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 #Project2025 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.
https://www.propublica.org/article/have-government-employees-mentioned-climate-change-voting-or-gender-identity-the-heritage-foundation-wants-to-know