by Ruth Talbot and Nicole Santa Cruz, photography by Stephanie Mei-Ling for ProPublica

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On a sweltering morning in Vidalia, Louisiana, Shannan Cornwell and Freddie Green got in a long line to wait for food.

The couple has struggled to pay for groceries amid soaring prices and health setbacks, they said. She had back surgery. He had undergone cancer treatment.

They turned to a local food bank to supplement their diets. Although they’re grateful for the food, lately they’ve noticed changes in what they receive. For months in the spring and summer their pickups did not include any meat, Cornwell said.

“You have to learn how to adapt to what you have,” Green said. “Which is hard,” Cornwell added.

In the spring, the Trump administration abruptly cut $500 million in deliveries from a program that sends U.S.-produced meat, dairy, eggs and produce to food banks and other organizations across the country — about a quarter of the funding the program received in 2024. The items that were delivered through The Emergency Food Assistance Program were some of the healthiest, most expensive items that organizations distribute.

The cancellation of these deliveries comes at a critical time for food banks. Food insecurity is higher than at any time since the aftermath of the Great Recession, according to federal data, and many food banks are reporting higher need than they saw at the peak of the pandemic. Demand is only expected to increase; this summer, President Donald Trump signed into law the largest cut to food stamps in the program’s history.

ProPublica obtained records from the Department of Agriculture of each planned delivery in 2025, detailing the millions of pounds of food, down to the number of eggs, that never reached hungry people because of the administration’s cut.

The cancellations began in mid-May, when over 100 orders of 2% milk bound for 31 states were halted.

The records show 4,304 canceled deliveries between May and September across the 50 states, Puerto Rico and D.C. (Experience this as an interactive story on ProPublica’s website.)

All told, the deliveries accounted for nearly 94 million pounds of food. The true loss is likely greater, food banks said, because not all of the year’s deliveries had been scheduled.

Most food banks rely on a combination of federal or state dollars, private giving and partnerships with businesses that donate leftover food. While the cancellations were disruptive to all food banks, according to their representatives, those that receive state funding or have strong community support said that they have weathered the cuts better than others.

The Food Bank of Central Louisiana, where Cornwell and Green’s groceries come from, gets more than half of its food from the federal government and receives very little state support. It serves rural areas of Louisiana, which has the highest poverty rate in the nation, according to U.S. census data.

The Trump administration canceled 10 orders for the food bank totaling over $400,000 of pork, chicken, cheese, dried cranberries, dried plums, milk and eggs, records show. The food bank has struggled to keep up with demand following the cuts and a decrease in private donations. Staff told ProPublica they used to distribute 25-pound packages of food, but over the summer, some packages shrank to about half of that weight.

“We’re not turning people away with no food. It’s not to that point,” said Jayne Wright-Velez, who has been the executive director at the food bank for 30 years. “But people are getting less food when they come to us.”

The organization has tried to fill the gap with produce donations, but transporting and distributing fruits and vegetables is challenging, and multiple patrons told ProPublica the produce had gone bad by the time they received it.

On a recent morning, Codie Dufrene, 23, came to collect food for her grandfather and his neighbors, who live 45 minutes from the closest grocery store.

Usually, the trunk of Dufrene’s car would be full. Not lately.

Dufrene received chicken for the first time “since way before the summer.” But the poultry came from a donation that hardly made up for the 74,000 pounds of chicken that never arrived in June.

She said that though her family is grateful and will use whatever they get, the quality of the food can be discouraging. Dufrene pointed out the condition of a cantaloupe she received. “You can tell — they’re frozen and they’re already super, super soft.” She said her mother would likely give them to her pigs, “because people can’t really eat those.”

Wright-Velez said the food bank trains its staff on food safety and does its best to check everything before it goes out, but it’s difficult to do at a large scale. “Especially in the heat of the summer, things just go bad so quickly,” she said. “The clock’s ticking as soon as we get the donation.”

The Emergency Food Assistance Program was created in 1983 to purchase farmers’ surplus food and distribute it to low-income people. The program’s budget is typically authorized every five years as part of the Farm Bill, but in 2018, the first Trump administration added funds to help farmers struggling under retaliatory tariffs the U.S. faced amid trade disputes. The additional, discretionary federal funds helped food banks serve more people; last fiscal year, they got nearly twice as much money from the fund as they did from their congressional allocation.

Now characterizing the additional funding as a “Biden-era slush fund,” the second Trump administration cut $500 million that had already been allocated. The government is still distributing food through other parts of the program, but food banks were caught off guard by the canceled deliveries because it’s rare for funding to be cut mid-year. Food bank managers, some with decades of experience, couldn’t recall a disruption like it. With the Farm Bill slated for renewal this fall, officials who run food banks worry that any additional cuts would cause them to have to scale back the number of people they serve.

Already the need is greater than what food banks have on hand, said Shannon Oliver, the director of operations at the Oregon Food Bank.

“We’re having to kind of prepare for the fact that there’s just not going to be enough food, and having to be clear with setting the expectation that we’re doing everything we possibly can,” she said.

The USDA did not respond to questions or requests for comment. In a May letter responding to senators’ concerns about the funding cut, the agency said it had made additional food purchases through another program and that the emergency food program continues to operate “as originally intended by Congress.”

“While the pandemic is over, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has not and will not lose focus on its core mission of strengthening food security, supporting agricultural markets, and ensuring access to nutritious foods,” the letter said.

By 8 a.m., the line in the parking lot of a library in Albuquerque, New Mexico, snaked around a chain-link fence. People had been waiting for hours to pick up groceries from Roadrunner Food Bank, which lost about 850,000 pounds of food to the funding cut, according to USDA records. As a result, people are receiving less dairy, meat and other high-protein items.

New Mexico consistently ranks among the poorest states in the nation, and it has more food bank distribution sites than full-service grocery stores, according to data provided by the USDA and Roadrunner Food Bank. And in recent months, organizers have noticed more people showing up than usual.

“They’re having to run from place to place to place to try to stitch together enough coverage for their family,” said Katy Anderson, a vice president at the food bank.

Vivian Santiago, 54, pieces together what she can from food-distribution sites across Albuquerque. She also uses her benefits from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to feed her daughter and 9-year-old granddaughter. Lately her electronic benefits card isn’t lasting even halfway through the month because of the increase in grocery prices, which have risen nearly 30% since February 2020, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It’s hard out there,” she said.

Patricia Parker, 42, suffers from kidney failure and receives disability benefits.

Parker has been homeless for about six months, sometimes sleeping in her car or staying with friends. She’s looking for a job after a recent stint at a laundromat didn’t work out. As she carried Doritos, green grapes, potatoes and onions from the Albuquerque food bank, she said she appreciates the help.

“I won’t have to go days without food,” she said.

Workers at food banks and pantries said that the canceled deliveries add to the growing challenges they face. Many staff members said they had seen a decline in private contributions and volunteers. Grocery stores and food manufacturers, which started managing their inventories more efficiently during the pandemic, now have less leftover food to give. Other Trump cuts have disrupted AmeriCorps, which helps staff mobile food pantries and other services, and are ending the Local Food Purchase Assistance Cooperative Agreement Program, which provided food from local farmers.

Food banks with more resources can be more creative. Several told ProPublica they’ve hired someone whose job is to find grocery stores in the area willing to donate food. But in areas where grocers are scarce, there are fewer options. In some cases, food banks are among the only places where people can get fresh fruits and vegetables.

“When we see federal cuts like this, that affects entire communities and villages and towns,” said Stephanie Sullivan, assistant director of marketing and communications at Food Bank for the Heartland, which serves 93 counties across Nebraska and western Iowa.

Cuts and changes to foundational federal programs for low-income people — namely, SNAP and Medicaid — are a looming concern. The increase in need even before these changes take effect could signal that food banks are a “canary in the coal mine” for what’s to come, said Christopher Bosso, a food policy expert at Northeastern University and the author of a book on SNAP.

Hunger will also be harder to measure now that the USDA has canceled an annual food insecurity survey, calling it “redundant” and “politicized.”

“It feels like the idea is to make it harder to identify the consequences of the policy changes that we’re seeing right now,” said Marlene Schwartz, the director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Health at the University of Connecticut.

Food bank administrators emphasized that they could not fill the gap created by benefit cuts in the administration’s multitrillion-dollar spending bill. Feeding America, a national nonprofit association of food banks and other organizations, estimates that for every meal its food banks provide, SNAP provides nine. The majority of people who receive food assistance also receive Medicaid, so reductions in both programs could force people to choose between health care and groceries.

The legislation cuts SNAP by $187 billion, or 20%, through 2034, according to estimates from the Congressional Budget Office. The bill, which has expanded work requirements for some recipients and taken protections away from others, will also increase the amount of money that states must contribute to the program for the first time in decades. Experts say it’s unclear how cash-strapped states will be able to shoulder that cost.

Two experts on food insecurity told ProPublica that hunger is expected to rise with the new program rules as it has when SNAP spending has been reduced in the past. There could also be ripple effects: Research has shown that people enrolled in SNAP are less likely to be hospitalized. And grocery stores where the majority of customers use these benefits could close, said Gina Plata-Nino, the interim SNAP director for the Food Research and Action Center, a national nonprofit that works to eradicate hunger.

The people who are harmed are “working incredibly hard,” Plata-Nino said.

“They are Americans who are falling on hard times and just need those resources to be able to have economic mobility and be able to escape poverty,” she said. “Without those resources, it just makes them even poorer and less equipped to be able to handle the tough economy that all of us are facing now.”

Michael Heaton, 76, takes care of his 31-year-old son, who has autism; the two live off Heaton’s Social Security and his son’s disability payments. After the pandemic, Heaton, who is retired, said he saw his SNAP benefits shrink from $600 a month to just over $100. To supplement their diets, he goes to pantries and food-distribution centers around Albuquerque.

On a recent morning, he picked up two bags. “This fills that gap,” he said. “We only take what we need, we’re not trying to be gluttonous or anything.”

Even food banks that rely less on federal funding are worried about what comes next if the emergency food assistance program is reduced or altered in a significant way.

“There’s not an option B,” said Brian McManus, the chief operations officer of the Food Bank of Central New York.

Louisiana, one of the states most reliant on SNAP, stands to be among the places hardest hit by further cuts.

“It’s unfortunate that in a time where the social safety nets are being cut, that our resources are also being cut,” said Wright-Velez.

If people haven’t experienced food insecurity, or don’t know someone who has, they might forget something important, she said:

“Those are real people on the other end of those cuts.”

In all, the USDA records indicate that food banks were expecting more than 27 million pounds of chicken, 2 million gallons of milk, 10 million pounds of dried fruit and 67 million eggs that never arrived. Food banks had planned to schedule more deliveries in the coming months. Those orders are not reflected in this data.

Anna Donlan contributed design. Illustrations by Justin Metz for ProPublica. Art direction by Andrea Wise. Joel Jacobs contributed data analysis.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Peter Elkind, ProPublica, and Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education

ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

When Los Angeles attorney Leo Terrell, a legal commentator, lifelong Democrat and fiery fixture on Fox News, announced on the network’s “Hannity” show that he was voting for Donald Trump in 2020, the MAGA universe went wild. Oliver North hailed him on his “Real American Heroes” podcast. Fox News signed him on as a paid contributor, at a six-figure salary.

Terrell, meanwhile, rebranded himself as “Leo 2.0,” complete with red Trump-style caps he offered for sale online. Leo 1.0 had slammed Trump for cozying up to white supremacists, blamed him for a surge in violent attacks on Jews and donated to Democrats. Leo 2.0? He attacked “DEI nonsense,” compared Black Lives Matter to ISIS and declared the 2020 election was “stolen from President Trump and America!”

In January, Terrell was rewarded for his loyalty when President-elect Trump, praising him as a “highly respected civil rights attorney and political analyst” with an “incredibly successful career,” named him senior counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department. Terrell assumed his marquee role a month later: as head of the multiagency Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.

As a Black, Christian former Democrat with little previous engagement with Jewish causes, Terrell, now 70, seemed an improbable pick to lead the effort to “root out anti-Semitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” as the task force announcement put it. But his zealous conversion and penchant for media bombast made him a perfect bullhorn for the task force’s actual mission: to strong-arm colleges into stripping away any vestige of “wokeness” in their hiring, admissions, classes and research.

In service of that goal, the government has abandoned due process in favor of media warfare, preemptive declarations of guilt and freezes on billions in critical federal funding.

Terrell has become an invaluable player in this extraordinary pressure campaign. Before most of the task force’s investigations had even launched, he publicly promised “massive lawsuits” against “Jew-hating” universities, including Harvard, the University of California, Los Angeles and dozens of others.

So far, the campaign has been effective. To preserve hundreds of millions of dollars in federal grants and contracts, Columbia and Brown have struck deals with the administration that cost them $220 million and $50 million, respectively, and go far beyond pledging tougher action to combat antisemitism. Columbia agreed to open academic programs and admissions decisions to outside monitoring. Brown pledged to ban transgender women from single-sex spaces and women’s sports. Harvard has sued the administration to try to unfreeze $2.6 billion in federal research funds, but it’s also trying to negotiate a settlement. Meanwhile, colleges nationwide are eliminating any remaining vestiges of diversity, equity and inclusion programs and shuttering multicultural centers lest the government come after them.

Amid the upheaval Trump’s task force has helped to sow, the history, motivations and behavior of its blustery leader have gone largely unexamined. ProPublica and The Chronicle of Higher Education interviewed dozens of people whose paths have intersected with Terrell’s and reviewed thousands of pages of court documents and financial records related to his career and life.

The portrait that emerged is dramatically at odds with Trump’s description of a “highly respected” and “incredibly successful” attorney. Peers in civil rights law said they always considered Terrell a minor player. Documents reveal a distinctly mixed legal track record, marred by malpractice suits, client disputes and mishandling a criminal case so badly that a federal appeals court lambasted his work as “woeful.”

Until his MAGA conversion, Terrell was beset by a litany of financial troubles, including nearly $400,000 in unpaid federal taxes, a personal bankruptcy filing and a trail of court judgments and liens brought by small businesses that worked for his law firm.

Current and former lawyers at the Justice Department say Terrell is less engaged with assessing cases or negotiating settlements than he is with scaring universities into submission. They say he’s voiced open disdain for what he calls “lawyer talk,” berating career staff who try to follow proper procedures for investigating civil rights complaints.

Despite his appetite for media attention, Terrell has volunteered little about himself. Friends and neighbors recall him walking a dog and bicycling and his fondness for golf. In the “about the author” section for a self-published book, he wrote: “In his spare time, Mr. Terrell likes to work. His hobbies are work and working.”

Terrell declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to written questions. In a brief phone conversation with a reporter, he explained, “I don’t do interviews with my life.” Told some details of our reporting, he added, “I’m not going to comment on anything,” and, finally, “I’m going to hang up respectfully.”

It is unclear whether Terrell’s previous troubles turned up in administration vetting for his current job. Officials at the Justice Department and White House did not respond to questions about Terrell’s role or his background.

Jewish activists are divided on Terrell’s approach, with some lauding it for rooting out anti-Jewish sentiment that emerged on campuses during pro-Palestinian protests and others bemoaning how he’s weaponized antisemitism.

Kenneth Marcus, an Education Department official in the first Trump administration who has spent years agitating for stronger federal action against campus antisemitism, is a fan. “What the president has gotten in Terrell,” Marcus said, “is someone with unique skills in delivering public messaging.”

That messaging is camouflage, according to Amy Spitalnick, CEO of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, a national network of Jewish groups. “No one should be under any illusion that this is about keeping Jewish students or faculty safe,” she said. “Gutting cancer and Alzheimer’s research does nothing to keep them safe.”

Terrell grew up in Carson, in south Los Angeles County, the fourth of seven siblings. Law was his second career, following a decade as a history and economics teacher in the Los Angeles public schools. He graduated from UCLA School of Law in 1990 and opened his own civil rights firm in Beverly Hills.

Almost immediately, Terrell began making a name for himself as a media personality with a decidedly progressive voice, becoming better known for his TV and radio commentary than for his courtroom achievements.

Starting in 1991, after the police beating of a Black man, Rodney King, Terrell became a regular on local and national TV and radio condemning police brutality and racial injustice. Three years later, he snagged his breakthrough commentating gig: as a friend and supporter of O.J. Simpson. Terrell’s role as a Simpson trial analyst produced a green-room friendship with Larry Elder, a conservative Black radio host in Los Angeles, who helped Terrell land his own talk show. “I thought he was smart, feisty, opinionated and entertaining,” Elder recalled. “I thought he would be good radio, despite my disagreement with virtually everything he stood for at the time.”

Terrell became a prized guest on Fox News. He spoke fast and loud, uttered every view with absolute certainty and was quick to interrupt, shout and attack, accusing one guest of tailoring his views “to make a name for himself” and another of trying to “hustle people to make money.” Pressed during one “Hannity” interview to say on air whether Simpson was guilty of murder, Terrell ripped off his ear piece and stormed out of the studio.

Prominent Los Angeles lawyers said he was never a big player in the city’s civil rights community. Carl Douglas, part of the Simpson defense team, said “Leo was always a talker,” not “a baller.” Connie Rice, former western regional counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said Terrell “was never at the table for the big cases that made impact. He loved holding press conferences.”

Terrell represented a Black teenager who’d been expelled from a Los Angeles high school for punching a white referee during a football game after the referee allegedly had directed racial epithets at him. He took up the cause of a mentally ill, homeless Black woman who’d been fatally shot by LA police after she wielded a 12-inch screwdriver at officers wanting to question whether she’d stolen a shopping cart. (No criminal charges were brought against the officers, but Terrell won a $975,000 settlement for her family.)

Now scornful of “woke” practices and bias claims, Terrell once represented himself in a race-discrimination case against a parking company after a garage attendant refused to honor his free-parking validation from a shopping mall and told him he owed $10. A supervisor let Terrell leave without paying, but he still sued, saying he was singled out for being Black and demanding damages for “humiliation, mental anguish and severe emotional distress.” The suit was later settled for a confidential amount. Reached three decades later, an attorney for the parking company called Terrell’s lawsuit “absurd — the worst discrimination case I’ve ever seen.”

Terrell always had side gigs: he self-published a book on workplace rights; he offered business consultations, corporate training seminars and mediations; he had a 900 number that charged $5 for the first minute and $2 for each additional minute for legal consultations.

In 2001, he ran unsuccessfully first for Congress, then two years later for Los Angeles City Council. He routinely promoted himself as “an NAACP attorney,” though the group said he’d never been employed there.

William Bloch, a veteran Los Angeles lawyer who brought two malpractice cases against Terrell, said Terrell acted as “the carnival barker” to attract business, then failed to do the necessary legal work. In one sex-discrimination case, according to the resulting malpractice suit brought by Bloch, Terrell accepted a settlement from the city of Beverly Hills for “a pittance” despite explicit instructions from his client, a female police officer, to zealously pursue her claim. Bloch persuaded an appeals court to undo the settlement. After the officer received a $100,000 award, plus money for attorney fees and costs, she dropped the case against Terrell. In the second matter, a jail employee for the city of Beverly Hills said she paid $6,000 to retain Terrell in 2009 after he “boasted of huge verdicts and settlements,” only to have him accept a $1,000 settlement from the city without her permission. According to her claim, Terrell conducted “little or no discovery, including taking no depositions.” The case was settled for a confidential amount, with no acknowledgement by Terrell of wrongdoing.

In court filings, Terrell denied any negligence or responsibility for harm to his clients, insisting they had approved all of his actions and saying lawyers are “not a guarantor of the results of any professional services.”

“He’s a discredit to the legal profession,” Bloch said.

A low point in Terrell’s legal career began in October 2009, when he was retained by the parents of Emond Logan, a 48-year-old California truck driver alleged to have transported more than a ton of cocaine to western Michigan as part of a multistate drug conspiracy.

Terrell rarely took on criminal cases, but he’d played Little League baseball with Logan, whose family approached him after hearing his radio show. Terrell demanded a $100,000 retainer. To pay it, Logan’s father sold much of his stock from more than 30 years at Pacific Bell Telephone and borrowed money from his daughter.

Logan faced overwhelming evidence: a leader of the drug gang had testified against him, and the arresting agents had seized five cars (including a Maserati), three Rolex watches and a $125,000 diamond ring, items well beyond his truck-driving income. His court-appointed lawyer had negotiated a plea agreement capping Logan’s prison time at 10 years.

Still, Terrell urged Logan to blow up his “bullshit” deal, according to transcripts of their recorded jailhouse calls and Logan’s later testimony. Logan followed Terrell’s advice, despite prosecution warnings that such relatively generous terms would be off the table. Terrell arranged for Logan’s pretrial release on bond. Four months later, Logan was back in custody after a government informant taped him threatening to kill his federal prosecutor. Terrell then urged him to accept a new plea offer, with no cap, and Logan was sentenced to 35 years in prison.

Terrell “didn’t do what he was supposed to do for the money,” Eugene Logan, Emond’s 93-year-old father, said in a telephone interview. “He told us he could get him off. If he’d taken the plea, he’d be out by now.”

Two courts denied Emond Logan’s attempts to get his sentence overturned based on Terrell’s counsel, but they excoriated Terrell’s lawyering. U.S. District Judge Paul Maloney wrote in a 2017 decision that Terrell had provided “abysmal advice.” A year later, the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decried Terrell’s “woeful representation” and said his overall conduct reflected “poorly on the profession.”

Terrell’s troubled legal practice left him with a worsening tangle of financial problems. Between 2004 and 2015, the IRS filed 11 liens against him for nearly $400,000 in unpaid taxes dating back to 1997. In October 2010, Terrell filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection, reporting $736,938 in liabilities, $304,650 in assets and monthly income of just $4,000. Because he stopped appearing for required meetings, his bankruptcy case was dismissed and none of his obligations were legally erased. During this period, Terrell took out six new mortgage loans against his three-bedroom West LA condominium. The property was sold at foreclosure in 2013.

Lorita Seaton was one of Terrell’s many unpaid creditors. She’d loaned him $40,000 in 2008 after he said he needed it to help cover his costs for a pending discrimination suit against Costco. In exchange, Terrell had signed a promissory note committing to pay her $60,000 by year-end. By February 2009, court records show, Terrell had won $422,000 at trial for his client and an additional $510,818 in legal fees and costs. Yet Seaton said she never got a penny.

“He had the audacity to tell me ‘there’s nothing you can do about it,’” she said in an interview. “I want to go stand on the mountain and just holler about this asshole.”

Between 2006 and 2014, more than a dozen small vendors for Terrell’s law firm went to court seeking to collect more than $170,000 in unpaid bills. A&B Reporting complained that it had prepared more than 30 deposition transcripts for Terrell, billing him more than $40,000 that remained unpaid. According to the company’s 2011 lawsuit, Terrell finally sent a $5,000 check — which bounced.

In February 2014, as his private financial straits worsened, Terrell formally updated his law office address: from the Beverly Hills tower where he’d worked for more than two decades to a “suite” on Santa Monica Boulevard, which was actually a mailbox at a UPS store. He has filed just a single case in federal court since that year, according to PACER, a public database of court filings and dockets.

Terrell’s financial troubles factored into years of legal warfare among his siblings over their mother’s care and modest estate. In a court filing, Terrell’s younger brother Zachary accused him of borrowing repeatedly from their mother to save his “flailing” law practice and keep his home. Terrell acknowledged accepting a $30,000 gift from his mother after he’d done free legal work for her. The estate case finally ended in late 2021, but Terrell received little because he had already borrowed against his expected inheritance. (Deborah Terrell-Trimble was the only Terrell sibling to respond to our calls and emails for comment, but she declined to answer questions about her brother or the case, saying the family was “trying to heal.”)

Terrell eventually paid off or settled some of his debts, but there’s no record of him paying the IRS or many of his other creditors, whose legal claims typically expire after 10 years in California unless they’re renewed.

According to publicly filed liens, he still owed the IRS $92,000 at the beginning of 2024. Yet on the financial disclosure he filed for his Justice Department job, which covered that period, he listed his liabilities as “none.”

Neither Terrell nor the Department of Justice responded to requests for comment about this omission.

Amid the financial pressures at home and at work, Terrell underwent a startling political transformation. In 2019 Fox interviews, he had called Trump “a racial divider” and said he sent out “dog whistles” like “no president on this planet in our country’s history.” Less than a year later, he went all in for Trump. Fox News hired him as a paid contributor soon thereafter, at an annual salary of $250,000.

In interviews on Fox and other conservative outlets, Terrell offered two reasons for his ideological makeover. The first was the growing influence of the Black Lives Matter movement, which he complained had “hijacked” the Democratic Party, citing far-left calls to “defund the police.” He also objected to Joe Biden’s comment during an interview with a Black radio host that “if you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, then you ain’t Black,” calling it “offensive and insulting to every African American because we don’t vote as one group.”

Over the next four years, Terrell displayed the fervor of the converted. Biden was an “idiot”; Kamala Harris (whose name he repeatedly mispronounced) was only chosen as his running mate “because she’s a woman and because of her race.” Democrats were members of the “anti-Israel” and “pro-Hamas party.” Far-right agitator Laura Loomer was “a journalist,” while NBC’s Kristen Welker was “a DEI hire.” In 2023, Terrell made a pilgrimage to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where he posed poolside, making a thumbs-up gesture. Shortly before starting his Justice Department gig, Terrell made sure he was leaving no culture-war stone unturned. “I hate anti-Semitism! I hate attacks on Catholic Families! I hate attacks on parents expressing their First Amendment Rights at School Board Meetings! I hate Sanctuary Cities! I hate DEI! I hate Critical Race Theory!” he declared on X.

“I love this guy,” Trump gushed, introducing “Leo 2.0” in February at a White House commemoration of Black History Month. “He was a radical Democrat, he became a radical Republican.” Terrell returned the love, telling the audience: “We are in the presence of the greatest president of all time!”

What motivated him? Larry Elder, who was on air with Terrell as he announced his conversion and coined the nickname “Leo 2.0,” declined to speculate: “I really don’t care about why Leo did his 180. I’m just glad he finally did!”

Juan Williams, the Fox News senior political analyst, however, called the change in Terrell’s views “performative.” He said Terrell saw an opportunity to cast himself as “coming out of the liberal matrix, and ‘now I’ve seen the light.’ He understood the value in that universe.”

If it is a performance, it’s one Terrell has continued at the Justice Department, where the effect of his pugnacious style and footloose approach to the law has alarmed career staff accustomed to following strict rules regarding regulatory due process.

“That’s lawyer talk!” Terrell regularly thundered to Justice Department lawyers. “I don’t want to hear any lawyer talk!”

In the days after his Jan. 23 appointment, several said, Terrell emphatically rejected efforts by agency veterans to explain the legally required steps to bring civil rights complaints against universities.

“Leo did not want to hear our views about how to investigate, how to find a violation, how to proceed in these cases,” said a Justice Department veteran who heard Terrell’s comments. “No ‘lawyer talk’ at the Justice Department! It was just incredibly bizarre.” The attorney was one of 10 current and former lawyers with the agency’s Civil Rights Division interviewed for this story, most of whom asked not to be named for fear of retaliation.

At another meeting early in his tenure, Terrell told career Justice Department attorneys he thought they were out to thwart his agenda, according to two attendees. “He immediately came in and openly told us that he did not trust any of us or believe anything we said,” one recalled.

The Justice Department antisemitism task force, which includes officials from the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education and the General Services Administration, was announced on Feb. 3. It immediately announced antisemitism investigations of four medical schools regarding “offensive” pro-Palestinian “symbols and messaging” displayed by students during their 2024 commencement ceremonies. Then, over the next five weeks, the task force and Trump administration announced plans to investigate 10 universities; the “immediate” cancellation of hundreds of millions in federal funding for Columbia; an investigation of the entire University of California System; and “potential enforcement actions” against 60 colleges in 24 states.

It’s not clear whether Terrell had a hand in choosing the task force’s targets, but he took the lead in making the government’s case against them publicly.

“We are suing every one of these universities guilty of antisemitism,” Terrell told Fox News host Mark Levin on March 9. “We’re going to bankrupt these universities. We are going to take away every single federal dollar.” Antisemitism, shouted Terrell, waving his arms, “is rampant across the country!” Hate-crime charges, he vowed, would be brought against “these people who hate Jews.” Terrell blamed campus antisemitism on the MAGA movement’s usual suspects: “the Democrat Party” and “blue cities [that] have turned their back on Jewish Americans.”

“The academic system in this country has been hijacked by the left,” he declared, “has been hijacked by the Marxists!”

Four days later, the task force announced plans to meet with leaders of four cities “rocked” by campus antisemitism (New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Chicago) to determine whether federal intervention was warranted.

Career civil rights officials, many of whom had served under both Democratic and Republican administrations, were horrified. The Justice Department didn’t publicly announce who it was investigating or planned to sue. It didn’t reach findings before it had found cause in a completed investigation that typically takes months or even years. And investigating Democratic leaders in “blue cities” in the name of fighting campus antisemitism was far outside the department’s charge.

“The process is turned upside down,” said Ejaz Baluch, a senior trial attorney in the Civil Rights Division who left in May and is now a lecturer at Columbia Law School. “We were given a conclusion and told to find supporting evidence to justify it. It’s basically civil rights enforcement as a political tool. These things don’t actually solve antisemitism. It’s about silencing political dissent they disagree with.” Former civil rights deputy chief Jen Swedish, who worked at the Justice Department for 15 years, called the actions “cover for attacking higher ed.”

Back in early February, a division-wide posting seeking attorneys to help staff the antisemitism task force had drawn just three volunteers. Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s appointee as assistant attorney general for civil rights (and one of his former personal lawyers), later told a Federalist Society conference that this revealed the career staff’s lack of concern about antisemitism.

Current and former division attorneys interviewed by ProPublica and The Chronicle said the lawyers had misgivings about the administration’s tactics and were reluctant to work with Terrell, who already had a reputation for berating staffers. One said he’d repeatedly yelled at her.

A memorable episode came in March, when Terrell loudly berated a revered 82-year-old civil rights attorney, Franz Marshall, over the failure to quickly terminate federal oversight in a Louisiana school desegregation case, a goal of Republican state officials.

Marshall, who had represented the government in hundreds of desegregation cases over five decades, tried to explain that closing the case required a motion by the school district to lift the order, which the Justice Department could support or oppose, and review by a federal judge.

“Who told you that you had to do it this way?” Terrell interrupted. “I want you to name names!”

“This is the process,” Marshall assured him. “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

“Well, maybe you’ve been doing it for too long!” Terrell snapped. The tirade, which lasted nearly an hour, was audible to dozens of attorneys waiting outside the conference room for an upcoming meeting.

Marshall (who could not be reached for comment) resigned a short time later, joining a wholesale exodus from resignations, firings and reassignments that has totaled about 70% of the Civil Rights Division’s 365 attorneys since January. The Louisiana consent decree was lifted on April 29.

In late April, Terrell had convened a meeting with some of the remaining lawyers to address concerns about working with him. “That crazy guy you see on TV is not here,” he insisted, according to one attendee. “The guy before you is a civil rights attorney. There’s an urban myth that I scream and yell. I’ve never yelled in my life.”

There’s little evidence Terrell has been directly involved in negotiations with campuses under investigation; instead, those appear to have been increasingly steered by the White House. Terrell has voiced distrust of any bargaining, preferring to “lay the hammer on them with lawsuits,” as he told Justice Department lawyers in an April meeting. In mid-July, when word leaked that the Trump administration was about to announce an agreement with Columbia to restore its funding, Terrell questioned whether it was tough enough.

“I will not ‘SELLOUT’ Jewish Americans,” he posted on X. “NO DEALS!”

Six days later, the administration announced a $221 million settlement with Columbia, setting the stage for a string of similar deals with other colleges.

The extremism of Terrell’s messaging also doesn’t bother Dov Hikind, a former New York state Democratic assemblyman representing Brooklyn and the founder of Americans Against Antisemitism. “If Leo Terrell and others are speaking tough, I don’t lose any sleep over that.”

But the administration’s approach alarms other Jewish groups and erstwhile academic allies in the fight against campus antisemitism. The task force is “using legitimate fears of antisemitism in ways that are both dangerous and wrong,” said Amy Spitalnick, of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs. When Terrell proclaimed on Fox News that the task force would “bankrupt” targeted universities, “they were saying the quiet part out loud,” she added.

Whether Terrell is good for Jews or bad for Jews, his conversion has certainly been good for him. Leo 2.0 now has 2.5 million followers on his personal X account, and his speaking fee runs between $50,000 and $100,000; his government salary is $167,603. Terrell has attained “a rock star persona” in the Trump administration, said Kenneth Marcus, the former Education Department official and antisemitism activist. “People are very much drawn to him in a way that’s disproportionate to his rank in the federal government.”

There’s no sign administration officials, including Terrell, will let up in their campaign against higher education. Since late July, even as negotiations with Harvard dragged on and Brown’s settlement was announced, the administration froze $108 million in funding from Duke University’s medical system, citing “systemic racial discrimination” in hiring and admissions. It also halted more than $584 million from UCLA as punishment for tolerating a “hostile environment” for Jews and demanded $1 billion to restore the flow of government money. Duke has not publicly responded to the discrimination complaints. The University of California’s president, James B. Milliken, has pledged to work with the administration, but he said a $1 billion penalty would “completely devastate our country’s greatest public university system.”

Other colleges are just trying to stay out of the administration’s dragnet — and Terrell’s sights.

“He’s scared schools stiff, so everyone is scrambling,” said Brett Sokolow, an attorney and higher education consultant whom college and university leaders have turned to for advice.

Terrell’s approach, he said, is “way over the top — and effective as hell.”

Doris Burke of ProPublica contributed research.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.

by Brandon Roberts, Annie Waldman and Pratheek Rebala, illustrations by Sam Green for ProPublica

When the Trump administration announced massive cuts to federal health agencies earlier this year, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said he was getting rid of excess administrators who were larding the government with bureaucratic bloat.

But a groundbreaking data analysis by ProPublica shows the administration has cut deeper than it has acknowledged. Though Kennedy said he would add scientists to the workforce, agencies have lost thousands of them, along with colleagues who those scientists depended on to dispatch checks, fix computers and order lab supplies, enabling them to do their jobs.

Done in the name of government efficiency, these reductions have left departments stretching to perform their basic functions, ProPublica found, according to interviews with more than three dozen former and current federal employees.

Food and drug facility inspectors are having to go to the store and buy supplies on their own dime so they can take swab samples to test for pathogens.

Some labs have been unable to purchase the sterile eggs needed to replicate viruses or the mice needed to test vaccines.

And less than five years after a pandemic killed more than a million Americans, scientists who study infectious diseases are struggling to pay for saline solution, gloves and blood to feed lab mosquitos.

The Trump administration has refused to say how many workers have been lost so far. But ProPublica’s analysis reveals the cuts in unprecedented detail.

More than 3,000 scientists and public health specialists are gone.

Over 1,000 regulators and safety inspectors have also left.

In total, more than 20,500 workers, or about 18% of the Department of Health and Human Services’ workforce, have left or been pushed out, according to ProPublica’s analysis of federal worker departures using public information from the HHS employee directory.

The analysis is an undercount — it doesn’t include the hundreds or even thousands of workers who have received layoff notices but remain on administrative leave.

No health agency has been spared, with some important divisions losing more than 1 in 5 workers. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in charge of public health, lost 15% of its staff; the National Institutes of Health, the largest funder of biomedical research in the world, 16%; and the Food and Drug Administration, which ensures the safety of most of what goes into people’s bodies — from baby formula to cancer drugs to hip implants — 21%.

Thousands of these employees were laid off or had their contracts cut, while some took buyouts or retired earlier than anticipated. Divisions have experienced a brain drain of epic proportions, ProPublica found, losing senior leaders behind some of the biggest health initiatives of the modern era, like the rapid rollout of the COVID-19 vaccine.

Many of the cuts contradict what the administration has said about its priorities.

The secretary who has questioned the safety of vaccines has pushed out scores of regulators who work to make vaccines safe. And while he has declared a new era in the fight against chronic disease, he has decimated a center dedicated to that very goal.

Division leaders and staffers told ProPublica the cuts will lead their agencies to neglect their duties: Federal researchers will conduct fewer clinical trials and studies, regulators will conduct fewer or less-thorough inspections of egg farms and foreign drug factories, and public health specialists will be less prepared to combat outbreaks of deadly viruses. With exit and severance packages pending, many former and current workers would only speak anonymously, out of fear of retribution.

HHS did not dispute the findings of ProPublica’s analysis and didn’t directly respond to questions about the consequences of the cuts of thousands of scientists, public health specialists and safety inspectors. HHS also did not respond to our questions about why it wouldn’t share data on workforce reductions. A spokesperson for the department said the idea that Kennedy is weakening public health is “dishonest.”

“Yes, we’ve made cuts — to bloated bureaucracies that were long overdue for accountability,” the spokesperson said in an email. “At the same time, we are working to redirect resources to science that delivers measurable impact, rebuilds public trust, and helps Make America Healthy Again.”

Former health secretary Xavier Becerra, who served under President Joseph Biden until earlier this year, called the cuts reckless.

“Public health isn’t a luxury — it’s a core function of government,” he said. “This hollowing out of expertise could leave us dangerously exposed. It takes years to build a professional workforce with the technical knowledge and public trust these roles require. Once you lose that, it’s not easy to get back.”

REGULATORS LOST

Spotlight: The Food and Drug Administration

When HHS announced the federal worker cuts, the department said that the FDA’s safety inspectors and reviewers overseeing food, drugs and medical devices would be spared.

However, ProPublica has found that the FDA has lost more than 400 workers who support inspections of everything from dairy farms to seafood processors to blood banks, and who ensure that companies follow federal regulations. More than a third of them worked at its Office of Inspections and Investigations, which serves as the “eyes and ears” of the agency. More than 240 consumer safety specialists have left across the agency, including nearly 40 workers responsible for safeguarding food, plus about 220 chemists, biologists and toxicologists.

The Food and Drug Administration, the primary agency responsible for regulating food, drugs and vaccines, has lost over 900 scientists and health experts since January, along with over 500 regulators, investigators and compliance workers.

Many of the investigators who left had honed their skills over years of field visits and inspections, developing a sixth sense for possible violations. “I could walk into a plant and within five minutes could tell you if there was a rodent problem,” said a former division director at the investigations office who left the FDA after inspecting countless facilities over more than two decades. “Once you’ve been in a hot warehouse and you smell rodent urine, it’s like fresh-cut grass, you know exactly what it is the minute you smell it.”

With diminished capacity to spot potential problems, the system of oversight, which has historically been short-staffed, could break down, several former investigators told ProPublica. “They might miss something — a contaminant in a drug, a contaminant in a piece of food, a microbug in something because we had to freeze it for six months until they had enough person power to actually look at the sample,” the former director said. In April, CBS News reported that the investigations office was already planning on reducing routine “surveillance inspections” in response to worker cuts.

Key support staff who make sure investigators have everything they need, from essential supplies to travel visas, have also been cut. About 65% of the staff in the division responsible for budget, facilities and travel for the investigations office have left.

Dr. Peter Lurie, who was an associate commissioner at the FDA during the Obama administration, said that such drastic cuts will hamper the agency’s ability to recruit future inspectors and scientists.

“The big attraction of federal employment has always been its stability and its benefits, and we’re at the point that the stability is undermined,” said Lurie, who is currently the president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “This is a set of cuts that is going to hamstring the FDA for a decade or more.”

Vaccine Regulators Pushed Out

One of the divisions of the FDA most impacted by workforce cuts has been the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research. It ensures the safety and quality of biological products for human use, like red blood cells for people with sickle cell disease, immunotherapy for those battling cancer and vaccines for everyone. Since January, the center has lost about 500 people, or 26% of its workforce.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the center played a crucial role in ensuring the quick rollout of safe and effective vaccines. It reviews and approves new vaccines and oversees their manufacturing and use. The center also conducts its own research to support the development of vaccines.

But in February, when the administration began slashing the federal workforce, the research stalled. “At some point, we decided which experiments were the priority for us,” a former CBER scientist told ProPublica.

“The center was already somewhat understaffed for the workload,” said Dr. Peter Marks, who led the center from 2016 to 2025. “Now with these cuts, particularly cuts of the most experienced individuals who have left for various reasons, the agency, and in particular the Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, is just a shadow of its former self.”

Marks, who helped launch the program to rapidly develop COVID-19 vaccines, resigned under pressure in March, citing an “unprecedented assault on scientific truth” in his departure letter. Kennedy, who has long been a fierce critic of vaccines, has used his office to further sow doubt about immunizations, despite decades of evidence of their safety and efficacy.

Two of the center’s top cell and gene therapy officials were placed on leave this summer. HHS did not respond to questions about the high-profile exits, but it has previously suggested the gene therapy leaders weren’t aligned with the administration’s goals and said that Marks had no place at the agency if he did not support “restoring science to its golden standard.”

As civil servants have departed the center, political appointees have gained a foothold. Under the leadership of Dr. Vinay Prasad, who the administration brought in to lead CBER in May, the center “was run as a political organization,” said Marks. “Decisions were not being made on science, nor were they even being made on articulated policy. They were being made essentially on an arbitrary basis.” The New York Times reported that Prasad overruled his center’s experts on the use of COVID vaccines, recommending restricting the shots. Prasad did not respond to ProPublica’s emailed questions.

A spokesperson for HHS said in an email that Kennedy was not antivaccine and that the agency would continue to regulate immunizations. “The FDA remains steadfast in enforcing rigorous vaccine oversight, ensuring the highest standards of safety and protection for all Americans,” said the spokesperson, adding that Kennedy was “pro-safety, pro-transparency, and pro-accountability.”

SCIENTISTS CUT

Spotlight: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

In May, Kennedy claimed in a Senate committee hearing that HHS had not fired any “working scientists,” only targeting those in IT or administration. “In terms of working scientists, our policy was to make sure none of them were lost and that that research continues,” he said.

But ProPublica has found that more than 1,050 scientists, physicians and public health specialists — many of whom were conducting research and disease surveillance — have left or been pushed out of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention alone since January.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has lost over 3,000 workers. A third of them worked as scientists or in health care roles.

One of the key responsibilities of scientists at the CDC is surveillance — gathering and studying data on deaths or disease outcomes; many of the experts leading this work are gone. The team tracking maternal and infant health outcomes, which helps the public understand how people die in childbirth, has been placed on administrative leave. The program cataloguing the frequency of common injuries, such as car accidents, overdoses, dog bites and drownings, was cut. The staff that monitors lead poisoning in children was eliminated.

Dr. Thomas Frieden, who led the CDC during the Obama administration, said the cuts were endangering the public.

“What public health does is it helps us see the invisible: See whether it’s the microbes that are killing us, or the toxins that are poisoning us, or the trends in diseases that we need to respond to protect ourselves and our families,” he said. “To the extent that these actions weaken our ability to see health trends and health risks, they make Americans less safe.”

Chronic Disease Experts Forced Out

During one of his January Senate confirmation hearings, Kennedy declared war on chronic disease. “President Trump has asked me to end the chronic disease epidemic and make America healthy again,” he testified.

Despite this proclamation, Kennedy-approved cuts slashed the staff of the CDC’s chronic disease center by about 20%; nearly half of those lost were scientists and public health workers.

Several divisions of the National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion have also been radically diminished: 45% of its oral health division, which protects the teeth of kids whose parents can’t afford dentists, has been lost, along with more than 35% of the division that focuses on preventing heart disease and strokes.

The cuts are worse than they appear on paper because they don’t reflect the people on administrative leave. At the center’s smoking and health office, for example, our analysis shows more than a quarter of the workforce is gone, but according to multiple former staffers, only one federal employee is actually still working there.

As the office emptied out following a wave of mass layoffs and forced retirements, a handful of stragglers frantically boxed up historical research, guidance documents and reports so that they wouldn’t be destroyed. “It’s 60 years of work that could be thrown in trash dumps,” said a former staffer.

The work of the office, which tracks tobacco use and supports state smoking prevention programs, has essentially been eliminated, said multiple workers. Federal grants have been delayed, leading some states to cut their programs. While cigarette smoking has decreased in recent decades, vaping and e-cigarette use has surged, particularly among young people, even as evidence mounts of their dangers. But after this year, the office’s tracking of youth smoking and tobacco use is expected to be discontinued.

“If eliminated, the expertise that existed at the Office on Smoking and Health, it doesn’t just pause, it disappears, and that would take years to rebuild,” said Ranjana Caple, the national senior manager of advocacy at the American Lung Association. “The nation loses its ability to prevent the next wave of nicotine addiction, protect kids and help people quit.”

RESEARCH STAFF TARGETED

Spotlight: The National Institutes of Health

One of the central roles of the NIH is its funding of research at academic and biomedical institutions. It awards roughly $30 billion annually. Since January, the administration has terminated more than 1,450 research grants and withheld more than $750 million in funding.

Even the grants that survived are not being paid out, partly because the administration has fired the workers who administer the funding, said former and current staffers.

“There were all of these cuts to the people who deliver the grant funds, the people who are in charge of the funds and reviewing the funds,” said Anna Culbertson, a former NIH scientific program specialist who was a probationary federal employee and was laid off in February. “The consequence of grant funding delays is that some experiments and trials that take years may have to be restarted.”

At three NIH institutes focused on mental health, aging and infectious disease, 30% or more of the workers in divisions responsible for approving and dispatching money have been cut, leading to substantial delays in payouts. A recent analysis by STAT found that NIH grant funding levels have dropped nearly 30% compared with previous years.

The National Institutes of Health has lost more than 7,000 workers since January. Because HHS does not provide job titles for the majority of workers at the NIH, we are unable to show worker departures by job category.

“With the resignations, retirements, firings and contractors being lost, the capacity to get grants out the door is diminished,” said a scientific review staffer still with the agency. “We just can’t get everything done.”

The delays have forced universities to pause research, fire staff and even turn away students. At the University of Washington, the renewal of 73 federal grants totaling over $61 million was delayed as of April, leading to furloughs and layoffs, court documents reveal. And at the University of California, the delays have contributed to a systemwide hiring freeze on new faculty and staff. The financial instability created by the funding delays led the University of Massachusetts, Amherst to reduce admissions to its doctoral programs by 250 students.

Infectious Disease Researchers Scaled Back

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which supports research that develops and tests vaccines, lost more than 850 workers, or roughly 17% of its workforce, since January.

The institute has long played a critical role in combating infectious disease: It funded decades of research on coronaviruses, laying the foundation for vaccines; it extensively supported HIV/AIDS research, which has transformed the disease from a death sentence to a chronic condition; and it has trained scores of scientists and researchers, fostering their careers and discoveries.

But in recent years, it has become a target of the right. Its former director, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who led the center for nearly four decades until 2022 and was a member of Trump’s Coronavirus Task Force, was accused by Republican lawmakers of “wielding unchecked power over public health policy” by encouraging temporary stay-at-home orders. Citing his leadership, Senate Republicans in 2023 proposed abolishing the institute and divvying up its functions.

Since January, scores of senior officials at the institute have been forced out or placed on administrative leave, which several former high-level employees told ProPublica they believed was political retribution in response to pandemic policies. HHS did not respond to questions about whether the moves were retaliatory.

The most recent director of the institute, Dr. Jeanne Marrazzo, was forced to choose between dismissal or a reassignment in an outpost of the Indian Health Service.

“They’re taking out the head,” said a NIAID scientist who recently left, “because then there’s no one to protect us.”

Sophie Chou contributed data reporting.

Art Direction by Andrea Wise.

This post was originally published on ProPublica.