October 8, 2025
Over the past year, Pinpoint has conducted a comprehensive Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) program seeking to uncover and expose the non-public activities of liberal activist groups working to influence government agencies, legislatures, regulatory bodies, and public pension funds. These efforts aren’t transparent to the public, so it’s up to groups like Pinpoint to do the hard work of requesting and retrieving public records, and reporting out what we find.
So far, our comprehensive FOIA program has produced:
As a first set of findings, over the coming weeks, Pinpoint will release records showing the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) running coordinated influence campaigns across multiple states built on sustained pressure and carefully scripted messaging, posing direct threat to the integrity and independence of public policy and pension governance across the country.
PESP’s tactics demonstrate how an activist organization can manipulate public policy by leveraging insider connections to advance its agenda. PESP cultivates privileged channels with officials, seeking advance signals on policy shifts, and leverages former staff inside government.
This extensive inquiry represents a comprehensive examination into the operations of an ideologically driven partisan organization that publicly claims to be a “watchdog.” Through systematic public records requests filed across multiple states and federal agencies, we obtained thousands of internal emails revealing coordination between PESP staff and government officials, strategic planning materials outlining campaigns targeting specific pension funds, and communications records demonstrating coordinated messaging across multiple jurisdictions.
Uncovering these records is critical, as detailed investigations by the Washington Examiner have exposed a concerning pattern: the Private Equity Stakeholder Project (PESP) consistently publishes reports and engages in advocacy aligned with the interests of labor unions shortly after receiving substantial payments from them. These findings highlight the vital role of organizations like the Pinpoint Policy Institute, which scrutinize such financial ties to reveal potential conflicts of interest, ensuring transparency and accountability in advocacy efforts that impact workers and industries nationwide.