by Sharon Lerner and Andy Kroll
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Three investigators for the Heritage Foundation have deluged federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests over the past year, requesting a wide range of information on government employees, including communications that could be seen as a political liability by conservatives. Among the documents they’ve sought are lists of agency personnel and messages sent by individual government workers that mention, among other things, “climate equity,” “voting” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.
The Heritage team filed these requests even as the think tank’s Project 2025 was promoting a controversial plan to remove job protections for tens of thousands of career civil servants so they could be identified and fired if Donald Trump wins the presidential election.
All three men who filed the requests — Mike Howell, Colin Aamot and Roman Jankowski — did so on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, an arm 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 call attention to efforts by the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency to teach staff about gender diversity, which Fox News characterized as the “Biden administration’s ‘woke’ policies within the Department of Defense.” Heritage also used material gathered from a FOIA search to claim that a listening session the Justice Department held with voting rights activists constituted an attempt to “rig” the presidential election because no Republicans were present.
An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to 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 hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.
Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”
Among 744 requests that Aamot, Jankowski and Howell submitted to the Department of the Interior over the past year are 161 that seek civil servants’ emails and texts as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams messages that contained terms including “climate change”; “DEI,” or diversity, equity and inclusion; and “GOTV,” an acronym for get out the vote. Many of these FOIAs request the messages of individual employees by name.
Trump has made clear his intentions to overhaul the Department of the Interior, which protects the nation’s natural resources, including hundreds of millions of acres of land. Under President Joe Biden, the department has made tackling climate change a priority.
Hundreds of the requests asked for government employees’ communications with civil rights and voting rights groups, including the ACLU; the Native American Rights Fund; Rock the Vote; and Fair Count, an organization founded by Democratic politician and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Still other FOIAs sought communications that mention “Trump” and “Reduction in Force,” a term that refers to layoffs.
Several requests, including some 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 “all employees who entered into a position at the agency as a Political Appointee since January 20, 2021,” the first day of the Biden administration. Others target career employees. Still other FOIAs seek agencies’ “hierarchy charts.”
“It does ring some alarm bells as to whether this is part of an effort to either intimidate government employees or, ultimately, to fire them and replace them with people who are going to be loyal to a leader that they may prefer,” Noah Bookbinder, president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said of the FOIAs.
Asked whether the project gathered the records to facilitate the firing of government workers, Howell said, “Our work is meant to just figure out who the decision-makers are.” He added that his group isn’t focused on simply identifying particular career employees. “It’s more about what the bureaucrats are doing, not who the bureaucrats are,” he said.
Howell said he was speaking on behalf of himself and the Oversight Project. Aamot requested questions in writing, but did not respond further. Jankowski did not reply to a request for comment.
Bookbinder also pointed out that inundating agencies with requests can interfere with the government’s ability to function. “It’s OK to make FOIA requests,” said Bookbinder, who acknowledged that CREW has also submitted its share of requests. “But if you purposely overwhelm the system, you can both cause slower response to FOIAs … and you can gum up other government functions.”
Indeed, a government worker who processes FOIAs for a federal agency told ProPublica that the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job. “Sometimes they come in at a rate of one a second,” said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. The worker said they now spend a third of their work time processing requests from Heritage, including some that seek communications that mention the terms “Biden” and “mental” or “Alzheimer’s” or “dementia” or “defecate” or “poop.”
“They’re taking time away from FOIA requesters that have legitimate requests,” said the worker. “We have to search people’s accounts for poop. This isn’t a thing. I can’t imagine a real reporter putting in a request like that.”
Asked about the comment, Howell said: “I’m paying them, so they should do their damn job and turn over the documents. Their job is not to decide what they think is worth, you know, releasing or not.” He added that “we’re better journalists by any standard than The New York Times.”
Project 2025, which is led by Heritage, became politically toxic — with Trump disavowing the endeavor and Kamala Harris seeking to tie her opponent to the plan — in part for proposing to identify and fire as many as 50,000 career government employees who are deemed “nonperforming” by a future Trump administration. Trump attempted to do this at the end of his first term, issuing an executive order known as “Schedule F” that would have allowed his administration to reclassify thousands of civil servants, making them easier to fire and replace. Biden then repealed it.
Project 2025’s 887-page policy blueprint proposes that the next conservative president reissue that “Schedule F” executive order. That would mean a future Trump administration would have the ability to replace tens of thousands of career government employees with new staffers of their choosing.
To fill those vacancies, as ProPublica has reported, Project 2025 has also recruited, vetted and trained future government employees for a Republican administration. In one training video obtained by ProPublica, a former Trump White House official named Dan Huff says that future government staffers should prepare to enact drastic policy changes if they join the administration.
“If you’re not on board with helping implement a dramatic course correction because you’re afraid it’ll damage your future employment prospects, it’ll harm you socially — look, I get it,” Huff says. “That’s a real danger. It’s a real thing. But please: Do us all a favor and sit this one out.”
Howell, the head of the Oversight Project and one of the FOIA filers, is a featured speaker in one of Project 2025’s training videos, in which he and two other veteran government investigators discuss different forms of government oversight, such as FOIA requests, inspector general investigations and congressional probes. Another speaker in the video, Tom Jones of the American Accountability Foundation, offers advice to prospective government employees in a conservative administration about how to avoid having sensitive or embarrassing emails obtained under the FOIA law — the very strategy that the Oversight Project is now using with the Biden administration.
“If you need to resolve 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?’ Talk through the decision,” Jones says.
“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going down to the canteen, getting a cup of coffee, talking it through and making the decision, as opposed to sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups is going to come back and seek.”
The records requests are far reaching, seeking “full calendar exports” for hundreds of government employees. One FOIA submitted by Aamot sought the complete browser history for Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, “whether exported from Chrome, Safari, Windows Explorer, Mozilla.” The most frequent of the three requesters, Aamot, whose online bio describes him as a former psychological operations planner with the Army’s Special Operations Command, submitted some FOIAs on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and others for the Daily Signal. The publication spun off from the Heritage Foundation in June, according to an announcement on the think tank’s website, but another page on the site still seeks donations for both the foundation and the Daily Signal.
ProPublica obtained the Department of Interior requests as well as tallies of FOIAs from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Health Resources and Services Administration through its own public records requests.
Several of the Heritage Foundation’s requests focus on gender, asking for materials federal agencies presented to employees or contractors “mentioning ‘DEI’, ‘Transgender’, ‘Equity’, or ‘Pronouns.’” Aamot sent similar requests to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Office of Management and Budget, Americorps and the Chemical Safety Board, among other agencies. Howell said he believes that the group has uncovered evidence that “unpopular and just frankly sexually creepy and sexually disordered ideas are now being translated into government jargon, speak, policies, procedures and guidance documents.”
Heritage’s FOIA blitz has even sought information about what government employees are saying about Heritage and its employees, including the three men filing the thousands of FOIAs. One request sent to the Interior Department asks for any documents to and from the agency’s chief FOIA officer that mention Heritage’s president, Kevin Roberts, as well as the names of Aamot, Howell and Jankowski.
Irena Hwang contributed data analysis. Kirsten Berg contributed research.
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