Category: Washington Post

The Food and Drug Administration said Sunday that a laboratory finding showing cyclospora contamination in a sample of shredded iceberg lettuce supplied by Taylor Farms de Mexico was a false positive.

But the agency did not back away from its conclusion that the company remains linked to a multistate outbreak of cyclosporiasis through its traceback investigation.

“It does not mean they are walking it back,” Susan Mayne, a former head of the FDA’s center on food safety that oversees outbreak investigations, said in a text message Monday. “Absence of evidence (of a positive test result) is never evidence of absence.”

Numerous outbreaks are solved on the basis of basic disease detective work, talking to people who have fallen ill, tracing back what they ate, and finding connections among others who were infected. Laboratory tests are one part of a wider investigative analysis.

The FDA said laboratory experts reanalyzed the sample and determined that the initial result “does not represent true amplification and should be considered a false positive.” The agency said there are currently no confirmed positive product samples for cyclospora.

Cyclospora is detected by running chemical reactions that double the amount of DNA in a sample until there is a noticeable signal, said Don Schaffner, a food scientist at Rutgers. Detecting a parasite after just a few tests points to a strong presence, but that conclusion weakens as more and more tests are run — one potential source of false positives, he said.

“If you have a sample that, let’s say, has no cyclospora DNA, but you run enough reactions,” he said, “you’ll eventually amplify noise — stuff that’s not real — and it’ll turn into something that’s real.”

The updated laboratory finding — that the FDA did not find the parasite in a particular lettuce sample — does not change the rest of the agency’s investigation. The sample that the FDA tested was not part of the original recall; the evidence around the recall is based on epidemiological and traceback determination linking the outbreak to Taylor Farms-supplied iceberg lettuce.

The top line of the notice on the FDA website continues to say: “Do not eat recalled iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms de Mexico.” It says the FDA’s investigation is ongoing.

In a statement late Sunday, Taylor Farms spokesperson Mindi Mayhew said the company had “completed a voluntary recall of iceberg from central Mexico.” She said the recalled product was limited to iceberg lettuce grown and processed in central Mexico.

All other Taylor Farms products, including all Taylor Farms-brand products available for purchase, are not involved in the recall, she said. “We are committed to working with public health authorities as the ongoing outbreak investigation continues.”

Taylor Farms announced Friday that it was initiating a recall hours after it said it was voluntarily removing iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico from the U.S. market.

Unlike a voluntary product hold or removal, a recall requires a company to actively notify customers and work to recover affected products from commerce, making it a broader and more costly response.

Late Friday, Taylor Farms de Mexico published a detailed 27-state recall list covering all iceberg lettuce sourced from central Mexico and distributed from June 29 through July 16. The products — many of them bulk food service packages — had “best if used by dates” extending to Aug. 3.

When Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy were initially tapped to co-lead the Department of Government Efficiency at the end of 2024, the billionaire duo promised DOGE’s last act would be to delete itself by a mandated end date: July 4, 2026.

Numerous lawsuits filed by federal workers, states, and activists attempted to halt DOGE’s radical cost cutting effort, arguing Musk’s allies operated with little transparency and targeted agencies, grants, and programs enshrined by law.

Now, DOGE’s website, built to house “receipts” documenting its attempt to cut $2 trillion from the federal budget, lies dormant, while posts from the DOGE X account have slowed to a trickle.

But weeks after its 18-month end date has elapsed, DOGE has proved remarkably hard to kill.

Instead, DOGE has evolved from its radical cost-cutting mission, with some of its members and agenda embedded across the government, continuing to reshape the federal bureaucracy behind the scenes.

“DOGE is a way of life. … It never terminates,” former DOGE staffer Katie Miller said on X on July 4, the day of its supposed expiration.

Nearly two dozen people hired or vetted through DOGE remain in government, including an influential diaspora filtered throughout the executive branch, according to a Washington Post analysis of court records and government documents.

This includes Gavin Kliger, chief data officer at the Pentagon, and Jeremy Lewin, a senior adviser to Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Lewin, who oversaw much of the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, now directs the State Department’s foreign assistance programs.

Meanwhile, the National Design Studio, which is run by former DOGE lieutenant Joe Gebbia, is seen by many of its members as the spiritual successor to DOGE, according to two people familiar with the organization, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations. Its chief engineer is Edward Coristine, the staffer known as “Big Balls,” who as a 19-year-old DOGE employee gained access to agencies including the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security.

DOGE’s membership rolls were never made public, so it’s impossible to tally the total number of alumni sprinkled throughout the government. The Trump administration fought lawsuits to make DOGE staffers’ identities public, and some information has only come out recently through public records requests and legal challenges.

Administration officials have retreated from DOGE’s plans, reversing cuts and bringing back workers.

But the upheaval unleashed by the U.S. DOGE Service has left an imprint on the federal government, with consequences still rippling through Washington. DOGE forcibly reworked the operations at agencies such as the Social Security Administration, where staff members were reorganized to make up for losses on the front lines. Unemployment is up in the D.C. metro area since Donald Trump returned to the White House. Federal workers remain fearful of retaliation.

Musk hinted that he hoped DOGE would outlive its initial wave of cuts. “Is Buddha needed for Buddhism?” Musk said as his time in government wound down last year. “Was it not stronger after he passed away?”

Among a Republican caucus typically in lockstep, there is internal stratification over DOGE, even as several Trump administration officials have started DOGE-like initiatives. Late last year, the Office of Personnel Management launched a Tech Force to recruit young Silicon Valley types to government.

When Vice President JD Vance introduced an anti-fraud task force, he did not associate it with Musk’s work.

“I think that’s unfortunate that nobody has ever tried to take a systematic look at how much fraud there is in the federal government,” Vance said in a Fox News interview in February.

The White House and Musk did not return requests for comment for this story.

Democrats have continued to capitalize on anger over DOGE, demanding investigations into its staffers’ access to sensitive data and the fallout from cuts. Meanwhile, the debate remains — even among some Republicans — whether the effort was worth its dramatic fallout.

“There were a lot of claims of billions and billions of dollars in savings,” Republican Sen. Thom Tillis (N.C.) said in a hearing this month with Russell Vought, director of the Office of Management and Budget. “I simply want to know where you booked them and where I can see it.”

Max Stier, CEO of the Partnership for Public Service, said the government is continuing to bear the costs of DOGE’s work, such as the rehiring of federal workers, legal expenses from actions such as the sudden closure of the USAID and paying severance, and diminishing employee morale, resulting in productivity losses.

DOGE and other Trump administration-led cuts have resulted in an economic cost of more than $165 billion, or more than $1,028 per taxpayer, according to Stier’s organization’s estimates. The costs include the loss of estimated economic benefits from terminated grants, the effect of severance payments, estimated legal expenses, and money spent on rehiring workers, for example.

Contrary to the promises Musk offered during the early days, federal spending as a whole actually increased over the past year. Agencies are ramping up hiring plans after hundreds of thousands of federal workers left last year.

For the first six months of Trump’s second term, DOGE was central to the administration. Musk frequently appeared in the Oval Office beside Trump, while his closest associates showed up at federal agencies with little to no warning and made consequential decisions, overruling career staff and even Trump officials. Musk touted cuts that he said would amount to a $2 trillion reduction in federal spending.

Several of DOGE’s more limited priorities remain, including an ongoing effort to digitize federal retirement records that are housed in a Pennsylvania mine. At the end of June, the Office of Personnel Management announced it will no longer send anymore paper to the mine after DOGE engineers built a website to replace the paper forms.

Inside some agencies, meanwhile, DOGE maintains a presence. There “are still an exceptional number that remain today and are more quietly operating behind the scenes,” said one staffer at the Transportation Department, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution.

At the General Services Administration, Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who at one point led Technology Transformation Services, has not left, even though he no longer appears to have any official job at the agency and is listed as a special government employee, according to a GSA employee who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

Many of those aligned with DOGE who remain in government are working at the National Design Studio, which the White House created to modernize government websites and take on other brand initiatives. The National Design Studio says its mission entails “making the services Americans rely on easier to understand, access, and use,” a focus that echoes DOGE’s aim to upgrade outdated tech and the mandate of DOGE’s predecessor, the U.S. Digital Service. Its work, however, is more narrowly focused than either of those bodies.

Two people close to DOGE, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said the design outfit, led by Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, serves as the spiritual successor to its work. With about 100 people and weekly meetings focused on efforts such as TrumpRx and the design of the new food pyramid, they represent an evolution of the DOGE mission, but a significant culling of its mandate.

Before the National Design Studio, Gebbia initially focused on redesigning the federal retirement online portal after previous administrations had not been able to fully digitize the process of leaving government. Although the young technologists had hoped to be done with the project in a few months, it took them longer than expected.

At the tech- and politics-focused Hill and Valley Forum earlier this year, Gebbia and Coristine described work that was a far cry from Musk’s chainsaw-wielding approach to government transformation. Gebbia, for example, described pitching Trump and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles on the idea for the National Design Studio, saying there might not be another president who cares as deeply “about design, about aesthetics, about architecture,” as Trump.

Not a single reference to the DOGE controversies was uttered during their 20-minute talk, and the friendly moderator, the CEO of the cloud-based design platform Figma, did not ask about it.

While DOGE did not complete its far-fetched goal to cut $2 trillion, the slashing of foreign aid, research, and humanities grants has continued to have lasting effects. Health organizations in Africa said aid cuts hampered the global response to a deadly Ebola outbreak. And the administration had to ramp up a response to a screwworm reemergence after cuts at the Agriculture Department.

The Post previously found that children in Congo had died awaiting lifesaving drugs after U.S. aid cuts under Trump. An Oxfam analysis found that the cuts to aid from the United States would lead “to the first rise in under-five child mortality this century.”

Musk has denied such catastrophic impacts, even amid evidence of their occurrence. “There is not even a single dead child!” he said on X in June. “If there were, it would be worldwide headline news!”

In some parts of the government, there is a dispute over whether DOGE is still there or not.

At the Social Security Administration, as DOGE team members sought to find savings in the massive mandatory spending program, they were given access to the government’s most sensitive databases, which include the personal information of all Americans living and dead. They ultimately did not find the fraud Musk claimed was there.

In an ongoing court case about DOGE’s access to agency data, the administration has reported that all DOGE members have left the agency and that it has no plans to bring the organization back to Social Security.

Democracy Forward, a legal group challenging DOGE’s access to data, rebutted that and pointed to testimony that Social Security Administration chief information officer Michael Russo had previously identified himself as DOGE, and SSA general counsel Mark Steffensen fought to get DOGE members into sensitive databases. The two are still at the Social Security Administration.

“Rumors of DOGE’s demise have been greatly exaggerated, and DOGE personnel remain at SSA,” plaintiffs told the court.

The Trump administration also sought to get the case dismissed, citing that DOGE wouldn’t exist after July 4. But U.S. District Judge Ellen Lipton Hollander didn’t buy it.

“Akin to a company that goes out of business,” Hollander wrote in a June 26 opinion, “the DOGE Temporary Organization cannot escape responsibility for the conduct it undertook while it existed simply by reaching its expiration date.”

The Department of Homeland Security under Secretary Markwayne Mullin is cultivating a relationship with business groups whose concerns about losing workers to aggressive immigration enforcement had been rebuffed by former secretary Kristi L. Noem.

Earlier this month, DHS officials met at the agency’s Washington headquarters with the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, which represents the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and major trade associations that depend on immigrant labor, according to several people with knowledge of the meeting, which has not been previously reported.

It was the first such meeting to be reported since President Donald Trump reentered the White House. Business groups say they have been trying to gain a foothold at the agency since Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrests began to spike last year.

Mullin did not attend the early July meeting — which included officials from ICE and Customs and Border Protection, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly — and the gathering did not produce an immediate change in policies. But two of the people said DHS officials said they want to meet regularly with the group to assess the impact of Trump’s mass deportation campaign and business needs.

“It was cordial, it was constructive,” one of the people said. “It’s actually very welcome because the last secretary was absent, and her proxies were not very responsive.”

A DHS spokesperson declined to comment on the meeting; coalition members declined to comment publicly.

Immigration arrests have more than quadrupled since Trump took office, driven by a dramatic increase in traffic and neighborhood stops, workplace sweeps, and other public arrests, according to the Deportation Data Project. As a result, industries including agriculture, manufacturing, construction, healthcare, and elder care say they are reeling from shortages in jobs critical to the economy.

Noem was dismissive of those concerns while overseeing chaotic enforcement operations that drew bipartisan outrage, especially after agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minnesota in January. Trump fired her in March and turned to Mullin, a U.S. senator from Oklahoma and former plumbing company owner.

Mullin brought Senate staffers with ties to the business community to DHS, business lobbyists said, and his staff quickly set about trying to mend relations.

“It’s important to note that Mullin comes from the business community,” said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of National Immigration Forum, which represents Fortune 500 companies on Capitol Hill and was not part of the July meeting. “Under his leadership the agency does seem much more open to working with businesses and industry to focus on how their enforcement priorities and worksite compliance efforts can be better aligned [and] not negatively impact American businesses and the economy.”

DHS officials declined to acknowledge a shift in approach but said they are trying to keep an open line to business and other moderate wings of the GOP.

“Under Secretary Mullin, DHS is ensuring it remains a strong partner to American communities across the country by engaging stakeholders and industry partners that advance our mission to protect the homeland,” an agency spokesperson said.

However, the spokesperson said, “Worksite enforcement remains a cornerstone of our efforts to protect public safety, national security, and economic stability while rescuing individuals who may be victims of labor trafficking or exploitation.”

The outreach to business comes as Mullin faces the first crisis of his brief tenure at DHS: ICE agents shot and killed two people in less than a week — a 52-year-old Mexican man in Houston and a young Colombian man in Maine. Outrage over the shootings, including from Sen. Susan Collins (R., Maine), led Mullin to pause traffic-stop arrests last week, a decision Trump swiftly overrode the following day.

Mullin now faces the challenge of proving that he can deliver on Trump’s core campaign pledge to deport a million people a year while avoiding the widespread backlash that helped sink Noem’s tumultuous reign.

In recent weeks, DHS has sought to appease business groups even as it has dramatically ramped up arrests. Through the first 12 days of July, ICE is on pace to arrest the most people in a single month since Trump reentered the White House, with an average of more than 1,400 people a day. Meanwhile, the agency has agreed to partially walk back a plan to force green-card applicants to return to their countries of origin, which tech leaders said would severely impact their workforce. And it has agreed to open a guest-worker visa program to the dairy industry. Both actions followed intense lobbying by industry groups.

This month, the Trump administration also extended the timeline for canceling work permits for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Haiti and six other countries who are losing long-standing humanitarian protections after a Supreme Court ruling. Business groups — which had swamped the Trump administration with calls, letters, and other outreach warning of the potential fallout of the ruling on nursing homes and hospitals — rushed to take credit for that decision as well.

“They listened to business and GOP lawmakers on the extension of work permits instead of terminating them immediately,” said Rebecca Shi, head of the American Business Immigration Coalition, a bipartisan group that represents 1,700 employers.

While Noem’s advisers spoke occasionally with business leaders, they often dismissed requests, emphasizing that they were laser focused on removing undocumented workers, several business lobbyists said.

“They were unapologetic about [their agenda],” said a lobbyist who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Trump, who is known to take phone calls with and host dinners for business executives, hasn’t been immune to business backlash since immigration arrests exploded in 2025.

Last June, during high-profile operations targeting worksites, the administration announced that farms, restaurants, and hotels would be spared further raids. The policy change — aimed at blunting potentially severe economic and political fallout — appears to remain largely intact a year later, pushing ICE agents toward neighborhood arrests and traffic stops to meet their deportation goals.

But while certain industries have been shielded from workplace raids, other are being pummeled. In South Texas, raids on construction sites have mushroomed since Mullin replaced Noem, builders say.

“It’s the highest it’s ever been,” said Mario M. Guerrero, a homebuilder and executive director of the South Texas Builders Association. “We got builders saying like, ‘Look, I’m done.’ These agents are showing up to jobsites, following work trucks, and going to Home Depots and picking up everyone.”

It remains to be seen whether the budding relationship between DHS and business leaders will produce more far-reaching policy changes. Goals of the business community include expanding guest-worker visas and restoring protections for Haitians — demands that are staunchly opposed by much of Trump’s political base.

Business leaders also ardently desire a path to legal status for the nation’s estimated 8 million undocumented workers (though they stress their support for removing those with criminal records). That politically fraught target has eluded policymakers in Washington for decades.

On Friday, as he met with reporters about Trump’s campaign to force states to purge alleged noncitizens from their voting rolls before this fall’s midterm elections, Mullin continued to walk a fine line between reassuring a skeptical public and satisfying the president’s desire for maximum impact.

While “I turn down the temperature with you guys,” Mullin told reporters, “we’re turning up the heat on the streets.”

MIDDLEBURG, Va. — No one in town has seen the new neighbors perusing the cucumbers at the Safeway, or dining on $98-an-ounce caviar at the restaurant down the street, or browsing the main drag’s array of well-appointed antique stores, one of them displaying a $4,600 gold-laden mirror fit for a palace.

For now, Vice President JD Vance is visible in the usual places, on television and social media, where powerful newsmakers are typically found.

But word that Vance and his wife, Usha, are making a second home in Middleburg is dominating local chatter, the focus of which is less about MAGA and more about him bringing too much Washington — motorcades, helicopters, Secret Service — to an old-money enclave that views itself as an escape from Washington.

“I can’t even paint my building without a permit — you’d think they would’ve had a town meeting to discuss it, but it just got dumped on us,” said Kenna Day, 35, a gift shop manager whose shoulder tattoo is the scripted French version of “Hell Is Other People.”

“I worry it will be disruptive to the calm we have here,” Day said. “It’s why people come. It’s like walking into a Hallmark card. We all get along so well.”

A couple of blocks away, Vladimir Maldonado, 24, a server at a Mexican restaurant owned by his family, said a patron had told him she had seen a caravan of 50 black SUVs in the area that she assumed was transporting the Vances to Middleburg.

“She said, ‘Did you hear about the vice president moving down the street?’” Maldonado said. “I was like, ‘That’s crazy!’” Serving chips and salsa to the country’s second-in-command, he said, would be a thrill even though he doesn’t agree with Vance or President Donald Trump on most issues.

“If he walks in here, I’d ask him so many questions, like tell me everything,” he said. “His picture would definitely go on the wall.”

The White House did not respond to emails seeking confirmation of published reports that the Vances, who are expecting their fourth child later this month, are moving into a second residence at Wolver Hill Farm, a nearly 500-acre estate a mile from the Safeway on Middleburg’s main thoroughfare.

Chuck Kuhn, whose JK Moving Services has relocated presidents and vice presidents, including Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Trump, purchased the property six years ago for $8.5 million. Kuhn, reached on his cell phone, declined to answer whether the Vances are living at Wolver Hill, saying, “My formal comment is no comment.”

A person familiar with the arrangement, speaking on the condition of anonymity because they’re not authorized to talk about the matter, confirmed the vice president is leasing two of the farm’s four homes and said the Secret Service is expected to be a visible presence on the road leading to the property.

The Vances also reside at the vice president’s official residence, the U.S. Naval Observatory, in Northwest Washington. The mansion, on 12 acres that are part of the observatory compound, includes 33 rooms, a pool, and hot tub.

A town with one traffic light and a history of attracting dignitaries

Set in Virginia’s rolling countryside an hour west of Washington, Middleburg has one traffic light and roughly 750 residents, a majority of whom voted for Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The town is known for horseback riding and hunting, fences made of stacked stone and long winding driveways leading to multimillion-dollar homes.

It is a world away from the hardscrabble Appalachian life Vance chronicled in his best-selling Hillbilly Elegy memoir.

At any given time, an array of dignitaries — senators, congressional leaders, diplomats — can be spotted window shopping on Washington Street, Middleburg’s main commercial corridor, where decorative lawn jockeys stand sentry outside a few businesses. The well-heeled can also be found at the Salamander Resort, next door to Wolver Hill, where suites go for as much as $1,100 a night.

Over the years, at least four presidents have owned homes or visited the town, including Lyndon B. Johnson, Ronald Reagan, and Obama. The Kennedys built a home in Middleburg in the early 1960s, a 167-acre estate they called Wexford that Jackie Kennedy sold after the president’s death, though she still visited after leaving the White House to ride horses with her children. Elizabeth Taylor and her husband Sen. John Warner lived in Middleburg until their divorce. Robert Duvall resided on a 360-acre farm in the area for several decades until his death earlier this year. In April, Queen Camilla visited a horse farm in town during King Charles III’s trip to the United States.

Trowbridge Littleton, the town’s $400-a-month part-time mayor whose family’s local roots stretch back eight generations, said he had no firsthand knowledge of the Vances’ move to Middleburg, though he did see a cluster of black SUVs on the road leading to Wolver Hill the other day.

Middleburg’s residents and seven-member police force, the mayor said, are accustomed to famous names coming and going, and predicted that the Vances would not disrupt life. “Everyone is welcome. We’re an open and friendly community, and we’ll manage it,” he said.

Vances become a lively topic at cocktail hour

Punkin Lee, 80, the owner of Journeymen Saddlers, a leather repair shop, has lived in Middleburg her entire life and can recall when Jackie Kennedy came into her place “and waited her turn, no different than anyone else.”

“A lot of celebrities who have friends here come and visit, then you hear about it when you run into someone at the post office a couple of weeks later and they’ll say, ‘Did you see so and so?’” Lee said. “They came and went, and it was all quiet and nice.”

The vice president and his family may be another matter, though, given his security detail and entourage, she said. “I don’t see how it can’t be different,” she said. “I haven’t seen them, and I don’t need to see them.”

A place where residents have vented about the potential disruption is a private Facebook page known as “Middleburg Uncensored,” which became fodder for a recent Daily Beast article headlined, “Vance’s New Neighbors Rage as VP Brings Chaos to Horse Country.”

Carol Henson, 81, a bookkeeper who has lived on the edge of town for more than three decades, was among those who complained about what she characterized as the “vile daily upset” the vice president would cause “our lovely little burg.”

Henson, in a phone interview, said the “inconvenience is not what this is really about.” Referring to Trump’s policies, she said, “It’s just awful what they have been doing.” She described the vice president as “abhorrent.”

“People don’t want to be mean,” she said of town residents. “They don’t want to be mean to outsiders. But there’s a big difference between JD Vance and Robert Duvall.”

Where some in town see the Vances as a reason to rage, Christian Puccio, owner of an Italian restaurant, envisions opportunity.

“For them to be out here is pretty cool,” said Puccio, who opened the Oak and Ember Tasting Room and Market six months ago just outside town. “If they’re around, I’d say come over. It would be cool to have anyone from public office in here. There’s no such thing as bad publicity. The guy is helping to run the country.”

A computer repairperson, a guy everyone knows as Gomer Pyles (his birth name is Dennis), said he sees Vance’s presence as possibly catalyzing a different sort of opportunity.

“If he comes into a restaurant, and we can talk to him, maybe he will change his ways,” said Pyles, 74, who moved to the area from California in 1981. “You can attack it, but you can also say, ‘What can I do to make this a benefit?’ I see it as an opportunity for change.”

The change that Chris Gore, a retired CIA analyst, has observed in recent days is that his social circle has a fresh subject to enliven their cocktail hour.

An 18-year resident who has voted for Republicans and Democrats, Gore said he listens “more than I talk” as his friends fret that Vance’s arrival will link Middleburg to Trump.

The one consolation in Vance’s choice of real estate, Gore said, is that he’s renting. “That’s a relief,” he said. “If he bought, then we’d have to deal with him indefinitely.”

Nearly two dozen red wolf pups were born in the wild this spring in eastern North Carolina, giving a remarkable boost to one of the most endangered species on the planet.

“It’s inspiring to see these underdogs making another incredible comeback,” said Will Harlan, southeast director for the Center for Biological Diversity, in an statement about the births.

The 23 pups born in the wild this year marked the most since 2013. While not all the pups ultimately survived, their arrival briefly doubled the number of red wolves living on the landscape.

There are only 22 known adult or adolescent red wolves living on or near the Alligator River and Pocosin Lakes national wildlife refuges, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which oversees the decades-long effort to restore a native animal that once roamed widely throughout the southeastern United States.

The number of wild adult red wolves had dipped perilously into the single digits in the not-so-distant past, but the modest population growth of recent years remains far below the number needed for red wolves to sustain themselves over time.

That makes this year’s births a joyous and encouraging moment for those invested in resurrecting a species that has long stood on the brink of extinction.

“This is such a huge improvement over the disastrous years of 2019 to 2021, when no pups were born in the wild at all for four years straight — a trend that was rapidly becoming a death knell for a species that typically only lives for three to six years in the wild,” said Ron Sutherland, chief scientist for the Wildlands Network, who has long worked on red wolf issues.

Federal officials said four litters of red wolf pups were born to breeding pairs in the wild earlier this spring. Some died early on — survival of red wolf pups in the wild is typically around 50% — but a significant number remain.

“With the mortalities of some of the young pups detected during our monitoring, we know there are a minimum of 12 pups remaining in the wild and possibly up to 16,” the agency wrote in a recent update.

“The other four pups do not have transmitters, but we confirmed their presence on the landscape as recently as late May. We will continue to monitor the pups using radio telemetry and remote sensing cameras,” the statement added.

The push to save red wolves in the wild has experienced dramatic ups and downs over the past four decades on North Carolina’s Albemarle Peninsula, with its massive swamp forests, farmland, and marshes.

Red wolves had been hunted to near-extinction in the 1970s and were reintroduced to eastern North Carolina in 1987. By 2011, more than 120 roamed the wild. But that growth did not last, and their numbers eventually plummeted.

Among the most significant threats facing red wolves over time were unnatural deaths at the hands of humans. Vehicle strikes along Highway 64, a popular route to the Outer Banks, and other roads have become the largest cause of mortality for red wolves. Others have died of gunshots.

The fate of the species also has risen and fallen alongside shifting priorities of the federal government, conflict with nearby landowners, scientific disputes, and legal challenges.

Changes in federal policy and personnel, as well as legal challenges from conservation and environmental groups, have led to a recommitment to the recovery program.

While officials have outlined plans to strategically release some of the nearly 300 captive-bred wolves into the wild over time, the ongoing birth — and survival — of new pups in the wild is an essential element to reestablish the species across its native region.

“We’ve still got a long way to go,” Joe Madison, the red wolf recovery program manager in North Carolina for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told the Washington Post one morning in 2024 as he drove through the Alligator River refuge. “I don’t think anybody thinks it’s going to be easy or short.”

He spoke at the time about how the work of restoring endangered red wolves is slow and tumultuous, but very much worth it.

“They are a missing piece of the ecosystem out here,” he said. “And without that, things are out of whack.”

Sutherland said that while this spring’s surge of births is promising, one key will be to make sure the world’s most endangered wolves, young and adult, have the best chance to survive and thrive on the landscape.

A key piece of that is unfolding now, as state and federal officials have committed tens of millions of dollars toward building wildlife crossings over the next several years in an effort to reduce traffic-related deaths near the refuges where red wolves roam. Environmental groups have helped to raise millions more.

“Wolves can grow their population quickly when they are protected from mortality,” Sutherland said, “and when there are enough unrelated animals out there to form pairs, and we could see some remarkable growth over the next few years.”