Hannah Natanson covered DOGE and won a Pulitzer Prize.

Hannah Natanson, Pulitzer Prize winner.

Washington Post wins Pulitzer Prize for public service, feature photography.

It’s the second time The Post has won the prestigious award in five years. Former staff photographer Jahi Chikwendiu also won for feature photography.

The Washington Post on Monday won the Pulitzer Prize for public service for its coverage of President Donald Trump’s far-reaching efforts in his second term to shrink the federal workforce and overhaul government through the Elon Musk-led U.S. DOGE Service.

The Post also won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography for work by former staff photographer Jahi Chikwendiu documenting the struggle of a young couple coping with a terminal cancer diagnosis even as they awaited the birth of their daughter.

The stories that won the public service prize, widely considered the top honor in American journalism, prominently featured staff writer Hannah Natanson’s reporting that chronicled how federal workers’ lives were upended last year. In an essay, she recalled being the newspaper’s “federal government whisperer,” a role she described as all-consuming, involving interactions with more than 1,000 sensitive government sources.

On Jan. 14, FBI agents executed a search warrant at Natanson’s home in Virginia, seizing equipment while subpoenaing The Post that same day. Natanson wasn’t the target, the government said, but it alleged that the raid was necessary in an investigation into a federal contractor accused of illegally retaining classified government materials. The Post is in court litigating Natanson’s case, attempting to retrieve her electronic devices and arguing that the government’s actions amounted to an unprecedented overreach that could chill journalists’ ability to do their jobs in the future.

In its citation, the Pulitzer jurors said they recognized The Post for “piercing the veil of secrecy around the Trump administration’s chaotic overhaul of federal agencies and chronicling in rich detail the human impacts of the cuts and the consequences for the country.”

The public service prize is awarded to The Post as an institution. Meryl Kornfield and former Post staff writer Jeff Stein also heavily contributed to the package, which drew from journalists’ work across the newsroom.

Trump’s effort to downsize the federal government ricocheted through official Washington power corridors, as well as D.C.’s neighborhoods and suburbs. D.C.’s unemployment rate is climbing steadily and has recently hit peaks not seen since the pandemic. It has also caused widespread emotional fallout, as Natanson and Post investigative reporter William Wan captured in their piece on the deteriorating mental health of many federal workers. The federal workforce cuts disrupted everyday operations across the country, from Social Security offices to national parks, and stalled international food assistance and other forms of U.S. aid overseas.

The coverage also revealed the extent to which Silicon Valley entrepreneurs allied with the president have reshaped Washington, especially Musk’s efforts to transform Washington through DOGE.

The award was one of two Pulitzers that The Post took home on Monday.

Chikwendiu, a former staff photographer, won for photographs taken for two stories about a young couple, Tanner and Shay Martin, who struggled with Tanner’s terminal colon cancer while Shay carried their daughter, AmyLou. The couple let Chikwendiu, along with reporter Ariana Eunjung Cha and video journalist Drea Cornejo, spend months documenting their lives in Utah. Data journalist Dan Keating analyzed trends in rising cancer rates among young Americans.

In a follow-up story, Chikwendiu photographed Tanner’s funeral less than six weeks after the couple’s baby was born. In their citation, the jurors honored Chikwendiu for “a heart-wrenching and achingly beautiful photo essay on a young family welcoming the birth of their first child as the father is slowly dying from cancer.”

The Pulitzer wins, which recognize work published in 2025, come amid a turbulent season for The Post, which saw hundreds of journalists depart its newsroom in the past year — first through buyouts in the summer and then layoffs in February. Publisher and CEO William Lewis resigned in the aftermath of the layoffs, and chief financial officer Jeff D’Onofrio stepped in as acting publisher and CEO.

Matt Murray, The Post’s executive editor, said in an interview Monday that the wins are a testament to the newsroom’s hard work.

“As difficult as some of what we’ve been through is and as challenging as the moment can be to navigate, we all want a thriving and growing Washington Post in what is a very difficult industry, because this kind of work is so important,” Murray said. “I hope people who have opinions about The Post or thoughts about The Post have the opportunity to revisit it and look at the work that we’re really doing every day.”

Natanson, he said, was central to energizing the coverage honored for public service.

“Hannah just got to work. She became, through the virtue of her work, a superstar for The Post and brought a lot of other people onto that same train,” he said. “It was the kind of ambition and reinvention and enterprise that has often made The Post continue to hum. And, you know, a star was born.”

Murray said he hopes the honor brings renewed attention to Natanson’s legal case.

“If the award helps bring a larger awareness of this press fight, and the load that Hannah is carrying for all journalists right now, that’s a good thing and I’m really happy about that,” he said.

Considered the year’s top awards in journalism, the Pulitzer Prizes are administered by Columbia University’s journalism school and have recognized exceptional work since 1917. The Post last won the public service prize in 2022 for its coverage of the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The Post was a finalist for the award in 2024 for its reporting on the AR-15 semiautomatic rifle, coverage that was awarded the Pulitzer for national reporting.

The Post was honored alongside two finalists for public service: the Wall Street Journal’s coverage of financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the Chicago Tribune’s coverage of immigration raids in the city. The Pulitzer board moved the Chicago Tribune’s entry and awarded it the prize for local reporting.

The Post was also a finalist in the national reporting category for its coverage of immigration and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The coverage focused on the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign and featured articles written by reporters across the newsroom. The jurors, in their citation, praised The Post for “reporting that tracked the impact of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign, following it from a Chicago park to the White House, a tent encampment in Texas and a Salvadoran prison.”

The Pulitzer jurors honored a wide array of newsrooms in its annual awards. The New York Times took home three awards: the investigative reporting award for reporting on Trump’s alleged conflicts of interests while in office; columnist M. Gessen won the opinion writing prize for essays on authoritarian regimes; and photojournalist Saher Alghorra won the breaking news photography award for documenting devastation and starvation in Gaza.

The Post and Reuters won two awards each. Reuters’s reporters Jeff Horwitz and Engen Tham won the beat reporting prize for reporting on how Meta allegedly served scams and AI-generated content to users, including children. It also won the national reporting award for reporting on the Trump administration’s expansion of power and its targeting of political foes.

The Minnesota Star Tribune won the breaking news award for covering a shooting at a Catholic school mass that left two children dead and 17 wounded.

The San Francisco Chronicle’s Susie Neilson, Megan Fan Munce and Sara DiNatale won the explanatory award for a series on insurance companies allegedly using algorithmic tools that undervalued their properties lost to forest fires.

The prize for local reporting went to Dave Altimari and Ginny Monk of the Connecticut Mirror, and Sophie Chou and Haru Coryne of ProPublica for a series on controversial towing laws. The prize was jointly awarded to the Chicago Tribune for its reporting on the Trump administration’s immigration sweeps.

The Associated Press’s Dake Kang, Garance Burke, Byron Tau, Aniruddha Ghosal and Yael Grauer won the international reporting award for reporting on mass surveillance.

Aaron Parsley of Texas Monthly won the feature writing award for a first-person story about the Central Texas floods. The criticism prize went to Mark Lamster of the Dallas Morning News for his architecture criticism.

Anand RK and Suparna Sharma, and Natalie Obiko Pearson of Bloomberg won the illustrated reporting prize for a story on digital scams and surveillance in India.

The staff of the podcast “Pablo Torre Finds Out” won the audio reporting prize for its investigation of how the Los Angeles Clippers allegedly evaded the NBA’s salary cap.

Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown received a special citation from the Pulitzer jurors for what it called “groundbreaking reporting” in 2017 and 2018 that exposed Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of young women and the powerful people who enabled him. Brown was not honored by the Pulitzers at the time of her reporting.

In a video message shared ahead of the ceremony, Chikwendiu spoke of his first encounter with Tanner Martin and how it evoked his own visits to his ailing mother.

“I remember how when I first hugged him, I hugged him in a way that I would hug my mother, remembering how her cancerous body in her last days felt pain at every touch,” he said. “So when I went to hug Tanner, squeezing and tensing myself around him, but not squeezing into him, but just tensing around him so they could feel the intensity of my hug without feeling the pain of it.”

Chikwendiu said he was pleased to represent the Martins — and their story — in accepting the award. “I accept being that conduit and it being recognized and going down in the halls of history as being a Pulitzer Prize-winning work,” he said.

Christine Armario, The Post’s immigration editor, recalled a moment from Trump’s second inauguration that signaled a year of intense coverage, stories she called “revelatory, distinct and urgent” in an interview Monday. Arelis R. Hernández, a Post reporter, was stationed on a border bridge alongside migrants lining up to enter the United States, many of whom had secured hard-to-obtain appointments through U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But within minutes of Trump’s swearing-in, those appointments were canceled.

“Arelis captured one woman wailing when she learned that she wouldn’t be allowed in,” Armario said in an interview. “Her name was Margelis Tinoco, and she had embarked on a months-long journey from Colombia, fleeing armed guerrillas after her son’s murder.”

That kicked off months of reporting, during which staffers from the newsroom went to nearly every city where the U.S. had launched enforcement operations.

“We did all of this while being continually castigated by the administration,” Armario said. “For me, this coverage is a testament to what we are as an institution and what is immovable no matter what odds or obstacles we may be facing. This is a newsroom that is defined by its people.”

In a speech to the newsroom, Murray said it was a “bittersweet” moment to accept the public service award, but he said it was earned. He likened The Post’s DOGE reporting to the days of the Watergate scandal:

“We sometimes make a point about Watergate around here, that Bob Woodward didn’t set out to bring down a president. He was just covering a police blotter item. And he followed where it led. And the exact same thing can be said about this work. Reporters saw something happening. They asked questions, they refused to look away, and they followed the story.”

Murray also said the raid on Natanson’s home is an affront to press freedom. He called it “a profound threat, not just to The Post and not just to Hannah, but to every journalist, every source, every person who depends on the constitutional protection of the First Amendment, which is everybody.”

D’Onofrio also voiced his support for Natanson in her legal case and the importance of unfettered journalism.

“The clearest, most potent way we can continue to protect, preserve, and fight for the First Amendment is to produce absolutely critical, indispensable journalism, precisely the work that we are honoring here today, and it’s essential to our democratic way of life,” he said.

When Natanson spoke, she praised her co-workers.
“For every single tip, there was a colleague able and willing to help,” she said.

She also toasted Dan Eggen, a Post editor who edited many of the winning stories and who recently died.

Natanson closed her speech with a message to the men and women who brought critical information to light by sharing their stories with her.

“To every government worker who risked so much to confide in me, I want you to know your trust is the highest honor I will ever receive. We at The Post are doing everything we can to protect it. And I want to thank you. You believe that truth matters in a democracy. You trusted that The Washington Post was the right place to report it. With everything I have, I still believe that, too.”

The Pulitzer jurors also awarded the letters and drama prizes:

Fiction: “Angel Down” by Daniel Kraus
Drama: “Liberation” by Bess Wohl
History: “We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitution” by Jill Lepore
Biography: “Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution” by Amanda Vaill
Memoir or autobiography: “Things in Nature Merely Grow” by Yiyun Li
Poetry: “Ars Poeticas” by Juliana Spahr
General nonfiction: “There is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America by Brian Goldstone
Music: “Picaflor: A Future Myth” by Gabriela Lena Frank (The Washington Post).

The Washington Post article above also lists the other winners of the Pulitzer Prize. ☝️

Do you think Trump knows there are other awards he didn’t get?

Trump is an embarrassment.

Primaries in the Midwest.

From the Associated Press and me.

Ohio: Tuesday’s primary will solidify competitive races for the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House that could decide control of Congress for the final two years of President Donald Trump’s presidency.

Sherrod Brown, a Democratic former senator, will face Trumper Jon Husted in November.

Indiana: Trump’s push to gerrymander districts across the country hit a snag last year in Indiana when half of the state’s Republican senators sided with Democrats to defeat the plan. Now the president has endorsed primary challengers against seven of those state senators.

Last night. 👇

In November election, Democrats will face MAGA Republicans. That may be good for us. It won’t be MAGA v. DEms. Independents will be voting too, and polls show they don’t like MAGA.

Michigan: After 16 months without representation in the state Senate, voters in the competitive District 35 will decide control of the chamber. Michigan Democrats cling to a 19-18 majority. A Republican victory would deadlock the state Senate.

This happened last night.👇 We won.Dems control the Michigan Senate.

Remember Trump saying his ballroom would cost taxpayers nothing. His friends would pay for it.

Turns out different FOT (“Friends of Trump”) want to pay.

G.O.P. Proposes $1 Billion for Security Improvements in Ballroom Project

Senate Republicans have inserted $1 billion for White House East Wing security enhancements in the immigration enforcement funding bill they hope to rush through Congress this month, setting up a political fight over a ballroom that President Trump has said would be financed with private money.

The leaders of the Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees on Monday released plans for the roughly $70 billion package, which would significantly bolster spending on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and border patrol through the end of Mr. Trump’s term using a party-line legislative process that can skirt a filibuster.

A surprise addition to the measure was the $1 billion proposed by the Judiciary Committee for security work related to Mr. Trump’s East Wing renovation. The measure does not mention the president’s proposed new ballroom, which is being challenged in court, but Mr. Trump has insisted that a main reason for the project is to enhance security.

While the president has previously insisted that the renovation would be funded through private donations, a spokesman on Tuesday said the White House applauded the proposed security funding for a “long overdue” project.

Mr. Trump and congressional Republicans have escalated their efforts to defend the project after the attempted assault late last month at a journalism gala in Washington attended by the president.

The bill says the public money would be directed to “security adjustments and upgrades, including within the perimeter fence of the White House compound to support enhancements by the Secret Service relating to the East Wing Modernization Project, including above-ground and below-ground security features.” It also bars any of the funding being spent on “non-security elements.”

But Democrats pounced on the proposal, signaling that they intended to make the ballroom a centerpiece of their opposition to the measure and their election-year message that the president and his party were not meeting voters’ needs.

“Republicans are on a different planet than American families,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic minority leader, said in a post on social media. “Republicans looked at families drowning in bills and decided what they really needed was more raids and a Trump ballroom.”

Top Democrats also noted that consideration of the bill would put all senators on the record on a White House construction project that polls have shown to be unpopular.

“Just flagging that now everyone gets an up or down vote on the ballroom,” Senator Brian Schatz, Democrat of Hawaii, said on social media.

Should the provision survive and be enacted into law, it could clear away legal obstacles to construction of the ballroom, which a federal judge has ruled requires congressional approval.

Republicans are advancing the legislation outside of normal congressional spending channels because Senate Democrats had blocked money for ICE and the border control in a dispute over the tactics and conduct of federal immigration officers. That fight shut down parts of the Department of Homeland Security for almost 80 days.

“The Senate Judiciary Committee is taking action to help provide certainty for federal law enforcement and safer streets for American families,” Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. “We will work to ensure this critical funding gets signed into law without unnecessary delay.”

After the attack at the journalism dinner last month, some congressional Republicans proposed that the ballroom be paid for with $400 million in federal money, with private donations to be used for extras such as china. Democrats quickly made clear that they would not support that effort, leaving the potential funding uncertain.

On Tuesday, Davis Ingle, the White House spokesman, cited the recent incident in praising the security funding in the bill.

“As President Trump has repeatedly said, the White House must be a safe and secure complex that generations of future presidents and visitors to the people’s house can enjoy,” he said.

Republicans had pushed for the bill to be kept free of any proposals not directly tied to the immigration crackdown to make it easier to push through rapidly to meet the president’s June 1 deadline, but evidently chose to make an exception in the case of the White House project.

The Judiciary Committee measure would provide about $39 billion and the homeland security measure another $32.5 billion for hiring, training and equipping new immigration enforcement officers and purchasing and employing new border control technology, including artificial intelligence. The homeland security secretary would receive $5 billion in a flexible fund and the legislation includes $1.4 billion for the Justice Department. None of the spending would be offset with cuts elsewhere.

Senator Rand Paul, the Kentucky Republican who leads the Homeland Security Committee, has been resistant to surges in new spending but said he is backing the funding push because of Democratic recalcitrance.

“Senate Democrats refuse to vote for a single dollar to secure our borders or enforce our immigration laws, even against the most violent illegal aliens,” Mr. Paul said in a statement. “To make sure those vital functions are funded, my committee will vote later this month to give the funding needed.”

Republicans can ultimately pass the spending if they hold together, but Democrats are expected to try to make it as difficult as they can by subjecting Republicans to politically tough votes six months out from the midterm elections.

“Republicans are in danger of losing control of Congress in November, so they are going outside the usual bipartisan appropriations process to fund these unpopular policies through the end of the Trump administration,” Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said in a statement. (New York Times)

Change is coming.

You may have heard - Everyone watches Women’s sports!

2026 WNBA franchise valuations: See where all 15 teams rank.

The WNBA has its first $1 billion franchise.

And that franchise just started play one season ago.

CNBC released its ranking of the most valuable WNBA franchises in 2026, and it's the Golden State Valkyries that top the list with a $1 billion valuation.

After Golden State, the top five are the New York Liberty ($600 million), Indiana Fever ($560 million), Las Vegas Aces ($500 million) and Seattle Storm ($450 million).

So, how does a new team like the Valkyries skyrocket to the top of the ranking in just one year? CNBC senior sports reporter Michael Ozanian broke it down.

"Their revenue for the 2025 season was $73 million. In 2026, their revenue could exceed $90 million," Ozanian said. "The owners of the Valkyrie, Peter Goober and Joel LeCoe, they also own the Golden State Warriors of the NBA and they own the Chase Center where both the Valkyries and the Warriors play. This has given them a tremendous opportunity to cross sell sponsorships, to cross sell hospitality at the arena.

They have tremendous scale at the building between the two teams and they've done a great job marketing the team. They really are a prime example of the fact that in the WNBA, the teams that tend to be the most valuable are those that play in NBA sized arenas and are also owned by people who own NBA teams."

Ozanian added that Golden State is set to have 12,000 season tickets sold this season, which would be a league record.

Ozanian also predicts that within the next five years, all well-run WNBA teams will reach the billion-dollar valuation. New owners coming in have invested significant money into their teams and are finding unique ways to boost profit. Star youngsters like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers, among others, play a crucial role in growing interest, too.

Here's the full 15-team list...

(NBC Sports Bay Area & California)