Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Joe Wertz

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Joe Wertz joined the Center for Public Integrity’s environment and labor team in 2019. He previously worked as a managing editor and senior reporter at StateImpact Oklahoma, a journalism collaboration of public radio stations in Oklahoma, where he covered environment and energy for NPR audiences and other national outlets. His work includes leading coverage of his home state’s oil- and gas-linked earthquake surge and the state’s plodding regulatory response, Scott Pruitt’s rise and fall at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and national reporting on drilling, renewable energy, agriculture, pollution and climate change. Joe has worked as an editor and staff reporter at several major newspapers, taught university courses on data journalism and graduated from the University of Central Oklahoma.

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A community hospital emergency entrance in Hillsboro, Oregon. Photo: M.O. Stevens / CC BY-SA 3.0

Nearly half of US hospitals no longer deliver babies, new report finds

Rural hospitals keep losing the fight over leaner Medicaid budgets, and a separate analysis finds reaching the nearest labor and delivery unit already takes an hour or more in fourteen states.
The U.S. Capitol. Photo: FEMA/Bill Koplitz (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

F is for Failure and Fascism

On leadership, character, climate, prices, trade, alliances, militarism, health, civil/voting rights, even law and order.
A Navy fighter jet approaches an aircraft carrier. Photo: U.S. Navy, public domain

Pentagon Iran War Report admits to Worst Drubbing since Vietnam

The Pentagon puts the war's cost at 33.4 billion dollars, independent estimates put it at more than three times that, with strikes across roughly twenty Middle East bases.
The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Photo: NOAA, public domain

Kennedy Center board warns of bankruptcy unless Trump’s name returns to building

A 57-page draft resolution ties the center's fundraising future to ten proposed inscriptions honoring the president, as a federal judge who already ruled the board overstepped weighs a related case.
Farmworkers harvest sweet potatoes. Photo: USDA, public domain

Judge orders Labor Department to rewrite farmworker wage rule after finding it unlawful

The ruling forces new minimum pay rates for the guestworker visa program that brings in most of the country's legal farm labor, with back pay possible for hundreds of thousands of workers.