Is Obama Reneging on Whistleblower Campaign Promise?

August 11th, 2009. By AbiK

So it seems. If you recall, President Obama made some campaign promises with regard to whistleblowers in government. There was even a kumbaya kind of moment when his position on whistleblowing was shared on his transition website. An article by Martha Gore at Examiner.com (The Washington Times initially broke this story) showed the original quote that was on the Obama site: 

Protect Whistleblowers: Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism, which can sometimes save lives and often save taxpayer dollars, should be encouraged rather than stifled. We need to empower federal employees as watchdogs of wrongdoing and partners in performance. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government. Obama will ensure that federal agencies expedite the process for reviewing whistleblower claims and whistleblowers have full access to courts and due process.

I’m convinced a number of advertising writers go into political PR writing as some kind of purgatory before heading out to sit in front of that IBM Selectric in the sky. Regardless, look at the choice of words in the above passage: “government employee committed to public integrity”…”courage and patriotism”…”we need to empower federal employees”…all the catch-phrases are there. And they sounded so good, didn’t they?

So here we are, with Obama approaching 200 days in office, and we learn that in June and July of this year, the White House’s counsel’s office was providing its own drafts of proposed whistleblower legislation. In the mix, it seems some protections for FBI whistleblowers had been weakened—what was that about encouraging vs. stifling whistleblowers?—and it reduced access to jury trials for national security workers who sue for protection from retaliation.

What the proposed legislation means for the folks at the FBI is that employees would lose the right to have their cases reviewed by the Justice Department’s inspector general’s office. They would now have to seek protection from FBI managers.

Some folks have lost that lovin feeling they had for Obama’s initial plan—folks like Maryland Dem. Rep. Chris Van Hollen and Executive Director of the National Whistleblowers Center (and also private lawyer) Steve Kohn, and others I’m sure. And this one’s not over yet.

Stay tuned…

Tags: Whistleblowers

This was posted on Tuesday, August 11th, 2009 at 3:04 pm and is filed under Employment . Feel free to respond, or trackback. Read our comments policy.