Category: Washington Post

NAIROBI, Kenya — Reported Ebola cases have surged above 1,000 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and health experts are warning this could be one of the worst outbreaks, rivaling the largest on record, which killed 11,365 people in West Africa from 2014 to 2016.

On Wednesday, French officials announced the country’s first case of Ebola from this outbreak — a doctor who had traveled to Congo on a humanitarian mission. The doctor was being treated at a special medical facility and was reported to be in stable condition, according to a statement from the French Health Ministry.

With more than 250 confirmed deaths in Africa, the World Health Organization said Tuesday that the current outbreak, first reported in May, has the largest number of confirmed cases during the first month of any Ebola outbreak in Africa.

There have been 17 outbreaks since the discovery of the virus in 1976, involving three strains. The current strain, Bundibugyo, has been seen only twice before, in 2007 in Uganda and in 2017 in Congo. There is no specific treatment or vaccine for it.

“None of those previous outbreaks had the magnitude of the volume of cases and geographical spread that we are seeing today,” said Manuel Albela, an epidemiologist with Doctors Without Borders who is working with the Ebola response team.

“And even that comparison — again, one month into the declaration of the outbreak — it falls short, because we have never seen almost 900 confirmed cases just after one month of the declaration of the outbreak,” Albela said. “Going back to the comparison with the outbreak in West Africa, it’s a very similar situation because we don’t have a specific treatment for this specific virus.”

Diagnosing Bundibugyo is complicated, because there is no specific test kit for the rare strain and this is one reason the strain initially spread fast without detection.

The virus is now present in at least three eastern provinces in Congo. Ituri province, the epicenter, has recorded 954 confirmed cases, with 91 more in North Kivu province and three in South Kivu province, according to government data released Sunday, with 267 people reported dead.

In neighboring Uganda, 20 infections and two deaths have been reported.

Misinformation and distrust about the virus have complicated the response, leading many infected people to refuse treatment.

Health workers have been attacked during contact tracing and when relatives are denied access to the infected bodies of their loved ones.

On Friday, in the Mambangu neighborhood of Beni, angry residents attacked workers who went to disinfect the home of someone who died of Ebola, according to said Serge Kambale, 39, a doctor who spoke to the Washington Post by phone from the city.

During the incident, two workers were injured when the locals started throwing stones at them. Fabrice Kavono, a witness, said that the crowd attacked the health workers and accused them of fabricating the disease for material gain.

“It is the second time Ebola is in Beni, but they say it’s in Bunia and Mongbwalu only and that they are making it up here to make money,” Kavono said.

Another witness told the Post that people with relatives in Mongbwalu, the mining town in Ituri province at the center of the outbreak, were fleeing in droves to relatives in parts of North and South Kivu — spreading the virus as they traveled.

Onesphore Bangenza, the leader of the Ebola Response Team in Bunia for Mercy Corps, a nonprofit group, said that burials in which relatives insisted on washing bodies of loved ones and touching them were still happening, and that residents were not adhering to distancing guidelines.

“We have motor taxis transporting more than three people,” Bangenza said. “There are people who do not want to be tested. The scale of the outbreak could be larger.”

In May, 30 people who had exhibited Ebola-like symptoms died at a displacement camp in Kigonze that hosts families fleeing conflict in the region, Reuters reported.

Two aid workers confirmed that 13 deaths had been reported at the camp within 48 hours and that more 30 total deaths were expected.

“The constant movement and overcrowding of refugees in camps is causing fear that this virus could spread even more and the scale of the outbreak may grow” Bangenza said, adding that conditions in the camps were abysmal. “No water, no latrines,” he said. “The hygiene condition is very, very bad.”

New Ebola cases have been reported in cities such as Beni where an ISIS-affiliated rebel group, the Allied Democratic Forces, has waged attacks, prompting families to flee their homes.

At a local hospital in Beni, a patient admitted with malaria asked to be discharged early because he feared that others at the hospital would have Ebola and infect him, he told the Post. While he was in the hospital, the ADF attacked an area near the hospital, killing seven people.

“First, I was afraid that because I exhibited malaria symptoms, which are similar to Ebola, I would be assimilated with people with Ebola,” the patient said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private health matters. “In the small hospital, there is no clear follow-up, so anything can happen. Then, the attack scared me more.”

Congo has been besieged by years of conflict especially in the mineral-rich eastern regions of the country, which boast the world’s largest deposits of coltan and cobalt, used to manufacture electronics.

Cycles of violence have also weakened health systems in the region.

Just last week, protests broke out in Kinshasa, Congo’s capital, after people learned of a proposal to change the constitution to allow an extension of term limits, which would allow President Félix Tshisekedi to stay beyond his current term, which was supposed to be his last.

The Rwanda-affiliated M23 rebel group was working with health teams after two cases of Ebola were discovered in Goma, a city that M23 controls, the group’s deputy spokesperson, Oscar Balinda, told The Post. M23 controls large swaths of territory in eastern DRC.

The United States has sent $375 million in aid, so far, to contain this latest Ebola outbreak, Trump said during a recent Group of Seven meeting in France.

Experts say more must be done contain the outbreak.

“One of the key factors to try to control an outbreak of Ebola is to decentralize as much as possible the testing capacity, so that the tests can be done in the places where the cases are,” said Abela, the epidemiologist. “And I think that this, little by little, is happening. But, as usual, we want things to happen yesterday.”

Abela also said that contact-tracing is crucial but not enough is being done. “At the moment, I think there are 70 percent of the contacts being followed up when the target is normally 95 percent, according to the DRC authorities.”

He added: “This is clearly one of the gaps.”

In his battle to clean the murky waters of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, President Donald Trump has tried draining, painting, hydrogen peroxide, and what the Interior Department describes as “high-tech nanobubble ozone technology.” But he has seemingly overlooked two of the most important factors that experts say are driving unsightly — and sometimes dangerous — profusions of algae: pollution and climate change.

Algae thrive in warm, still waters, causing populations to explode as global temperatures rise, said environmental engineer Steve Chapra, an emeritus professor at Tufts University.

Meanwhile, rampant human development has increased the amount of fertilizer and sewage produced by farms and cities, and severe storms intensified by the warmer atmosphere are causing more of these pollutants to run off into local waterways — providing algae with the nutrients they need to grow.

In a 2017 study, Chapra and his colleagues projected that climate change would cause a more than fivefold increase in the number of days when U.S. water bodies are affected by harmful algal blooms.

Short-term measures like those Trump has pursued may temporarily reduce algae populations in some water bodies, Chapra said. But unless they grapple with warming and nutrient pollution, any efforts to address these blooms in the Reflecting Pool and elsewhere are doomed to fail in the long run.

The consequences could be profound, because the problems presented by blooms go far beyond aesthetics, he added. They can disrupt aquatic food chains, deplete oxygen in water bodies and even produce deadly toxins.

“It’s probably the biggest water quality problem in the world,” Chapra said. “The Reflecting Pool is the canary in the coal mine.”

A spokesperson for the Interior Department did not respond to questions about whether the department had considered nutrient pollution or water temperature in planning the pool’s refurbishment. In an email, the agency reiterated that the National Park Service is using hydrogen peroxide and ozone nanobubbles, which break up algae by damaging their cells.

The root causes of blooms

Algal blooms have long thrived in the Reflecting Pool, thanks to stagnant, shallow water enriched by pollution and warmed by sweltering D.C. summers.

Since 2012, the pool has been filled from the Tidal Basin, which in turn is fed by the Potomac River. Both water bodies contain excessive amounts of nitrogen and phosphorous — the nutrients most loved by algae — and are designated as “impaired” by the Environmental Protection Agency, meaning they don’t meet basic water quality standards for swimming, fishing, and supporting aquatic life.

Trump said his $14 million renovation this spring would clean the pool’s algae-clouded waters by sealing leaks and painting the bottom “American flag blue.”

But the refurbishment didn’t address the pollution that is the root cause of algal growth, said Hans Paerl, an aquatic ecologist at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The pool was refilled on June 4 using the same nutrient-rich Tidal Basin water as before.

The spate of warm, sunny days that followed — June so far has been about 2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than normal, according to the National Weather Service — provided ideal conditions for the photosynthetic creatures to multiply. Those high temperatures may have been exacerbated by the pool’s new dark blue coating, which absorbs more heat than its previous gray finish, Chapra said.

Within days, satellite data showed that the Reflecting Pool contained more algae than at any recorded point in June for at least five years.

The bloom that turned the pool green shortly after it was refilled was likely caused by a single-celled organism called cyanobacteria, Paerl said. Pictures of the pool showed a characteristic bright green scum coating the surface of the water.

Cyanobacteria blooms are the most dangerous, Paerl said, because they produce toxic compounds that can cause rashes, vomiting, and neurological problems in people who touch or ingest them.

After the Interior Department treated the pool with hydrogen peroxide, which breaks down cyanobacteria’s cell membrane and disrupts photosynthesis, the cyanobacteria bloom seemed to wane.

But the water’s sickly green sheen remains. Aquatic ecologist Rosalina Christova, a George Mason University researcher who acquired a sample from the Reflecting Pool on June 15, found that the water had been colonized by a genus of multicellular green algae called Desmodesmus. In an email, she called the population “very dense.”

The green algae are more resistant to the effects of hydrogen peroxide, and they were likely able to capitalize on the nutrients released from the disintegrating bodies of the slain cyanobacteria, Paerl said.

“This created a niche for another player, so to speak,” he said. “Nutrients keep cycling through there and feed whatever blooms.”

A growing global threat

Though the administration’s concerns about algae in the Reflecting Pool are in part cosmetic, the proliferation of blooms in waterways across the planet pose a significant — and growing — threat, said Joaquim Goes, a biogeochemist at Columbia University.

By studying satellite images of the ocean, he found that microalgae scums — caused by the same tiny organisms as those afflicting the Reflecting Pool — have expanded at a rate of 1% per year since 2003. The phenomenon has disrupted food chains and created oxygenless “dead zones” where fish can’t survive.

“It is spreading like wildfire all over the world,” Goes said. “And there is no question that temperature is playing a role.”

Blooms are also increasing in freshwater bodies that supply people’s drinking water, research shows.

A 2022 EPA assessment found that 49% of U.S. lakes showed excess amounts of chlorophyll a, the photosynthetic compound that indicates presence of cyanobacteria and green algae. Detections of microcystins, a class of toxin produced by cyanobacteria, increased by almost 30 percentage points since the previous assessment was conducted five years earlier.

Massive cyanobacteria blooms have poisoned important fisheries, such as in Lake Erie. They can imperil important ecosystems, like the Everglades below Florida’s Lake Okeechobee. They have been linked to the deaths of dogs, cattle and, in rare cases, humans.

Even green algae, which do not produce toxins, can clog filtration systems and disrupt drinking water supplies. When they die, the decomposition of their bodies depletes oxygen in the surrounding water, killing other aquatic life.

The National Office for Harmful Algal Blooms, funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, estimates that phenomenon causes an average $50 million in damage to the U.S. economy each year. Individual severe events can cause even greater harm: An unprecedented “red tide” cost roughly $2.7 billion in decreased tourism revenue when it forced the closure of beaches across southern Florida in 2018.

Lasting solutions

Theories about the persistence of the Reflecting Pool algae abound.

The Interior Department has blamed residual organisms that remained in supply lines after the renovation. Some have speculated that the recent blooms are a product of liberal “sabotage.”

The Trump administration has said it plans to drain the pool again to address algae growth and paint that is peeling from its bottom.

But those measures are unlikely to prevent algae from reemerging, said environmental engineer Victor Bierman, a retired water quality consultant and former EPA scientist.

As summer heat continues to ramp up, he worries the green algae could be replaced by cyanobacteria, which have no predators and readily outcompete other microbes at high temperatures.

“You can get rid of an existing bloom, but if you don’t change the underlying conditions … you’re going to grow more algae,” Bierman said.

Officials could stymie growth by increasing the flow of water through the pool, but that would disrupt the still surface needed for it to be reflective, he added. A better option would be installing an enhanced filtration system that removes nutrients from the Tidal Basin water before it is pumped into the pool.

Ultimately, said Chapra, algae blooms will continue to plague the Reflecting Pool and countless other water bodies until people address the human-made problems of nutrient runoff and climate change.

“If you don’t follow the science, then you think it’s magic or espionage, and it’s not,” Chapra said. “This is basic biology.”

President Donald Trump accused Tehran of making “false statements” on Tuesday, after an Iranian official said his government had not agreed to allow international inspectors access to their country’s damaged nuclear facilities, despite U.S. claims.

Trump claimed that Iran had already agreed to the inspections for an indefinite period of time and suggested it was one of many points of progress in recent days. “If they did not agree to this, there would be no further negotiations!” Trump posted on Truth Social.

The clashing accounts suggested that there may still be considerable distance between the parties on the current terms of the negotiations. And it may be one of many still in dispute: Iranian officials also pushed back on other reported details regarding deliberations over Tehran’s ballistic missile program and how its government could use billions of dollars in unfrozen funds it expects to receive as a result of the peace talks.

The dispute over inspections was sparked Monday, when Vice President JD Vance said Iran had agreed to grant the International Atomic Energy Agency access to its nuclear sites, telling reporters in Switzerland that it was a “major milestone for the American people, and the first step in permanently denuclearizing or permanently ending a nuclear weapons program in Iran.”

Iran, however, rejected the claim the following day, with Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei saying there was no plan for IAEA inspections of its nuclear facilities damaged by the war and that officials had not met with the director general of the nuclear watchdog.

“There is simply no established procedure for this matter,” Baqaei said in comments reported by state media, adding that Iran would “adhere to the standard procedures, which are already well-defined and transparent.”

U.S. officials, including Vance, have repeatedly said that Iran is being misleading in its account of the ongoing talks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio told reporters Tuesday that Iranian statements were driven by “domestic politics.”

“We know what they agreed to do, and now they’ll either do it or they won’t,” Rubio said as he arrived in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, to see Arab Gulf allies. “If they do, the process moves forward, and if they don’t, the president will have some decisions to make.”

Iran had been subject to regular inspections under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and agreed to more intensive monitoring under the Obama nuclear deal that Trump has frequently condemned. After Trump terminated that agreement in 2018, Iran blocked IAEA access to some sites, while some inspections continued.

Since June 2025, Iran has prohibited the inspectors from visiting sites bombed by the U.S. and Israel.

Ali Bahreini, Iran’s ambassador to the United Nations, told reporters in Geneva on Tuesday that discussion of Iranian nuclear activities is set for the next stage of talks. The ceasefire memorandum that Trump signed at the Palace of Versailles on June 17 gave the U.S. and Iran 60 days to resolve their hardest disputes, including over the fate of Iran’s uranium stockpile and the Strait of Hormuz.

In a news conference Monday at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland, Vance said conversations with inspectors from the IAEA could happen as soon as that day.

Baqaei’s contradictory comments Tuesday highlighted the difficulty of turning the fragile ceasefire into a more comprehensive peace agreement.

Baqaei also said Iran would be free to use unfrozen assets or revenue from oil sales as it sees fit, after Vance said that such funds, if unfrozen, would be subject to oversight and could benefit American farmers. “The important point is that Iran’s previously blocked assets are now available and can be used freely by Iran in accordance with its own priorities,” Baqaei said, according to Iranian state media.

The spokesperson also pushed back on reports that Pakistan’s prime minister, Shehbaz Sharif, had said that talks would involve discussion of Iran’s ballistic missile program. Baqaei said that the program was “not part of the negotiations” with the U.S., state media reported.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian traveled to Pakistan on Tuesday to meet with officials there who have been mediating the negotiations with the U.S. “The effectiveness of the talks depends on full commitment to the agreed obligations and their precise implementation,” he said in a post on X, in an apparent acknowledgment of the broad-brush nature of the 14-point memorandum of understanding.

“Statements outside the agreed text do not help advance the negotiations,” he added.

The ceasefire called for an end to Israeli attacks in Lebanon, which resumed over the weekend, again testing the fragile deal. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has criticized the deal and is not formally a party to the agreement. The Washington Post previously reported that U.S. intelligence warned the Trump administration that Netanyahu would probably work to undermine it by continuing the attacks. On Sunday, Trump accused Iran-backed Hezbollah militants of “causing trouble” in Lebanon.

Overnight, Netanyahu, Defense Minister Israel Katz, and Israel Defense Forces Chief of the General Staff Eyal Zamir issued a joint statement saying the IDF would “continue to act with determination in order to neutralize threats” and maintain what it calls a “security zone” in southern Lebanon.

The Israeli and Lebanese governments are currently holding direct negotiations brokered by the U.S. in Washington. A State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to brief the media, said Monday that the shared goal for all parties was the ending the “cycle of violence for good.”

Though the Trump administration had initially rejected calls to formally include Lebanon in talks with Iran, Lebanese President Joseph Aoun said that he had held a call with Vance and Rubio on Tuesday in which they had agreed to set up a joint U.S.-Lebanese-Iranian cell to help “solidify” the ceasefire in Lebanon.

Rubio told reporters in Abu Dhabi that while the Lebanon talks were separate from the Iranian talks, Tehran played a critical role in that conflict due to “their support and sponsorship of Hezbollah.”

A private company run by a supporter of President Donald Trump has pledged to restore the grass on the South Lawn of the White House after it was destroyed by the Ultimate Fighting Championship event held there earlier this month.

The White House announced last week that ScottsMiracle-Gro, an Ohio-based company, will commit $1 million to restore the South Lawn after the UFC event held on Trump’s 80th birthday left it heavily damaged. The company said it is donating “a combination of monetary and product support,” including re-sodding the South Lawn and then creating a “custom turf grass blend” with which to reseed it.

It is unclear whether the commitment includes restoring the grass on the White House Ellipse, which was similarly damaged after the event. Aerial photos taken over the weekend by Reuters showed a large, circular expanse of dirt where the verdant Ellipse had been.

The National Park Service, which typically handles White House lawn maintenance, directed inquiries Monday to the White House. Representatives for the White House said that ScottsMiracle-Gro had offered a private donation to the National Park Service to go toward lawn care, and that no taxpayer dollars would be used.

But Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, a nonprofit government watchdog, said the arrangement raises ethics questions, particularly following the recent failed repairs at the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, which were done under a no-bid contract awarded to a Trump ally.

“Major corporations generally don’t do things out of the goodness of their heart. It’s generally — they do things for the government because they want something from the government,” CREW vice president Jordan Libowitz told the Washington Post.

Libowitz noted that ScottsMiracle-Gro markets and distributes the herbicide Roundup, whose active ingredient, glyphosate, has been the subject of lawsuits alleging that it causes cancer. In February, Trump signed an executive order calling glyphosate “crucial to the national security and defense” of the country, a move that angered part of his base. The Supreme Court is currently considering whether to block lawsuits that allege Roundup causes cancer.

ScottsMiracle-Gro CEO James Hagedorn is a longtime Trump supporter who has advised the president on a different kind of grass: He lobbied for marijuana to be reclassified from a Schedule I drug — the most strictly regulated — to a Schedule III drug, and praised Trump when he signed an executive order late last year doing so.

Tom Matthews, a ScottsMiracle-Gro spokesperson, said the company only markets the consumer brand of Roundup, which does not contain glyphosate, and pushed back on suggestions that there was a conflict of interest.

“The special blend we’ve created for the White House is for the White House lawn regardless of who’s president,” he said, adding that it would also not be available to consumers. “We’re not commercializing it. We don’t have commercial business with the federal government and we don’t plan to.”

Libowitz said it is not unusual for American presidents to boost American businesses, though usually they are not singled out in the way Trump has before — by including Palantir’s stock ticker, for example, in a social media post that touted the defense company.

Last week, the official White House social media accounts announced ScottsMiracle-Gro’s donation in a post that seemed “just a little off” and like an ad, Libowitz added, particularly since the company was one of the sponsors of the UFC event.

“It’s not just like ‘I support American businesses.’ It’s ‘I want you to put money behind the businesses supporting me,’ ” Libowitz said of Trump’s posts promoting private companies.

“It seems to be this whole [UFC] event was an opportunity for different corporations to advertise in front of the president,” he added.

Organizers of the UFC event had anticipated the grass would be destroyed when planning the event. Last year, UFC CEO Dana White told the Sports Business Journal that they were allocating $700,000 to replace the grass “because we’re going to f— up the South Lawn.”

White and the UFC did not immediately return requests for comment Monday about whether the UFC would still be paying for any portion of the repairs to the South Lawn or to the Ellipse.

As America approaches its 250th birthday, the grassless Ellipse and South Lawn — paired with the algae-filled Reflecting Pool and demolished East Wing of the White House — have drawn partisan criticism.

“In the 250th year anniversary of USA the @WhiteHouse and surroundings looks so terrible … is so sad to see …” José Andrés, a chef and vocal Trump critic, wrote on X.

According to ScottsMiracle-Gro, Trump personally selected a blend of tall fescues and Kentucky bluegrasses to restore the South Lawn.

“The president knows a lot about grass. I think his history and past with golf courses,“ Nate Baxter, ScottsMiracle-Gro chief operating officer, told Fox Business.

Grass experts said it would be more cost effective to reseed the lawn, rather than to lay down new sod and then reseed, but it would have taken several weeks for grass seed to germinate and establish itself.

Matthews, the ScottsMiracle-Gro spokesperson, said the best time to grow grass from seed is the spring and fall because of the cooler nighttime temperatures.

“To replenish the lawn in a quicker fashion, the sodding is the solution for it. … Then the overseeding will help thicken it and strengthen it and create stronger roots systems,” he said.

The White House did not address questions about why they opted to resod and whether the new sod would be laid in time for July 4.

“To replace it with sod, you’re talking a pretty significant financial expenditure or impact,” said Steve Mercogliana, director of operations at the Philadelphia-based Four Seasons Total Landscaping.

Mercogliana, whose business went viral after it inexplicably hosted a 2020 news conference for Rudy Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team, said organizers could have also spared large swaths of grass by building a small platform to keep people off the lawn. He said he watched a little bit of the UFC fight “here and there,” but couldn’t help doing so through a landscapers’ lens.

“I was curious. I looked at it and I thought, ‘Oh man, I wonder what that ground’s going to look like when all these people leave the premise? What’s the impact of that?’ And here we are,” he said.

New photos show that President Donald Trump’s name is indeed off the Kennedy Center, offering the first public look at the performing arts venue’s facade since crews removed the letters by court order.

The images were taken last week inside the tarp-covered scaffolding that has hidden the title of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for the nine days since crews removed Trump’s name. The images were first provided to the Washington Post by the activist group Hands Off the Arts before being independently obtained and verified by the Post.

“This is the picture the Trump administration does not want anyone to see, so it’s all the more important … that people have an opportunity to witness when they’re winning,” said Mallory Miller, co-founder of Hands Off the Arts.

On June 12, a 14-member crew erected scaffolding to comply with a court-ordered deadline to remove Trump’s name. The workers missed the deadline, taking down the letters around 3 a.m. Saturday. The Kennedy Center’s lawyers confirmed in a court filing later that morning the work was done.

But the center left the scaffolding and tarps in place. For nine days, barricades manned by security guards have kept people from approaching and blocked any view of the exterior.

The new photos show two rows of blank square panels, with black lettering just visible below. In older photos, Trump’s name occupied the bottom of the two blank rows.

In a statement last week, Kennedy Center spokesperson Roma Daravi said the tarps and scaffolding “will remain up as crews address maintenance needs of the marble and soffit panels.”

On Friday, lawyers for Rep. Joyce Beatty (D., Ohio), an ex officio board member whose lawsuit led to the removal, accused Trump and his allies on the board of “willfully sabotaging Kennedy Center’s iconic façade to assuage Defendants’ vanity or massage broken egos.”

The trustees “appear to be actively undermining the restoration of the Kennedy Center’s name, in a petty act of defiance,” they wrote.

On Monday night, House Democrats on the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, which oversees the Kennedy Center and other federal buildings, said the center should take down “the shame scaffolding.”

“Now that the Courts have compelled President Trump to take his name off another man’s Memorial,” they said in an X post, “it’s time for a return to normalcy.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled a Rastafarian can’t pursue a lawsuit against prison officials who forcibly sheared his dreadlocks in violation of a court order while he was incarcerated at a facility in Louisiana.

In a 6-3 ruling along ideological lines, the justices found Damon Landor could not sue prison officials as individuals under a 2000 federal law that requires states to protect the religious rights of prisoners in state institutions.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch, who wrote the majority opinion, found prison officials could not be held personally liable in most instances for violations of religious rights under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA). The ruling centered on the technicalities of the law.

“Under the Spending Clause, Congress lacks regulatory authority to impose liability on them directly and must depend instead on consent,” Gorsuch wrote of the prison officials. “And because they never agreed to answer suits like this one, Mr. Landor’s case cannot proceed against them any more than a breach of contract action might proceed against a defendant who never formed a contract.”

The ruling came over the objections of the court’s liberals, who said barring a remedy for a violation would render the law toothless.

“Prisoners like Landor who suffer violations of their religious freedom in state prisons — no matter how blatant — will often be left remediless,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote for the liberals. “And encroachments on prisoners’ statutory rights are likely to happen with fair frequency, as state-empowered prison officials will have little incentive to abide by federal law, even if it is handed to them on a piece of paper.”

She added: “We took this case to address whether Landor can seek money damages from the officials who ignored the law, held him down, and ‘uncrowned him before God.’”

The ruling dealt with the question of who can be held liable under the RLUIPA but departed from a series of decisions by the Supreme Court expanding religious freedoms in recent terms, including allowing religious parents to opt their children out of lessons featuring LGBTQ+ books, permitting a football coach to pray on a field at a public high school, and protecting a Christian web designer who did not want to serve same-sex couples.

That trend has pushed up against another set of court decisions limiting the ability of prisoners to obtain compensation for ill treatment in custody.

Landor’s case began in 2020, when he arrived at the Raymond Laborde Correctional Center to serve out a term for drug possession. The two previous facilities in which Landor was incarcerated allowed him to keep his dreadlocks, a symbol of his religious devotion that he had grown for roughly 20 years and that reached nearly to his knees.

At Laborde, Landor told a prison guard about his faith and presented him a copy of a court decision that found RLUIPA prevented Louisiana prisons from forcing Rastafarians to cut their hair.

The guard threw the ruling in the trash.

Despite pleading with the warden, Landor was handcuffed to a chair and held down by two correctional officers, who trimmed his dreadlocks. Landor was devastated, because lengthy dreadlocks are seen as a physical embodiment of Rastafarians’ religious commitment to God.

After Landor finished his term, he sued under RLUIPA. He also filed claims in state court for negligence, infliction of emotional distress, and violation of the Louisiana Constitution.

Congress enacted RLUIPA under the Constitution’s spending clause, requiring state corrections departments to comply with the law’s provisions in order to receive federal money. The law includes a provision that allows individuals to sue to enforce the law’s requirements.

Landor’s case raised the issue of whether the law also allows people to sue prison officials for damages in their personal capacity. In 2011, the Supreme Court ruled it did not authorize claims against state prison officials in their official capacities, so the one remaining avenue for Landor to collect damages in federal court for his treatment was to sue officials personally.

Zack Tripp, an attorney for Landor, told the justices during arguments in November that allowing suits such as Landor’s would be an effective deterrent to prevent the abuse of prisoners’ rights. If defendants cannot collect damages, he said, prison officials “can treat the law like garbage.”

“It is the poster child for RLUIPA violation,” Tripp said of Landor’s case.

In filings, Landor’s lawyers also pointed out that the Supreme Court held in 2020 that a “sister statute” of RLUIPA, employing the same language, does allow a plaintiff to sue a government official in his or her individual capacity for damages for religious discrimination.

The Louisiana attorney general and Department of Public Safety and Corrections wrote in briefs that the state “condemns” in “the strongest possible terms” what happened to Landor. They said they have changed grooming policy in response to the incident.

The state argued that allowing suits for damages, however, could open the door to lawsuits being filed against individual government officials in other areas of federal law, such as Title IX, the landmark statute that prohibits sex discrimination in education.

A federal judge and an appeals court ruled against Landor, finding the law did not allow him to sue officials for damages in their individual capacities. All other federal courts that have examined the issue have come to the same conclusion.

Landor is still able to pursue his claims in state court.