Dear Reader,

Last week we published ProPublica’s Annual Report for 2025.

As the report shows, last year our reporting led to meaningful progress across a number of areas, as well as concrete policy and legislative changes — many of them with bipartisan support.

In a tumultuous year, ProPublica’s reporting helped reverse plans to cut Social Security disability benefits, helped launch a five-year, $37 million federally funded effort to reduce the country’s “unacceptably high” stillbirth rate and spurred lawmakers to propose a sweeping series of changes that could transform the way the government safeguards the quality of essential generic drugs. And that's not all. To appreciate the depth and breadth of our journalism's impact, I encourage you to take a look at the full report.

Our 2025 Annual Report features:

Local Impact: We are particularly proud of the impact of our local reporting last year, where we saw concrete policy and legislative changes across the country, on matters as politically fraught as abortion laws in Texas and gun control in Tennessee. State laws were passed with bipartisan support that will reform Idaho’s coroner system; strengthen police accountability in Louisiana; increase oversight of sober living homes in Arizona; ban anonymous child abuse complaints in New York to prevent misuse and weaponization; and ban school-based police ticketing in Illinois. Our series uncovering predatory state towing practices in Connecticut that spurred an overhaul of towing policies in Connecticut also won the Pulitzer Prize for local reporting earlier this month.
Spotlight on Immigration Reporting: Throughout 2025, our reporters paid close attention to President Donald Trump’s immigration policy agenda and its consequences. Read more about the dozen-plus stories we published, including on the increasingly aggressive tactics deployed by immigration agents making arrests; the more than 170 U.S. citizens held by immigration agents; what the 238 Venezuelan men deported to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador endured; and a short film, “Status: Venezuelan,” that followed one family on the front lines of the Trump administration’s move to strip protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan families living in the United States.
Documenting the End of Aid: We highlight our photojournalism in an eight-page spread dedicated to our reporting on the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Last year, photographers Peter DiCampo and Brian Otieno traveled with reporters Anna Maria Barry-Jester and Brett Murphy to meet the people affected by aid cuts and document what happened to them — in a devastating cholera epidemic in South Sudan, in a refugee camp maternity ward and in a human-caused hunger crisis in Kenya. The series has been honored with a George Polk Award for international reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting.

ProPublica investigates corruption, abuses of power and betrayals of public trust because we believe that when the facts are clear, people can make real change happen. We publish these reports three times a year to hold ourselves accountable to our mission by detailing the real-world impact spurred by our stories.

Thank you for sharing our belief that accountability journalism is vital to the health and resilience of our communities and part of the bedrock of a strong democracy. At few times in history, if ever, has a free and independent media been under greater pressure. But with support from readers like you, we’re growing larger, getting stronger and spurring more impact than ever before.

Thank you for standing with us.

With gratitude,

Robin Sparkman
President, ProPublica

Read the report

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