Last
Thursday, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform held a hearing
on the 2009 Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, legislation that GAP has
been working to pass for several years. A deputy assistant attorney general
gave key testimony on the matter, relaying the Obama administration’s perspective.
While the whistleblower community is quick to note how (generally) supportive
the president is of such protections, questions remain about how strong the
support is. For example, the official refrained from offering the
administration’s “full endorsement” of the legislation. GAP was mentioned here
in the Washington
Post article:
Sometimes,
the importance of an issue to an administration can be gleaned by the rank of
the person sent to talk about it. As a deputy assistant attorney general, De is
at least five rungs from the top of the Justice Department's ladder. His
testimony ignored some points in the legislation that are important to
advocates, leaving Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability
Project, to say, “The jury is still out on the position the administration will
take on the hard issues.”
GovExec also covered
the hearing, specifically focusing on the issue surrounding national
security employee whistleblowing rights within the legislation:
As a matter of
public policy, I think this is a truly horrible idea that will materially
undermine our national security, weaken our ability to obtain sensitive
information from intelligence services in other nations, probably get a lot of
innocent Americans killed, and conceivably endanger the liberty of all
Americans," Turner said.
Thomas Devine,
legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a whistleblower
advocacy group, disagreed, arguing that the secretive nature of intelligence
work makes whistleblower protections even more critical.
“While there
may be animus against whistleblowers in all domestic institutions, at the FBI
and intelligence agencies it is more likely to be obsessive hostility,” Devine
said. “The code of loyalty to the chain of chain of command is the primary
value at those institutions, and they set the standard for intensity of
retaliation.”
Several
witnesses, including Devine, advocated the expanded protections as a way to
prevent leaks. In the past, whistleblowers have turned to the press because
they had no internal avenues for reporting concerns, witnesses said. By
providing them protection through internal channels, classified information
could be kept among those with the proper clearances.
-- Dylan Blaylock, GAP Communications
Director
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