FOIAengine: How the Project 2025 Personnel Database Gets Built
As the presidential election nears, we’ve been tracking the opposition-research strategies of both major parties. Last week, we examined recent Freedom of Information Act requests from the Democratic National Committee. This week, we’re flipping the script to take a closer look at the conservative Heritage Foundation and its affiliates that have bombarded federal agencies with thousands of FOIA requests.
The recent Heritage Foundation requests are significant because they represent a new and more aggressive FOIA stratagem, vigorously pursued in some cases by new players. The requests we’ve been watching and tracking can be found in PoliScio Analytics’ competitive-intelligence database FOIAengine, which tracks FOIA requests in as close to real-time as their availability allows.
But the signals are also being picked up elsewhere. In a lengthy exposé published last week, Pro Publica implied that some FOIA requests by the Heritage Foundation were made in order to target federal civil servants for firing in a second Trump term.
According to the Pro Publica story, “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.”
A Heritage spokesman told Pro Publica that Heritage’s FOIA-driven database of civil-servant emails is “more about what the bureaucrats are doing, not who the bureaucrats are.”
Even so, Heritage’s Project 2025 official website – titled “Building for Conservative Victory Through Policy, Personnel, and Training” – calls the initiative “a historic movement, brought together by over 100 respected organizations from across the conservative movement, to take down the Deep State and return the government to the people.” Project 2025 includes a policy guide for the next Trump administration and a LinkedIn-style database of personnel who could serve. Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, while Democrats have sought to tie him to it.
Heritage is one of a number of conservative FOIA requesters, including some newcomers, seeking to vacuum up government records. Offshoots of the foundation, including its Oversight Project and the Daily Signal news site, also are frequent requesters.
Heritage, which reported revenue of $106 million and assets of $388 million in 2022 (the most recent year available), says its mission is to “formulate and promote public policies based on the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, traditional American values, and a strong national defense. . . . But unlike so many other organizations in Washington, the Heritage Foundation’s focus isn’t on putting more power into the hands of government – it’s on returning power to the people.”
Heritage’s Oversight Project says it uses FOIA and other means “to make government more transparent to the public and to allow Congress to use its oversight authorities with maximum effectiveness. The requests and analysis of information are informed by Heritage’s deep policy expertise.” Heritage’s news site, the Daily Signal, bills itself as “an alternative to the establishment press” serving “a massive audience of conservatives and independent-minded Americans.”
The Daily Signal, with more than 700 recent FOIA requests listed in FOIAengine, was spun off as a separate affiliate last June. Although the Daily Signal now calls itself an independent media organization, scores of recent FOIA requests from the Daily Signal bear the names of requesters who are working elsewhere within Heritage. For example, all 56 of the FOIA requests logged in August by the FTC from the Daily Signal named Colin Aamot as the requester. Aamot describes himself as “an investigative columnist” for the Signal as well an investigator for Heritage’s Oversight Project. His biography says he “previously served as a psychological operations planner with the Army’s Special Operations Command.”
Because of variations in how agencies track and log FOIA data, not all requests bear an organization’s name. Still, if an individual’s name is listed, it is often possible to associate the person with an affiliated organization – and that is the case with Heritage. We’ll break down highlights below.
Heritage or one of its offshoots is listed as the FOIA filer in thousands of FOIA requests. Agencies targeted include the Food and Drug Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Board, the Federal Reserve Board, and the Treasury and Transportation departments. Requests seeking the calendars, organization charts, and emails of career civil servants seem calculated to feed into Project 2025’s personnel database.
Heritage’s FOIA requests run the gamut, from the very specific to the most general. For example, a Heritage request to the Department of Transportation sought “records from Secretary Peter Paul Montgomery ‘Pete’ Buttigieg regarding his actions prior to the Baltimore Bridge Collapse, specifically, the Secretary’s calendar, and his sent emails from March 18, 2024 through March 26, 2024.” At the other end of the spectrum, Heritage sought, from the FDA, “information regarding organizational charts for every year of the listed office or any version of it” – a request in support of the Project 2025 personnel database.
A raft of August 19 requests from the Dailly Signal to the FDA focused on another hot-button conservative issue, seeking “all communications mentioning ‘Biden’ and ’25th’ or ‘Parkinson’s’ OR ‘dementia’.” Similarly, on June 17, the FDA logged 46 FOIA requests from the Daily Signal, each naming a different FDA consultant or advisor, for “all emails mentioning ‘Biden’ and ‘health’ or ‘age’ or ‘mental’ or ‘physical’ or ‘drugs’ or ‘stairs’ or ‘dementia’ or ‘Alzheimer’s’ or ‘Alzheimers’ or ‘Parkinsons’ or ‘poop’ or ‘defecate’ within ten words of each other.”
Among the Daily Signal’s requests logged by the FDA on September 3 were 20 styled as opposition research on its possible foes within the agency. The requests, identical except for the names of the agency officials targeted, sought “all communications mentioning ‘Project 2025’ or ‘P2025’ or ‘Mandate for Leadership’ or ‘Heritage Foundation’.” (“Mandate for Leadership” is the name of Project 2025’s overall blueprint for a future Republican administration.)
Mike Howell, the executive director of Project Oversight, boasted to Pro Publica that his group had filed more than 50,000 public records requests over the past two years. Project Oversight, he said, is “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”
FOIAengine access now is available for all professional members of Investigative Reporters and Editors, a non-profit organization dedicated to improving the quality of journalism. IRE is the world’s oldest and largest association of investigative journalists. Following the federal government’s shutdown of FOIAonline.gov last year, FOIAengine is the only source for the most comprehensive, fully searchable archive of FOIA requests across dozens of federal departments and agencies. FOIAengine has more robust functionality and searching capabilities, and standardizes data from different agencies to make it easier to work with. PoliScio Analytics is proud to be partnering with IRE to provide this valuable content to investigative reporters worldwide.
To see all the requests mentioned in this article, log in or sign up to become a FOIAengine user.
Next: Hedge fund requests to the SEC and FDA.
John A. Jenkins, co-creator of FOIAengine, is a Washington journalist and publisher whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, GQ, and elsewhere. He is a four-time recipient of the American Bar Association’s Gavel Award Certificate of Merit for his legal reporting and analysis. His most recent book is The Partisan: The Life of William Rehnquist. Jenkins founded Law Street Media in 2013. Prior to that, he was President of CQ Press, the textbook and reference publishing enterprise of Congressional Quarterly. FOIAengine is a product of PoliScio Analytics (PoliScio.com), a new venture specializing in U.S. political and governmental research, co-founded by Jenkins and Washington lawyer Randy Miller. Learn more about FOIAengine here. To review FOIA requests mentioned in this article, subscribe to FOIAengine.
Write to John A. Jenkins at JAJ@PoliScio.com.