The Brief

A choking layer of pollution-laced fog settled over Minneapolis last month, blanketing the city in its worst air quality since 2005. A temperature inversion acted like a ceiling, trapping small particles emitted from sluggish engines and overworked heaters in a gauze that shrouded the skyline. That haze arrived amid the hottest winter on record for the Midwest. Warmer temperatures melted what little snow had fallen, releasing moisture that helped further trap pollution.

Though summertime pollution from wildfire smoke and ozone receives more attention, climate change is making these kinds of winter inversions increasingly common — with troubling results. One in four Americans are now exposed to unhealthy air, according to a report by First Street Foundation.

Jeremy Porter, head of climate implications research at the nonprofit climate research firm, calls this increase in air pollution a “climate penalty,” rolling back improvements made over four decades. On the West Coast, this inflection point was passed about 10 years ago; air quality across the region has consistently worsened since 2010. Now, a broader swath of the country is starting to see deteriorating conditions. During Canada’s boreal wildfires last summer, for example, millions of people from Chicago to New York experienced some of the worst air pollution in the world. It was a precedent-breaking spate that saw the average person exposed to more small particulate matter than at any time since tracking began in 2006.

It’s a preview of more to come.

Since Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, federal law has regulated all sources of emissions, successfully reducing pollution. Between 1990 and 2017, the number of particles smaller than 2.5 micrometers, known as PM2.5, fell 41 percent. These particulates pose a significant threat because they can burrow into the lungs and enter the bloodstream. Exposure can cause heart disease, strokes, respiratory diseases like lung cancer, and premature death. Such concerns prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to toughen pollution limits for the first time in a decade, lowering the limit from 12 micrograms per cubic meter of air to 9 earlier this month.

But a stricter standard isn’t likely to resolve the problem, said Marissa Childs, a post-doctoral researcher at Harvard University’s Center for the Environment. That’s because the agency considers wildfires an “exceptional event,” and therefore exempt from the regulation. Yet about one-third of all particulate matter pollution in the United States now comes from wildfire smoke. “The Clean Air Act is challenged by smoke,” she said, both because wildfires defy the EPA’s traditional enforcement mechanisms, and because of its capacity to travel long distances. “Are we going to start saying that New York is out of compliance because California had a fire burning?”

To get a better sense of how a growing exposure to air pollution might impact the public, First Street used wildfire and climate models to estimate what the skies might look like in the future. (Though its researchers relied on Childs’ national database of PM2.5 concentrations, she was not otherwise involved with First Street’s report.) They found that by 2054, 50 percent more people, or 125 million in all, will experience at least one day of “red” air quality with an Air Quality Index from 151-200, a level considered risky enough that everyone should minimize their exposure. “We’re essentially adding back additional premature deaths, adding back additional heart attacks,” Porter said at a meeting about the report. “We’re losing productivity in the economic markets by additionally losing outdoor job work days.”

First Street has now added its air quality predictions to an online tool that allows anyone to search for climate risks by home address. As extreme heat increases ozone and changing conditions intensify wildfires, it shows just how unequal the impacts will be. While New York City is projected to see eight days a year with the Air Quality Index at an unhealthy orange, meaning an in the range of 101 to 150, an increase of two days, the Seattle metropolitan area is expected to see almost two additional weeks of poor air. “That’s two more weeks out of only 52,” said Ed Kearns, First Street’s chief science officer. “Twelve more days of being trapped in your house, not being able to go outside — worrying about the health consequences.”

Just as the sources of pollution are unevenly distributed, so too is people’s ability to respond. “People across the board are seeking information about air quality,” Childs said, for example, searching online about pollution levels on particularly smoky days. But not everyone has the same ability to make choices to protect themselves. Childs cowrote a 2022 Nature Human Behavior paper that found behavioral responses to smoke — staying indoors, for example, or driving to work rather than waiting for the bus — are strongly correlated with income. If left to individuals, she says, “the people who have the most resources are going to be the most protected, and we’re going to leave a lot of people behind.”

In a collaboration with real estate company Redfin, First Street found early signals that suggest people are already leaving areas with poor air quality. Tarik Benmarhnia, an environmental epidemiologist at the University of California, San Diego, quibbles with those conclusions, however, saying many variables influence both air quality and residential mobility, like income and housing prices. Air pollution is a notoriously complex subject — difficult to predict even a week out, much less speculate on what might happen in three decades. “I think the most critical problem is a total absence of any discussion of uncertainty,” he said.

He also worries that First Street’s risk index could unintentionally magnify these distinctions of privilege. If potential homeowners use the database to avoid areas based on the report’s predictions, property values in those regions could fall accordingly, reducing tax bases and decreasing the ability to provide services like community clean air rooms during smoke events. “It may act like a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Benmarhnia notes that traditional sources of air pollution, like factory emissions, show a very consistent relationship between socio-economic status, race, and higher pollution levels, a pattern that repeats across the country. Smoke and ozone don’t tend to follow these social gradients because they disperse so widely. “But wildfire smoke doesn’t come on top of nothing, it’s on top of existing inequities” like access to health care, or jobs that increase outdoor exposures, he said. “Not everybody is starting from the same place.” Benmarhnia recently published a paper finding that wildfires, in concert with extreme heat, compound the risk to cardiovascular systems. But the people most likely to be harmed by these synergies live in low-income communities of color.

“The thing about air pollution is there’s only so much you can do at individual or civil society level,” said Christa Hasenkopf, the director of the Clean Air Program at the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “It’s a political and social issue that has to be tackled at a national level.” The university’s Air Quality Life Index measures how air pollution is contributing to early deaths around the world, aiming to provide a clearer image of the health gaps. “The size of the impact on life expectancy in two relatively geographically nearby areas can be surprising,” she says, like between eastern and western Europe.

For her part, Hasenkopf is enthusiastic about First Street’s air quality report, hoping it will help highlight some of these inequities. Though 13 people die every minute from air pollution, funding for cleaner air solutions remains limited. “That disconnect between the size of the air pollution issue, and what resources we are devoting to it is quite startling,” Hasenkopf said.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass on Monday unveiled a $14.9 billion budget that is significantly rosier than last year’s spending plan, when she suggested massive layoffs and service cuts to accommodate a billion-dollar deficit.

This year, because of a projected increase in revenues, the mayor is proposing no layoffs and a modest expansion of street services. Bass' budget also calls for hiring police officers to keep up with retirements and resignations, maintaining Fire Department spending and holding steady funding for homelessness programs.

“This budget is about protecting the progress we have made and making clear that Los Angeles is moving forward and will not go backward,” Bass said at a news conference.

In the proposal, the reserve fund is 5.7% of the general fund, or $490 million. The budget does not dip into the reserves, in contrast to last year’s plan.

Bass is seeking re-election this year. The primary is June 2.

Some of her challengers in the upcoming election, including Councilmember Nithya Raman, criticized Bass’ proposal as doing little more than maintaining the status quo.

“The budget the Mayor released today tells us the plan is to largely keep doing what we're doing — but what we're doing is not working,” Raman said in a statement.

Next, the proposal will go to the City Council for consideration. Budget hearings will be conducted in the coming weeks.

Increasing revenue

Among the reasons city officials say revenue will go up is the expected influx of thousands of visitors to World Cup soccer matches this summer. More travelers mean more people staying in hotels and paying hotel taxes, as well as more sales tax revenue.

The budget projects a $412 million increase in general tax revenue, including $71 in business taxes, $34 million in sales taxes and $67 million in utility taxes.

The budget would add 170 new positions in the department that handles street repairs and increase funding for street and sidewalk fixes, curb-ramp installation, street sweeping, bulky item pickup and dedicated illegal dumping enforcement throughout the city.

The budget also proposes hiring 510 police officers, representing a target of 8,555 for the Police Department and enough to keep up with attrition, according to budget officials. Bass has set a goal of 9,500 officers.

“It’s about preventing the shrinkage of LAPD,” Bass said.

That proposal is likely to see opposition from some council members who want to see the department shrink and funding for unarmed response teams increase.

Inside Safe

The budget sustains citywide coverage for civilian unarmed crisis response, maintaining deployment of 500 crossing guards and expanding a program that aims to help children get to and from school safely and protect them from gang violence.

Under the budget, funding for Inside Safe, the mayor’s signature program to address homelessness, would remain about the same — $104 million.

The mayor touts an 18% drop in street homelessness as evidence of its success.

The budget maintains funding for the city Fire Department. In November, voters are expected to decide whether to increase the sales tax by half a percent to pay for more firefighters and equipment.

Criticism for the budget

Bass’ challengers immediately criticized her budget as lacking vision.

“This budget maintains a status quo of reduced services and higher fees, the direct result of fiscally irresponsible decisions made by this Mayor in prior years,” Raman said in her statement.

In January, the council member voted against Bass’ plan to hire 170 more police officers.

Adam Miller, a tech entrepreneur and another Bass challenger, said keeping the budget flat “implies that the status quo is working.”

“That is tone-deaf to the city of Los Angeles as Angelenos overwhelmingly feel we need change," he said.

The budget needs to be approved by the City Council and signed by the mayor by July 1, the start of the fiscal year.

Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer is leaving her post amid an internal investigation brought on by complaints about misconduct.

White House Director of Communications Steven Cheung announced the departure on X, writing "she has done a phenomenal job in her role by protecting American workers, enacting fair labor practices, and helping Americans gain additional skills to improve their lives." Cheung said Chavez-DeRemer was taking a position in the private sector.

A senior official at the Labor Department not authorized to speak publicly about the departure said the secretary had resigned.

Chavez-DeRemer is the third cabinet member to leave during President Donald Trump's second term.

In early March, Trump fired Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem shortly after lawmakers on Capitol Hill berated her over her agency's handling of immigration enforcement — as well as its $220 million ad campaign featuring the secretary on horseback.

A month later, Attorney General Pam Bondi left amid simmering frustration over her leadership of the Justice Department and her handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

While Chavez-DeRemer has played a far less visible role than Bondi or Noem in Trump's second term, her tenure has also been marked by controversy.

In January, the New York Post first reported that the Labor Department's inspector general was looking into complaints that Chavez-DeRemer was having an affair with a subordinate, drinking alcohol on the job and using taxpayer-funded travel to visit with friends and family members.

NPR has not independently verified the contents of the investigation.

While in office, Chavez-DeRemer spent much of her time away from Washington. A year ago, she launched her "America at Work" listening tour, an initiative that took her to all 50 states.

Chavez-DeRemer's chief of staff and deputy chief of staff, who had been on leave since January, resigned in early March. A third senior member of her staff, Melissa Robey, said in a statement issued March 26 that she had been fired a couple days earlier, after giving a four-hour interview to the Office of the Inspector General.

Meanwhile, the New York Times was first to report that Chavez-DeRemer's husband, Shawn DeRemer, an anesthesiologist in Portland, Ore., had been barred from Labor Department headquarters in Washington, D.C., after at least two staffers reported he had touched them inappropriately. Washington, D.C. police and federal prosecutors closed the investigations without bringing charges.

An unconventional choice

Trump's selection of Chavez-DeRemer to lead the Labor Department was seen by many as a concession to Teamsters President Sean O'Brien. O'Brien had been friendly with Trump through the presidential campaign, taking a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention and later declining to endorse Trump's opponent, then-Vice President Kamala Harris.

O'Brien had pushed for Chavez-DeRemer's selection, noting that she was one of only a few Republicans in Congress to have supported the PRO Act. That bill aimed to make it easier for workers to organize unions, including by overturning state Right to Work laws, which weaken unions.

At the time, Trump wrote, "Lori's strong support from both the Business and Labor communities will ensure that the Labor Department can unite Americans of all backgrounds."

Deputy Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, who has already been running much of the day-to-day operations of the Labor Department, has been named acting secretary, according to Cheung's post on X.

Sonderling previously served at the Labor Department during the first Trump administration and at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission under the Biden administration, having been nominated by Trump during his first term to fill a Republican seat.
Copyright 2026 NPR

Before he became an Orange County Superior Court Judge, Ebrahim Baytieh was fired as a prosecutor by District Attorney Todd Spitzer for allegedly cheating to win convictions. And Baytieh was accused by a San Diego judge last year of lying under oath. But an O.C. nonprofit that teaches youth about constitutional rights awarded Baytieh “Judge of the Year” at its annual reception last week.

The group, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Orange County, said in a statement that they honored Baytieh because he was the top volunteer for the group’s high school mock trial competition. The statement said the group had “received positive feedback from coaches and students over whose trials [Baytieh] presided.”

Some questioned whether the award was appropriate.

“It’s disgusting,” said Scott Sanders, the former public defender who uncovered the so-called “snitch scandal,” in which Baytieh was a major player. “If you’re going to have a group that’s dedicated to constitutional rights, it is not a good look to make your ‘Judge of the Year’ a guy who has been found to violate constitutional rights.”

What’s come to be known as the O.C. snitch scandal refers to the systematic use of jailhouse informants to coax confessions from defendants without their lawyers present, and then hide that evidence from defendants — both of which are illegal. The misconduct took place under former District Attorney Tony Rackauckas. Spitzer, the current DA, has vowed to never let such misconduct happen again. But he has been left to deal with the fallout, including past wrongful convictions that continue to come to light.

Baytieh, who held a top position in Rackauckas’s office, repeatedly denied the allegations of misconduct.

Nevertheless, a federal civil rights investigation ultimately concluded that O.C. law enforcement “systematically violated criminal defendants’ right to counsel."

Baytieh’s prominent role in those violations has come into focus in recent years, most recently when the District Attorney’s Office was forced to drop murder charges in a decades-old case that Baytieh had initially prosecuted. The judge in that case concluded that Baytieh and his prosecution team had withheld evidence, and then lied on the stand about it in 2024. The judge called the prosecution’s behavior "reprehensible."

Orange County Asst. Public Defender Scott Sanders questions former prosecutor Ebrahim Baytieh, now an O.C. Superior Court judge, about the use of jailhouse informants in a San Diego courtoom on June 10, 2024.

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Previously, Baytieh had been fired by Spitzer after an internal investigation found Baytieh had illegally withheld evidence in the same murder case. Baytieh would go on to win election to the O.C. Superior Court a few months later, with endorsements from dozens of current and former judges and law enforcement leaders.

LAist reached out to Baytieh for this story but has not received a response. Paul Meyer, a defense attorney who has represented Baytieh in recent years, declined to comment.

One-man protest from an unlikely critic

As high school students and their parents arrived at Calvary Church in Santa Ana last Thursday for the mock trial awards ceremony, Paul Wilson walked through the parking lot, handing out copies of a six-page letter, penned by Sanders, the former public defender, highlighting Baytieh’s unethical behavior and urging the Constitutional Rights Foundation not to honor the judge.

The event went on as planned.

Wilson and Sanders have become unlikely allies in a quest to root out past misconduct by O.C. law enforcement and seek justice for defendants who didn't get a fair trial.

More than a decade ago, Sanders and Wilson were on opposite sides of the courtroom. Sanders was defending Scott Dekraai, the man accused of killing Wilson’s wife, Christy, and seven others in the county’s worst mass shooting in modern history, at a salon in Seal Beach.

Dekraai was arrested in what appeared to be a slam dunk legal case. But then, while preparing for trial, Sanders discovered a secret law enforcement program that offered money and perks to jailed informants to surreptitiously question defendants, including Dekraai. Questioning a defendant without giving them the opportunity to have a lawyer present runs afoul of the Constitution. Prosecutors were also hiding evidence about informants from defendants, another constitutional violation.

As a result of Sanders’s discovery, the Dekraai case dragged on for years. In a humiliating defeat, the DA’s office was removed from prosecuting the case because of the misconduct. And in a blow to the victims’ families, a judge ruled that the death penalty would be off the table.

An investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice followed, during which Baytieh, then a top prosecutor, denied having any knowledge of the misconduct.

Paul Wilson hands copies of a letter detailing Judge Baytieh's role in the snitch scandal to attendees of an awards ceremony sponsored by the Constitutional Rights Foundation of Orange County.

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After the ordeal, Wilson began crusading to reform O.C. law enforcement. “We haven’t gotten the justice we deserve,” Wilson said of himself and other victims’ family members.

That’s what led him to make copies of Sanders’s denouncement of Baytieh’s “Judge of the Year” award, and to bring them to the Constitutional Rights Foundation’s celebratory event last week, he told LAist.

“ I felt a great need to go down and let some of these students that Baytieh has been mentoring … know who this guy was and what he's all about and what he continues to be,” Wilson said.

“For years and years, those guys operated behind this shield that nobody was going to catch them,” Wilson said of Baytieh and other former O.C. prosecutors and sheriff’s deputies who were found by judges and the U.S. Department of Justice to have participated in the misconduct.

Wilson told LAist he passed out about 45 copies of Sanders’s letter before someone from the Constitutional Rights Foundation asked him to leave.

Read the letter:

Pending justice

Sanders retired last year from the O.C. Public Defender’s office after 32 years. Before he left, around 60 convictions tainted by the misuse of informants had been lessened or overturned. In one, a 69-year-old man was freed from prison after the DA's Office admitted that prosecutors withheld evidence decades ago that mitigated his guilt. The man had already spent 41 years in prison.

Sanders said there’s much more work to do — in court filings, he has detailed dozens of convictions that he argues should be revisited because of law enforcement misconduct.

Baytieh prosecuted many of those cases.

“Every one of his cases should be torn apart,” Sanders said.