As wildfires swept through Los Angeles in January 2025, New York Times reporter Hannah Dreier noticed something strange – firefighters were working bare-faced for days on end, while residents were told to wear masks or stay indoors to protect themselves from dangerous air pollutants.
In over 400 interviews, public records requests to eight agencies, an analysis of thousands of pages of individual medical and service records, and the creation of a database tracking every national crew deployment over the past two decades, Dreier discovered the dramatic and lasting consequences that firefighters were facing from fighting wildfires without protection, and that the Forest Service had understood the dangers of smoke for decades, but downplayed the risk.
As a result of the reporting, Congress passed a bipartisan law, signed in December 2025, that requires the government to pay $450,000 to wildland firefighters who become disabled or die from smoke-related cancers. Five additional bills prompted by this reporting are still pending at the federal level, and it has also spurred state-level spending and regulation in California, as well as new OSHA and Forest Service protections for wildland firefighters, including the reversal of the Forest Service’s decades-long ban on masks.
Rx Roulette
Reporters from ProPublica uncovered how the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has quietly allowed certain medications to flow into the country from known substandard overseas factories and failed to routinely test these drugs for safety or quality, putting the public at risk. The series also revealed that basic information about where generic drugs are made is fragmented, obscured, and effectively inaccessible to consumers, even though generics account for about 90% of U.S. prescriptions.
The team, which included members of ProPublica’s data and news apps teams and over a dozen students from the Medill Investigative Lab, filed almost 50 FOIA requests and sued the FDA to obtain records, ultimately constructing a database of 40,000 generic medications and their factory inspection histories – the first comprehensive list of drugs shipped from banned factories.
Citing the investigation, leaders of the Senate Special Committee on Aging proposed bipartisan reforms and demanded more testing, transparency, and a full accounting of exemptions. The FDA commissioner pledged changes and a tougher stance on foreign plants.
With Every Breath: Millions of Breathing Machines. One Dangerous Defect.
After months of sorting through thousands of complaints submitted to the FDA, reporters revealed that Philips Respironics kept millions of dangerous breathing machines – used by COVID-19 patients, infants, the elderly, and veterans – on the market, despite warnings from their own experts that the devices posed serious health risks. The investigation also revealed that the FDA had received warnings about contaminants in the machines for years but repeatedly failed to warn the public. Their reporting prompted the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to launch an investigation of the FDA’s oversight of medical devices for the first time in a decade and led to calls by influential members of Congress for the Justice Department to open a criminal investigation into Philips Respironics.
Sacrifice Zones: Mapping Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution
In an unprecedented data analysis and interactive map, ProPublica revealed more than 1,000 hot spots of toxic industrial air pollution that the EPA has allowed to spread across America, elevating the cancer risk of more than a fifth of the nation’s population, including 256,000 people exposed to threat levels the agency deems unacceptably high. The series captured how the EPA, through weak policies and calculated choices, created “sacrifice zones” where overlooked communities next door to toxic manufacturing plants bear disproportionate health costs so that consumers can enjoy the products made there. The interactive map at the heart of this reporting provides residents – for the first time – with a way to see their own estimated risk from air pollution. As a result of this reporting the EPA committed to looking into hot spots, and pledged new cumulative risk guidelines and a “more robust” analysis of air pollution. More than 76 local news outlets reported on the findings from their area, expanding awareness of local air pollution risks and prompting local activism.
This reporting was done by ProPublica, with collaboration from the Texas Tribune and Mountain State Spotlight.
Unresponsive
In this months-long investigation into Sedwick County EMS – the lone ambulance provider for more than half a million people – reporters at The Wichita Eagle uncovered a public safety crisis that put an entire community at risk. Through open records, leaked documents, interviews, and direct research, the reporters built a database of response times, and direct testimony to back it up, that showed the department had dangerously slow response times and staffing shortages driven by mismanagement. While under the EMS director’s leadership, the department had fallen from one of the best in the Midwest to one that showed up late for over 11,000 potentially fatal emergency calls in two years. The series led to the prompt ousting of the EMS director, an apology by the county manager for his slow response to the crisis, and most importantly – a massive overhaul of the county’s EMS service.
Hillsborough County had the highest number of adult lead poisonings in all of Florida. Reporters from the Tampa Bay Times set out to discover why. They interviewed more than 100 current and former employees at a local battery recycling plant suspected to be the cause. Johnson, Woolington and Murray gathered over 100,000 pages of documents and hundreds of photos and videos from employees that showed the perilous conditions inside the factory. They even became certified lead inspectors as they exposed how the factory had contaminated the surrounding community. After the initial parts of the series ran, OSHA sent inspectors into the plant for the first time in five years, confirmed the Times’ reporting, and issued one of the steepest fines in recent Florida history. Local children were screened for lead, and county regulators increased monitoring and oversight of the company, which also saw its credit rating downgraded and was driven to improve its safety systems. The Times’ project was supported by PBS FRONTLINE’s Local Journalism Initiative, which provided partial funding and consultation.
The New FDA: Partnership With Deadly Risk
Seven drugs approved since 1993 have been withdrawn after reports of deaths and severe side effects. A two-year Los Angeles Times investigation has found that the FDA approved each of those drugs while disregarding danger signs or blunt warnings from its own specialists. Then, after receiving reports of significant harm to patients, the agency was slow to seek withdrawals.
Uninformed Consent
The Seattle Times began a five-part investigative series entitled, “Uninformed Consent: What patients at ‘The Hutch’ weren’t told about the experiments in which they died.” In it, Times reporters David Heath and Duff Wilson described how patients had died prematurely in two clinical trials at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, experiments in which some of their doctors and the center itself had a financial interest.
The Body Brokers
A five-part series and follow-ups on tissue donation that changed laws, sparked a federal investigation and prompted widespread industry reform.
Profits from Pain
An investigative journalism series that laid bare the problems with the quality of Florida’s Medicaid HMO treatment system for the poor.
