Revealed: how a shadowy group of far-right donors is funding federal employee watchlists
Project
2025 architects are among those behind the American Accountability
Foundation and their blacklists targeting people of color
A rightwing non-profit group that has published a “DEI Watch List”
identifying federal employees allegedly “driving radical Diversity,
Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives” is bankrolled by wealthy family
foundations and rightwing groups whose origins are often cloaked in a
web of financial arrangements that obscure the original donors.
One
recent list created by the American Accountability Foundation (AAF)
includes the names of mostly Black people with roles in government
health alleged to have some ties to diversity initiatives. Another
targets education department employees, and another calls out the “most
subversive immigration bureaucrats”.
The lists come amid turmoil in the US government as Donald Trump’s incoming administration, aided by Elon Musk,
the world’s richest man, has sought to fire huge swathes of the federal
government and purge it of DEI and other initiatives – such as tackling
climate change – that Trump has dubbed “woke”.
While
the publication of the personal details of government workers – whom
the website describes as “targets” – has reportedly “terrified” many in
federal departments, the Guardian has discovered that some current and
former employees of AAF have taken pains to conceal their affiliations
with the group on LinkedIn and other public websites.
One of the donors to the AAF is the Heritage Foundation, the architects of Project 2025, which has been a driving ideological force behind Trump’s re-election and first weeks in government.
Heidi Beirich,
the chief strategy officer of the Global Project Against Hate and
Extremism (GPAHE), said: “It’s not surprising to find a vile project
such as this backed by Project 2025 entities and far-right donors who
have it out for public employees.”
Disclosure
documents show that the AAF has been closely involved in training
Republican staffers in collaboration with the affiliated Conservative
Partnership Institute, in sessions that promise to train rightwing
operatives in skills including “open source research” and “working with
outside groups”.
Funding fear
Significant sums come to AAF via “dark money” donor-advised funds, which obscure the original benefactors by design.
In
the most recent filings for large donor-advised funds, AAF received
$25,000 via the Goldman Sachs Charitable Fund; $16,750 via the National
Christian Charitable Fund; and $22,300 via the Fidelity Investments
Charitable Gift Fund.
But other donors are
named private foundations, some of which also donated to affiliated
organizations including the Conservative Partnership Institute (CPI).
In
2022, for example, the Dunn Foundation gifted $250,000 to CPI and
$25,000 to AAF. In 2023, the same foundation gave AAF another $25,000
and upped its CPI donation to $2.5m.
In 2023,
the WL Amos Sr Foundation handed $10,000 to AAF, $55,000 to
CPI-affiliated American Moment, and $300,000 to CPI, along with another
$200,000 to Project 2025’s architects at the Heritage Foundation.
The
Guardian emailed Foundation Source, listed as the administrator of the
Dunn Foundation in filings, and William Amos III, who is listed as
president of the WL Amos Sr Foundation, to ask about their donations and
whether they approved of AAF’s style of political advocacy.
The
Guardian also emailed others listed as officers or trustees of other
family foundations that have made substantial donations to AAF,
including Tina Kimbrough, executive director of the Nord Family
Foundation; and Hallie McFetridge, a trustee of the Quinn Family
Foundation.
Only Quinn’s McFetridge responded,
saying: “As we are a family foundation, different members of the family
are able to make gifts as their conscious dictates. Another member of
our family made this particular donation.”
She
added that she would pass the Guardian’s questions on to that person but
that “I can assure you I would find this absolutely intolerable. I
strongly disagree with this approach to political advocacy.”
Other heavyweight conservative groups have pitched in for AAF.
AAF was one of two organizations to receive direct grants in 2023 from the Club for Growth Foundation. That foundation is co-located and affiliated with
a family of non-profits and political committees including Club for
Growth Action and Club For Growth PAC, which channel money to
conservative causes and candidates from billionaire mega-donors Jeff
Yass, Richard Uihlein and their affiliates.
According
to tax filings, in 2023 AAF also received $50,000 from The 85 Fund,
which is one among a network of organizations funded by Leonard Leo, the
conservative mega-donor and Federalist Society mastermind.
Although 2024 filings for AAF are not yet available, last June the organization reportedly
also received $100,000 from Heritage for a project whose “goal is to
post 100 names of government workers to a website this summer to show a
potential new administration who might be standing in the way of a
second-term Trump agenda”.
‘Incubated’ by the Conservative Partnership Institute
The
most crucial support for AAF, however, has come from the organization
that birthed it: the CPI, which continues to have a profound influence
on the Trump administration and the Republican party as a whole via its own activities and those of its flotilla of spin-off groups.
AAF was founded
in 2021 to “take a big handful of sand and throw it in the gears of the
Biden administration”, as Tom Jones, the organization’s head, told Fox
News at the time.
In 2021 and 2022, however,
CPI’s filings indicate that it was the “directly controlling entity” for
the “related tax-exempt organization” AAF, and that CPI funded AAF to
the tune of $335,100 in 2021 and $210,000 in 2022.
This was the period in which a well-heeled CPI was incubating a “network
of closely affiliated think tanks, legal groups, and training centers
dedicated to the thorough makeover of the federal government”, according
to the Nation.
That network included America
First Legal (AFL), the Center for Renewing America (CRA), the Electoral
Integrity Project (EIP) and American Moment, along with AAF.
All
of these groups were on the advisory board for Project 2025, and most
have placed personnel at the highest levels of the new Trump
administration.
AFL’s Stephen Miller is Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy; CRA’s Russell Vought is poised to be confirmed as head of the office of management and budget; and in a little-reported move, Trump placed American Moment’s founder, Saurabh Sharma, as special assistant in the presidential personnel office.
Moulding Maga minds
The Guardian reported last year
that CPI had been cementing ties between the far right and the GOP by
means of training events for Hill staffers and their bosses in Congress
Many
of these events were held at “Camp Rydin”, a sprawling 2,200-acre
(890-hectare) property on Maryland’s eastern shore purchased after a
$25m donation was made to CPI by its namesake, retired Houston software
entrepreneur Mike Rydin, in the wake of January 6.
Others
were held at one of at least nine adjacent properties on Washington
DC’s Pennsylvania Avenue purchased by CPI since 2022, in what reports described as a $41m “shopping spree” that has created a “Maga campus”.
CPI literature describes the precinct as “Patriot’s Row”.
Records
obtained from US Senate and House ethics disclosures indicate that AAF
has benefited from being front and center at many of these events.
At
a 29 May 2024 “Legislative Assistant Symposium” attended by staffers
then working for senators including Josh Hawley, Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz
and JD Vance, AAF’s Jones was billed as speaking on “strategies for how
Congress should approach oversight and accountability”, alongside
speakers from CPI, AFL, Advancing American Freedom and anti-immigrant
group NumbersUSA.
A parallel event with the
same line-up drew staffers for hard-right Maga representatives including
Anna Paulina Luna – who recently introduced a bill that would see
Trump’s face added to Mount Rushmore – and Paul Gosar, who in November invoked antisemitic conspiracy theories in a newsletter defending Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s pick to lead national intelligence.
NumbersUSA was part of a network
of groups “founded and funded” by John Tanton, whom the Southern
Poverty Law Center called the “puppeteer of the nativism movement and a
man with deep racist roots”.
At an event held
15-17 February 2023, hosted by AAF and attended by staffers for Congress
members including Luna, Ken Buck and Marjorie Taylor Greene, trainees
were to learn skills including “how to effectively draft requests for
information from agencies and witnesses”, “tools and techniques for
conducting open source research into agencies, individuals, and
organizations”, and conducting “mock interviews with reluctant /
recalcitrant witnesses”.
AAF’s reticent researchers
Prior to AAF, Jones worked as a Capitol Hill staffer for a string of high-profile hard-right Republicans including Ron Johnson, Cruz and the former senator Jim DeMint, who headed up CPI after he was forced out in an internal power struggle at Heritage.
Since
opening his AAF unit, he has blooded a new generation of rightwing
opposition researchers. Some of those researchers appear reluctant to
publicly advertise their affiliation.
On
LinkedIn, four people openly flag their affiliation with AAF: Jones
himself; communications manager Yitz Friedman of Brooklyn, New York;
development adviser Nadeen Wincapaw of Tampa, Florida; and associate
researcher Elisabeth Guinard of Helena, Montana.
Search
engine-cached versions of the LinkedIn page of Jerome Trankle of
Washington DC, however, indicate that he is research director at AAF.
Data brokers also yield an AAF-associated email address for Tankle.
Trankle’s
live LinkedIn profile has him doing “ESG & Financial Services”
research at “AAF” without using the badged – and searchable – link some
of his colleagues use.
The Guardian emailed the
address associated with Trankle at AAF to ask why he doesn’t more
clearly advertise his affiliation but received no response.
Additionally, an anti-fascist research group claimed late on Wednesday
to have identified additional researchers on the basis of LinkedIn
profile pictures that had inadvertently been included in purposed
evidentiary materials about government workers on the DEI Watch List
site.
The Guardian corroborated the inclusion of researchers’ profile pictures in evidence on the DEI watchlist.
One
of those identified, Cari Fike, is married to Hugh Fike, a senior
director at CPI, and is a former lobbyist for Heritage Action, the
501(c)4 associated with the Heritage Foundation.
The Guardian contacted Fike for comment on her apparent involvement in researching government workers for AAF.
Beirich,
the extremism expert, said: “It’s rather ironic that an organization
that is targeting public officials through a watchlist that could open
them up to harassment and mistreatment goes to such lengths to protect
its own,” adding: “Clearly, they understand how dangerous this outing
can be.”
Dirt machine
The dirt machine now targeted at government workers was honed on higher-profile targets during the Biden administration.
Early
on, AAF pointed its opposition-research machine at Biden nominees
including Saule Omarova, nominated for comptroller of the currency;
Sarah Bloom Raskin, nominated for vice-chair for supervision of the
Federal Reserve Board, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, supreme court justice,
whom the organization falsely claimed had been soft on sex offenders.
In the process of “desperately seeking dirt”
on the Federal Reserve nominee Lisa Cook, AAF used a customary tactic
of peppering her employer, Michigan State University, with records
requests. But Jones went one step further by bombarding “dozens” of her
colleagues in a bid to cast doubt on her tenure promotion a decade
earlier.
A significant proportion of the nominees targeted by AAF – including Brown Jackson, Cook and Omarova – were women of color.
The
dozens of public employees whose information was collected in
“dossiers” on the DEI watchlist site are overwhelmingly people of color.
Of 44 profiles listed under agencies at the time of reporting, 29 were
people of color, and 20 were women of color alone. Just five were white
men.
“The fact that many on the list are people of color just adds another layer of vileness to the project,” Beirich said.
“Recent
attacks by the Trump administration on public employees shows that the
Maga/Project 2025 movement will go as far as possible to make life
miserable for public servants.”
This article was amended on 10 February 2025. An earlier version
incorrectly stated that employees of Foundation Source act as trustees
for the Dunn Foundation; rather Foundation Source acts as an
administrator. A spokesperson said after publication that Foundation
Source “does not recommend (or decide) specific organizations for its
clients to fund”, and that it has no affiliation with the CPI or AAF.
It also clarified that Jeff Yass and Richard Uihlein have not contributed to the Club for Growth Foundation.