The Times and ProPublica Partner to Uncover Who Is Deregulating America

Federal regulations govern huge swaths of American life. They dictate what information should appear on a wine bottle’s label, how big a boat you can build without installing emergency lighting, the criteria your house should meet if you want it on the National Register of Historic Places. They’re all listed, broken down into 50 categories, in the Code of Federal Regulations, a document that came in at just under 180,000 pages as of 2015. Every consumer, business and industry in the country encounters these regulations in one form or another, and as such they’re constantly debated.

President Donald J. Trump dived headlong into that debate this February, issuing an executive order creating “Regulatory Reform Task Forces” across the federal agencies. These groups, the order explained, would evaluate existing regulations and make recommendations about which to keep, scrap or modify. Most government agencies declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams.

To find out more about the people conducting these reviews, The Times partnered with the nonprofit investigative journalism organization ProPublica on a report published today. “These are public task forces. The work and the people doing that work should be public,” said Robert Faturechi, a reporter for ProPublica, who joined The Times’s Danielle Ivory to track down these officials’ identities, and who might be influencing them in their work — including entities that could represent a conflict of interest.

The task was not made easier by the agencies themselves. “It’s been very difficult to get names,” Ms. Ivory said. Both she and Mr. Faturechi filed numerous Freedom of Information Act requests, many of which have yet to receive a response. Of those they did get, some included only partial information — the titles but not the names of task force members, for example. “But it’s just been radio silence for the most part,” Mr. Faturechi said.

Some agencies, like the E.P.A., have regularly taken public comments. But task force officials have also been meeting regularly in private with industry representatives. “There’s a public-facing effort,” Ms. Ivory said of the E.P.A.’s process, but also one behind the scenes. “And that has not been very transparent.”

One big break came when Ms. Ivory, in what she described as a “fit of frustration, because we just weren’t getting any records from the agencies,” dug through publicly available documents on the Department of the Interior’s website. There, she found the handwritten visitor logs from the department’s front desk. She and Mr. Faturechi were then able to track the meetings task force members at the department had been taking. “We found dozens of instances of industry representatives meeting with these particular task force appointees, which gave us a window we wouldn’t have had otherwise,” Mr. Faturechi said.

The Times and ProPublica have been partnering for nearly a decade, on everything from Sheri Fink’s 2009 Pulitzer Prize-winning report on Memorial Medical Center in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to the Edward Snowden leaks in 2013. “We hew to very similar journalistic ambitions and standards,” said Rebecca Corbett, an assistant masthead editor of The Times. “We offer a huge audience, so their journalism can get read,” she said, “and it amplifies our own.”

Ms. Ivory and Mr. Faturechi’s collaboration began after they discovered they were both pursuing similar stories. Working together, both reporters believed, made for a better final product and helped them do justice to the complexity of both the people and issues involved. “There’s often pushback” from the agencies, Ms. Ivory said, “and it’s good to have a backstop, to turn to Robert and say ‘am I being fair?’ ”

Still, their work, like that of the task forces themselves, is far from over. Mr. Faturechi and Ms. Ivory hope readers will come forward with further information on task force members, many of whom remain unknown. They’ll also be targeting federal employees with Facebook advertisements, encouraging them to come forward with whatever they might know. “This is a way to get this into the public realm, to tell the public who is going to be looking at these regulations, which affect them in their daily lives,” Ms. Ivory said. “Please help us!”