Visit over to the FEC’s website to get specific contributions to political candidates and commissions. Next set the sensor for all efforts made by individuals who named the U.S. Department of Justice as their company between the years 2023 and 2024.
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Second, set a screen for all efforts to any organization whose name includes” Harris” in its title. 500 DOJ people are identified in that search as contributing to one of the numerous plan organizations attempting to nominate Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris as president of the United States. These campaign contributions regular$ 233 and complete$ 111, 301.
Do the same search again, but this time it will apply to all donations to” Trump” plan organizations. This search identifies 35 DOJ employees who contributed an average of$ 529 each to the former chief executive’s 2024 campaign, with a collective total of$ 18, 530.
In other words, 14 days as some DOJ people who identify as like prefer Harris to Donald Trump in the Oval Office. These numbers cannot accurately represent how all of DOJ’s 114, 000 employees support either applicant because including the patient’s firm is deliberate.
The information also does not include any of the DOJ people who gave money to political clothing such as Act Blue and WINRED, which act as conduits for promotion efforts, both, to Democrats and Republicans. Efforts to group boards like the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee are not included in the list.
Let’s move on to contributions made by the 787, 000 civilian employees who work for the Department of Defense ( DOD ) because DOJ employees are n’t representative of the entire 2.1 million federal career workforce.
Here’s what we find at DOD: A total of 284 employees contributed a total of$ 36, 668 to Trump, at an average of$ 130 each. By comparison, 1, 158 DOD workers wrote checks to Harris, at an average of$ 127 each. In other words, at DOD, four days as some people gave to Harris as did to Trump.
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Why is this major? A plan is growing in the Elite Left Establishment to refuse Americans with non-left or anti-left social views exposure to the fundamental law that guarantees transparency in government just as they are then directly demanding the power to censor every American’s right to speech.
The Freedom of Information Act ( FOIA ), which was approved by Congress on a bipartisan basis in 1966 and signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1966, is what it is now. Rep. John Moss (D-Calif. ) is known as the” Father of the FOIA” and then-Rep. Donald Rumsfeld (R-Ill. ) was a chief co-sponsor.
Every citizen is given the right to access all provincial government records, including those that are not subject to sensible exceptions like national security, corporate trade secrets, and law enforcement, under the FOIA.
This regulation is also the heart of British media. Over the years, journalists have reported thousands of thoroughly significant news reports that would not otherwise have been known due to millions of FOIA requests.
These include information from media outlets from all political parties about every president since LBJ, such as the revelation that the FBI was secretly monitoring radical left-wing organizations opposed to President Ronald Reagan, revelations about the legal justifications used to defend President Barack Obama’s use of drones to destroy Americans connected to radical criminal organizations, and DOJ officials ‘ omission from the monitoring court in order to get search warrants for individuals connected to President Donald Trump.
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However, ProPublica ( PP ), a non-profit left-wing advocacy group that uses journalism to advance its values and perspectives, published a thinly veiled argument earlier this week to deny the conservative Heritage Foundation’s request for access to the FOIA. How’s the PP result:
Over the past year, three Heritage Foundation authorities have flooded governmental agencies with requests for thousands of Freedom of Information Act requests, including those that conservatives might consider to be politically reprehensible. Among the papers they’ve sought are names of agency workers and emails sent by individual state workers that notice, among other things,” weather equity”, “voting”, or” SOGIE”, an acronym for sexual orientation, gender identity and expression.
Read on, and PP informs readers that what these History investigators are doing is looking into allegations that federal employees have political views that would reject Trump’s policies and programs if he is elected for a minute four-year term.
The key component of the story to this most recent emerging censorship work on the left, which PP did not even mention until the 17th article: Later in his first name, Trump’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget ( OMB) recommended that his supervisor sign an executive order to begin destroying the all-but impossible walls of protection that made it all but impossible to fire incompetent and insubordinate job officials.
Because there was too little time to implement it, the effort was not a significant factor as Trump’s term came to an end. That executive order is known as” Schedule F.” However, there are widespread fears from the Left and high hopes from the Right for Schedule F to return.
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That’s because, as everyone in American politics knows, and as evidenced by those FEC contribution numbers above, the career civil service very much favors more government, as would be expected from those working for the government. The Left has long supported Big Government, and Harris-Waltz’s administration will make things happen sooner.
The Right is well aware of this bias, and prior to Schedule F, it was all but impossible to stop Left-wing career bureaucrats from opposing policies and initiatives when electing conservative presidents and legislators.
Schedule F offers the Right a luke hope of returning the balance to a career civil service that runs government according to the people’s will rather than the interests of Left-wing special interests.
The fact that the FOIA reportedly teaches the Right how to identify bureaucratic obstacles to the passage of a conservative mandate has clearly scared the Left.
Thus, the Heritage campaign uses the FOIA to lay the groundwork for removing bureaucratic barriers to a conservative electorate’s policy mandates to federal officials.
An anonymous bureaucrat quotes an anonymous bureaucrat who claims PP Heritage is overburdened with a blizzard of FOIA requests, providing proof of the intensity of that fear.
Indeed, a government official who handles FOIA requests for a federal agency claimed that the volume of requests for them made it difficult to perform their duties. ” Sometimes they come in at a rate of one a second”, said the worker, who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press…” They’re taking time away from FOIA requesters that have legitimate requests”, said the worker.
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Federal bureaucrats are never in a rush to process them, and backlogs are common across the government because I spent years on the payroll of the government before I became a journalist and filed my own share of FOIA requests over the years.
As Jay McTigue, Director of Strategic Issues for the Government Accountability Office ( GAO ) told , the Federal News Network earlier this year:
We looked back over the past ten years, looking at data from 2013 through 2022, and discovered that government backlogs had almost doubled to a little over 200, 000 at the end of fiscal year 2022. This reflects a long term trend, a persistent challenge for federal agencies.
The fact that the law gives federal officials the authority to not waste time on nonsense requests is one of the many things PP neglected to mention in addition to the government’s chronic FOIA backlogs that PP neglected to mention to its readers.
By way of full disclosure, I should tell readers that I spent six great years working at Heritage, from November 1999 to April 2006. I devoted myself to teaching anyone who would listen the importance of the FOIA to ensuring transparency and accountability in government, in addition to running the Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting ( CARR ) Boot Camps that taught hundreds of Washington journalists how to do data-driven reporting.
Among those who spoke at conferences across the ideological spectrum from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. about the subject, as well as being named to the 2006 class of inductees ot the National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame, were those who testified against the Senate and House committees on FOIA issues.
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Am I proud of these things? You bet I am. And I’m just as determined as ever to contribute to making sure that every American citizen, regardless of their political beliefs, benefits from the accountability and transparency that laws like the FOIA provide.