A growing number of states are making an equal split between parents the default child custody option in divorce cases.

Louisiana and Mississippi this year joined at least five other states that have adopted the so-called 50-50 standard — four of them since 2021, as more legislators rework divorce-related laws that remained mostly unchanged for years.

The 50-50 custody issue does not break down cleanly along partisan lines: The Mississippi bill was sponsored by Republicans, the Louisiana legislation by Democrats. Both states’ laws explicitly codify a custody guideline that many courts in other states follow.

Supporters say a formal 50-50 custody standard makes divorce proceedings more equitable for fathers — who historically have been awarded less custody time than mothers — and encourages them to maintain an active role in their children’s lives.

And it can reduce friction between separating parents by signaling they’re both starting the custody process on an equal playing field, said Don Hubin, board chair of the National Parents Organization, an advocacy group that has pushed for more states to adopt legal presumptions of shared parenting.

Without that presumption, Hubin said, one or both parents may feel like they have to paint each other in a bad light in order to ‘win’ more time with their children.

“It’s not just about the practice of shared parenting, but about the law signaling to parents that this is going to be the outcome unless something special is going on in your case,” he said. “It reduces the anxiety of the parents, which reduces the conflict between the parents.”

But critics say the standard might harm vulnerable women and children by making it more likely that children must spend time with a parent who isn’t safe. They fear that for women in abusive marriages, the knowledge they would have to cede 50% of their child’s time to an unsafe parent could push them to remain in a marriage just to protect their children.

Kimberly Rummage, who lives in Kentucky, calls her state’s 50-50 custody standard “absolutely diabolical.” She’s had a lengthy battle in court with her ex-husband over custody of their child.

“I think that parents should have to prove why they get that 50-50,” she said. “You should have to show what you’ve done in that child’s life, what you know about that child, how you’ve participated and supported that child.”

Some critics also argue that the 50-50 standard doesn’t account for the needs of children at different ages. Mississippi state Rep. Dana McLean, a Republican, warned her colleagues the state’s new law could harm breastfeeding infants who need to spend most of their time with their mothers during their first months of life.

Mississippi’s new law requires family courts to use equally-shared parenting time as the default in custody cases. Parents seeking more time must present evidence showing why a 50-50 split isn’t in their child’s best interest. It also changes how child support is calculated: The new formula for 50-50 custody can lower child support payments for the parent with the lower income.

Louisiana’s new law says child custody “shall” be divided equally, rather than “should,” which was the language under the previous law.

In both states, as in others that have adopted the 50-50 standard, a judge can override the rule if the court finds credible evidence for awarding more time to one parent.

But in Mississippi, several judges spoke against the bill before it passed, saying the old system — in which custody was awarded on a case-by-case basis using a specific set of factors — was the most fair.

At least five other states have similar laws, and all were approved with bipartisan support: Kentucky (2018), Arkansas (2021), West Virginia (2022), Florida (2023) and Missouri (2023).

Effects on divorce rates

Proponents of 50-50 laws say one positive side effect is that they could save some marriages. In Kentucky, the state’s divorce rate dropped 25% between 2016 and 2023, compared with an 18% decline nationwide.

But Krista Westrick-Payne, one of the researchers who studied the rates, told Stateline it’s impossible to tie Kentucky’s drop directly to the state’s 2018 50-50 custody law because too many other factors in that timeframe influenced it.

“There’s no one cause, no one single driver for these rates,” said Westrick-Payne, who is the assistant director of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University in Kentucky.

The data shows that factors like state laws or local economic conditions tend to have a minimal effect on whether a couple divorces, she said.

“The more significant things that affect whether or not a couple decides to divorce have much more to do with their relationship and their personal situation.”

Westrick-Payne said she believes divorce and custody-related law should be crafted with the effects on individuals and families in mind, rather than as a way to affect widescale, population-level changes.

“When it comes to something like divorce, something that’s so personal, I think the focus needs to be more on the individuals going through it,” she said, “as opposed to some big policy to affect just whether somebody divorces or not.”

A growing effort

Hubin expects to see more states moving to codify the equal custody presumption in their laws in the coming years, as parenting norms change and more households become dual income. Fathers have taken on more caregiving responsibilities than a generation ago, he said.

“Fathers who’ve been involved with their kids, they’re not happy with being consigned to an ‘every other weekend’ visitor in their kids’ lives,” he said.

Nationally, mothers of children under 6 spend about seven and a half hours a day with their children, compared to a little over five hours for fathers, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The time gap shrinks as kids get older: Mothers spend 3.8 hours a day with their teens and fathers spend about 3 hours.

Earlier this year, a 50-50 custody bill in Oklahoma, sponsored by both Republicans and Democrats, sailed through the House but died on the Senate floor. Similar bills have been proposed in Alabama, Idaho, Indiana and North Carolina.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Cerina Fairfax, a Virginia dentist and mother of two, spent nearly two years living in the same house as her husband while she was trying to divorce him.

Virginia state law required couples with children, like the Fairfaxes, to wait a year before being allowed to file for divorce. Cerina’s husband, former Virginia Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax, had also tried different legal tactics to prolong the process.

In March of this year, a judge granted Cerina sole custody of their children and ordered Justin to move out.

A few weeks later, with just days left before his move-out deadline, Justin fatally shot Cerina and then himself, police say, while their two teens were also in the house.

The tragedy focused national attention on state divorce laws, which have remained mostly static since 2010, when New York became the last state to allow no-fault divorce. In the years since, most of the states that have tweaked their divorce laws have made it easier, not harder, to get one. Virginia, for example, relaxed some of its requirements just days before Cerina Fairfax’s death.

Now that could be changing.

In recent years, more conservatives have turned to divorce as a “family values” talking point, with some pushing to make it harder for couples to divorce. By doing so, they’ve relaunched a national conversation that would have been nearly unthinkable just a few years ago.

In 1969, California became the first state to allow no-fault divorce, which allows one member of a couple to file for divorce without proving that the other person engaged in wrongdoing such as adultery, abuse or abandonment. No-fault divorce emerged from the women’s rights movement of that era, promising women greater freedom to escape from unhappy or abusive marriages.

But the loss of that freedom suddenly seems more plausible, particularly for those whose confidence in federal protections for women’s rights was shattered after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022. And as state lawmakers ramp up restrictions around birth control, fertility treatments and pregnancy loss, new limits on divorce seem less far-fetched.

“What’s different now is that it’s actually gaining some traction,” said Marcia Zug, a family law professor at the University of South Carolina School of Law whose work focuses on the legal history of marriage. “Simply the idea that we’re talking about it seriously, that it’s part of some Republican party platforms, that it’s not just laughed out of the room.

“Even if we’re not anywhere near eliminating it, that is the major change.”

Earlier this year, for example, an Iowa Senate subcommittee approved a bill that would allow couples to opt out of no-fault divorce when they’re registering for marriage licenses.

“In the last generation, we have seen the chaos of — the circus of — pure no-fault divorce, (and) the ugliness of divorce and the breakdown of marriage,” Iowa state Sen. Jesse Green, a Republican, told his colleagues during a February hearing on his bill, which later died in committee.

“A lot of people are not getting married anymore because maybe, in some cases, they feel the lack of support and accountability with our law,” he said.

Oklahoma bill would end incompatibility as grounds for divorce

In Texas and Nebraska, the official state GOP platforms call for ending or limiting no-fault divorce. Other state Republican parties, such as in Louisiana, have considered similar party planks.

Republican lawmakers in states including South Carolina and South Dakota have filed bills to limit no-fault divorce or make the process harder.

Oklahoma state Sen. Dusty Deevers, a Republican and pastor, filed a bill in 2024 to abolish no-fault divorce, after saying he wanted to see public shaming for those who cause divorce.

At the same time, some prominent social media influencers have been using their platforms to call for streamlining divorce laws.

Hadley Vlahos, a Mississippi registered nurse with 2.2 million followers on TikTok, used her platform this summer to talk about her three-year-long divorce, which included an 11-day trial and hundreds of court filings. She has called for changes to Mississippi’s divorce law, one of only two in the country that doesn’t allow a no-fault divorce if one spouse objects. Her petition to change state law has more than 30,000 signatures.

Jen Hamilton, a nurse and content creator North Carolina who has 7.2 million followers across TikTok and Instagram as well as a bestselling book, called for changes to the divorce laws in her state after separating from her husband.

She recently appeared at a fundraiser with North Carolina state Sen. Woodson Bradley, a Democrat who co-sponsored a bill that would shorten the required separation period before divorce in certain circumstances. That bill remains in committee.

Hamilton’s goal, she told her followers, “is to do everything that I can to get North Carolina law changed to protect women — and some men — from these archaic, paternalistic laws that keep people trapped in marriages that are either unhealthy or dangerous.”

A paradox

Divorce has been declining in the U.S. for more than 40 years.

Four of the five states with the highest divorce rates — Oklahoma, Nevada, Mississippi, Wyoming and Alabama, as of the most recently available data — are Republican led; Nevada has a Republican governor but a Democratic-controlled state legislature.

But state laws aren’t an effective way to raise or lower the number of divorces, said Krista Westrick-Payne, a marriage and divorce researcher and assistant director at the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

“The more significant things that affect whether or not a couple decides to divorce has much more to do with their relationship and their personal situation,” Westrick-Payne said.

Religious areas tend to see higher divorce rates, according to her research. So do areas that are more politically conservative.

“That feels like a paradox,” she said. But those areas generally see more people marrying at younger ages — one of the biggest predictors of divorce.

“So it’s not to say religious people are divorce prone; it’s just they have all these other risk factors, and underlying population dynamics that affect this.

“People like to get on social media and make these overarching statements, flattening a very complex issue,” she said. “And I don’t think that serves anyone very well.”

The most dangerous time

The Iowa proposal to allow couples to opt out of no-fault divorce faced strong opposition from domestic violence advocates, who said such laws especially burden people fleeing domestic violence — who are overwhelmingly women — and can leave them stuck in a dangerous marriage while they try to prove to a court that they’re being abused.

“For someone experiencing domestic violence, leaving is already incredibly complicated, and for a lot of survivors, it is the most dangerous time,” said Lindsay Pingel, director of community engagement at the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence, which represents 25 victim service provider organizations across the state.

Then-California Gov. Ronald Reagan, himself divorced, signed the law that made his state the first to allow no-fault divorce. Prior to that, a person trying to divorce had to prove in court that his or her spouse did something wrong. But such things are difficult to prove in court, and subject to a judge’s interpretation.

“We know that domestic violence doesn’t always come with the kind of documentation that someone who’s never experienced an unhealthy relationship might expect,” Pingel said. “There might not be a police report, or medical records, photographs or witnesses.”

Most survivors of domestic violence don’t talk about it with others until they’ve decided to leave, she said. And many don’t feel safe involving authorities in a situation that could make it more dangerous.

“We have to stop asking why survivors continue to stay in unhealthy relationships when we continue to put barriers in place that prohibit them from leaving.”

Cerina and Justin Fairfax tragedy underscores new Va. laws that could help prevent similar violence

Women who talked to Stateline about their divorces described years-long court battles with convoluted rules, fraught custody arrangements and uneven protections in cases of abuse.

Some states require months- or years-long waiting periods where a couple must be separated before they can file for divorce. At least three states — Arkansas, Arizona and Louisiana — allow so-called “covenant marriage,” a legally binding agreement that comes with additional requirements and is harder to end through divorce. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is from Louisiana, is in a covenant marriage with wife Kelly.

Recently, some states have made it easier for couples to divorce. Maryland, for example, moved to a purely no-fault divorce process in 2023.

Virginia’s new divorce law includes some narrow changes, including an option for speeding up the divorce process. It also created a legislative work group to study whether the state should eliminate fault-based divorce entirely.

And in Missouri, Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe in April signed a new law clarifying that pregnancy can’t prevent a divorce from being finalized.

Pingel, of the Iowa domestic violence coalition, said supporting healthy marriages and protecting vulnerable people from dangerous marriages aren’t competing goals.

“Children benefit from safety and stability,” she said. “and keeping someone legally tied to a person who is causing harm doesn’t necessarily create a healthier family.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

Jalapenos. Frozen berries. Beef. Alfalfa sprouts.

A summer of food recalls, including the record-shattering cyclosporiasis outbreak tied to iceberg lettuce that has sickened thousands, has raised many Americans’ fears of contracting a foodborne illness.

The recalls have focused attention on the Trump administration’s decision to cut funding and staff at several public health agencies, and prompted questions about whether those changes have made consumers more vulnerable.

In fact, this year’s tally of food recalls is roughly in line with the numbers in recent years. About 48 million people each year get sick from a foodborne illness. But experts worry that the scope, severity and scale of outbreaks and their associated food recalls are growing.

While the United States sees some cyclosporiasis cases every year, this year’s outbreak has crushed records: Since May, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has confirmed more than 17,000 cases, with another nearly 12,000 reported cases still under investigation. The outbreak has resulted in at least 922 hospitalizations and two deaths.

Federal officials have blamed this year’s multistate outbreak on processed iceberg lettuce from central Mexico. The lettuce was brought to the U.S. by Taylor Farms, a distributor that supplies foods to thousands of restaurants and grocery stores, including Target, Taco Bell, Whole Foods, Kroger, Walmart, Costco and Jack in the Box.

The CDC and the Food and Drug Administration are investigating at least six other clusters for which a source hasn’t yet been confirmed.

Cuts at the CDC and FDA haven’t necessarily increased consumers’ chances of food contamination or outbreaks, said Jennifer McEntire, a food microbiologist and the founder of a food safety consulting firm. However, McIntire said, “I do think the cuts may have influenced the way outbreaks unfold.”

“I think there are valid questions around the timing of the response, the time it took for agencies to recognize the outbreak and to start to investigate it, get boots on the ground in Mexico,” she said.

Darin Detwiler, a food safety expert and professor emeritus at Northeastern University, noted that the U.S. is seeing more recalls affecting multiple states, rather than a small area. He added that more recalls are being tied to a problem earlier in the food chain — such as contaminated irrigation water at a large lettuce farm rather than, say, improperly stored deli meat at a sandwich shop  — which can spread the pathogen to a far higher number of people and make it harder to track and contain.

“We’re seeing so many people impacted, so many states impacted, and the recalls are dragging on for a long time,” Detwiler. “There’s ambiguity or lack of transparency over who’s even behind a recall.”

The White House dismissed concerns about the federal government’s ability to handle outbreaks.

“The Trump Administration has never cut FDA food inspectors or other frontline personnel for domestic disease response,” White House spokesperson Allison Schuster told Stateline in an email. “President Trump’s top priority is the health and safety of the American people, and the federal government remains capable of robustly addressing any future outbreaks.”

Fewer staff, less funding

Last year, the Trump administration laid off thousands of employees at federal public health agencies including the CDC, which tracks and responds to disease outbreaks, and the FDA, which oversees and regulates food safety.

While some of the layoffs were reversed through lawsuits or by Congress, the nation’s health public agencies remain at diminished capacity. The CDC workforce has been reduced by 28% since December 2024, the month before Trump took office, according to a Stateline analysis of data from the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Employee numbers at the FDA are down 23% during the same period.

Last year, U.S. inspections of foreign food facilities, such as the Mexican farming operation linked to the cyclospora outbreak, plummeted to historic lows following those staffing cuts. The FDA suspended a quality control program for food testing. And the parasite surveillance staff at the CDC, which responds to outbreaks, was downsized last year by the Department of Government Efficiency from 11 people to three.

Sandra Eskin, a food safety expert who worked in the office of food safety at the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Biden administration, likened federal public health cuts to the game Jenga, where players construct a tower of wooden blocks and then remove the blocks one at a time while trying not to make the tower fall.

“I think that’s what we’re seeing,” said Eskin, who now leads a public health nonprofit called Stop Foodborne Illness, which advocates for stronger food safety policies. “Whether it’s cuts in staff, cuts in funding that trickle down to the states, or late responses to outbreaks — these are all pieces of wood in that game where you start pulling them out and then the whole thing collapses.”

The federal government also has delayed requiring companies to comply with new food safety rules, included in a law enacted more than a decade ago, that would help regulators track where food comes from and where it’s going during outbreaks.

Detwiler and other experts say the new rules could have helped speed the government’s sluggish response to the cyclospora outbreak investigation after Taylor Farms initially tried delaying the recall.

Last year, the Trump administration also drastically scaled back FoodNet, an early warning surveillance system that required tracking of infections caused by eight different foodborne pathogens. The federal-state collaboration is now only required to track two pathogens: salmonella and Shiga toxin-producing E.coli. The other six pathogens, including cyclospora, were made optional.

The CDC says the change was made because other surveillance systems monitor those pathogens. But McEntire and other food safety experts want them reinstated on FoodNet.

State impacts

Infectious outbreaks like cyclosporiasis are typically investigated by state and local health departments, which largely rely on federal dollars distributed through the FDA and CDC. Public health has been chronically underfunded for decades under several administrations, experts say.

But the Trump administration since last year has terminated $5.78 billion in CDC grants — funds that were appropriated by Congress but had not yet been spent.

Michigan, at the center of the cyclosporiasis outbreak with the highest number of cases and clusters, is one of 23 states (plus the District of Columbia) that successfully sued the Trump administration in June 2025 over federal funding cuts.

Changes to federal funding last year affected public health infrastructure across Michigan, a representative from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services told Stateline. During the cyclosporiasis  outbreak, the state used its own resources to bolster local responses.

“While we are able to support this investigation on a local level, sustained investment in public health capacity is essential to ensuring Michigan can respond effectively to future regional and statewide public health threats,” said department spokesperson Lynn Sutfin.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org

New state oversight laws are pumping the brakes on private equity’s push into healthcare, according to new data.

The number of private equity-involved healthcare deals has declined since last year, and the value of those deals in the first half of 2026 is lower than it was for the same time in 2025, according to a new report from Pitchbook, a company that tracks private capital markets and investment data.

The report’s authors say that a slew of new state laws is one reason why.

At least 25 states have proposed or passed laws increasing oversight of healthcare transactions in recent years, restricting the power of companies that are not run by physicians to control medical practices, or limiting how private equity and other companies can operate.

California, Oregon and Rhode Island each had new laws or regulations take effect this year that require more documentation and transparency on mergers, acquisitions and other deals among healthcare companies.

“[P]rivate equity and increasing market consolidation drive up the cost of care, further inhibiting patient access,” Rhode Island Attorney General Peter Neronha, a Democrat, said in a January statement announcing his state’s new regulation.

Neronha said the new oversight will give his office “a bird’s eye view to ensure that future medical group mergers do not harm Rhode Islanders’ access to health care services.”

New state laws and regulations have made the purchase of healthcare companies and other similar financial transactions take longer and cost more, PitchBook analysts found. And rolling up smaller companies into larger conglomerates — a consolidation strategy that private equity has relied on in myriad industries, including healthcare — is harder to do under tighter state scrutiny.

The healthcare sector hit hardest by the new private equity rules is physician practice management, or companies that perform administrative tasks such as patient scheduling and billing. Deals in that corner of healthcare, the sector in which private equity has the largest role, are on track to decline by half this year, compared with 2025.

Last year, at least seven states (California, Indiana, Massachusetts, Maine, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington) enacted laws that built guardrails around private equity’s involvement in healthcare.

Some states have targeted private equity in specific areas of healthcare: Earlier this year, Connecticut passed what may be the strongest law in the country to address accountability and transparency for private equity-owned nursing homes.

Lawmakers in Hawaii, Indiana, New York, Pennsylvania, Vermont and Virginia all proposed bills this year that would add oversight of healthcare transactions or limit how private equity is allowed to operate.

In the past decade, private equity investors have spent $1 trillion acquiring healthcare companies.

This increased state oversight has followed mounting public outrage over hospital closures, nursing home crises, patient abuse and neglect, and other failures that regulators have tied to private equity’s involvement in healthcare.

Proponents of private equity say its investments fill critical gaps in the U.S. health care system, providing much-needed capital to help hospitals and physicians upgrade technology and streamline their processes.

But research has found few positive effects. One large 2023 study found that private equity involvement increased the nursing home death rate by 11%. Other studies have linked private equity involvement to increases in emergency room visits and rising Medicare costs. A 2022 Moody’s Investors Service report found that almost 90% of financially stressed health care companies are owned by private equity.

States have stepped in to regulate, even as congressional investigations have not yielded new federal laws.

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org

Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, on Wednesday agreed to pay 47 states, the District of Columbia, and a handful of U.S. territories, up to $17.1 billion in penalties over claims that its social media platforms are addictive and a danger to children.

As part of the settlement, Meta also pledged to make changes to Instagram and Facebook that are designed to reduce young people’s use of the platforms.

“Meta intentionally exploited kids for profit and then lied about it, claiming its products were safe when its own internal research confirmed the platforms were addictive and harmful,” said Washington, D.C. Attorney General Brian Schwalb, a Democrat, in a statement announcing the settlement.

“The physical, mental and emotional harms that intentionally addictive social media inflict on youth — and particularly teenage girls — are widespread across the tech industry, and this successful, coordinated multistage litigation has resulted in Meta being the first platform to come to the table and agree to such comprehensive reforms,” he said.

“It will not be the last.”

The settlement ended a high-stakes, landmark case, filed in 2023, in which states said Meta purposely designed its social media platforms with addictive features, that Meta knew it was exposing children to serious mental harms, and that it intentionally misled the public about the safety of those platforms.

Meta has not admitted wrongdoing.

The federal trial began last week in Oakland, California, led by a bipartisan group of attorneys general from California, Colorado, Kentucky and New Jersey.

State officials are calling the settlement the biggest consumer protection win since the Big Tobacco settlements of the 1990s.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, a Republican, said in a statement Wednesday that the lawsuit was “never just about the money.”

“Kids deserve a childhood that isn’t measured in likes and followers,” he said. “The online protections delivered by this settlement will bring a generational change that will make social media platforms safer for Kentucky families.”

In addition to the financial settlement, Meta agreed to make major changes to its Instagram and Facebook features for young users, including a daily time limit, automatic pauses, nighttime blocks that restrict access from midnight to 6 a.m., and stronger safeguards against bullying and harmful content. Most of the updates must be in place for at least a decade.

Meta is trying to drag its competitors along with it. The company agreed to further restrict daily time limits for teens only if TikTok and YouTube agree to adopt comparable measures.

Under the settlement terms, Meta will pay out just 70% (about $12.7 billion) to states unless TikTok and Alphabet-owned YouTube also agree to set one-hour daily time limits for young users, as well as night mode and age assurance measures.

Meta will pay the remaining 30% — $5.3 billion — if the other two companies agree to the new measures and each agrees to pay states about $5.3 billion.

C.J. Mahoney, chief legal officer at Meta, said in a statement that the changes needed to be made across the social media landscape to have an impact.

“Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us,” Mahoney said.

“Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industry-wide solution.”

Settlement money will be paid out to the participating states and territories annually over a decade, based on their populations.

Just three states, Florida, New Mexico and Texas, aren’t part of the settlement. New Mexico won its own lawsuit against Meta earlier this year, when a jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million in damages for violating the state’s consumer protection laws. Texas negotiated its own settlement with Meta that includes a $1 billion payout and a promise of more safety features for children.

While state officials lauded the changes coming to Instagram and Facebook as wins for child safety, some free speech advocates expressed concern over broader implications of the new restrictions.

Kate Ruane, director of the Free Expression Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology, a civil rights organization said in a statement that safe and age-appropriate online experiences for children are critical.

“But we also see the potential for significant risks to everyone’s privacy and free expression rights online, especially in the ways this settlement will subject all users to invasive age assurance and limit all kids’ access to content and services regardless of their individual needs,” Ruane said.

Meta and other social media platforms still face thousands of ongoing lawsuits from individuals and school districts across the nation that accuse them of targeting young users with addictive algorithms and inadequate safety measures.

One of those is a lawsuit against Instagram filed by South Carolina state Rep. Brandon Guffey, whose 17-year-old son Gavin died by suicide in 2022. His family said they later learned he was a victim of sexual extortion after being targeted by a scammer on Instagram.

“Scammers put immense pressure and sometimes even a countdown on these teens,” Guffey said in an emailed statement after the settlement announcement. “Gavin didn’t deserve to have less than two hours before he took his life. He deserved to have a parent that was aware of this.”

Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.

In the summer of 2023, a third of the fire engines owned by the fire department in Kansas City, Kansas, were unusable. Five of 15 pumper trucks were out of commission, and the department was waiting on parts from the manufacturer.

So Kansas City fire officials went on a nationwide hunt for trucks. But their frantic search turned up just four they could buy immediately, and the vehicles were designed for smaller, more rural departments.

Their experience was not unusual: Municipalities and fire departments in every state are struggling with soaring prices and years-long delivery times for trucks. It’s a crisis many cities and departments lay squarely at the feet of the country’s biggest fire apparatus manufacturers.

“There must come a day of reckoning when the manufacturers of our most important tools are held accountable for runaway pricing and extended delivery times,” Dennis Rubin, the chief of the Kansas City Fire Department, told U.S. senators last fall at hearing convened to investigate price increases and delivery delays on fire trucks.

Kansas City is one of more than 60 cities, counties and fire departments across the nation — from Milwaukee to San Diego, Pittsburgh to Tampa — that say the country’s three biggest fire truck manufacturers have conspired to suppress competition, resulting in skyrocketing prices for fire trucks and repair parts, and yearslong manufacturing delays.

In April, a federal court rolled up their claims into a trio of antitrust class action lawsuits in a Wisconsin district court.

The defendants are fire apparatus manufacturers REV Group Inc., Oshkosh Corporation and Rosenbauer Group, along with some of their subsidiaries and related companies, as well as their trade group, the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association.

Des Moines sues fire truck companies, alleging ‘parasitic’ pricing, anti-trust violations

By some estimates, the three manufacturers together control 70-80% of the U.S. fire truck market. Fire engine prices have nearly doubled since 2020, from about $589,000 to over $1 million, according to the International Association of Fire Fighters.

Fire departments also are reporting extended wait times for new fire trucks. In 2024, officials with the Seattle Fire Department noted it took more than four years to replace a ladder truck — a process that had previously taken just a year.

And some departments are accusing manufacturers of charging them “floating prices” that increase soon before a truck is ready to be delivered. The president of a volunteer fire department in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, said his department paid a 50% deposit on a fire truck and the supplier later said it could no longer deliver at that price, leading to the department paying an additional $110,000, reported the Pennsylvania Capital-Star.

“By hiking prices for trucks and replacement parts without competition, the defendants have made it harder for the city of Pittsburgh and other municipalities across the country to make the required investments in lifesaving services and put the burden back on our communities,” Pittsburgh Mayor Corey O’Connor said in a July statement announcing its antitrust lawsuit. A city representative declined to comment further.

The plaintiffs in the suit assert that manufacturers worked together to throttle the production of fire trucks nationwide and minimize competition to increase prices. Many cities and fire departments also allege the Fire Apparatus Manufacturers’ Association — the industry’s primary trade group — helped the manufacturers coordinate price increases and limit production by passing secret or proprietary data between them.

Dan Meyer, vice president of sales at Pierce Manufacturing, a subsidiary of Oshkosh, has said his company has worked to expand its manufacturing capabilities and hired more workers. REV Group did not respond to Stateline’s request for comment.

Some states, too, have recently jumped into the fray.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican, launched an investigation in February into potential anticompetitive conduct of the same three manufacturers, after hearing complaints from Texas cities and their fire departments. His office said it had already uncovered “multiple potentially unlawful price hikes” involving Texas fire departments.

California has also filed an antitrust suit, asserting that REV Group and its former private equity owner, American Industrial Partners, created monopolies in fire truck markets. In Pennsylvania, state Rep. Jennifer O’Mara, a Democrat, held a hearing in her district in March, proposing future legislation to address the issue.

And Congress is getting involved. In July, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat, and U.S. Sen. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, along with Democratic Rep. Becca Balint of Vermont and Republican Rep. Ben Cline of Virginia, filed a resolution directing the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the consolidation in the fire truck manufacturing industry.

The resolution comes on the heels of a 2025 Senate investigation, launched by Warren and Banks, into the effects of private equity rollups in the fire truck manufacturing industry.

At local, state and even federal levels, there’s a bipartisan appetite for antitrust enforcement, said Basel Musharbash, an attorney who represents some of the cities involved in the class action suit, including Little Rock, Kansas City and Las Vegas.

“You can look at any number of industries that supply things to municipalities and you’ll see the same dynamic,” he said, pointing to consolidation in the ambulance industry, public works and public transit buses.

“Across the economy, there’s no shortage of industries where we’re seeing decision-making and control being concentrated in the hands of a few executives at a few companies, and that’s just inconsistent with American’s views about freedom and markets and democracy.”

Attracting investors

Last fall, the Garden City Fire Department in rural Garden City, Kansas, had been waiting nearly two years for the two new fire trucks it had ordered for one of its fire stations. The department serves all of Finney County, an agricultural area in the southwest part of the state.

Without the new trucks, the department was moving trucks around from its other stations to try to fill the void, and using three aging backup vehicles — the oldest was built in 1989; the newest in 2006 — that had a host of repair issues and few or no safety features.

Pa. fire companies feel the pinch as private equity buys up truck manufacturers 

Fire truck manufacturers rely on cities, counties and other local and state governments to purchase their products — and that steady flow of public funding has proven attractive to investors.

A decade ago, private equity firm American Industrial Partners began buying fire truck manufacturers around the country, eventually rolling them up into one conglomerate called the REV Group. As it consolidated smaller companies, it also shut down some of its manufacturing plants even as fire truck orders climbed after federal pandemic assistance dollars flowed to state and local governments, said Musharbash.

REV Group may control as much as 40% of the market now, he said, with Oshkosh subsidiary Pierce Manufacturing controlling around 25-30% and Rosenbauer a smaller piece.

In 2024, REV Group’s private equity fund owner, American Industrial Partners, divested from its fire truck conglomerate, and the other companies are publicly traded. But they’ve boosted profits through private equity-like tactics, he said.

For example, Los Angeles County and other municipalities say that Oshkosh, a publicly traded company, boosts its profits partly by requiring customers of Pierce Manufacturing to purchase only Pierce proprietary parts, despite cheaper prices available from competitors.

Draining public dollars

In Providence, Rhode Island, city officials purchased three pumper trucks in 2021 from Oshkosh subsidiary Pierce Manufacturing for $449,159 per truck. In 2024, when the city bought five more, the cost had jumped more than 63% to $734,320, officials said in court filings. Those trucks won’t be delivered until next year.

Fire chiefs, industry watchers and local officials hope the FTC will commission a study to dig into the industry to better understand why smaller manufacturers are having a hard time entering the industry.

“In an industry like fire trucks, where you’ve seen skyrocketing prices, backlogs, deteriorating quality over a period of more than half a decade, we should be seeing a large number of new manufacturers cropping up,” Musharbash said. “We should see smaller manufacturers expanding, and yet that’s not happening.”

Musharbash said cities and local lawmakers should reexamine how they purchase fire trucks, ambulances, city transit buses and other equipment manufactured by big corporations.

“There are these rackets in these industries that local governments depend on, and they’re draining dollars out of municipal budgets and state budgets. It’s a huge waste of public funds.”

This story has been updated to include arguments from the court filing the defendants submitted on Tuesday. Stateline reporter Anna Claire Vollers can be reached at avollers@stateline.org.