Heritage Foundation staff are inundating federal agencies with thousands of requests for information

Three Heritage Foundation investigators have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, seeking a wide variety of information about government employees, including communications that conservatives see as political responsibility. Among the documents sought are lists of agency staff and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate justice,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” which stands for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression abbreviation.

The Heritage team made the requests even as the think tank’s Project 2025 announced a controversial plan to strip tens of thousands of public officials of their job protections in order to identify and fire them if Donald Trump wins the presidency.

All three men who submitted the application – Mike Howell, Colin Aamot and Roman Jankowski – a The supervision project of the Heritage Foundationan offshoot of the conservative group that uses FOIA, lawsuits, and undercover videos to investigate government activities. In recent months, the group has used information gleaned from the requests to raise awareness of the Defense Intelligence and Security Agency’s efforts to train personnel on gender diversity. It was featured on Fox News as “the Biden administration’s ‘woke’ policy within the Department of Defense. Heritage also used material gathered through FOIA research to allege that the Justice Department’s hearing with voting rights activists was an attempt to “rigg” the presidential election because no Republicans were present.

An analysis of more than 2,000 public records requests filed by Aamot, Howell, and Jankowski with more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on the hot–used by individual government workers. key expressions.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell said in an interview with ProPublica. Howell, executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group has filed more than 50,000 requests for information in the past two years. He called the project “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Of the 744 requests Aamot, Jankowski and Howell submitted to the Interior Department last year, 161 sought emails and text messages from public officials, as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams messages that contained the term “climate change”; “DEI” or Diversity, Equity and Inclusion; and “GOTV”, short for get out the vote. Many of these FOIAs request messages from individual employees by name.

Trump has made clear his intention to overhaul the Interior Department, which protects the nation’s natural resources, including hundreds of millions of acres of land. It was prepared by the department under President Joe Biden climate change management priority.

Hundreds of requests sought government employees’ communications with civil rights and voting rights groups, including the ACLU; the Indian Rights Foundation; Rock the Vote; and Fair Count, an organization founded by Democratic politician and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Still other FOIAs sought notices that mention “Trump” and “reductions,” a term that refers to layoffs.

Several inquiries, including those sent to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focus on personnel. Some ask for “any employee who has held a political appointee position at the agency since January 20, 2021, the first day of the Biden administration. Others target career employees. Still other FOIAs seek agency “hierarchy charts.”

“Whether this is part of an effort to intimidate government employees or whether they will ultimately be fired and replaced with people who will be loyal to a leader they prefer,” Noah Bookbinder of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics or CREW’s President and CEO said about FOIA.

Asked if the project collected the documents to help fire government workers, Howell said, “Our job is to figure out who the decision makers are.” He added that his group is not just focused on identifying individual career employees. “It’s more about what the bureaucrats do than who the bureaucrats are,” he said.

Howell said he was speaking on behalf of himself and the Oversight Project. Aamot asked for questions in writing, but did not respond again. Jankowski did not respond to a request for comment.

Bookbinder also pointed out that inundating agencies with requests could hinder government operations. “It’s OK to make FOIA requests,” said Bookbinder, who acknowledged that CREW has made some requests. “But if you deliberately overload the system, it can cause a slower response to FOIAs … and screw up other government functions.”

In fact, a government employee who processes FOIAs for a federal agency told ProPublica that the volume of requests from Heritage is getting in the way of their work. “Sometimes they come in at the rate of one per second,” said the worker, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The worker said they now spend a third of their work time processing Heritage’s requests, including those seeking communications that mention the terms “Biden” and “mental” or “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” or “poop” or “poop.” .

“They are taking time away from FOIA requesters who have legitimate requests,” the worker said. “We have to search people’s accounts for poop.” It’s not a thing. I can’t imagine a real reporter making such a request.”

Asked about the comment, Howell said: “I’m paying them, so do their damn job and hand over the documents. It’s not their job to decide what they think is worthy, you know, to release or not.” He added that “we are better journalists in every way than The New York Times.”

The 2025 project, led by Heritage, has become politically toxic — with Trump rejecting the effort and Kamala Harris trying to tie her opponent to the plan — in part because it proposed identifying and firing 50,000 government employees deemed “non-performing.” ” a future Trump administration. Trump attempted to do so at the end of his first term, issuing an executive order known as “Schedule F” that would have allowed his administration to reassign thousands of public employees, making it easier to fire and replace them. Biden then retracted it.

Project 2025’s 887-page draft policy recommends that the next conservative president reissue the “Schedule F” executive order. This would mean that a future Trump administration could replace tens of thousands of government employees with new staff of its choosing.

To fill the vacancies, as ProPublica reported, Project 2025 also recruited, screened and trained future government employees for a Republican administration. In a training video obtained by ProPublica, former Trump White House official Dan Huff says future administration staff should prepare for drastic policy changes when they join the administration.

“If you don’t help make a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it will hurt your future employment prospects, then you’re also socially damaging—I get it, I get it,” says Huff. “This is a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us a favor and sit this one out.

Howell, head of the Oversight Project and one of the FOIA whistleblowers, is a featured speaker in a Project 2025 training video in which he and two other veteran government investigators discuss different forms of government surveillance, such as FOIA requests, Insp. investigations and congressional probes. Another speaker in the video, Tom Jones of the American Accountability Foundation, advises would-be government employees in the conservative administration on how to avoid receiving sensitive or embarrassing emails under the FOIA — a strategy the Oversight Project is currently investigating. applies. the Biden administration.

“If you have to solve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, buttonhole a guy and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?'” Discuss the decision, says Jones.

“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the cafeteria, having a cup of coffee, talking it over and making a decision, rather than emailing him and starting a thread that’s Accountable.US or something.” from those other groups he will return and seek.”

The registration requests are far-reaching, aimed at the “full calendar export” of hundreds of government employees. One FOIA filed by Aamot sought Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s entire browsing history, “whether exported from Chrome, Safari, Windows Explorer or Mozilla.” The most common of the three suitors, Aamot, to whom online bio described as a former psychological operations planner with the Army’s Special Operations Command, he filed some FOIAs on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and others for the Daily Signal. According to a notice published on the think tank’s website, the publication was spun off from the Heritage Foundation in June, but another page by page is still seeking donations for both the foundation and the Daily Signal.

Through its own public records requests, ProPublica obtained requests from the Department of the Interior, as well as compilations of FOIAs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Health Resources and Services Administration.

Several of the Heritage Foundation’s requests focus on gender, asking for materials that federal agencies have presented to employees or contractors that mention “DEI,” “Transgender,” “Equity” or “Pronouns.” Aamot sent similar requests to the Director’s Office. National Intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget, Americorps, and the Chemical Safety Board, among others. Howell said he believed the group had uncovered evidence that “unpopular and frankly sexually creepy and sexually disturbed ideas are now being translated into government jargon, speech, policies, procedures and guidance documents.”

The Heritage FOIA blitz even requested information about what government employees say about Heritage and its employees, including the three people who filed the thousands of FOIAs. One of the requests, sent to the Interior Department, seeks from the agency’s FOIA director any documents that mention Heritage President Kevin Roberts and the names of Aam, Howell and Jankowski.