Reposted from the FOIA-L listserv.
Note the full report is found at this link: www.llrx.com/...
The Heritage Foundation's Reckless Misuse of FOIA to Target Individuals
The Heritage Foundation’s current public records campaign is an abuse of the FOIA process. In recent years, the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project and its publishing spinoff, The Daily Signal, have filed an unprecedented and overwhelming number of FOIA requests – 65,000 according to Reuters and more than 50,000 according to ProPublica. Esquire magazine described the volume of requests as “spamming the federal government”.
According to the articles, the goal of the requests is to scrutinize government employees’ communications, to identify (for example, individuals using keywords or phrases such as “climate change”, “reduction in force” or DEI) and potentially remove civil servants perceived as obstructive to Donald Trump’s agenda, in preparation for a potential Trump administration.
FOIA is a crucial tool for ensuring government transparency and accountability, but the volume, nature, and scope of these requests raise significant concerns. Numerous public interest and advocacy groups such as American Oversight, POGO, CREW, TRAC, PEER, the Center for Biological Diversity, Democracy Forward Foundation, Judicial Watch, and the American Center for Law and Justice, and countless news organizations, regularly file FOIA requests to report on matters of public importance.
However, the Heritage Foundation’s requests, taken en masse, are designed instead to target individual people; and not just specific individuals they could argue they need information on, but categories of people who are not yet known to them. In other words, this has all the attributes of a witch hunt. It’s appalling, it’s irresponsible, and it seems nothing less than an abuse of the FOIA process.
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What the Reuters and ProPublica pieces omitted was the exact nature of the Heritage FOIA requests. It is necessary to see the requests in order to be able to put them into context.
[In the longer version at the link] are examples of requests submitted by Colin Aamot of The Daily Signal, and Mike Howell and Roman Jankowski of the Heritage Foundation’s Oversight Project.
These requests have been submitted to nearly every federal agency and every agency component, with 744 requests to the Department of Interior alone, another 192 requests to NASA, and on and on, often seeking similar records from dozens of named staff members and political appointees within each agency....
Michael Ravnitzky
mikerav@verizon.net
