All Things Whistleblower: A GAP Blog

Big Whistleblower Rights Hearing Today in the Senate

There’s a crucial Senate hearing on S. 372, the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2009, later today. The hearing will take place at 2:30, and is being held by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, Subcommittee on Oversight of Government Management, the Federal Workforce, and the District of Columbia.

The proposed legislation is aimed at vastly improving federal employee whistleblower rights – vital protections for effectively combating waste, fraud and abuse throughout the federal government.

Unfortunately, the current proposed Senate legislation, as written, does not match the corresponding House of Representatives’ version of the bill (HR 1507), introduced in March. While both bills improve greatly upon the now-gutted Whistleblower Protection Act, the House version is clearly superior because it mandates jury trials for federal employee cases that now get stuck (for years) in the bureaucratic and administrative purgatory. The House bill also protects national security whistleblowers who report wrongdoing and corruption that they experience to authorized members of Congress, or designated officials within their agencies. Mike German of the ACLU wrote on Daily Kos why this is important. He’s also got a great personal story to tell of his whistleblowing experience in the FBI, which you can see here.

-- Dylan Blaylock

WWYW Episode 13 - Obama's Signing Statement on Whistleblowers; Protecting Patients from Faulty Medical Devices

This is the page to leave comments about Episode 13 of Whistle Where You Work, GAP’s television program. To view the show online, visit www.whistleblowertv.org. Here’s a description of the program:

In March, President Obama signed a $410 billion omnibus spending bill, but in so doing, he attached a signing statement asserting that certain provisions of the legislation raised constitutional concerns that Congress was stepping on Executive powers. Specifically, the president stated he was not waiving his authority to control communications by federal employees to Congress involving information that is properly privileged or otherwise confidential. What are the ramifications of this statement for federal employee whistleblowers who wish to take concerns to Congress? Guests include Sharon Bradford Franklin of The Constitution Project and Tom Devine, Government Accountability Project

Then, we sit down with Lisa Hayes of Alliance for Justice, who is fighting for legislation that would allow patients injured by medical devices to sue the manufactures of such faulty products. If patients harmed by prescription drugs have legal recourse against manufacturers, why shouldn’t medical device producers be held accountable too?

This program was filmed in late April 2009.

Last Week's Congressional Hearing on the WPA

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

Friday Roundup

This Post article details how an internal World Bank report shows that that organization is riddled with ineffective programs and weak monitoring systems. Last week, GAP reported that a separate internal Bank report detailed the organization’s lending to poor countries does not effectively address fraud and corruption. (More coverage here from the NYT on today’s story)

Also in the Post, this brief article (second one down) details how a bipartisan group of lawmakers have sent President Obama a letter urging his support to strengthen whistleblower protections and “where significant injustice has occurred, to make the employee whole by restoring them to government service.” This is a tremendous action, and the Representatives should be applauded for their efforts.

-- Dylan Blaylock 

Federal Contractor Employee Protections; Hotline Stats

This op-ed by GAP President Louis Clark (from the Bell Gardens Sun) has appeared in several outlets around the country. It focuses on how there are solid (and required) whistleblower protection provisions for the employees of federal contractors who receive contracts with stimulus funds. However, most of these companies (and the relevant government agencies) are unprepared to handle such inevitable retaliation claims.

Here’s some coverage of GAP’s report released last week, The ABCs of Drug Safety: Accountability, Balance, and Citizen Empowerment, which focuses on the severe problems with the current system for conducting and regulating clinical trials. The report details the urgent need for reform. From AllGov:

“Things are so bad with the Food and Drug Administration’s clinical trial system for approving new drugs that the country is “virtually defenseless” from preventing another Vioxx scandal. This finding, and many others regarding dangerous conflicts of interest in the FDA process, are reported in a new study by the Government Accountability Project.”

In an important story that came out last week in the NYT, our food really is getting less safe, quantifiably.

And lastly, an article from the Louisville Courier Journal details how the Louisville Metro Council is set to debate adding an anonymous hotline for citizens to report waste and fraud with city operations. The article has a cool stat:

“An Association of Certified Fraud Examiners study cited in the ordinance says that cities without tip lines lose about $135,000 a year to fraud, while those with tip lines lose only about $56,000.”

-- Dylan Blaylock

More on Signing Statements; Pistachios; George Will and Sea Ice

The Washington Independent has more coverage of GAP’s letter sent (as part of a coalition) to President Obama last week, urging for a clarification of his stance on whistleblower protections. This issue was brought into question from a signing statement Obama signed last month regarding the rights of whistleblowers to communicate with Congress. From the article:

The coalition, which includes such groups as the ACLU, American Federation of Government Employees, and Government Accountability Project, asked Obama to endorse legislation that would protect from retaliation federal employees who expose waste, fraud, abuse, suppression of federal research, and threats to public health and safety, and give them the right to a jury trial. 

Also, and predictably, the size of the pistachio recall has significantly expanded. The pistachio industry, looking to avoid the scope of the peanut debacle, yesterday proactively launched a Web site dedicated to communicating which products are not affected by the recall. From the Washington Post:

Caroline Smith DeWaal, food safety director at the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based health advocacy group, said the industry Web site is a great idea. "In these really large ingredient recalls, consumers really need to know which products are not affected," she said.

CSPI is a coalition member of GAP, and Smith-DeWaal really knows her stuff.

Also from the Post, and in sad news to George Will, new evidence shows that Arctic sea ice is melting more quickly than scientists had originally anticipated.

-- Dylan Blaylock

 

WWYW Episode 3 - Standing Up against Killer Canine Drugs; The State of Whistleblower Rights (as of 10/08)

This is the page to leave comments about Episode 3 of Whistle Where You Work, GAP’s television program. To view the show online, visit www.whistleblowertv.org. Here’s a description of the program:

First, we interview Dr. Victoria Hampshire, an FDA veterinarian who gathered national attention after going public about her ordeal in late 2005. Dr. Hampshire was investigated by a private detective hired by Wyeth Pharmaceuticals after she negatively reviewed one of Wyeth’s animal care products. Wyeth then held a secret meeting with then-FDA Acting Commissioner Lester Crawford, and the FDA subsequently removed her from that product’s review and launched a criminal investigation of Dr. Hampshire. She was completely cleared by that investigation.

Then, our panel discussion looks at the state of Whistleblower Rights and Pending Legislation (as of October 2008). Numerous whistleblower protections for all kinds of workers have been written into law six months prior. But federal employee protections still fall far short of where they need to be. Is there hope on the horizon, or even right now in Congress? We’ll discuss pending legislation, the overall importance of government accountability, and why it is vital for the country to institute thorough transparency measures. We’re joined by Gary Bass, Executive Director of OMB Watch, and Tom Devine, Legal Director of the Government Accountability Project.

This episode was filmed on August 22, 2008.