FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Tim Whitehouse (240) 247-0299 twhitehouse@peer.org
Feds Should Stifle Heritage Foundation Witch Hunt
Right-Wing Group’s Fleet of FOIAs Seeks Employee Personal Information
Washington, DC — The same right-wing organization that produced the widely condemned Project 2025 has a new consternation-inducing initiative, filing an armada of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests seeking federal employees’ sexual orientation and feelings on issues such as climate change and diversity. These requests are an abuse of the FOIA process, according to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), an organization with decades of in-depth FOIA experience, and should be flatly rejected by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), as well as nearly a score of other targeted federal departments.
The Heritage Foundation Oversight Project has submitted at least 2,000 FOIA requests to some 20 agencies ranging from EPA to the Centers for Disease Control, to the Departments of State and Defense. These requests seek employee emails and other communications where the terms “climate change,” “diversity, equity or inclusion,” as well as “SOGIE,” an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression, and even “poop” are mentioned. The requests also seek detailed information from employee calendars.
Federal agencies are required by law to process FOIA requests. PEER urges federal agencies to use the discretion the law allows to charge the Heritage Foundation in advance for the costs of conducting these searches. FOIA allows waiver of these fees when the release of the requested information would be “in the public interest” for which the Heritage barrage would not qualify.
The sheer volume of the Heritage onslaught is flooding agency FOIA offices and interfering with normal operations. This is particularly problematic for agencies such as the Department of Homeland Security, which is trying to cope with disaster relief and other emergency needs.
“Taxpayers should not subsidize even indirectly the costs of this misguided attempt at abetting a political purge,” stated Tim Whitehouse, PEER’s executive director, noting these requests fail the criteria for what is required for a public interest fee waiver. “Heritage should post a bond with each agency for the estimated costs of these searches before they even begin to process these requests.”
In addition, much of the information about individual employees is exempt from FOIA under a provision that allows agencies to withhold any information constituting “a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.” The sexual orientation of civil servants, for example, is invasive and not counterbalanced by any identified public interest served by disclosing this information.
“The very material Heritage wants to glean as fodder for compiling an enemies list, such as individual names, is exempt from FOIA,” added Whitehouse, pointing out that PEER makes robust use of FOIA. “The director of every agency targeted by Heritage should assure their workforces that their core expectations of privacy will be vigorously upheld.”
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Look at the scope of the Heritage FOIA dump
