Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has repeatedly claimed he "removed lead from Detroit's elementary schools" as the city's health director, but FOIA documents, court filings, and expert assessments show the lead problem persisted long after he left.
El-Sayed's campaign website states flatly that he "removed lead from Detroit's elementary schools." His fundraising pitches carry the same line. But a Washington Free Beacon investigation published July 29, 2026, drawing on legal filings, city records, and documents obtained through public-records requests, found that the lead was never removed, and that El-Sayed's own book acknowledged as much years before he started making the claim on the campaign trail.
El-Sayed, 40, launched his Senate bid in April 2025 to replace retiring Democratic Sen. Gary Peters. He has won the endorsement of Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and he has campaigned alongside left-wing influencer Hasan Piker, who has said Israel brought October 7 on itself and that "hamas is a thousand times better" than Israel. El-Sayed leads the Democratic primary field, which has unsettled establishment Democrats who worry his progressive profile could cost the party the seat in November.
Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan tapped El-Sayed, then 30 years old and fresh from medical school at Columbia, to run the city's health department in 2015. The Flint water crisis, roughly 65 miles north, was reaching its peak, and concerns about lead in school drinking water were spreading across Michigan.
In early 2016, El-Sayed's department sent letters to local schools offering reimbursement if they tested their water for lead. An April 2016 Detroit Public Schools financial plan credited Mayor Duggan with suggesting the voluntary program. Schools tested just two water fountains and one food-prep sink per building, a limited scope that would later prove inadequate.
By April 2016, 19 of 62 tested schools showed elevated lead or copper levels. Additional testing over the summer pushed the total to 24 schools. The district shut off drinking water in the affected buildings and brought in bottled water. It then hired DiHydro Services to apply a silicate treatment to pipes in 10 of the hardest-hit schools.
That treatment did not remove lead. Thang Ngu, DiHydro's chief operating officer, told the Free Beacon the silicate process is "basically a mitigation process. It doesn't remove the lead." Marc Edwards, a Virginia Tech professor and nationally recognized expert in water treatment and corrosion, went further. He said the silicate method "is not backed by much proven research, and might not have improved things at all compared to normal Detroit corrosion control. There is some suggestion it can sometimes even make things worse."
El-Sayed signed the mitigation plan for John R. King Academic and Performing Arts Academy, a large K-8 school in Detroit, on August 30, 2016. Within days, the school's water fountains were erroneously turned back on for about a week. A teacher called the health department and was told the fountains should not have been reactivated. A state administrative law judge later found that the school district had unlawfully threatened teachers with discipline if they complained to outside agencies about the water.
El-Sayed's record of exaggerating his record and shifting his public positions did not begin with the lead claim. Adrian Hemond, CEO of Grassroots Midwest, a Michigan-based bipartisan consultancy, put it bluntly:
"El-Sayed has a track record of playing fast and loose with his professional and political history. While not unusual for candidates seeking public office, it is exactly the sort of spin and exaggeration that voters claim to detest."
El-Sayed left the health department in February 2017 to run for governor. That same month, Detroit Public Schools publicly declared that all water metal levels were back below EPA thresholds. The district appeared to have turned the page.
It hadn't. Testing conducted in March 2017, just weeks after the all-clear, found that 9 of the 10 schools that had received the silicate treatment still had elevated lead levels. Only John R. King showed no elevated metals. Jennifer L. Jennings, a Princeton professor who reviewed the data, told the Free Beacon the March 2017 reports showed "between 6 percent and 100 percent of the water fixtures at these schools had elevated lead levels."
Jennings also flagged a familiar pattern among city officials eager to move on from a public health scare:
"The dynamic among city officials to declare an all-clear quickly, often by taking individual fixtures out of rotation, is certainly one I've seen before."
Bruce Lanphear, a professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University, said the lead levels were "excessive, by any measure." He described the health consequences in stark terms: "Students and teachers at these schools were being exposed to unacceptably high levels that would increase the risk for decrements and IQ scores, increases in ADHD-like behaviors, and in teachers, the risk of preterm birth."
Yet a July 2017 Detroit News article quoted district officials saying that March testing showed the water was safe to drink across the district, a claim directly contradicted by the test results themselves.
El-Sayed lost the 2018 Democratic gubernatorial primary to Gretchen Whitmer by more than 20 points. Meanwhile, the lead problem he later claimed to have solved was getting worse. In spring 2018, the district launched a more thorough testing campaign that checked all fountains and sinks, not just two fountains and one sink per building. The results were grim: 57 of 86 schools showed elevated lead or copper. At least 8 of the original 19 schools flagged during El-Sayed's tenure were among them.
The school superintendent shut off water in all 106 district schools at the start of the 2018, 2019 school year. Students and staff relied on bottled water and water coolers. Edwards, the Virginia Tech expert, connected the dots: "It seems that whatever lead removal or treatment that occurred before 2018 did not fix the underlying problem, since hydration stations were required district wide."
By the first half of 2019, the number of schools with elevated lead or copper had risen to 72. The district used $3 million in philanthropic donations to install more than 500 filtered water-fountain and bottle-fill stations, described in October 2018 school board minutes as the "permanent solution." That installation reached critical mass by the fall 2019 semester.
El-Sayed, who has positioned himself as a working-class champion despite top-one-percent income, was not part of any of this. He left the health department two and a half years before the filtered stations went in.
In his 2020 book, Healing Politics, El-Sayed wrote that "most of these mitigation efforts were temporary." He noted that "in 2018 another round of testing found that many schools had tested positive once again, a reminder that the work always continues." He described 19 schools that "tested positive for lead" and wrote that "in the end, we were able to get every single school to comply with our protocol." Compliance with a testing protocol is not the same as removing lead.
On an August 2021 episode of his podcast America Dissected, El-Sayed described his role more modestly, saying he had partnered with Michigan's American Federation of Teachers chapter "to make sure that kids had their schools tested for lead in the water." The Free Beacon reviewed 247 official podcast transcripts spanning September 2019 to November 2025. The shift from "tested" to "removed" appears to have begun only after El-Sayed launched his Senate campaign in April 2025.
Roughly a year into the campaign, El-Sayed softened the claim at a rally, saying he got schools "on a pathway to being lead-free." That is a long way from "removed lead from Detroit's elementary schools."
The lead claim is not El-Sayed's only credibility problem. The Washington Examiner reported that El-Sayed has publicly identified himself as a physician despite holding no medical license in Michigan or New York. State licensing records in both states show no record of El-Sayed ever holding a physician's license. Michigan law prohibits individuals from representing themselves as licensed physicians without a valid license. El-Sayed once described his only direct patient-care experience as a four-week sub-internship near the end of medical school, joking he was "the worst doctor on the team" and likening it to "cosplaying a doctor."
He also claimed to have delivered "tens of thousands of glasses" to children through a program during his tenure. Bridge Michigan reported the more accurate figure was approximately 16,000. His progressive PACs spent nearly half their cash on consultants and only a small fraction on candidates and ballot initiatives, the Detroit News reported.
El-Sayed spent only about four years total working at government agencies. After his failed 2018 gubernatorial bid, he spent roughly four years as a political commentator, podcaster, and public speaker, picking up visiting-academic fellowships along the way. He joined the Wayne County health department, which handles public health outside Detroit proper, in December 2022 and left in April 2025 to run for Senate. His campaign website says he "has dedicated his entire career to building government agencies that actually work for Michiganders."
El-Sayed has also called for abolishing ICE and staked out positions well to the left of most Michigan voters, raising electability concerns even within his own party.
The primary race has become a proxy fight between the Democratic Party's progressive and establishment wings. El-Sayed leads the Democratic field at 28 percent, with Rep. Haley Stevens at 18 percent and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow at 17 percent, according to Newsmax polling from late May. Thirty-eight percent of Democratic respondents remained undecided roughly 10 weeks before the August 4 primary.
More recent polling from Fox News showed Stevens leading El-Sayed 48 to 41 percent among likely Democratic primary voters about three weeks before the vote, with Stevens holding a 46-point advantage among Black voters. AIPAC-aligned United Democracy Project has spent nearly $15 million supporting Stevens and opposing El-Sayed. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and party leaders view Stevens as more electable, worried El-Sayed would jeopardize the seat in a state Trump carried by just over one percentage point.
Republican Mike Rogers, endorsed by Trump, holds a slim edge over all three Democratic challengers in general-election matchups, though every pairing falls within the margin of error. CNN reported that Rogers suggested on a private call in June that he was better positioned to beat El-Sayed than the other Democrats.
Neither El-Sayed's campaign nor Detroit Mayor Duggan's office responded to the Free Beacon's request for comment. The questions about El-Sayed's financial backers and personal credibility have only multiplied as the primary approaches.
Voters who value honesty in their candidates now have a clear test case. El-Sayed wrote in his own book that the mitigation efforts were temporary and that schools tested positive again. Then he launched a Senate campaign and told Michigan he fixed the problem. If a candidate will inflate a public health record involving children and lead-contaminated water, there is no claim too small to embellish, and no voter who should take the next one at face value.
