Over the past year, three Heritage Foundation investigators have bombarded federal agencies with thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests, seeking a wide range of information about government employees, including communications that conservatives might view as politically charged. Among the documents they sought were agency personnel lists and messages sent by individual government employees that mentioned, among other things, “climate justice,” “the vote,” or “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.
The Heritage team made the requests even as the Project 2025 think tank pushed a controversial plan to remove job guarantees 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 Heritage Foundation Visible Projecta division of the conservative group that uses the Freedom of Information Act, lawsuits and secret videos to investigate government activities. In recent months, the group has used information gleaned from the requests to highlight efforts by the Defense Department’s Counterintelligence and Security Agency to train personnel on gender diversity, which Fox News is characterized as “the politics of the Biden administration at the Department of Defense woke up.” Heritage also used materials gathered through Freedom of Information Act searches to argue that the Justice Department’s wiretapping of voting rights activists was an attempt to “rigg” the presidential election because Republicans were not present.
An analysis of more than 2,000 public records requests sent by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to more than two dozen federal departments and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows a strong focus on hot-button phrases that are used by individual civil servants.
Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told 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 this project “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”
Among the 744 requests that Aamot, Jankowski and Howell sent to the Interior Department over the past year, 161 requested emails and text messages from government employees, as well as Slack and Microsoft Teams messages that contained terms including “climate change”; “DEI”, or diversity, equity and inclusion; and “GOTV,” short for “get out of the vote.” Many of these Freedom of Information Acts request communications from individual employees by name.
Trump has made clear his intentions to overhaul the Interior Department, which protects the nation’s natural resources, including hundreds of millions of acres of land. Under President Joe Biden, the department did just that combating climate change priority.
Hundreds of requests asked government officials to contact civil rights and voting rights groups, including the ACLU; Indian Rights Foundation; Rock the Vote; and Fair Count, an organization founded by Democratic politician and voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams. Still other Freedom of Information Acts requested messages that mention “Trump” and “Force Reduction,” a term that refers to layoffs.
Several requests, including some directed to the Department of Defense, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, focus on personnel. Some are asking for “all employees who took office at the agency as political appointees beginning January 20, 2021,” the first day of the Biden administration. Others target career employees. Still other Freedom of Information Acts seek agency “hierarchy charts.”
“It’s really troubling as to whether this is part of an effort to either intimidate public servants or ultimately to fire them and replace them with people who will be loyal to the leader they prefer,” Noah Bookbinder. , president and CEO of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, said about the Freedom of Information Act.
When asked if the project collected records to facilitate the firing of public employees, Howell said: “Our work is only to find out who is making the decisions.” He added that his group is not focused on simply identifying specific career employees. “It’s more about what bureaucrats do than who they are,” he said.
Howell said he was speaking on behalf of himself and the Oversight Project. Aamot requested the questions in writing, but did not respond further. Jankowski did not respond to a request for comment.
The binder also noted that inundating agencies with requests could hinder the functioning of the government. “Filing freedom of information requests is fine,” said Bookbinder, who acknowledged that CREW has also filed its share of requests. “But if you deliberately overload the system, you can cause a slower response to the Freedom of Information Act … and you can screw up other government functions.”
Indeed, a government official who handles FOIA for a federal agency told ProPublica that the volume of requests from Heritage is hampering their ability to do their job. “Sometimes they come at a rate of one per second,” said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous because they are not authorized to speak to the press. The worker said they now spend a third of their business hours processing requests from Heritage, including some looking for posts that mention the terms “Biden” and “mental,” or “Alzheimer’s disease,” or “dementia,” or “defecation”, or “poop”.
“They’re taking away the time of Freedom of Information Act requesters who have legitimate requests,” the worker said. “We have to search people’s account for poo. It’s not a thing. I can’t imagine a real reporter making that kind of request.”
When asked for comment, Howell said: “I’m paying them, so they have to do their damn job and turn over the documents. It’s not their job to decide what they think is worth, you know, releasing or not.” He added that “we are better journalists by any measure than The New York Times.”
Project 2025, run by Heritage, has become politically toxic, with Trump rejecting the initiative and Kamala Harris seeking to tie her opponent to the plan, in part because of the proposal identify and fire up to 50,000 career civil servants which the incoming Trump administration deems “dysfunctional.” Trump attempted to do so late in his first term by issuing an executive order known as “Report F,” which would have allowed his administration to reclassify thousands of government employees, making it easier to fire and replace them. Then Biden canceled it.
Project 2025’s 887-page policy plan proposes that the next conservative president reissue the “Schedule F” executive order. This would mean that the incoming Trump administration would be able to replace tens of thousands of career civil servants with new hires of its choosing.
To fill those jobs, ProPublica reports, Project 2025 also recruited, screened and trained future civil servants for the Republican administration. In one training video obtained by ProPublicaformer Trump White House official Dan Huff says future government employees should prepare to implement sweeping policy changes when they join the administration.
“If you don’t engage in a major course correction because you’re afraid it’s going to hurt your future employment, it’s going to hurt you socially — look, I get it,” Hough says. “This is a real danger. This is a real thing. But please: do us all a favor and sit down this time.”
Howell, head of the Oversight Project and a Freedom of Information Act signatory, appears in one of Project 2025’s training videos, in which he and two other veteran government investigators discuss various forms of government surveillance, such as Freedom of Information Act requests, inspector general investigations and congressional investigations. Another speaker in the video, Tom Jones of the American Foundation for Accountability, offers advice to future public servants in a conservative administration on how to avoid confidential or embarrassing emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act — the same strategy now used by the Oversight Project with the Biden administration.
“If you need to solve something, if you can do it, it’s probably better to walk down the hall, zip a guy up and say, ‘Hey, what are we going to do here?’ Discuss the solution,” Jones says.
“You’re probably better off,” Jones says, “going to the cafeteria, having a cup of coffee, talking it out and making a decision, rather than sending him an email and creating a thread that Accountable.US or one of those other groups will come back and look for.” .
The records requests are very broad, requiring a “full calendar export” for hundreds of government employees. One Freedom of Information Act filing by Aamot demanded Home Secretary Deb Haaland’s full browser history “exported from Chrome, Safari, Windows Explorer, Mozilla.” The most common of the three queries, Aamoth, whose online biography describes him as a former psychological operations planner with the Army’s Special Operations Command who provided some FOIAs on behalf of the Heritage Foundation and others to the Daily Signal. The publication split from the Heritage Foundation in June, according to a statement on the think tank’s website, but other page on the website is still seeking donations for both the foundation and the Daily Signal.
ProPublica obtained requests from the Department of the Interior, as well as Freedom of Information information 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 that federal agencies provide to employees or contractors “that mention ‘DEI,’ ‘Transgender,’ ‘Action,’ or ‘Pronouns.’ Aamot sent similar requests to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Management and Budget, the US Corps and the Chemical Safety Board, among other agencies. Howell said he believes the group has found evidence that “unpopular and just plain sexually horrific and sexually disordered ideas are now being translated into government jargon, conversation, policies, procedures and guidelines.”
The Heritage FOIA blitz even sought information about what government officials are saying about Heritage and its employees, including three people who filed thousands of FOIAs. One request, sent to the Interior Department, seeks any documents from the agency’s chief freedom of information officer that mention Heritage President Kevin Roberts, as well as the names Aamot, Howell and Jankowski.
Irena Hwang contributed data analysis. Kirsten Berg contributed to the study.
