ProPublica wanted to find more sources in the federal government. So it brought a truck.
On the morning of February 27, USAID workers who had been fired or placed on administrative leave during the Trump administration’s sudden dismantling of the agency went back to their offices at the Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C., for the last time.
They’d been assigned 15-minute windows to clean out their desks; the agency had shut down so quickly that many of them still had personal items in the office when Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency revoked their building access.
Outside the building, a crowd — made up at least in part by current or former federal workers, including former USAID administrator and UN ambassador Samantha Power — gathered to show their support for the USAID workers and protest against Trump and Musk.
Behind them, a black truck sat parked on Pennsylvania Avenue. LED billboards on both sides flashed a message to anyone walking by: “Are (were) you a government worker? ProPublica journalists want to hear from you.” A Signal number and url followed.
The truck isn’t the first time ProPublica has tried innovative methods of reaching new sources. When Jameel and her colleague Melissa Sanchez reported a series about working conditions on dairy farms, they reached undocumented workers by developing relationships with the hosts of local radio stations that they knew the workers listened to during their shifts and hung flyers at local businesses that served immigrant communities. For a story on crumbling schools in Idaho, reporters handed out instant cameras to students so they could document the damage themselves.All of that outreach is part of a newsroom-wide focus on building deep, long-term relationships with sources. “Every single person has been very focused on this idea that right now, the thing that we need to do is build relationships with people who work and know about what’s happening at federal agencies,” Tobin said.
The emphasis, she said, is less on immediately turning tips into stories and more on showing people that ProPublica’s team is dedicated to big-picture accountability. “We occasionally hear from tipsters who ask ‘Why didn’t you cover my thing?’ We try to remind them that we’re thinking of it more as a feedback loop and relationship-building conversation,” Tobin said.
Building relationships beyond a single story is especially important when a source has lost their job. “What we would call ‘formers’ of a company or agency only know things first-hand up until the last day that they were there,” Murphy told me. “However, these people have a wealth of institutional knowledge, and they are subject matter experts in what these programs were doing before they halted operations. They know the broader context. They know what had been true in the past and what projections might be going forward. So just because they’re no longer there doesn’t mean they have any less value as sources. Regardless [of whether] they’re still at their desk or if they left weeks ago, they’re really important to me.”
The truck was such a success that it was deployed again to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau when DOGE announced its plans to shut it down, and Tobin said it will continue to hit the streets when there are good opportunities. (According to Jameel, the first thing the truck driver said when he picked up the phone ahead of the deployment to the CFPB offices was, “Please tell me you’re calling because you want to do this again.”)
While tipsters will always be able to reach out via the general tip lines, the ProPublica homepage now also includes a directory of reporters grouped by interest area so potential sources can reach out directly to the reporters they think would be most interested in what they know.
“This started as a loose, kind of half-baked idea and turned into a real thing in a matter of days because of the extraordinary work done by my colleagues,” Murphy said. “Seeing half an idea turn into actual tips that then turned into a story was really great. It made me extremely proud to work at ProPublica.”
Tobin says ProPublica has heard from thousands of federal workers since January; there are so many tips coming in now that the team is hiring a dedicated tips coordinator to help triage everything and make sure potential sources get connected to the right people. And, Tobin says, the engagement team has an ever-growing bucket list of outreach methods they’d like to try one day.
“There are various things on wheels,” Tobin said. “I didn’t have LED billboard truck on my bingo card, though.”
One day, she said, she’d like to do trains.