The Government Accountability Office has been formally asked to investigate whether political operatives working for President Donald Trump obtained the personal information of Americans who submitted email addresses, phone numbers, postal addresses, and billing details while signing up for events celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
The explosive request, sent to Acting Comptroller General Orice Williams Brown, calls for a sweeping review of Freedom 250 — the Trump-aligned organization that took control of much of the nation’s semiquincentennial celebration — and its network of vendors with deep ties to the president’s political operation.
At the center of the allegations is Campaign Nucleus, a political technology firm founded by Brad Parscale, Trump’s former campaign manager.
Parscale was the political novice running Trump’s digital advertising in 2016 when he teamed up with scandal-plagued Cambridge Analytica to help propel Trump to the White House.
Every American who requested a free ticket to a Freedom 250 event on the National Mall — including the FIFA World Cup Fan Zone, the Great American State Fair, the July 4 Salute to America and the Patriot Games — submitted a name, email address, phone number and ZIP code through Campaign Nucleus’ system.
A second Parscale-owned company, Dyspatchit, handled Freedom 250’s email and text messaging operations, collecting billing and mailing addresses. A third Trump campaign-affiliated vendor, Ace Specialties, operated the official Freedom 250 merchandise storefront, collecting billing and mailing addresses along with other contact information.
“Based on our preliminary findings, President Trump and his allies are in a position to use information on American voters, harvested with taxpayer money and government resources, in an attempt to tip the scales in the upcoming midterm elections,” the request states. “This is a grave threat to Americans’ personal privacy and freedom from election interference.”
The GAO has confirmed receipt of the request. Spokesperson Sarah Kaczmarek said the agency “has a process it goes through to determine whether we do work and when, which we are working through right now.”
‘An asset of extraordinary value’
The data collection operation, according to the request, was assembled at taxpayer expense using money Congress appropriated for a nonpartisan celebration of America’s 250th birthday. Freedom 250 received the majority of the $150 million set aside for the semiquincentennial, sidelining the congressionally chartered America250 Commission in the process.
A national contact list built with those funds — potentially enriched with geolocation and behavioral data and scored for persuadability using artificial intelligence — would represent “an asset of extraordinary value to a party heading into a midterm election,” the request warns.
Parscale’s Campaign Nucleus, according to reporting cited in the request, “specializes in mining information from a politician’s supporters” and using AI to analyze personal data and assign numerical scores, producing lists of voters deemed persuadable. Phone numbers and email addresses are among the most valuable assets in modern political campaigning, allowing direct, low-cost contact for fundraising, volunteer recruitment and voter mobilization.
From free tickets to fundraising solicitations
The request documents what it describes as extensive overlap between Freedom 250’s operations and Trump’s political organization. Americans registering for free July 4 tickets were asked to consent to “alerts [and] donation requests” and were later sent links to a Trump-branded WinRed page soliciting donations of up to $5,000 for the Never Surrender PAC.
Freedom 250 blamed a vendor mistake. Yet registrants subsequently received emails carrying Freedom 250’s name and logo from an address on the Trump campaign’s own domain. Federal records show Never Surrender pays the same vendor — Dyspatchit — that operates Freedom 250’s email program. The PAC has paid Dyspatchit more than $426,000 for email services during the current election cycle.
“This means that either Freedom 250 is so closely tied to the Trump campaign that it is using the campaign PAC’s email for its own regular business purposes, or that Freedom 250’s mailing list has already been shared with the Trump campaign and the campaign is utilizing it for outreach,” the request states. “In either scenario, it is clear that Freedom 250 and the Trump campaign are co-mingling their activities.”
A legal loophole
The request warns that federal privacy protections may not cover the data collected because Freedom 250 was structured as a nonprofit subsidiary rather than a federal agency. The Privacy Act of 1974 and the Paperwork Reduction Act generally regulate federal agencies, raising questions about whether their protections extend to information gathered through a federally funded nonprofit and its private vendors.
Freedom 250’s privacy policy does not name its data protection manager, sets no stated data retention limit and permits vendors to “disclose, share, and use your information.” The board controlling Freedom 250 includes John DeStefano, former president of Data Trust — the firm that handles voter data for the Republican National Committee — alongside Trump campaign figures Meredith O’Rourke and Chris LaCivita.
“It is unclear what safeguards exist to prevent data collected by Freedom 250 from migrating to Freedom 250’s political allies or to the White House’s National Design Studio,” the request states.
That studio, staffed largely by former DOGE employees, inserted a PostHog tracking script into the Freedom 250 website’s backend — a commercial tool capable of collecting detailed information about how visitors interact with a website, potentially including clicks, scrolling, keystrokes and location information. Though the tracker was deactivated in June following media inquiries, the request says it could be reactivated. It also notes that no Paperwork Reduction Act filings on behalf of the National Design Studio appear in the Federal Register despite the script’s prior use.
Teenagers targeted by online harassment
The consequences of Freedom 250’s approach to personal data were particularly acute for minors who participated in the Patriot Games, a competition for teenagers ages 14 to 17. The application required applicants to post public introduction videos to YouTube, provide their Instagram, X and TikTok handles, and grant Freedom 250 open-ended rights to their names, images and likenesses without an expiration date.
Teenagers who identified their ages, schools and hometowns on camera became targets of hate, harassment and obscene comments from online trolls who used the publicly available information against them. The mother of one 16-year-old participant described deleting harmful comments strangers left on her daughter’s account.
“Freedom 250’s solicitation of teens’ videos with little respect for their privacy adds evidence to their pattern of being cavalier with Americans’ data,” the request states.
What GAO is being asked to examine
The request asks the GAO to produce a full list of Freedom 250’s vendors, subcontractors and data processors, including the political party and PAC clients those entities served during the 2024 and 2026 election cycles. It also seeks to determine how much federal money paid for data collection services, identify what safeguards, if any, prevent the information from reaching political committees, and assess potential violations of appropriations and campaign finance laws.
The GAO is also being asked to examine whether and how the Privacy Act and Paperwork Reduction Act apply to personal information collected through nonprofit subsidiaries and their vendors, including information obtained from minors, and to recommend options for closing privacy gaps that could allow a federally funded nonprofit to operate a nationwide data collection system on behalf of presidential anniversary events without the protections that would apply if the government collected the information directly.
The request follows a July 2 interim report documenting allegations that Freedom 250 “hijacked” America’s 250th birthday celebration, sidelined the nonpartisan America250 Commission and captured the lion’s share of federal funding. That report characterized Freedom 250 as a “shadow organization” that benefited Trump allies while collecting Americans’ personal information with little oversight.
Whether the GAO will ultimately open a formal investigation remains uncertain. The agency has confirmed only that it is reviewing the request under its normal procedures.
The questions raised, however, extend beyond whether Americans surrendered personal information merely to obtain tickets to a patriotic celebration.
The central issue for investigators is whether a taxpayer-funded commemoration of American independence created a valuable political database — and whether information collected under the banner of the nation’s 250th birthday was, or could be, transferred to partisan organizations seeking an advantage in the midterm elections.
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