If you thought there were more whistleblowers than usual popping up in government agencies, you were right.
The watchdog group Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER) reported last week that the number of official whistleblower reports has gone up significantly since 2001, from 380 cases that year to 535 cases in 2003.Meanwhile, the backlog of pending whistleblower reports to the Office of Special Counsel, the federal the agency charged with investigating such complaints, has more than doubled to 690.
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. . . a bipartisan group in Congress is pushing to strengthen whistleblower protections, an effort opposed by the Bush administration. Congress passed the Whistleblower Protection Act in 1989 and strengthened it in 1994.
But critics say the law has failed to protect federal workers because of a series of judicial decisions that have undermined its effectiveness. "The reality today is that government workers who expose wrongdoing have no legal protections against being fired or facing retaliation," says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project On Government Oversight, a private organization in Washington that investigates government wrongdoing.
One of the things we already know is that many of the leaders of these agencies come from the industries they're supposed to regulate (see below). Apparently they don't have much liking for civil service protections, either.
One of the best yet often unmentioned reasons to elect Kerry is to do a clean sweep of all the political appointees and get these agencies back to regulating the industries they're supposed to oversee rather than granting industries' fondest wishes.
Posted by Linkmeister at October 14, 2004 04:02 PM