The Heritage Foundation Is Spamming the Government With Thousands of FOIAs

The Heritage Foundation, the rightwing deliberation vessel down Project 2025, is spamming the national authorities with thousands of Freedom of Information Act Requests, successful an evident effort to place civilian servants that a 2nd Trump medication would deem undesirable, a new report from ProPublica claims.

The accusation requests were filed connected behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which its organizers picture arsenic fostering a “government that is liable and accountable to its citizens.” ProPublica reports that, via an investigation of implicit 2,000 FOIA requests submitted by members of the Oversight Project, the outlet recovered that the rightwing think-tank has been barraging agencies similar the State Department and the Federal Trade Commission to hunt for mentions of “hot-button phrases utilized by idiosyncratic authorities workers.” Those topics seemingly see phrases similar “climate equity,” DEI, and simply “voting.”

One of the men said to beryllium progressive successful this effort—Mike Howell—is the aforesaid feline who precocious got successful an online spat with a “gay furry hacker,” 1 of the cyber vigilantes that reportedly hacked the Heritage Foundation successful July. (The enactment has maintained that it was not hacked.) Notably, Howell is reported to person lambasted the hacker, a self-identified subordinate of the LGTBQ community, arsenic having “turned against nature,” and a “degenerate pervert.” ProPublica present reports that 1 of the keywords that the FOIA deluge has progressive is “SOGIE,” an acronym for intersexual orientation, sex identity, and expression. Howell is the enforcement manager of the Oversight Project.

Howell told ProPublica that helium and his squad had “submitted much than 50,000 accusation requests implicit the past 2 years,” seemingly calling it “the astir prestigious planetary investigative cognition successful the world.”

Such efforts are uniquely worrying fixed that the Heritage Foundation is besides behind the push to re-institute Schedule F, a argumentation that would destruct occupation protections for thousands of national workers. Trump created Schedule F done executive order successful 2020, during the past days of his presidency. Critics accidental that, if re-instituted, Schedule F would let a caller Trump medication to occurrence civilian servants en masse and replace them with governmental lackeys. It’s unclear whether this would really beryllium possible, however. In April, the Office of Personnel Management published caller rules and regulations designed to support a bulk of the national workforce from specified an effort. Even conservatives person offered disapproval of this idea, claiming it could pb to governmental chaos.

Project 2025—which has been called a argumentation “blueprint” for the adjacent Trump administration—has also. Not lone has Project 2025 been decried by its astir ardent critics arsenic a program to institute Christian nationalist authoritarianism, but a bulk of Americans look to dislike the policies associated with it. Though Trump has disavowed relation with the project, it was drafted by droves of erstwhile medication officials and galore commentators deem it to beryllium an close practice of the policies that would thrust his 2nd term.