The New Yorker staff writer Jon Lee Anderson and the contributor Andy Kroll have been named 2025 winners of Polk Awards, among the highest honors in journalism. Anderson received the Sydney Schanberg Prize for his reporting on decades of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where regional and global actors have fuelled one of the world’s most vicious entrenched conflicts. Kroll, a reporter at ProPublica, was recognized for a profile of Russell Vought, an architect of Project 2025 who has used his latest role, as the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, to hobble government agencies, decimate the federal workforce, and expand President Trump’s powers in ways that challenge the Constitution.
Anderson, who has written for The New Yorker since 1998, travelled twice to Congo, and to neighboring Rwanda, in order to report his article. As many as six million soldiers and civilians have been killed during Congo’s thirty-year conflict—by violence, displacement, disease, and famine—and yet the fighting “seldom makes the international news,” Anderson notes. The article combines deep historical context with up-to-the-minute developments, taking in the legacies of colonialism and slavery while also explicating contemporary factors in the bloodshed, including ethnic rivalries, international competition over resources, and diplomatic maneuvers by the Trump Administration. To give voice to Congolese citizens, Anderson spoke with figures ranging from rebel leaders to medical personnel, from a regional king to an elderly woman tending subsistence crops in a cemetery. Anderson’s reporting vividly refutes Trump’s claim to have “stopped” the conflict, while also showing the risks and the potential significance of an eventual resolution. “Many of the people I talked with in Congo wished fervently for a new way of life but seemed barely able to conceive of one,” Anderson observes.
Kroll received the Polk Award for political reporting, for a comprehensive and often alarming portrait of Vought, one of the most significant figures behind Trump’s dismantling of federal agencies and consolidation of Presidential power. The profile, co-published with ProPublica, charts Vought’s unlikely rise from backstage technocrat to the highest levels of influence within Trump’s orbit. Regarded by opponents and allies alike as “a master of the arcane rules that can get legislation passed,” Vought has wielded his expertise to bring about sweeping changes that eluded Trump in his first term, altering the country’s legal landscape and transforming the relationship between American citizens and their government.
The Polk Awards, which will be handed out at a ceremony on April 10th, preserve the memory of George Polk, a CBS journalist who was killed in 1948 as he reported on a civil war in Greece. James Baldwin won the first Polk to recognize a piece in The New Yorker, for “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” The magazine’s writers and editors have now received a total of thirty Polk Awards.
