Former President DONALD TRUMP speaks at a campaign rally inside the Mosack Group manufacturing warehouse in Mint Hill, North Carolina on September 25, 2024.Melissa Melvin-Rodriguez/The Charlotte Observer/ZUMA

This story was published first by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for ProPublica’s Big Story newsletter to receive our biggest stories as soon as they are published.

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.

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.

An analysis of more than 2,000 public-records requests submitted by Aamot, Howell and Jankowski to more than two dozen federal offices and agencies, including the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Trade Commission, shows an intense focus on hot-button phrases used by individual government workers.

Those 2,000 requests are just the tip of the iceberg, Howell told ProPublica in an interview. Howell, the executive director of the Oversight Project, estimated that his group had submitted more than 50,000 information requests over the past two years. He described the project as “the most prestigious international investigative operation in the world.”

Among 744 requests that Aamot, Jankowski and Howell submitted to the Department of the Interior over the past year are 161 that seek........

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