relationship began the same month, according to the resignation letter. Within a month or two, Evans said she told Teuber she did not want to continue having sex with him, she said in an interview.

Teuber denied the allegation.

“After she made her interest plainly known, we did engage in intimate relations, which were always willing, voluntary and consensual, and often initiated by Ms. Evans,” Teuber wrote in an email.

The two continued to have sex. Evans said she was required to bring paperwork to Teuber’s home office.

“(On) my first trip to deliver papers for his signature, he pushed me into the downstairs front bedroom for sex and told me that, ‘You always listen better after I fuck you,’” she wrote to the board members.

“You may wonder if this relationship was consensual,” she wrote. “It is not, if the person controls your employment.”

In one instance, Evans wrote that “(Teuber) wouldn’t get off of me to let me leave.”

“Later he texted me, simply saying ‘I’m sorry; that wasn’t cool.’”

Teuber denied that any sexual encounter between the two was not consensual.

Another time, Teuber and the woman had a sexual encounter inside the ANTHC boardroom executive suite, she wrote.

Teuber denies this happened.

“This is another degrading, dehumanizing example of the requirement to keep my job,” she wrote. “Any time I tried to ignore his calls or texts during my personal non-work private time, he would swear at me, demand responses, and threaten me by referring to my job and stating that I have it because of him.”

Teuber responded: “I did at times express myself strongly to Ms. Evans, but all such expressions were job performance related.”

Teuber said in an email that he resigned “a few minutes” after he learned of the allegations against him. He did not answer questions about why he resigned.

“I am a single mother of a 4-year-old daughter. I am an Athabascan from the Koyukon Region,” Evans wrote to the 15-member ANTHC board. She said she appreciated the opportunity to work for the organization and acknowledged that her complaint about Teuber’s behavior would normally be sent to a human resources department, not the board of directors.

In her resignation letter, Evans said that ANTHC has tolerated and enabled similar abuse in the past.

Teuber wrote that he was not aware of any prior allegations against him.

ANTHC did not respond to questions about any past reports of abuse. In a written statement Monday, incoming chairperson Bernice Kaigelak said the organization “will not tolerate harassment of any kind.”

“As the new chair, I am committed to a harassment-free workplace,” Kaigelak said. “This is particularly important given the rate of sexual harassment or abuse of Alaska Native women. All complaints of harassment will be investigated, and prompt action will be taken when issues are identified, regardless about whom they are directed.”

This story was originally published by the Anchorage Daily News and is republished here with permission.

This story was originally published by ProPublica.

At 7:47 a.m. on the Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, Dr. Jay Butler pounded out a grim email to colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.

Butler, then the head of the agency’s coronavirus response, and his team had been trying to craft guidance to help Americans return safely to worship amid worries that two of its greatest comforts — the chanting of prayers and singing of hymns — could launch a deadly virus into the air with each breath.

The week before, the CDC had published its investigation of an outbreak at an Arkansas church that had resulted in four deaths. The agency’s scientific journal recently had detailed a superspreader event in which 52 of the 61 singers at a 2½-hour choir practice developed COVID-19. Two died.

Butler, an infectious disease specialist with more than three decades of experience, seemed the ideal person to lead the effort. Trained as one of the CDC’s elite disease detectives, he’d helped the FBI investigate the anthrax attacks, and he’d led the distribution of vaccines during the H1N1 flu pandemic when demand far outstripped supply.

But days earlier, Butler and his team had suddenly found themselves on President Donald Trump’s front burner when the president began publicly agitating for churches to reopen. That Thursday, Trump had announced that the CDC would release safety guidelines for them “very soon.” He accused Democratic governors of disrespecting churches, and deemed houses of worship “essential services.”

Butler’s team rushed to finalize the guidance for churches, synagogues and mosques that Trump’s aides had shelved in April after battling the CDC over the language. In reviewing a raft of last-minute edits from the White House, Butler’s team rejected those that conflicted with CDC research, including a worrisome suggestion to delete a line that urged congregations to “consider suspending or at least decreasing” the use of choirs.

On Friday, Trump’s aides called the CDC repeatedly about the guidance, according to emails. “Why is it not up?” they demanded until it was posted on the CDC website that afternoon.

The next day, a furious call came from the office of the vice president: The White House suggestions were not optional. The CDC’s failure to use them was insubordinate, according to emails at the time.

Fifteen minutes later, one of Butler’s deputies had the agency’s text replaced with the White House version, the emails show. The danger of singing wasn’t mentioned.

Early that Sunday morning, as Americans across the country prepared excitedly to return to houses of worship, Butler, a churchgoer himself, poured his anguish and anger into an email to a few colleagues.

“I am very troubled on this Sunday morning that there will be people who will get sick and perhaps die because of what we were forced to do,” he wrote.

When the next history of the CDC is written, 2020 will emerge as perhaps the darkest chapter in its 74 years, rivaled only by its involvement in the infamous Tuskegee experiment, in which federal doctors withheld medicine from poor Black men with syphilis, then tracked their descent into blindness, insanity and death.

With more than 216,000 people dead this year, most Americans know the low points of the current chapter already. A vaunted agency that was once the global gold standard of public health has, with breathtaking speed, become a target of anger, scorn and even pity.

How could an agency that eradicated smallpox globally and wiped out polio in the United States have fallen so far?

ProPublica obtained hundreds of emails and other internal government documents and interviewed more than 30 CDC employees, contractors, and Trump administration officials who witnessed or were involved in key moments of the crisis. Although news organizations around the world have chronicled the CDC’s stumbles in real-time, ProPublica’s reporting affords the most comprehensive inside look at the escalating tensions, paranoia, and pained discussions that unfolded behind the walls of CDC’s Atlanta headquarters. And it sheds new light on the botched COVID-19 tests, the unprecedented political interference in public health policy, and the capitulations of some of the world’s top public health leaders.

Senior CDC staff describe waging battles that are as much about protecting science from the White House as protecting the public from COVID-19. It is a war that they have, more often than not, lost.

Employees spoke openly about their “hill to die on” — the political interference that would prompt them to leave. Yet, again and again, they surrendered and did as they were told. It wasn’t just worries over paying mortgages or forfeiting the prestige of the job. Many feared that if they left and spoke out, the White House would stop consulting the CDC at all, and would push through even more dangerous policies.

To some veteran scientists, this acquiescence was the real sign that the CDC had lost its way. One scientist swore repeatedly in an interview and said, “The cowardice and the caving are disgusting to me.”

Collectively, the interviews and documents show an insular, rigorous agency colliding head-on with an administration desperate to preserve the impression that it had the pandemic under control.

Some of the key wounds were self-inflicted. Records obtained by ProPublica detail for the first time the cataclysmic chain of mistakes and disputes inside the CDC labs making the first U.S. test for COVID-19. A respected lab scientist made a fateful decision to use a process that risked contamination, saw signs of trouble, but sent the tests to public health labs anyway. Many of those tests didn’t work, and the scramble to fix them had serious consequences.

Even when the CDC was not to blame, the Trump administration exploited events to take control of the agency’s messaging. As a historically lethal pandemic raged, the White House turned the CDC into a political bludgeon to advance Trump’s agenda, alternately blocking the agency’s leaders from using their quarantine powers or forcing them to assert those powers over the objections of CDC scientists.

Once seen as an apolitical bulwark, the CDC endured meddling on multiple fronts by officials with little or no public health experience, from Trump’s daughter Ivanka to Stephen Miller, the architect of the president’s immigration crackdown. A shifting and mysterious cast of political aides and private contractors — what one scientist described as young protégés of Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, “wearing blue suits with red ties and beards” — crowded into important meetings about key policy decisions.

Agency insiders lost faith that CDC director Dr. Robert Redfield, a Trump appointee who’d been at the agency only two years, would, or could, hold the line on science. One division leader refused to sign what he viewed as an ill-conceived and xenophobic Trump administration order. Redfield ultimately signed it himself.

Veteran CDC specialists with global reputations were marginalized, silenced or reassigned — often for simply doing what had always been their job. Some of the agency’s most revered scientists vanished from public view after speaking candidly about the virus.

The Trump administration is “appropriating a public enterprise and making it into an agent of propaganda for a political regime,” one CDC scientist said in an interview as events unfolded. “It’s mind-boggling in the totality of ambition to so deeply undermine what’s so vitally important to the public.”

The CDC repeatedly declined to make Butler, Redfield or any other employees mentioned in this story available for questions, and a CDC spokesperson declined to comment on behalf of the agency. The White House did not respond to an email seeking comment.

A spokesperson for the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the CDC, rejected accusations of political interference.

“Under President Trump, HHS has always provided public health information based on sound science,” the HHS spokesperson said. “Throughout the COVID-19 response, science and data have driven the decisions at HHS.”

People interviewed for this story asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation against themselves or their agency.

In interviews and internal correspondence, CDC employees recounted the stunning fall of the agency many of them had spent their careers building. Some had served on the front lines of the CDC’s most storied battles and had an earned confidence that they could swoop in and save the world from the latest plague, whether it was E. coli on a fast-food burger or Ebola in a distant land. Theirs was the model other nations copied. Their leaders were the public faces Americans turned to for the unvarnished truth. They’d served happily under Democrats and Republicans.

Now, 10 months into the crisis, many fear the CDC has lost the most important currency of public health: trust, the confidence in experts that persuades people to wear masks for the public good, to refrain from close-packed gatherings, to take a vaccine.

Dr. Martin Cetron, the agency’s veteran director of global migration and quarantine, coined a phrase years ago for what can happen when people lose confidence in the government and denial and falsehoods spread faster than disease. He called it the “bankruptcy of trust.” He’d seen it during the Ebola outbreak in Liberia in 2014, when soldiers cordoned off the frightened and angry residents of the West Point neighborhood in Monrovia, the capital. Control of a pandemic depended not just on technical expertise, he told colleagues then, but on faith in public institutions.

Today, some CDC veterans worry that it could take a generation or longer to regain that trust.

“Most of us who saw this could be retired or dead by the time that’s fully fixed,” one CDC official said.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, the CDC’s top career scientist, was one of the first to notice a brief report about four cases of “unexplained pneumonia” in Wuhan, China, in an emerging diseases bulletin. It followed a warning about a “red blotch disease” in the grape industry.

As a disease detective in 2003, Schuchat had been dispatched to China to investigate the outbreak of SARS, a respiratory disease that killed about 800 people and shut down parts of Asia. Her role in that outbreak and in later epidemics inspired the virus hunter played by Kate Winslet in the movie “Contagion.” Unflappable and regarded as brilliant, Schuchat eases the tension at meetings by singing ditties about the latest outbreak set to Broadway tunes. Nobody wants to disappoint her.

At 8:25 a.m. on Dec. 31, Schuchat emailed Butler and other colleagues asking if “any of your folks know more about the ‘unknown pneumonia’” in Wuhan.

Emails and calls bounced among the agency’s leaders, a handful of veterans with more than a century of experience among them. Dr. Dan Jernigan, the flu chief, and his boss, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, met at headquarters to plan. Within hours, they learned there were 27 cases — seven of them severe — with fever, difficulty breathing and a buildup of abnormal substances in the lungs. All the cases were believed to be connected to an outdoor seafood market. “Raises concern about SARS,” Messonnier wrote in an email.

The news reached Cetron in New Hampshire. While celebrating the holidays at a beer-and-tacos pub across the river in Vermont, he told family and friends about a new virus in China that he worried could affect the whole world. “We should be bracing ourselves,” he said.

If the outbreak had been a movie, this would have been the scene where the heroine mobilizes an all-star squad of specialists to save the planet. Schuchat’s team is seen as among the top infectious disease experts in the world. All of them had started out in the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, an elite corps of globetrotting disease fighters. They were a brain trust forged by decades of defending the country from outbreaks.

But in the 11 years since the H1N1 flu pandemic, the terrain had shifted. Politics and budget cuts had weakened the agency at home and abroad. Meanwhile, the regime in Beijing had grown increasingly aggressive and authoritarian. The Trump administration’s trade war had worsened tensions. And after a series of tough-minded leaders who were adept at protecting the agency and its mission, Trump’s first choice as director quit after Politico reported that she had purchased tobacco stocks while leading the CDC, which fights lung diseases.

Trump appointed Redfield in 2018. He was an HIV researcher who had treated AIDS patients since the earliest days of the disease. He’d wanted the CDC job for decades, and had been passed over for it twice. During his first all-hands meeting at the Atlanta campus, he’d choked up describing the honor of leading the agency.

In the fierce chaos of Trump’s Washington, the CDC needed a streetfighter. Instead, it got “the nicest grandfather you can imagine,” a senior health official said. A former colleague described how Redfield, a devout Catholic, prayed with the ailing Elijah Cummings, a Democratic congressman from Baltimore, during a visit to the Capitol.

Redfield took over an agency that, despite its $8.3 billion budget, was feeling the chronic funding woes of the American public health system, which has been quietly gutted since the Great Recession. As the coronavirus began its march through the United States, years of federal and state cuts had left about 26,000 fewer employees at state, county and municipal health agencies since 2009, according to the nonpartisan Trust for America’s Health.

With a mission of protecting America from diseases, the CDC was stretched thin. Over the decades, its portfolio had expanded to include almost every malady, chronic or acute.

The CDC’s global presence was suffering too. An infusion of hundreds of millions of dollars at the time of the Ebola epidemic in 2014 allowed the agency to increase its presence to as many as 65 countries, but a large chunk of those funds ran out in 2019. As funding expanded and contracted in recent years, the CDC had to cut over 300 posts overseas, including both Americans and foreigners. By the time Schuchat noticed the blurb about an outbreak in Wuhan, her agency no longer had an office inside the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, its counterpart in Beijing. While the U.S. agency once had more than a dozen Americans in China, by January only three remained.

On Jan. 3, Redfield phoned his agency’s closest ally in Beijing, George Gao, the director of China’s CDC, a microbiologist trained at Oxford and Harvard. Gao said his agency had sent a field investigation team to Wuhan. But during conversations in the next few days, many of Redfield’s questions about the mystery disease went unanswered. Gao, who was usually open and talkative, sounded guarded, according to several officials familiar with the conversations.

Nevertheless, Redfield assured federal health and national security officials that information was flowing from China thanks to his rapport with Gao, knowledgeable people said.

On Jan. 6, Redfield sent Gao a carefully worded letter offering the help of CDC experts. Expecting the Chinese to accept “very soon,” CDC leaders began preparing a team to go to China, emails show.

To Redfield’s chagrin, however, the conversations with Gao came to a sudden halt. Ominous news accumulated: the first recorded death, Jan. 9, the first case outside China, Jan. 13. In the secure, high-tech room where the CDC brain trust met, the mood turned dark as the scientists began to fear they were confronting a pandemic.

“We were slowly convincing folks: It doesn’t matter if you believe it or not, but this is the circumstantial evidence,” a senior lab official said. “And you have to prepare.”

Amid the scramble to find out what was happening in China, CDC officials began telling the public not to panic. But they conveyed the serious nature of the threat.

On Jan. 17, for example, Messonnier said that the CDC was “especially concerned about a novel coronavirus” because related viruses — SARS and Middle East Respiratory Syndrome — were “difficult outbreaks with many people getting ill and deaths.”

It appeared that the illness had been spreading since at least early December, but data on cases provided by Chinese authorities was woefully incomplete, listing only the dates patients were hospitalized, not what symptoms they had or for how long, the senior lab official said.

“We knew they were good enough epidemiologists to get that data,” the official said. “Why aren’t they announcing the results?”

The lab official tried to contact a chief virologist at the China CDC who was usually helpful, but got no response. Neither did colleagues who reached out to Chinese scientists with whom they had collaborated for years. The Americans concluded that the regime in Beijing was telling them to keep quiet.

Gao had also run up against a cover-up by authorities in Wuhan, health and national security officials said. Gao’s field investigators were “told there was no evidence of human-to-human transmission,” said Dr. Ray Yip, a former country director for the CDC in China. “They didn’t show them all the cases. They had a couple of cases of hospital workers infected by then, and that’s obviously human-to-human, how else did they get it?”

During the SARS epidemic in 2003, Time magazine reported that Chinese authorities had hidden 31 infected health workers from the world by pulling them from their hospital, loading them into ambulances, and driving them around Beijing until a visiting delegation from the World Health Organization left the hospital.

In January of 2020, the bond between the U.S. and Chinese health agencies became a double-edged sword. Chinese leaders were wary about Gao’s relationship with the Americans, who heard rumblings that he would be made the scapegoat for the outbreak. Meanwhile, Redfield’s reputation suffered in Washington because he didn’t deliver.

“The China CDC and the U.S. CDC were almost seen as one,” a senior U.S. health official said. “Dr. Redfield contributed to this by talking about how much he talked to Dr. Gao, the information exchange they had going. There was a sentiment blaming Dr. Redfield for the inability to get more information.”

In reality, the blame went beyond Redfield and his agency. China was a hard target. Even U.S. spy agencies struggled to gather intelligence on the evolution of the disease. Still, at the moment of truth, the CDC’s decades of investment in building a network in China did not pay off. That failure created an early and significant schism between the agency and the Trump administration.

“What the fuck are we paying for people to be in China if they can’t go where there’s an outbreak when there’s an outbreak,” Joe Grogan, then the head of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council, recalled saying repeatedly at the time.

Deputy National Security Advisor Matthew Pottinger was another influential critic of the CDC and one of the first senior White House officials to realize the magnitude of the coronavirus threat. Pottinger had served as a Marine intelligence officer and worked in China as a correspondent for The Wall Street Journal. His coverage of the SARS pandemic had helped shape his view of China as what he called “an expansionist totalitarian empire.”

Pottinger clashed with CDC officials when he pushed to limit travel from China. Many of the agency’s scientists held the traditional public health view that border closures interfere with the movement of medical personnel and goods. On Jan. 31, Trump issued an order restricting most foreigners from entering the United States if they had been in China within the 14 days before their arrival.

The CDC deployed personnel to airports to screen incoming passengers for symptoms, a measure that leaders now admit was futile, given the high number of asymptomatic cases. (Of the 754,124 travelers screened at U.S. airports by mid-September, only 24 cases of COVID were confirmed, according to CDC records.)

The CDC had gone from being the world’s finest disease SWAT team to batting back claims from the administration that it was doing a lousy job.

Another blow came on Feb. 25, after an ill-fated press conference about the steps Americans might need to take to protect themselves. Leading that briefing was Messonnier, the no-nonsense director of the CDC’s powerful immunization and respiratory diseases center, who’d come to prominence during the 2001 anthrax attacks.

Asked by the media team to add a personal touch, Messonnier said she’d told her children they needed to prepare for a significant disruption of their lives and had called their school to ask about plans for online learning. Afterward, she left to take her children to the dentist.

But her words had rocked Wall Street and the White House. Soon the staff in the Atlanta Emergency Operations Center saw a news alert with a photo of Messonnier pop up on their phones. A CDC veteran remembers thinking: “Oh, crap, the stock market dropped!”

The market’s fall infuriated the president. Trump had privately confessed to author Bob Woodward that he was publicly downplaying the virus to prevent panic. The CDC would pay the price for undercutting that narrative.

The next day, Trump put Vice President Mike Pence in charge of his coronavirus task force and assumed the role of communicator-in-chief. The CDC, which had been the public face of the government during every health crisis in memory, soon became nearly invisible. After a few more briefings, a Pence aide told the agency’s media staff that this was the president’s stage, not theirs.

Even when Redfield was allowed to speak publicly, his sleepy eyes and soft, droning tone anesthetized listeners. The agency had been effectively muzzled.

“When it mattered the most, they shut us up,” a senior CDC official said. “The threat is clear. If we want to ever be able to talk tomorrow or next week or next month — or whatever is being dangled in front of us, you stay inside the lines.”

A friend of one CDC scientist ribbed him: “We keep waiting for the CDC to show up on a milk carton as a missing child.”

In the months that followed, CDC scientists watching the president’s news conferences on a wall of screens in the agency’s Emergency Operations Center were dumbfounded as Trump countermanded science in a flurry of inaccuracies and dangerous advice, saying the virus would soon go away, theorizing about injecting disinfectant as a treatment, and dismissing recommendations about wearing a mask.

As the agency stumbled in China and at home, a group of lab scientists was assigned a high-stakes mission: developing a test for the coronavirus.

Inside a small lab on the CDC’s Atlanta campus, microbiologist Stephen Lindstrom was put in charge. A Saskatchewan native who speaks at a breakneck clip, Lindstrom had studied in Tokyo and defended his Ph.D. dissertation in Japanese. During the H1N1 flu pandemic, his team had invented a test, jumped through regulatory hurdles and shipped it around the world in just two weeks’ time.

“Frankly, he kind of lives for the pressure,” said one of his colleagues.

But this time around, just about everything that could go wrong did. Calculated decisions went sideways, and Lindstrom couldn’t find a quick way to right them. Mystifying contamination appeared at every turn, relegating tests to the trash heap. Precious weeks were lost.

The CDC declined to make Lindstrom available for questions. But lab records obtained by ProPublica and interviews reveal for the first time the mounting pressure and the cascading troubles inside the lab.

As soon as Lindstrom’s team received the genetic sequence from scientists in China in January, they got to work. By the time German researchers on Jan. 13 announced the recipe for the test that would be adopted by the World Health Organization, Lindstrom’s team was almost done building its own.

Lindstrom had turned to the lab’s expert on coronaviruses to design the U.S. test. They chose one that looked for three targets on the same coronavirus gene. While the first and second targets were unique to the new virus spreading in China, the third would identify a broader family of coronaviruses, useful if the virus circulating in China mutated as it infected Americans.

Such a test works like this: Imagine three different pieces of velcro, each custom-made to stick to one of those three genetic targets. If any of them finds a perfect match in a patient’s sample, the test will cause that snippet of genetic material to duplicate over and over until there’s enough to light up a signal, alerting a technician that there is a positive test result.

To make sure the tests work properly, microbiologists prefer to validate a test using actual virus samples taken from people. Lindstrom didn’t have that, but he could use lab-made pieces of the virus to do the same thing. He also needed to make the velcro-like testing ingredients that find matches in patient samples.

Making both the testing ingredients and the snippets of the virus in the same location, though, goes against best practices. Even in world-class labs, manufacturing pieces of a virus can leave microscopic traces in the environment and on equipment for months. Those can later contaminate tests so that even water would give a positive result. That kind of false positive renders the tests useless.

Lindstrom’s lab didn’t have the equipment or expertise needed to make the raw materials for the test. But an underground corridor led to another CDC lab — the “core facility” — in a gleaming glass tower. Lindstrom had used it many times to quickly make testing materials. The facility could make what Lindstrom needed, but it was risky.

Hiring a private company to take on one of those tasks would add at least 10 days to production times, an eternity during an outbreak. So Lindstrom hedged his bets. He placed an order with a contractor for the genetic pieces he needed, but also asked the core facility to make those snippets along with the velcro-like ingredients.

“It’s a pretty dangerous procedure to make that in the same facility” due to contamination, said one CDC scientist. “Trying to fast-track it this way was risky.”

Years ago, low-level contamination ruined some CDC tests for Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, even though the core facility made the viral pieces on a different floor from the velcro-like ingredients, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Initially, it looked as if Lindstrom had made a good call. The core facility cranked out the parts needed for the tests and they passed quality checks, suggesting that making all of them in house wasn’t a problem. On Jan. 20, his lab was able to identify the first positive U.S. case. Still, Lindstrom showed a rare flash of anxiety, telling colleagues: “This is going to either make me or break me.”

Soon specimens were pouring in. At that point, Lindstrom’s lab was the only one in the country able to test samples to confirm whether patients had COVID-19. At the same time, his team was racing to get authorization from the Food and Drug Administration for test kits that could be distributed to state and local public health labs. Exhausted CDC scientists arrived at 7 a.m. and left after 11 p.m.

With that authorization in the works, Lindstrom asked the core facility to begin mass-producing the ingredients that stick to the three genetic targets in a human sample. Then Lindstrom made a second risky decision. He had his team produce the stand-in for the virus that labs would use to check that a positive sample would trigger a positive result, lab records show.

The ingredients made by Lindstrom’s lab and the core facility passed the quality checks, records show, so Lindstrom sent them to another CDC lab to process and put in vials for the test kits.

The first sign of trouble appeared on Feb. 3. Lindstrom’s team performed quality checks on two lots of tests. In one lot, the third target was showing up as present when testers were using only water — a false positive result. The other lot was fine, records show. Though the flawed lot was set aside, this was a red flag. Contamination can be difficult to eliminate once it occurs, and the batch that failed had gone through the same lab spaces as the one that passed. Nevertheless, Lindstrom released the good lot of tests to be sent to public health labs.

While those tests were in transit, his team performed one last round of quality checks. This time, one of the test kits that they believed was fine also came back with a false positive, records show. Confoundingly, the next day that same kit performed as it should when Lindstrom’s lab checked it, according to a lab record.

Complaints poured in as soon as the tests arrived at the public health labs. Before screening any samples from patients, scientists checked to ensure the tests worked, using water for a negative and the stand-in for the virus for a positive. They found the same problem with the third target: It registered as positive when just testing water.

“There is likely a widespread issue that will need to be addressed immediately,” a California public health official said in an email to the CDC on Feb. 8.

“Aw Shit!” Lindstrom muttered to his staff. His team rechecked bulk testing ingredients from that lot, and found no issues. Then they pulled a portion from the freezer that hadn’t been opened since they received it from the core facility. A few false positives turned up, records show. So Lindstrom’s lab ordered from the core facility a replacement for the ingredient that is supposed to stick to the third target. But he also had contractors make some too.

At first, it looked like the problem could be solved quickly. The core facility delivered test ingredients that passed quality checks on Feb. 11. But subsequent checks — after they had been put in vials again — showed problems, records show.

Lindstrom told colleagues he was convinced there was contamination, but some CDC leaders insisted that the problem was actually a faulty design akin to a software bug — that Lindstrom had chosen genetic sequences that could cause a glitch and show a false positive, according to emails and interviews. While they debated, public health labs with the faulty kits couldn’t process samples, and the FDA still hadn’t authorized any tests made by commercial labs. Instead of a network of labs around the country testing sick people, Lindstrom’s team remained one of the few that could do it, using kits they’d made before the problem arose.

The air was filled with tension. At one point, a manager on the CDC coronavirus response team banged on the door to Lindstrom’s lab and demanded test results from his staff rather than waiting for them to be entered in the agency’s database, according to a scientist who was present. During a meeting, Lindstrom yelled at his colleagues for going around him and browbeating his people, according to an official who was present.

When it seemed things couldn’t get any worse, they did. Public health labs began reporting on Feb. 12 that they also were having problems with the part of the test that was supposed to stick to the first target. Subsequent checks by Lindstrom’s lab found the same problem, records show. Lindstrom now had an issue with the ingredients that were supposed to match two of the three targets. And it wasn’t clear whether there was contamination in his lab, the core facility or the separate facility that put the material into vials. Two weeks after the first complaint, the CDC still didn’t have a solution.

The FDA’s head of lab diagnostics showed up to troubleshoot and found Lindstrom’s lab in disarray. The Wall Street Journal later reported that the FDA official’s boss told CDC leaders that if it had been any other lab, they would have shut it down.

Public health labs were clamoring for tests, and Lindstrom was running out of options. The replacement material that was supposed to stick to the third target was made incorrectly and had to be scrapped, records show. The test kits he had ordered from contractors hadn’t arrived yet.

It seemed like the virus’ fingerprints were everywhere. So when the core facility sent some test ingredients that passed quality checks, Lindstrom hired a contractor to put them in vials. Even those tests came back with problems, a lab record shows.

With the FDA’s blessing, Lindstrom cobbled together test ingredients from different batches that had all passed quality checks, and they dropped the troublesome third target.

By the end of February, three weeks after public health labs first reported problems, the CDC started to send new test kits.

In the aftermath, an investigation by HHS lawyers pointed to Lindstrom’s lab as a likely source of contamination and praised the core facility for following “extreme precautionary measures” that minimized risk. Lindstrom fumed to colleagues that the HHS report was inaccurate. He was adamant that evidence showed the contamination originated in the core facility, not his own lab, records show.

The CDC did its own review but never released it. Separately, the HHS inspector general has been investigating. And some CDC scientists remain convinced that the problem wasn’t contamination but faulty design.

Anger and mistrust caused by the shortage of tests fell on the CDC — even if the FDA shared the blame for sticking to a cumbersome regulatory process that delayed the rollout of more tests. The combination of delays and missteps by the nation’s two top health agencies put the United States dangerously behind in assessing the spread of the virus. In contrast, South Korean officials gave near instantaneous approval to commercial labs, and they quickly began testing 10,000 people a day.

In a written statement, FDA spokeswoman Lauren-Jei McCarthy said her agency “has demonstrated unprecedented regulatory flexibility in order to speed development and quickly authorize tests.” The FDA, she said, streamlined its process to allow “diagnostic tests to be developed, validated, and deployed within weeks rather than several months to over a year, as traditionally required.”

In July, the acting director of Lindstrom’s division summoned him. He was reassigned to a new job with no official title and few responsibilities.

The following month, a CDC journal published a study that showed that Lindstrom had not been the only one struggling with faulty tests. Commercial labs in Europe had similar problems that delayed testing in at least nine countries.

By then, though, the damage had been done. To the public and within the federal government, the CDC had failed catastrophically at a critical juncture.

As the virus hopscotched across the globe, cruise ships became early symbols of the pandemic. Overnight, they morphed from bastions of leisure into pariahs of the sea, floating hotspots crammed with tourists, sick and well.

The Diamond Princess quickly became the most infamous. During excruciating weeks in February, the disease ripped through the massive ship, infecting hundreds of passengers off the port of Yokohama, Japan. Relatives of those stranded on board pleaded with the U.S. government to evacuate them, likening the recirculated air to a gas chamber.

At the CDC, the dilemma of what to do with the ships and their passengers, many of them Americans, fell to Cetron, who had led the agency’s quarantine division for more than two decades.

Cetron, 61, bore his responsibilities with a grim knowledge of the past. The CDC doesn’t have much statutory authority. Its influence lies in the ability to coax the public into acting in the nation’s collective interest. But the agency has one formidable power: the ability to control border movement during an outbreak and deprive people of their freedom to protect the public’s health.

Cetron had talked openly about how that power had been used in the past as a weapon to stigmatize. His academic research partner, the medical historian Howard Markel, had written a book about the mistreatment of Jewish immigrants in New York during cholera and typhoid outbreaks in 1892. Even a group sent to help called them “human maggots.” Authorities shunted them off to a quarantine island where they endured squalor and isolation. Some died.

But with the coronavirus, the agency’s singular authority would be undercut, abused and politicized — and Cetron would be unable to stop it.

As the Diamond Princess languished, U.S. diplomats assured passengers that nobody with the virus would board the evacuation flights. However, after packing the American passengers on buses headed for chartered planes, officials learned that 14 had tested positive. The State Department pushed for all of the passengers — uninfected and infected — to fly out together, according to CDC officials who were involved in the discussions.

Schuchat and Butler objected. Dr. Robert Kadlec, the HHS official in charge and a former Air Force colonel, sided with the State Department. Kadlec told colleagues the priority was bringing Americans home. On one of the planes, the only thing separating the infected from the non-infected was a flimsy plastic sheet.

The Washington Post reported that Schuchat demanded the removal of all references to the CDC from the State Department press release about the repatriation.

CDC officials involved told ProPublica that they were appalled by both the decision and its sloppy execution. “There’s a four-foot gap at the top of the shower curtain that you bought from Home Depot — and you’re calling this a quarantine area?” one said. “If I were to write a book, it would be called Operation Clusterfuck, and it would start with this chapter.”

Spokespeople for the State Department and HHS said diplomats and federal health experts took stringent precautions on the evacuation flights.

“Individuals who tested positive were moved in the most expeditious and safe manner to a specialized containment area on the evacuation aircraft,” a State Department spokesperson said in a written response. He added, “All passengers were closely monitored by medical professionals throughout the flight and were provided masks for additional protection.”

Despite that very public ordeal, cruise lines kept packing more passengers on board and heading out to sea. Days after the Diamond Princess evacuation, a ship from the same company, the Grand Princess, set sail from San Francisco on another ill-fated voyage. On March 5, a military helicopter had to fly to the ship to deliver tests after passengers got sick.

The next day, with the Grand Princess floating off the coast of San Francisco, Trump flew to Atlanta for an impromptu tour of the CDC laboratories. Wearing a red “KEEP AMERICA GREAT” cap, Trump briefly praised the CDC’s tests as “perfect” and talked about the record high ratings for his recent appearance on Fox News. Asked by a reporter about cruise ships, the president said he preferred that the Grand Princess passengers remain on board because their arrival — even at a federal quarantine site — would cause a spike in U.S. case numbers.

“I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship,” Trump told reporters.

Cetron and his team mapped every cruise ship at sea with COVID patients, working feverishly to build support in the government for a no-sail order that could prevent more outbreaks. “These cruise ships are the equivalent of mass gatherings of hundreds if not thousands of the most vulnerable populations” at risk for severe illness or death from COVID, and any of these passengers could seed the virus in their communities when they returned home, he said in an email to Redfield.

The cruise industry resisted and put forth a plan that would allow companies to keep sailing with extra safety precautions. The day after Trump’s appearance in Atlanta, Pence and Redfield met in Florida with cruise executives. After Pence praised the industry’s “spirit of collaboration,” the chairman of the industry’s largest trade group said, “Given the significance of travel and tourism, it is critical that Americans keep traveling.”

Employees watching in the CDC’s command center in Atlanta let out an audible groan.

Cetron told colleagues in an email that the industry’s plan was inadequate, given the “sardine can density” of these ships, records show. Every day the federal government delayed shutting down this industry meant more illness and death. At a meeting in March, Cetron railed against the industry’s recalcitrance and his own government’s unwillingness to act, according to people who attended.

“This is unconscionable,” he told Schuchat and more than a dozen others around the conference table, his voice so anguished it alarmed some who were there.

Colleagues could see the toll the battle was taking on him. Raccoon-like rings deepened around his eyes. He looked like an unmade bed, often wearing the same shirt, pants and rumpled tweed jacket with elbow pads as the day before. At one point, the CDC’s chief of staff became so worried about Cetron’s health that he ordered him to surrender his phone to Butler, who answered the late-night calls. “Go home and get some sleep,” the chief of staff commanded, according to people who overheard the conversation.

When the CDC finally issued a 30-day no-sail order on March 14, it excluded the majority of cruise operators since their trade group, Cruise Lines International Association, voluntarily agreed the previous day to stop launching any new ships from U.S. ports during that time. The order praised the trade group’s actions, “and the commitment it demonstrates to protecting the health of both cruise ship passengers and the public at large.”

Outbreaks continued on ships that were already at sea. The trade group had drafted a plan to hire a global rescue team staffed by special-operations veterans who would extract infected passengers and take them to medical facilities contracted to care for them “without burden on the U.S. government,” records show. Yet by April 6, the group still hadn’t hired the rescue company, and public health authorities had to scramble to help evacuate critically ill people from ships, records show.

Cetron worked on a new no-sail order that exposed the industry’s failures and required cruise operators to care for the 79,800 crew members on ships in or near U.S. ports without further strain on public health workers, records show.

“Poor planning by the industry, failure to adhere to recommendations and unsafe transport operations used by ships to get passengers and crew home has posed significant risks to local, state, national and international spread of the virus,” Cetron told Redfield in an email. “Dozens of vessels are still at sea with active COVID infections on board,” he added, “heading toward US waters requesting arrival in our ports.”

Cetron told Redfield this tougher order was “urgently needed.” Yet, the Department of Homeland Security refused to sign off. Officials wrote that they disagreed with CDC’s “narrative describing the actions of the cruise line industry.”

After four days of wrangling, DHS agreed to keep the force of the order, but Cetron’s criticisms of the cruise industry were censored or softened. A section titled “Failure of Cruise Ship Industry to Develop and Implement a Response Plan” became “Critical Need for Further Cooperation and Response Planning.”

Representatives from Cruise Lines International Association did not return emails or a phone call.

In September, the CDC proposed extending the no-sail order into February 2021, but the White House Coronavirus Task Force instead sided with the cruise industry and picked an end date of Oct. 31.

At the same time as they were watering down Cetron’s criticism of the cruise industry, the White House and DHS were pushing him to invoke quarantine powers to stop a problem that barely existed: the spread of coronavirus by migrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border.

Two days after the no-sail order in March, Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller scheduled a meeting to discuss “Emergency Border Planning.” Like Cetron’s ancestors, Miller’s great-great-grandfather escaped anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe and found refuge in the United States. But Miller was a driving force behind Trump’s so-called Muslim ban, as well as the family-separation policy and efforts to build a wall spanning the 1,954-mile U.S.-Mexico border.

In a call on March 17, Miller urged the administration to use the CDC’s powers to close the border immediately because “the Southern Border is in crisis and will get worse as COVID-19 spreads in Mexico,” according to an email from a deputy general counsel at HHS.

Shortly after 7 a.m. the next day, an HHS lawyer sent Cetron’s team a proposed CDC order that largely closed the borders with Mexico and Canada. A deputy of Cetron’s lamented to the agency’s chief of staff that the order cited a “misrepresented and incomplete piece of data” to overstate the threat.

“I’m also not a fan of trying to make the case that Canada and Mexico represent a big risk on the land border based on what we ‘believe’ is occurring vs. what we know about the # of cases (which are far fewer than the # of cases in the US now due to community spread),” she wrote.

Cetron refused to sign off on the order, according to people who worked with him. “I will not be a part of this,” a furious Cetron told a colleague. “It’s just morally wrong to use a public authority that has never, ever, ever been used this way. It’s to keep Hispanics out of the country. And it’s wrong.”

With Cetron engaged in a personal act of civil disobedience, Redfield signed the order.

For the first time since the enactment of the Refugee Act of 1980, people who came to the border saying they feared persecution or torture in their home countries were turned away with no chance to plead their case for asylum.

Ken Cuccinelli, a senior Homeland Security official, later boasted to a congressional committee that border agents had expelled “90 percent of aliens crossing the Southern Border within two hours of encountering them — an incredible feat and of critical importance to the public health and the protection of our workforce in response to COVID.”

The order signed by Redfield said the CDC had invoked its powers “to protect the public health from an increase in the serious danger of the introduction of Coronavirus Disease 2019.” Nevertheless, border officials tested unaccompanied children seeking asylum — and expelled them even if their results were negative.

An HHS spokesperson said the department does not discuss internal deliberations. A CDC spokesman declined to make Cetron available for interviews.

During an online talk in August hosted by Dartmouth College, he said that one of the lessons of this pandemic was the importance of “a full bank account of trust” in institutions.

“And if there’s a bankruptcy of trust,” he said, “it can be really tough.”

By April, the numbers were brutal. There were 608,000 cases of COVID nationwide. More than 26,000 people had died, about 10,000 of them in New York City, where the per capita death rate had surpassed Italy’s. Morgue trucks appeared outside hospitals.

Inside the CDC, scientists scrambled to gather and analyze data that could alert them to emerging hotspots. The data was their fuel, driving almost every decision they made. Early in the outbreak, the lack of widespread testing had caused a shortage of data, obscuring the agency’s vision as the virus spread in Washington state, New York and New Jersey. The CDC updated its well-regarded hospital tracking system to collect information about COVID.

But in a startling power play this spring, the Trump administration stripped the CDC of its lead role in handling this vital hospital data, bringing in a private contractor that would struggle to gather reliable information. The unprecedented move, CDC scientists and public health specialists said, struck at the heart of the agency’s mission.

Now, with fall pushing people indoors and threatening a new wave of infections, CDC scientists worry they will again have trouble tracking outbreaks and directing doctors, nurses, medicine and equipment to hotspots.

“When you don’t have quality data that is accurate and reliable, you miss out on signals,’’ a CDC data scientist said. “It can have a devastating impact.”

Like many of the agency’s travails, politics played a role in the battle over data. Powerful critics worked backstage to sideline an agency that they saw as unresponsive and ineffective.

In February, Pottinger, the deputy national security advisor, had lobbied hard for Dr. Deborah Birx, his wife’s friend and former boss, to be named the White House coordinator of the federal response. Pottinger was exasperated by the CDC’s testing debacle and its failures in China. But it was also personal. As a former CDC scientist, Pottinger’s wife had helped invent an HIV test, which was adopted overseas, but not in the United States due to what Pottinger believed was bureaucratic dispute within the CDC. Pottinger told White House colleagues that the agency had a “culture where petty rivalries between egos tend to subordinate the public good.”

Birx, too, was no fan of the agency, even though she’d once run its global AIDS program, according to officials who know her. Since 2014, she’d overseen the State Department’s international AIDS-fighting initiative, which is seen as one of the most effective federal health programs in U.S. history. Birx was a leader who sent emails at 3:45 a.m. A former CDC colleague praised her as brilliant and “data-driven.”

Others were less impressed. Senior officials claimed she amassed power by undermining colleagues, stoking upheaval and presenting herself as the lone savior in a crisis. In February, an audit of her AIDS program by the State Department’s inspector general found that 49 of 68 respondents were critical of the leadership, with some describing it as “dictatorial” or “autocratic.” Several employees complained about intense pressure to meet performance targets, with one saying, “You’re incentivizing data cooking.”

With the CDC now under her ambit, Birx made similar demands. During contentious meetings, she clashed with Schuchat and others over the coronavirus data the CDC collected from hospitals, according to people who were present. She wanted many more details, and she wanted them faster.

Birx expected “every hospital to report every piece of data every day, which is in complete defiance of statistics,” a CDC data scientist said. “We have 60% [of hospitals] reporting, which was certainly good enough for us to have reliable estimates. If we got to 80%, even better. A hundred percent is unnecessary, unrealistic, but that’s part of Birx’s dogma.”

In April, HHS hired TeleTracking Technologies Inc. to collect COVID data along with the CDC. But the Pittsburgh company had trouble getting accurate information, records and interviews show. A CDC analysis in May discovered that data about ventilator use was missing from 57% of hospitals that reported to TeleTracking, compared with 6% of hospitals reporting to the CDC system during the same week. Rather than acknowledge that data was missing, the company reported zeroes instead, according to the CDC analysis.

“It would be like reporting on race and assuming that everybody for whom that variable is missing is white,” a senior CDC official said.

Still, TeleTracking agreed to add many data fields to the forms that hospitals had to fill out every day. CDC data experts refused to do that, warning that hospitals confronted with a form with 91 categories would leave them blank or provide unreliable numbers.

At an impasse, the government in July told hospitals to stop reporting coronavirus data to the CDC.

“That’s really almost like the final blow to show CDC you are out of the game,” said Yip, the agency’s former country director in China. “We don’t even trust you to handle the basic data.”

A TeleTracking spokesperson defended the company’s performance.

“TeleTracking, under HHS’s direction, has developed a data collection system that has enabled more hospitals to report their data more quickly and reliably than ever before,” the spokesperson said. “Since the switchover in July, compliance has improved more than 25%.”

Spokespeople for TeleTracking and HHS also pointed out that Redfield has publicly praised the new system and said his agency’s experts still have access to the data.

The pandemic has required a different and more flexible approach, an HHS spokesperson said. “Rather than reject incorrect data outright, HHS allows it to flow into our system,” the spokesperson said. “The error is flagged and then resolved directly with the hospital.”

Birx did not respond to requests for comment. During a press briefing on Oct. 6, she said she had worked with hospitals to pare back some daily requests to weekly. But at the same briefing, she and other health officials announced that hospitals now would have to provide information about flu patients as well as COVID. If they didn’t, the officials said, they could lose their Medicare and Medicaid funding — a fatal blow for a hospital.

CDC experts fear hospitals may cut corners as they try to comply. A scientist predicted that the tough new policy would “convert a problem of incomplete data to a problem of invalid data.”

By the summer, communities were wracked with anxiety about how to safely reopen schools that had been shuttered since the spring. They looked to the CDC for advice.

From past experience, the CDC’s career scientists knew that schools were tricky political terrain. The last time a pandemic hit the U.S., in 2009, the CDC caused a political backlash when it suggested one- to two-week school closures. But the outcome of the inevitable tug of war between politics and science was much different.

Just months after President Barack Obama took office, a novel flu jumped from pigs to people, then spread across the nation. CDC scientists identified it as an H1N1 virus and initially feared it might be as deadly as the 1918 flu pandemic that had infected a third of the world’s population, killing more than 50 million people.

While Schuchat warned the public, Acting CDC Director Rich Besser flew to Washington. A telegenic pediatrician, Besser told the president and his cabinet that the CDC would be recommending brief school closures in areas where Besser’s disease detectives had identified cases. Obama was clear: All decisions had to be made quickly and grounded in the best available science.

Besser, who recalled the events in an oral history in 2010, said he was then called to another meeting by Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s intimidating chief of staff. Obama’s top political advisor, David Axelrod, and several cabinet secretaries told Besser that his school closure plan wasn’t “going to fly.” Among the many problems: kids who counted on schools for meals would go hungry.

“Let me take a stab at rewriting this,” Besser recalled Emanuel saying as he began scribbling on a pad.

Besser was flabbergasted. Hadn’t the president just said that science was going to drive policy? He looked around, thinking, “I’m the only scientist at this table.”

He turned to his new boss, HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “Madam Secretary, I’m not real comfortable with this,” he recalled saying. Sebelius hushed him, urging him to wait. Emanuel read his new version aloud. Then Axelrod spoke. “You know, Rahm,” Besser recalled him saying. “I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to be writing scientific guidance.”

Cursing, Emanuel crumpled the paper in his fist, threw it aside and began eating his lunch. At a crucial moment, science prevailed.

In 2020, time and again, the crumpled paper hurled into the corner was the work of the scientists.

In late June, the CDC posted a checklist for reopening schools, which included advice on social distancing and masks. Trump raged on Twitter that he disagreed with the CDC’s “very tough & expensive guidelines for opening schools.”

One CDC official recalls seeing the July 8 tweet and sighing in defeat. “Come on, man, this is your team! You don’t have to tweet it like that! You can just pick up the phone and call Redfield!”

That checklist was supposed to be just the beginning of the agency’s advice on school reopening. Everyone nitpicked the CDC’s subsequent proposals, records show — even Trump’s daughter Ivanka, who suggested granting paid sick leave to teachers and administrators at high risk for COVID-19 complications. In a section that described the higher proportion of cases among Hispanic children, the White House counsel’s office wanted the CDC to add a reference to one of the president’s favorite bugaboos, the Mexican border.

But the most heated disputes involved an HHS mental health office that emphasized the role of schools as integral to the psychological well-being of children. It chastised the CDC team for writing an overly negative “tome” that was a “recipe for schools to stay closed.” The HHS unit was even critical of the suggestion that schools might need to close in areas where the virus was raging uncontrolled. The mental health office scolded the CDC for its “lengthy list of cautions” and said it had written its own guide for parents that had the “opposite tone,” records show.

The White House insisted that the mental health office’s missive lead the CDC’s schools page when it was unveiled in late July. To the outside world, it looked as if the president had snapped his fingers and the CDC caved. Those who bothered to drill down into the real CDC guidance posted beneath were confused by the conflicting messages.

“We didn’t know at CDC that it was going to be forced upon us to post it on our website,” said an agency staffer involved in the discussions.

Scientists at the agency commiserated, calling it “propaganda.”

The HHS mental health office “strongly supports the reopening of schools with appropriate safety measures,” a spokesman said in a written statement. “Parents should be equipped with all perspectives to make an informed decision about the whole health of their child.”

In August, the White House crafted new guidance from Trump. Titled “SCHOOLS SHOULD SAFELY REOPEN,” it contradicted the CDC recommendations on social distancing and masks, and minimized the risks to teachers and students.

The CDC objected, but the White House published it anyway.

The months of defeats were taking a toll. Redfield looked beaten. When his boss, HHS Secretary Alex Azar, upbraided him, he could only mumble, “Yes sir” or “I understand, sir” or “I agree, sir,” according to people who heard these exchanges. (Asked about these exchanges, an HHS spokesperson said: “The American people are fortunate to have Dr. Redfield leading the CDC.”)

Even Kyle McGowan, Redfield’s main protector and an avid political chess player, was running out of moves.

The appointment of McGowan as CDC chief of staff had been a norm-busting move: The 34-year-old was the first political appointee in memory to hold the influential post. He told senior scientists, “I know you think I’m a spy, but I’m really not.”

McGowan had managed campaigns for Georgia Congressman Tom Price, who’d received a 100% rating from the American Conservative Union. When Trump appointed Price as HHS Secretary, McGowan followed him. Six months after Price resigned, McGowan was named to the CDC post. He soon won the trust of CDC career staff. “There was a sense that he’d gone native,” a senior scientist said.

Before getting on the phone with his fellow political appointees in Washington, he’d call CDC scientists. “What can you live with?” he’d ask, according to people familiar with these conversations.

But McGowan and the CDC were often on the losing side. One of their prime tormentors was Michael Caputo, a political fixer handpicked by Trump himself to oversee communications at HHS. A proud protégé of convicted Roger Stone, Caputo had served as an adviser for Russian politicians, worked for Trump’s campaign and promoted conspiracy theories. Soon after arriving at HHS in April, Caputo began riding herd over CDC communications seen as conflicting with Trump’s political message. He made it clear that anyone who dared talk to a journalist without approval could be fired.

McGowan warned his CDC colleagues to be careful what they put in writing. “They can read your email,” he told them.

McGowan became increasingly protective of the CDC’s senior scientists, particularly Schuchat, whose office was adjacent to his. She was viewed as the defender of the agency’s principles, the one immortalized as a disease-hunter on screen. With a close colleague McGowan shared worries that she had become a target of the administration’s wrath, a symbol of the “deep state” bureaucrats the Trump die-hards believed were bent on destroying the president. She attracted the administration’s ire with her blunt assessments in media interviews.

During a June 29 interview with the editor of the medical journal JAMA, Schuchat said that what used to keep her up at night was a fear of an influenza pandemic like the one that struck the U.S. in 1918.

The current pandemic, she said, is similar to “that 1918 transformational experience.” And when asked about the rising case numbers in the United States, she said, “I think there was a lot of wishful thinking around the country, that, ‘Hey, summer, everything’s gonna be fine. We’re over this,’ And we are not even beginning to be over this.”

Schuchat had contradicted Trump’s message that life was returning to normal. McGowan told a colleague that he was hearing rumbles that Caputo and others were trying to fire Schuchat. It had come to this: A world famous scientist was in jeopardy for telling the truth.

“Should I be worried, Kyle?” she asked McGowan, according to a person familiar with the conversation, who said McGowan replied: “Not yet.”

McGowan reached his breaking point when Redfield asked him to stop the deportation of a dog, according to people who worked closely with him.

In late June, a Peace Corps volunteer evacuated from West Africa was told that the rabies vaccine of her dog, a terrier mix named Socrates, was not valid. Rabies vaccines are marked with pink dye, and a photo of Socrates’ vaccination showed a clear liquid, a CDC email said. Border authorities said Socrates had to be sent back to Africa, revaccinated and quarantined there for 28 days before returning. The Peace Corps volunteer sparked a #SaveSocrates outcry on social media.

CDC experts told McGowan that the last foreign dog with rabies that slipped through had cost more than $500,000 in public health charges, including shots for 44 people who had been near the animal, an email shows. Making an exception threatened to render the policy unenforceable for the 500 animals that are deported every year.

At a time when the pandemic had killed nearly 130,000 Americans, McGowan spent an hour and a half on the phone with the HHS general counsel and other senior officials to figure out how to make an exception for a dog. All the while, he told colleagues, his mind kept returning to the fact that the same administration was using the CDC’s quarantine power to deport thousands of children at the border with Mexico.

Later that day, Brian Harrison, the HHS chief of staff and a former labradoodle breeder, announced the liberation of Socrates. Secretary Azar out the news with the hashtag #SaveSocrates.

Privately, McGowan fumed.

“He was sad, downtrodden and defeated,” a colleague said. “This was really the final straw for him: How we are going to let dogs in, but basically we’re going to require children to be carted off and out of the country? And all in the name of public health.”

McGowan resigned in August.

The following month, Caputo took a medical leave after he hosted a live video on his personal Facebook in which he accused “deep state scientists” of “sedition” and warned his followers to stock up on ammunition in anticipation of political upheaval. In that rant, which was reported by The New York Times, Caputo said CDC scientists had only changed out of their sweatpants to meet at coffee shops and plot “how they’re going to attack Donald Trump next.”

In Atlanta, lawn signs popped up: “I SUPPORT Sweatpants, Coffee Shops and the CDC.”

Longtime CDC employees confess that they have lost trust in what their own agency tells the public.

In August, the CDC stunned infectious disease doctors everywhere when it recommended that people who had close contact with a COVID patient didn’t necessarily need testing if they didn’t have symptoms. Even Butler, one of the highest ranking scientists at the agency, began signing his emails to state and local health departments, “Keep testing, Jay.”

Another dismayed veteran who works with local health officials did something he had never done before. He told them to ignore his own agency’s guidance. The agency reversed the much-criticized recommendation about testing a month later, but the damage was done. After more than a decade at the CDC, the veteran decided to quit.

“It’s just a disappointment,” he said. “People’s reaction now at other agencies, at state and local public health agencies, when the CDC comes out with a recommendation, they are going to ask: ‘Is that the truth? Or is that what you were told to say?’”

Some longtime senior scientists at the CDC are grappling with whether they are too tainted to lead the rebuilding of trust.

“Many of us who might be viewed as complicit need to decide whether we need to leave,” one of them said, “Or can we be part of the ‘never again’ so that the agency never gets this kind of political interference again?”

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KIANA, Alaska — Village Police Officer Annie Reed heard her VHF radio crackle to life in the spring of 2018 with the familiar voice of an elder. I need help at my house, the woman said.

Reed, who doesn’t wear a uniform because everyone in this Arctic Circle village of 421 can spot her ambling gait and bell of salt-and-pepper hair at a distance, steered her four-wheeler across town. There had been a home invasion, she learned. One of the local sex offenders, who outnumber Reed 7-to-1, had pried open a window and crawled inside, she said. The man then tore the clothes from the elder’s daughter, who had been sleeping, gripped her throat and raped her, according to the charges filed against him in state court.

Reed, a 49-year-old grandmother, was the only cop in the village. She carried no gun and, after five years on the job, had received a total of three weeks of law enforcement training. She had no backup. Even when the fitful weather allows, the Alaska State Troopers, the statewide police force that travels to villages to make felony arrests, are a half-hour flight away.

It’s moments like these when Reed thinks about quitting. If she does, Kiana could become the latest Alaska village asked to survive with no local police protection of any kind.

An investigation by the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica has found one in three communities in Alaska has no local law enforcement. No state troopers to stop an active shooter, no village police officers to break up family fights, not even untrained city or tribal cops to patrol the streets. Almost all of the communities are primarily Alaska Native.

Seventy of these unprotected villages are large enough to have both a school and a post office. Many are in regions with some of the highest rates of poverty, sexual assault and suicide in the United States. Most can be reached only by plane, boat, all-terrain vehicle or snowmobile. That means, unlike most anywhere else in the United States, emergency help is hours or even days away.

When a village police officer helps in a sex crime investigation by documenting evidence, securing the crime scene and conducting interviews, the case is more likely to be prosecuted, the University of Alaska Anchorage Justice Center concluded in 2018. Yet communities with no first responders of any kind can be found along the salmon-filled rivers of Western Alaska, the pancake tundra of the northwest Arctic and the icy rainforests in the southeast panhandle.

The state recognizes that most villages can’t afford their own police force and has a special class of law enforcement, called village public safety officers, to help. But it’s not working. In the 60 years since Alaska became a state, some Alaska Native leaders say, a string of governors and Legislatures have failed to protect indigenous communities by creating an unconstitutional, two-tiered criminal justice system that leaves villagers unprotected compared with their mostly white counterparts in the cities and suburbs.

ProPublica and the Daily News asked more than 560 traditional councils, tribal corporations and city governments representing 233 communities if they employ peace officers of any sort. It is the most comprehensive investigation of its kind in Alaska.

Here is what we learned:

• Tribal and city leaders in several villages said they lack jail space and police stations. At least five villages reported housing shortages that prevent them from providing potential police hires with a place to live, a practical necessity in some regions for obtaining state-funded VPSOs. In other villages, burnout and low pay, with some village police earning as little as $10 an hour, lead to constant turnover among law enforcement.
• In villages that do have police, more than 20 have hired officers with criminal records that violate state standards for village police officers over the past two years. They say that’s better than no police at all. Our review identified at least two registered sex offenders working this year as Alaska policemen.
• Alaska communities that have no cops and cannot be reached by road have nearly four times as many sex offenders, per capita, than the national average.

The lack of local police and public safety infrastructure routinely leaves residents to fend for themselves. The mayor of the Yukon River village of Russian Mission said that within the past couple years, residents duct-taped a man who had been firing a gun within the village and waited for troopers to arrive. In nearby Marshall, villagers locked their doors last year until a man who was threatening to shoot people had fallen asleep, then grabbed him and tied him up. In Kivalina, a February burglary closed the post office for a week because the village had no police officer to investigate. Elsewhere, tribes mete out banishment for serious crimes from meth dealing to arson.

“There’s no one you can call and go, ‘Oh hey, my neighbor is going crazy right now,’” said Kristen George, tribal administrator for the Bristol Bay town of Clark’s Point, which balloons from 55 people to several hundred during the commercial fishing season.

If someone started shooting, George said, “they could probably wipe us out before troopers came.”

Many of the unprotected villages are in western Alaska, where sex crime rates are double the statewide average. (Alaska’s statewide rate, in turn, is nearly three times the U.S. average.) Rape survivors, as in the Kiana home invasion case, are told not to shower and must fly to hub cities or even hundreds of miles to Anchorage to undergo a sexual assault examination.

The problem is getting worse. Our investigation found the number of police provided through the state Village Public Safety Officer Program is at or near an all-time low; the few who remain are often unhappy and overextended.

When the lone VPSO in the northwest Arctic village of Ambler investigated a domestic violence call in April, for example, he said he was attacked by two people in the home who each grabbed one of his arms. In a subsequent report, he described it as one of the scariest moments of his life as he struggled to break free and grab a can of pepper spray.

“I was unable to get any assistance as I am the only law enforcement officer in this village within about a 100 square mile radius,” he wrote.

Rather than raise pay or boost recruitment, Gov. Mike Dunleavy this year proposed a state budget that would cut $3 million in funding for vacant village-based police officer jobs. The reductions are a small part of a proposed $1.8 billion reduction in state spending as cash-strapped Alaska struggles to live within its means while avoiding an income tax and continuing to pay annual Permanent Fund dividend checks to all eligible residents.

Dunleavy, a Republican, campaigned on promoting public safety, but he also promised Alaskans that they wouldn’t have to give up the annual oil wealth checks, and that those checks might increase. Under his proposed budget, each Alaskan would receive a more than $4,000 payment in October, the largest ever. (State lawmakers are working on a competing spending plan with fewer cuts, which would maintain VPSO funding at current levels and provide potentially smaller dividends.) Dunleavy has said growth in state spending is the problem, not annual checks to residents.

Whether each Alaskan also receives basic public safety protection — the ability to dial 911 and have a police officer or trooper show up at the door — depends largely on whether they live in cities like Anchorage and Fairbanks, or off the road system.

Martha Whitman-Kassock, who oversees self-governance programs for the Bethel-based Association of Village Council Presidents, grew up in rural Alaska and said the state appears to have no strategy for adding cops in villages.

“Public safety infrastructure and service in our region is a crisis,” she said.

A Fight Over Public Safety Funding

Alaska is the size of Texas plus California plus both Carolinas, Florida and Maine. Purchased from Russia in 1867, the frontier attracted a flood of gold miners and church missionaries. The newcomers brought Western diseases — diphtheria and influenza, smallpox and tuberculosis — killing thousands of Alaska Natives. The missionaries built churches and, soon, boarding schools. So many village children were sexually abused by priests that a class-action lawsuit bankrupted the Fairbanks Diocese.

Lost in the talk of how best to spend Alaska’s dwindling revenue is an unanswered question: Did the state ever meet its public safety obligations to villagers?

Alaska’s state government settled a 1997 lawsuit demanding equitable funding for village schools after a judge called the state spending system “arbitrary, inadequate and racially discriminatory.” Alaska Native rights advocates contend that funding of public safety remains unfair.

In 1999, the Native American Rights Fund sued the state on behalf of 10 Alaska Native villages, including Kiana and Clark’s Point, calling the absence of police in remote communities racist and unconstitutional. The villages claimed that the state had violated Alaska Natives’ equal protection under the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution by both opposing tribal courts’ authority to oversee criminal justice through traditional means while at the same time failing to provide armed police.

The Alaska Supreme Court upheld rulings against the villages in 2005, saying the lack of certified village cops could be explained by “financial and geographical constraints” rather than racial bias or purposeful neglect.

Early Alaska legislatures and state police saw the crisis coming.

In 1979, the state created the Village Public Safety Officer Program to place lifesaving peacekeepers in remote communities. The commander of the Alaska State Troopers at the time, Col. Tom Anderson, said the program was intended to “address some of the most serious, life-threatening problems of rural villages,” where accidental death rates are highest, by training officers to be firefighters and emergency medics as well as cops.

The number of these VPSOs, unarmed peace officers paid for with state funds but employed by regional nonprofits and boroughs, has plummeted from more than 100 in 2012 to 42 today. In some cases, promising VPSO recruits accept higher-paying offers in urban police departments or private security, leaving villages without their local officer.

Troopers’ ranks, too, have dwindled. Citing “critically low staffing levels,” the Alaska Department of Public Safety closed eight trooper posts between 2015 and 2018. Five years ago, the state employed 333 troopers statewide. At the end of last year, that number had shrunk to 293.

Law Enforcement on the Cheap

Outside Kiana City Hall, ravens pinwheeled above the trees on a weekday afternoon in March. A breeze carried snowmobile exhaust and wood smoke above newly built homes on stilts in the upper village down to old-town log cabins.

Inside the city building, council members in Carhartts and snow pants held their monthly meeting. For 90 minutes they shared powdered doughnuts and talked about utility rates, until it was time for Annie Reed to give a public safety report.

There had been several assaults over the past two weeks, said Reed, the village police officer who investigated the home invasion rape. “I was sick, so I didn’t do so much rounds. About 300 calls.”

When a village has no VPSO and no trooper, the only remaining option is an officer like Reed, hired by the local city government or tribe. Called village police officers or tribal police officers, they receive no benefits and are the lowest-paid and least-trained form of law enforcement in Alaska.

Reed makes about $20 an hour in a village where groceries cost twice Anchorage prices. These kinds of officers often find themselves performing tasks intended for armed, fully trained police. Reed thought she was going to be enforcing city ordinances like curfew and stopping underage drivers, not refereeing armed fights.

When people in Kiana need help they don’t dial 911, which would ring through to the Kotzebue Police Department nearly 60 miles away. They call Reed’s cellphone directly. The problems range from barking dogs to suicides to domestic brawls. She is never off duty.

“I have to drop my cooking and go. Or if my [grandkids] are getting ready to go to bed, I’m not there to say good night to them,” Reed said.

Suicides are worst. Calls involving domestic violence are common.

In Kiana, a series of trails and unpaved roads connect the neighborhoods, spilling onto the frozen rivers below. On one corner, a man with a mop of wild hair sat in his living room talking about the time he called Reed for help when his adult son began kicking him in the ribs. The man’s wife, left eye bruised, sat crying, saying she wished the local liquor store would close for the sake of Kiana’s children. The parents snapped at each other. As they argued, their daughter became angry. Why was everyone sharing family business, she asked?

The father leaped to his feet and pushed her across the living room. The young woman silently caught herself and slumped on the couch, her eyes returning to the TV.

“I don’t do meth,” her father said, although no one had asked.

A current VPSO, who asked not to be named and is not based in Kiana, said opening the door on one of these family fights is the most frightening task facing any solo Alaska peace officer.

“The No. 1 most dangerous call you could ever go to is a domestic violence call. Hands down,” the VPSO said. “So we are doing the most dangerous call that there is on a consistent basis, by ourselves with no backup [and] no communication with dispatch other than a cellphone and no way to defend yourself.”

While state law allows for communities to arm VPSOs and even city-hired village police officers like Reed, the director of the Alaska Police Standards Council said he is not aware of any employers that do so, partly because it could make insurance liability rates skyrocket for small communities.

In Savoonga, a Bering Sea island community closer to Russia than to mainland Alaska, the police chief, Michael Wongittilin, said that the first time he put on his uniform, a man aimed a shotgun at him. “About 92% of this community have high-powered rifles,” he said. “We don’t even have [bulletproof] vests. We don’t even have Tasers.”

Reed said she’s never been shot at and tries to talk her way out of any scary encounters. She began working as a cop about five years ago when a family member said the job would suit her. “She said I was a strong and outgoing person.”

Reed’s home is a warm cocoon in the upper village, where an ebony finger of baleen, the broom-length filtration system from the mouth of a bowhead whale, hangs on the wall above a tornado of small children and small dogs. The whale hunt souvenir is one of the only signs that Kiana, an upriver village, is Reed’s adopted hometown. She is originally from Utqiagvik, the northernmost city in the United States, where whaling is a seasonal rite.

Family ties between police, crime victims and offenders are impossible to avoid in villages of a few hundred people. Many officers said those inherent conflicts make the job less appealing to potential applicants.

A quick walk from Reed’s house, Franswa Henry, 40, stepped into the blowing snow with his hands in his pockets. His breath steamed in the cold, his teeth clenched. Two bounding white puppies circled his feet.

Henry said he’s on probation and recently got out of jail in Nome, where someone broke his jaw. He was there serving time on an assault charge that Reed had investigated.

“I had a shotgun pulled on me. You know, I grabbed an ax,” Henry said. It was a messy family dispute between stepbrothers in January, with kids inside the home. Hours before a state trooper was able to get to the village, Reed arrived and took statements. Kotzebue prosecutors filed charges and Henry turned himself in a few days later, pleading guilty to fourth-degree assault. But he said Reed can’t possibly be impartial — the kids in the house were her grandchildren.

She said arresting neighbors is never easy.

“I still have a few friends out there and a few families that still talk to me,” she said. “It’s pretty hard when you have to arrest somebody and they’ll start hating you for a while.”

Henry noted that Reed, like many village police officers, has a rap sheet of her own. She pleaded guilty to a harassment charge in 2016 and to misdemeanor assault in 2012. Both cases involved fights with family members, a record that would prevent her from working as a police officer in Anchorage or other large departments. (Reed described the cases as minor events that do not interfere with her work. She otherwise declined to comment on them. “It’s the past,” she said.)

Under state law, village police officers are not supposed to have felony records but misdemeanors can be considered on a case-by-case basis. Alaska Police Standards Council Executive Director Bob Griffiths said domestic violence convictions of any kind usually disqualify someone from receiving state approval to be a village officer.

But village police officers with criminal records are routinely hired without a background check because village leaders do not inform the state of new hires, and the regulation requiring them to do so has no teeth, Griffiths said.

“There’s Not Anybody There Looking”

Not everyone wants more big-city style, badge-and-gun policing in Alaska villages. Often, city and tribal leaders seek a mix of traditional peacekeeping and modern law enforcement.

The lakeside fishing community of Igiugig has requested a VPSO for years, said AlexAnna Salmon, village council president, but it has not received one. “The tribe just takes matters into our own hands when there are issues.”

“Severe troublemakers are banished. We usually purchase them a ticket out of Igiugig and then ask airlines to put them on a no-fly list,” she said of the Alaska Peninsula community.

About 140 miles to the east, in the Alutiiq village of Nanwalek, the chief of the traditional council has kicked a meth dealer out of town for good, a form of banishment known in Alaska as a “blue ticket.” “Basically the council has been able to handle a lot on their own without support from law enforcement,” tribal administrator Gwen Kvasnikoff said.

In the meantime, Alaska’s congressional delegation has attempted to hand more federal money, and more authority, to tribal courts. A pilot program proposed by Rep. Don Young, a Republican, would give special criminal jurisdiction to five Alaska tribal governments under the Violence Against Women Act.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, a Republican who has pursued federal funding for village tribal courts, recently called on U.S. Attorney General William Barr to visit Alaska villages to see the public safety problems firsthand.

But there’s a big difference between the court system and on-the-ground police, Murkowski said when informed by the Anchorage Daily News of how many Alaska communities have no police whatsoever.

“If we don’t have the law enforcement in the first place, it’s really hard,” Murkowski said. “People know that there’s not anybody there looking. It makes it easier to be the perpetrator.”

Research suggests that factors such as self determination, the presence of prominent traditional elders and employment opportunities — rather than more police — are the key to reducing suicide, alcohol abuse and other problems that have troubled many Alaska villages. But dozens of village and tribal leaders told the Anchorage Daily News and ProPublica they want and need police protection.

“When I’m here by myself and somebody comes pounding on my door and wants to beat the living daylights out of me, it would have been nice to have a VPSO in that next office,” said Mary Willis, tribal president for the Kuskokwim River village of Stony River.

In Wales, where a judge recently ordered the school district to pay $12.6 million after an employee sexually abused multiple girls, City Clerk Gerald Oxereok said the village hasn’t had any law enforcement for 20 years. On the shores of the Bering Strait, the whaling town is the westernmost city in mainland North America.

“Nobody has been applying for it,” Oxereok said of the vacant VPSO job. Some locals who might want the work don’t meet minimum requirements such as a high school diploma. Or they smoke pot or have a felony record, both of which are disqualifying.

When a screaming man broke the door to the tribal office in Kokhanok, a village on the shores of Iliamna Lake with 168 people and no police, tribe employee Lysa Lacson said she was forced to evacuate the building.

Troopers arrived three days later.

That was in December, Lacson said. The tribe told local airlines that the man was forbidden from flying back to Kokhanok. But that doesn’t always work. Sometimes the banished fly in to a different village and boat home, she said.

“We’re not trained in responding to those things,” Lacson said.

On the same day that Annie Reed investigated the home invasion rape case, a man attacked three people with a butcher knife in the Yup’ik fishing village of Kotlik some 280 miles to the south. Troopers say the suspect appeared at a schoolhouse vowing to kill the principal, who in turn warned villagers of the attack over VHF radios. The custodian locked the school doors and teachers herded students into the gymnasium and lunchroom, where adults stood guard at entrances.

Kotlik tribal administrator Pauline Okitkun said the town sometimes has village police officers, depending on funding. There was a young woman employed as one at the time, she said, but the call was too dangerous for her to handle unarmed and alone.

The man stabbed three people, including one who struck his arm with a piece of rebar to try and knock free the 8-inch knife, according to charges filed against him. The suspect also stabbed his sister in the stomach, but she was able to snatch the weapon away, according to the charges. Villagers held him in a cell until troopers arrived by plane more than two hours after the attack and school lockdown began. A Bethel judge ordered a competency evaluation for the suspect, who is awaiting trial and, according to the court clerk, has not entered a plea.

Kotlik, near the mouth of the Yukon River, is in Western Alaska, an area with the highest rate of reported sex crimes in the state. Leaders from 56 tribes in the region have listed public safety as their top concern in each of the past two years, according to the regional nonprofit, the Association of Village Council Presidents.

The council visited 45 communities in Western Alaska in 2018 to photograph dilapidated public safety buildings and count police officers. The resulting report found that eight villages had no jail cells of any kind. In others, if there were local police, the officers worked in headquarters with boarded doors, broken windows or no indoor plumbing. In one of those buildings, two inmates burned to death on April 28 while locked in their cells. The council researchers had flagged problems with the window, door lock and stairs months earlier.

“The idea that there are places in the United States, a first-world country, that do not have public safety … a basic human right, was horrifying to me,” said Azara Mohammadi, a council employee who worked on the survey.

In one of the larger surveyed communities, Mountain Village, population 804, the nonprofit found only one village police officer remains after another officer had been charged with stealing from the scene of a homicide. The Yukon River village’s public safety problems continued on a Friday afternoon in March, when the Mountain Village officer arrested a man accused of raping two people and took him to a jail cell housed within the steepled city office.

When an Alaska state trooper arrived the next afternoon, he discovered the jail empty and no guard on duty. The 19-year-old suspect had escaped overnight. By the time the trooper found and arrested him, he’d been missing for 16 hours. He has pleaded not guilty on charges of sexual assault, giving alcohol to a minor and felony escape.

Two Classes of Alaskans

Oil taxes, and savings accounts that were built upon oil taxes, pay the bills in Alaska. But even in times of plenty, when 2 million barrels were flowing through the trans-Alaska oil pipeline every day or when North Slope crude prices skyrocketed, the state has struggled to provide core services to villages.

Today, thousands of rural homes in 29 villages still lack running water and flush toilets, according to the state Village Safe Water Program. The road system reaches only about one out of every five communities.

Unapologetic in directing billions in federal spending to Alaska, the late Sen. Ted Stevens argued the young state’s isolation and the unique needs of Alaska villages demanded heavy government investment. At the height of his funding powers as chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Stevens backfilled the VPSO program with $1.5 million in federal funding when the state cut spending on those officers in 2003.

Dunleavy, who was elected governor last year and subsequently declared a “war on criminals,” has proposed a spending plan that includes defunding vacant village police officer jobs while funding trooper recruitment. But troopers don’t just serve villages, they respond to crimes in highly populated areas on the road system — including much of the fast-growing Matanuska-Susitna Borough that Dunleavy and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin call home.

Dunleavy said the cuts to the VPSO program reflect the decreasing number of village officers. (Saying the program is now “plagued with high turnover and poor retention,” the Alaska Legislature this month announced the creation of a working group that will attempt to rebuild it.)

“The drop in VPSOs employed occurred despite pay increases, retention bonuses and approved funding for equipment and office improvements,” Dunleavy spokesman Matt Shuckerow said. “As a result, Gov. Dunleavy’s budget proposal aligns funding and historic expenditures within the VPSO program.”

Shuckerow said that starting pay for VPSOs has increased from $16.55 an hour in 2008 to $26.79 today. That amounts to about $56,000 a year, wages that VPSOs say is still woefully low given they receive nearly identical training to Kotzebue-based troopers who make three times as much.

Sen. Lyman Hoffman, D-Bethel, warned that the spending plan creates two classes of Alaskans when it comes to public safety protection.

“If you were living in that community for a year and we had someone going out and shooting up the place and you did not have an officer to go to talk to, I think you would feel as unsafe as they do,” Hoffman told the state budget director in January.

As rural Alaskans learned of the proposed cuts, Kiana city manager Ely Cyrus received an email from the head of the VPSO program in his region.

“Ely, just an FYI at this point in time we will not be hiring a new VPSO for Kiana,” it read, referring to the state-funded police officer job that offers higher pay and requires more training than Annie Reed’s role as a city cop. “The state is withdrawing funding for three positions in order to help provide the money to give the Alaska state troopers a 7.5 percent raise.”

Cyrus, who sometimes moonlights as a snowplow operator, gave a tour of the village public safety building with its two jail cells and a stack of paperbacks for the guards. Next door sat a mud-flecked home, housing for the VPSO, for the sporadic times there is one. Plywood covered the shattered living room windows.

“I’m Overwhelmed”

When a home invasion rape occurs in Alaska’s largest city, the Anchorage Police Department sends patrol cars with sirens blaring, Deputy Chief Ken McCoy said. One uniformed officer makes sure the victim is safe while others search for the suspect. Paramedics appear. A detective from one of two special sex crime units joins a victim’s advocate and a nurse to begin the investigation and rape kit exam. Back at the crime scene, an officer stands guard to preserve evidence.

Two plane rides and several hours away, above the Arctic Circle, all the village of Kiana had on the night of the home invasion rape was Annie Reed.

When she arrived at the scene, she said, it was too late to find an overnight safe house for the victim. The suspect, 42-year-old Edmond Morris, had a history of rape, pleading guilty to sexual assault in 2016. While in Kotzebue in 2017, he broke into the home of a legally blind woman who lives alone, according to charges filed against him. The woman hid in the bathroom to call police. Morris had spent the past 15 years in and out of jail before returning to Kiana.

“Holy crap,” Trooper Anne Sears said she thought. Sears looked up Morris’ criminal record after learning of the alleged attack from Reed and investigated the case. “Everything he’s done. He’s done it before. Even his other cases were leading up to something similar.”

Reed said that when she asked the man to leave, he lingered around the home. With nowhere else to go and the midnight sun about to set, Reed took the woman to spend the night in her own home. (“Annie is freaking awesome,” said Sears, a longtime state trooper. “Kiana is lucky to have her.”)

One of Reed’s daughters fixed the woman a cot to sleep on in the living room, beneath the baleen and dreamcatchers. Another daughter traveled with the victim the next day to Kotzebue, but because there was no nurse available that day to begin a sexual assault exam, the victim flew another 550 miles to speak with city detectives in Anchorage. Her neck and wrists bruised, the young woman carried the gym shorts and ripped tank top she was wearing during the attack as evidence in a plastic bag.

It took three weeks for troopers to complete an investigation and arrive in Kiana to arrest Morris. During that time, he returned to the home where the attack occurred several times to ask if the family planned to press charges, prosecutors allege. He faces charges of sexual assault, assault and criminal trespassing.

In a phone interview from the Nome jail, Morris said he did not attack the victim and said she let him in the window. When the victim’s mother told him to get out of the house, he did, he said.

Morris is awaiting trial with a hearing scheduled for July. The window that Morris is accused of breaking open in order to commit the sexual assault is now covered with plywood, adorned with smiling hunting photos torn from a calendar. Dents still tattoo the front door, but that happened later.

The young woman, after returning to Kiana, took an ax to the doorknob. She’d been drinking and tried to break down the door after an argument with her mom. When that didn’t work, she climbed through the same window that, according to troopers, her rapist had pried open. She was later found sitting in the living room, sobbing.

Her mother doesn’t know exactly where she is now. Probably Anchorage. They talk on the phone sometimes, but never about that night, the mother said. “She just keep it inside her.”

Reed, in the meantime, has a decision to make. A troopers sergeant in Kotzebue said she is among the most reliable of the village police officers in the region. But after fielding hundreds of calls in a recent month, and deaths in the family, she has started looking for a job with days off. Or at least benefits.

“I’m tired,” she said.

A long sigh.

“I’m overwhelmed.”

As the anniversary of the home invasion rape approached, something unexpected happened. The VPSO who said he was attacked during a domestic violence call in the village of Ambler, 70 miles upriver, was reassigned by the borough. On April 30, he showed up in Kiana, the city manager said. Backup for Annie Reed.

But the move had a downside: It made Ambler, population 287, the 70th village in Alaska to have no police of any kind at some point this year.

ProPublica and the Anchorage Daily News are spending the year investigating sexual violence in urban and rural Alaska. Here’s how you can stay in touch with us:

• Get email updates.
• Share your story in our questionnaire.
• Reach out to the reporting team anytime: alaska@propublica.org

Minutes after ProPublica posted a recording of crying children begging for their parents, Kirstjen Nielsen stepped up to the podium in the White House briefing room to answer questions from reporters, as well as a growing chorus of criticism from Democrats and Republicans.

(You begin hearing the recording played at about 22:07 into the video)

Nielsen, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, blamed Congress for the Trump administration’s policy of separating children detained at the border from their parents.

Nielsen said the administration would continue to send the children to temporary detention centers in warehouses and big box stores until Congress rewrites the nation’s immigration laws.

At one point, a reporter from New York magazine, Olivia Nuzzi, played the tape ProPublica obtained from inside a U.S. Customs and Border Protection facility, according to tweets she posted.

I played the audio of children separated from their parents at a US Customs and Border Protection facility that was published by @ProPublica today at the White House briefing. Officials failed to adequately and truthfully answer questions about the policy. https://t.co/M7jyZQUwwK

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) June 18, 2018

I would have waited until I was called on to play it, but I was not being called on. After another reporter’s phone began loudly ringing with a melodic jingle, I figured the briefing room could probably deal with a more important disturbance.

— Olivia Nuzzi (@Olivianuzzi) June 18, 2018

It’s unclear whether Nielsen heard the recording, which consists mostly of the sounds of weeping children calling for their mothers and fathers.

Reporters attempted to ask her questions about the material in the recording — including “How is this not child abuse?” — but she did not respond directly.

Asked whether the recordings, along with pictures and more that have emerged in recent days, are an unintended consequence of the administration’s approach, she said, “I think that they reflect the focus of those who post such pictures and narratives.”

ProPublica’s president Richard Tofel said the decision to post the recording and accompanying story reflected a focus on providing a fuller accounting of what’s happening in facilities that are closed to public view.

“Our agenda is to bring the American people facts for their consideration,” he said.

The separation of these Central American children from their parents was triggered by the administration’s decision to bring criminal charges against adults who enter the country without permission.

That move, which is discretionary, brings into play regulations that prevent parents facing criminal prosecution from being imprisoned with their children.

Nielsen denied that the policy change was intended to pressure Congress.

“The children are not being used as a pawn,” she said. “We’re trying to protect the children, which is why I’m asking Congress to act.”