Peter William Beck Wins 2nd David Burnham Legacy Grant

TRAC Reports, Inc. is delighted to announce the recipient of its second David Burnham Legacy Grant for Investigative Reporting: Peter William Beck. Beck came to investigative journalism through the same conviction that animated David Burnham’s career—that the most honest account of what the federal government is doing lives in the records it generates, not the press releases it issues.

At Court Watch, Beck spends his days inside PACER and CourtListener reading filings almost no one else reads. That work has broken national stories—including the Justice Department’s revival of the Alien Terrorist Removal Court after 30 years of dormancy—and has been the basis for coverage in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, and NBC News, among dozens of other outlets. At Lawfare, where Beck serves as an associate editor, he reports on the Justice Department’s use of novel legal theories and edits data-driven accountability journalism.

Beck will use the $25,000 grant for a project examining the Justice Department’s shutdown of civil rights investigations into local law enforcement and carceral facilities during the second term of the Trump Administration. “I’m incredibly honored and excited to begin work on this project, and I have already begun lining up interviews with potential sources,” Beck stated.

He plans to build the first comprehensive public accounting of the Civil Rights Division’s retreat using Burnham’s method: skeptical, systematic querying of government data, documented so readers can check every claim against primary sources. Supported by this funding—and working alongside his editor Seamus Hughes, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist—Beck will pursue a document-driven investigation that neither of their small newsrooms could otherwise afford.

David Burnham died in October 2024 after a distinguished career as a New York Times investigative reporter covering police corruption in New York City, as well as federal agency performance in Washington regarding nuclear power, taxation, firearms, criminal justice, and immigration. He wrote several acclaimed books, including The Rise of the Computer State, A Law Unto Itself: Power, Politics and the IRS, and Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes, and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice. Burnham co-founded TRAC with Professor Susan B. Long in 1989.