The Heritage Foundation Is Spamming the Government With Thousands of FOIAs

The Heritage Foundation, the rightwing think tank behind Project 2025, is spamming the federal government with thousands of Freedom of Information Act Requests, in an apparent effort to identify civil servants that a second Trump administration would deem undesirable, a new report from ProPublica claims.

The information requests were filed on behalf of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project, which its organizers describe as fostering a “government that is responsible and accountable to its citizens.” ProPublica reports that, via an analysis of over 2,000 FOIA requests submitted by members of the Oversight Project, the outlet found that the rightwing think-tank has been barraging agencies like the State Department and the Federal Trade Commission to search for mentions of “hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.” Those topics apparently include phrases like “climate equity,” DEI, and merely “voting.”

One of the men said to be involved in this effort—Mike Howell—is the same guy who recently got in an online spat with a “gay furry hacker,” one of the cyber vigilantes that reportedly hacked the Heritage Foundation in July. (The organization has maintained that it was not hacked.) Notably, Howell is reported to have lambasted the hacker, a self-identified member of the LGTBQ community, as having “turned against nature,” and a “degenerate pervert.” ProPublica now reports that one of the keywords that the FOIA deluge has involved is “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression. Howell is the executive director of the Oversight Project.

Howell told ProPublica that he and his team had “submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years,” apparently calling it “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Such efforts are uniquely worrying given that the Heritage Foundation is also behind the push to re-institute Schedule F, a policy that would eliminate job protections for thousands of federal workers. Trump created Schedule F through executive order in 2020, during the last days of his presidency. Critics say that, if re-instituted, Schedule F would allow a new Trump administration to fire civil servants en masse and replace them with political lackeys. It’s unclear whether this would actually be possible, however. In April, the Office of Personnel Management published new rules and regulations designed to protect a majority of the federal workforce from such an effort. Even conservatives have offered criticism of this idea, claiming it could lead to political chaos.

Project 2025—which has been called a policy “blueprint” for the next Trump administration—has also. Not only has Project 2025 been decried by its most ardent critics as a plan to institute Christian nationalist authoritarianism, but a majority of Americans seem to dislike the policies associated with it. Though Trump has disavowed association with the project, it was drafted by droves of former administration officials and many commentators deem it to be an accurate representation of the policies that would drive his second term.