There are thousands of 501(C)(3) and (C)(4) non-profit educational foundations that have tremendous influence on public policy, but very few of them can match the radical clout potentially represented by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF).
Back in May 2024, AAF President Thomas Jones announced a program that raised eyebrows — and fears, worries, panic attacks — in many corners of the federal bureaucracy. The program is called "Project Sovereignty 2025" and the purpose is to expose at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal departments and agencies:
... the architects and advocates of the Biden administration’s disastrous open-borders policies. AAF will be highlighting those in the federal bureaucracy who, although their faces don’t appear on TV, and most Americans have never even heard their names, are responsible for the current crisis.
Shining a light on these individuals is vitally important, as, if allowed to remain in their positions operating in the shadows, they can be expected to obstruct any future president’s effort to fix the problem and secure the border.
In a brilliant illustration of the familiar maxim of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis that "sunlight is the best disinfectant," AAF shortly thereafter published extensive details about the professional and political associations, connections and affiliations of 10 government employees at DHS identified as defenders of the outgoing administration's border and immigration policies.
More recently, AAF extended the Project Sovereignty 2025 efforts to include uncovering 19 "dossiers" of "America's Most Subversive Education Bureaucrats." Among the 19, for example, is Brad Middleton, a senior adviser who is paid $163,333 annually.
The average annual salary for all federal workers is now $101,000+.
Prior to his appointment at the Department of Education (DoED), Middleton had a long history working for and advising Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who, according to Forbes, was among a list of Senate Democrats who proposed a plan in 2020 "to provide full debt cancellation for defrauded student borrowers in the next coronavirus relief package."
Thus, it should come as no surprise that Middleton would go from the Senate side of Congress to working to advance President Joe Biden's repeated efforts throughout his four years in the Oval Office to forgive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loans and transfer those debts to taxpayers.
Middleton also posted on his Facebook page an infamous graphic of Donald Trump and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin locked in a full mouth kiss on the occasion of one of the former's two impeachments during his first term as president. Reasonable people can disagree on the propriety of a government employee posting such a graphic, even as they agree that the First Amendment protects such expression.
Something else included by AAF in its reports are samples of the political campaign contributions of the government employees put under the non-profit's spotlight. Such information has long been publicly available through the Federal Election Commission (FEC).
But AAF is the first non-profit to point out the link between political campaign contributions and the political programs and policies advocated by government workers. The importance of this link is explained by Open Source, another superb organization that has been exposing the role of money in politics for decades:
"Only a tiny fraction (0.97 percent) of Americans actually give campaign contributions to political candidates, parties or PACs. The ones who give contributions large enough to be itemized (over $200) is even smaller. The impact of those donations, however, is huge."
That federal employees can make partisan political contributions may come as a shock to many Americans who think the Hatch Act makes partisan activities by civil servants illegal. The reality is that the Hatch Act does bar partisan activities on government property during official duty time, but it doesn't prevent civil servants from participating in and supporting partisan campaigns on their own time.
The DoED workforce provides a useful illustration of the political campaign contributions of a hugely significant part of the federal bureaucracy. The department is the smallest of the cabinet-level agencies with only 4,400 employees.
Even so, according to FEC individual contribution data, 2,708 contributions with a total value of $547,690 were made by DoED employees to the Harris for President and Harris Victory Fund. By contrast, the Donald Trump campaign received seven contributions from individuals identifying their employer as DoED, worth a total of $2,210.
The WINRED political action committee (PAC) that backs Republicans received 28 contributions from such individuals, with a total value $10,414. The ActBlue PAC that supports Democrats got 2,600 contributions with a total value of $480,944.
The same data pattern with some slight variances favoring either party is seen across the sprawling federal bureaucracy. The data also points to the huge significance of the fact that nearly half of the federal managers working in the national capital region recently told RMG Research they will actively oppose the Trump agenda in their official capacities.
As I previously explained here on PJ Media, the 2.3 million employees of the career federal civil service are supposed to keep their political opinions entirely apart from their official job performance, regardless of whether they support or oppose any particular presidential policy.
Something else the data may suggest is this: The Hatch Act has since 1939 limited the political activities of federal workers. If it's ok to require feds to keep their political views absolutely away from official work, maybe it's time the Hatch Act should be amended to require feds to keep their wallets away, too.
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