Go to the website of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) and click over to the page where you can find individual contributions to political candidates and committees. Then set the filter for all contributions made by individuals who listed the U.S. Department of Justice as their employer during 2023-2024.
Next, set a filter for all contributions made to any entity whose name includes "Harris." That search produces 500 DOJ employees who contributed to one of several campaign entities working to elect Democrat Kamala Harris to be President of the United States. These campaign contributions average $233 and total $111,301.
Now do the same search but this time do it for all contributions to "Trump" campaign entities. 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 times as many DOJ employees who identify themselves as such prefer to see Harris in the Oval Office than Donald Trump. It is important to note here that these figures cannot reflect the whole picture of how all of DOJ's 114,000 employees favor either candidate because including the donor's employer is voluntary.
The data also does not include any of the DOJ employees who gave money to partisan outfits such as Act Blue and WINRED, which act as conduits for campaign contributions, respectively, to Democrats and Republicans. Neither does it include contributions to party committees such as the Democratic National Committee or the Republican National Committee.
But maybe DOJ employees aren't representative of the entire 2.1 million federal career employee workforce, so let's head over to contributions by the 787,000 civilians working for the Department of Defense (DOD).
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 times as many employees gave to Harris as did to Trump.
Why is this significant? Because just as they are now explicitly demanding the power to censor every American's freedom of speech, a campaign is gathering strength in the Elite Left Establishment to deny Americans with non-left or anti-left political views access to the foundational law providing transparency — and thus accountability — in government.
That law is the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), approved on a bipartisan basis by Congress in 1966 and signed into law by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1966. 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.
The FOIA guarantees to every citizen the right to see all federal government documents that are not subject to reasonable exemptions such as national security, commercial trade secrets, and law enforcement.
This law is also the lifeblood of American journalism. Journalists have filed millions of FOIA requests over the years, with a result that thousands of critically important news stories that would not otherwise have been known are reported.
These include stories from media across the political spectrum about every President since LBJ, such as the fact the FBI was secretly surveilling radical left-wing groups opposed to President Ronald Reagan, details about the water torture methods used during the George W. Bush administration, the legal justification cited in defense of President Barack Obama's use of drones to kill U.S. citizens connected to radical terrorist groups, and the fact DOJ officials lied to the surveillance court in order to obtain search warrants against individuals associated with President Donald Trump.
But earlier this week, ProPublica (PP), a non-profit left-wing advocacy group that uses journalism to advance its values and perspectives published a thinly veiled case for denying the conservative Heritage Foundation's access to the FOIA. Here's the PP lead:
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.
Read on and PP tells readers that what these Heritage investigators are up to is probing for evidence of federal workers whose political views indicate they would oppose policies and programs favored by Trump if he is elected to a second four-year term.
Here's the key element in the backstory to this newest emerging censorship effort on the Left, which PP did not even mention until the 17th paragraph: Late in his first term, Trump's Director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought recommended that his boss sign an executive order to begin knocking down the all-but-impenetrable wall of protection making it all but impossible to terminate incompetent and insubordinate career bureaucrats.
That executive order is known as "Schedule F" and, because there was too little time to give it effect, the effort was not a significant factor as Trump's term ended. But the Left widely fears and the Right intensely hopes for the return of Schedule F.
That's because, as everybody in American politics knows and as is illustrated by those FEC contribution numbers above, the career civil service very much favors more government, as would be expected of people on the government payroll. The Left has been building Big Government for decades and will accelerate the process in a Harris-Waltz administration.
The Right knows this bias too well, and until Schedule F it was all but impossible to do anything about Left-wing career bureaucrats opposing policies and programs endorsed by voters when they elect conservative presidents and legislators.
Schedule F offers the Right a dim ray of hope of redressing the balance back toward a career civil service that administers government according to the will of the people rather than the will of Left-wing special interests.
The reality that the FOIA offers the Right a tool for identifying bureaucratic obstacles to the implementation of a conservative mandate endorsed by voters has clearly scared the Devil out of folks on the Left.
Thus, the campaign to discredit the Heritage effort using the FOIA to lay the groundwork for removing bureaucratic obstacles to a conservative electorate's policy mandates to federal officials.
Evidence of the intensity of that fear is found in a quote from an anonymous bureaucrat who tells PP Heritage is overwhelming federal agencies with a blizzard of FOIA requests:
Indeed, a government worker who processes FOIAs for a federal agency told ProPublica that the volume of requests from Heritage interfered with their ability to do their job. "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.
Having spent years on a government payroll myself prior to becoming a journalist and filing my own share of FOIA requests through the years, federal bureaucrats are never in a hurry to process them and backlogs are common across the government.
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 last decade looking at data from 2013 up through 2022, and we found that backlogs government wide have nearly doubled to a little bit over 200,000 at the end of fiscal year 2022. This reflects a long term trend, a persistent challenge for federal agencies.
Among the several factors in addition to the government's chronic FOIA backlogs that PP neglected to tell its readers is the fact the law provides federal officials the authority to not waste time on nonsense requests.
By way of full disclosure, I should tell readers that I spent six great years working at Heritage, from November 1999 to April 2006. In addition to creating and running the Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) Boot Camps that taught hundreds of Washington journalists how to do data-driven reporting, I devoted myself to educating anybody who would listen to the importance of the FOIA to ensuring transparency and accountability in government.
That devotion included testifying betore Senate and House committees on FOIA issues, speaking at conferences of folks across the ideological spectrum from San Francisco to Washington, D.C. on the topic, and being named to the 2006 class of inductees ot the National Freedom of Information Hall of Fame.
Am I proud of these things? You bet I am. And I am just as devoted as ever to doing my part to ensure that every American citizen, regardless of their political views, benefits from the transparency and accountability in government made possible by laws like the FOIA.
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