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 inv.