Brett Murphy
I’m a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter on ProPublica’s national desk, where I write about the government, companies and power.
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What I Cover
I currently cover the federal agencies at the center of Trump’s foreign affairs agenda and the corporations that help carry it out. Most recently, I wrote about the Biden administration’s State Department and how top officials there repeatedly disregarded government experts and appeared to flout U.S. law in order to continue supplying weapons of war to Israel.
My Background
I’ve been a reporter on ProPublica’s national desk since 2022. That year, I published a series of articles uncovering a new junk science in the justice system known as 911 call analysis. The reporting won a George Polk Award, among other honors.
In 2023, a team and I revealed how a set of politically connected billionaires provided lavish gifts and travel to Supreme Court justices over many years. Those stories won the Pulitzer Prize Gold Medal for public service.
I joined ProPublica after working as an investigative reporter at USA Today, where I covered labor, criminal justice and the federal government. There, I won several journalism awards, including the international Livingston Award for our investigation into a U.S. military attack on its own security forces in Afghanistan, which killed dozens of civilians, including as many as 60 children.
My series on widespread labor abuses in California’s port trucking industry was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and spurred a raft of reforms. Before USA Today, I covered courts and hurricanes for the Naples Daily News and other Gannett newspapers. I also co-founded the “Local Matters” newsletter, a weekly roundup of the best investigative and watchdog reporting from local newsrooms around the country.
I live in Brooklyn.
DOGE’s Millions: As Musk and Trump Gut Government, Their Ax-Cutting Agency Gets Cash Infusion
The Department of Government Efficiency is funded — and acts — like a federal agency. But the White House has shielded DOGE from the rules that govern such agencies, ProPublica found as it examines the group and expands a list of DOGE workers.
Trump Official Destroying USAID Secretly Met With Christian Nationalists Abroad in Defiance of U.S. Policy
Now one of the most powerful people in the U.S. government, Peter Marocco’s turbulent tenure during the first Trump administration sheds light on his current efforts to dismantle the American foreign aid system from the inside out.
In Breaking USAID, the Trump Administration May Have Broken the Law
ProPublica’s reporting provides new details about what legal risk officials were prepared to take and what laws they may have violated on their way to creating a “constitutional crisis.”
Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. ProPublica is attempting to document who is working with him and what they are doing.
“People Will Die”: The Trump Administration Said It Lifted Its Ban on Lifesaving Humanitarian Aid. That’s Not True.
Organizations that provide vital care for desperate and vulnerable people around the world have been forced to halt operations, turn away patients and lay off staff. “I’ve never seen anything that scares me as much as this,” one doctor said.
A Year of Empty Threats and a “Smokescreen” Policy: How the State Department Let Israel Get Away With Horrors in Gaza
Israel has repeatedly crossed the Biden administration’s human rights red lines. But the U.S. continued to send weapons. Exclusive records and interviews reveal what happened inside the State Department.
Blinken to Israel: Allow More Aid Into Gaza or Face the Consequences
The stern letter from the secretary of state and the Pentagon comes amid the worst month for relief efforts since the war began. ProPublica previously reported Blinken had earlier rejected findings that Israel was deliberately blocking aid.
Inside the State Department’s Weapons Pipeline to Israel
Leaked cables and emails show how the agency’s top officers dismissed internal evidence of Israelis misusing American-made bombs and worked around the clock to rush more out while the Gaza death toll mounted.
Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.
Blinken told Congress, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting” aid, even though the U.S. Agency for International Development and others had determined that Israel had broken the law.
Blinken Says Israeli Units Accused of Serious Violations Have Done Enough to Avoid Sanctions. Experts and Insiders Disagree.
The secretary of state told Congress that Israel had adequately punished a soldier who got community service for killing an unarmed Palestinian. Government officials call it a “mockery” and inconsistent with the law.
Netanyahu Resists U.S. Plan to Cut Off Aid to Israeli Military Unit
After months of inaction, Secretary of State Antony Blinken is poised to bar U.S. aid to an Israeli unit accused of human rights abuses.