regarding whistleblowing, my advice is don’t do it. the federal government is a dying industry. the mahatma’s admonishment to be the change you want to see doesn’t apply. wait to see whether there’s a change in administration in early 2009.

The history of whistleblowers in the federal government is long, bloody and fraught with difficulty. The federal agencies are giving lessons to middle managers how to drive out the whistleblowers without taking an "adverse action" which would give them a right to a hearing before the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board. Meanwhile, the vacant positions which result are being filled by "Bushies", who will use the Civil Service Reform Act protections to keep their job, while they sabotogue the next administration.

Do you think I am overstating the situtation? Talk to me in two years.

I have been representing federal employees since 1981, first as trial counsel for the U.S. Federal Labor Relations Authority, as a labor studies instructor, and since 1984, as an attorney in private practice. Many would-be whistleblowers have survived the process and are exposing potential health and safety problems, gross-mismanagement, etc. without losing their job. Many attorneys, therapists, union representatives, family, friends and community groups support them in thousands of ways.

Read back over the letters written so far -- there is more than a kernel of truth in every one. The situation is better here, than many countries in the world, where the likes of my clients would be likely jailed and/or killed. Do not lose hope. If you know someone who is witnessing a serious problem and feels the need to blow the whistle -- listen to them and validate their experience. Advise them to:

Carefully plan their next steps.

Check out legal advice available through the many resources on the internet, including nela.org, cela.org, peer.org, whistleblowers.org, whistleblower.org, etc.

Stay postitive, strong and healthy!

He was sent to a psychiatric hospital for blowing the whistle?

Hey, that is just what our "enemies" do too. Our march to fascism is going well. There's the old story that the more you hate someone, the more you become like them.

We have met the enemy. It is us.

There is not any part of the government, social policy, bureaucracy, judicial offices and anything else that Bush and his Repu(b)gnant enablers have touched that they haven't corrupted. This is just one more of a long litany of disgusting perversions of justice formulated and carried out by the White House.

Whistleblowing should be a last resort, behind reasonable criticism and questions, complaints and leaks.

Transparency, which used to offset set many problems with self-evident need for correction, has been replaced by excessive secrecy coupled with an elaborate system of tracking and intimidation designed to enforce that secrecy, which is usually cast as part of understood "loyalty".

Since leaks are anonymous, they may correct the most obvious and blatant problems but many times do not because no investigation will proceed absent a valid (identified) source in the first place.

So it's Catch-22 for the whistleblower. Complain and identify oneself at the risk of getting fired. Complain anonymously through leaks and nothing happens, except perhaps drawing raised suspicion as a source of the complaint.

The general result of reduced transparency and increased secrecy has created:

1) An increased degree of incompetence at the top levels of management;

2) More incentives to abuse the system for personal gain;

3) Absurd levels of paralyzing, bureaucratic controls so bizarre that they delegate by default great amounts of power to the wrong people at the wrong times for the wrong reasons;

As a general rule, the more incompetent the top leadership, the more likely the case for whistleblowing. Such "leaders" cannot communicate meaningfully with those below them, particularly to sort through and respond to the substantial information and viewpoints that come up through the ranks.

Only the very best leaders are able to engage with staff in serious challenges to their decisions and policies in a way that commands respect and voluntary loyalty that generally wards off the need for leaks and whistleblowing.

For example, consider the commanding presence of Thad W. Allen, Commander of the Coast Guard compared to the likes of Michael Brown of FEMA whom Allen replaced during Katrina.

Internal staff may disagree with Allen, but his grasp of the big picture as well as the details are undeniable. Because he's capable of defending policy in public, that suggests he's also likely to implement the same policies internally with sufficient consistency to avoid corruption and morale problems.

Agency heads like Allen used to be the rule. Now they're the exception, replaced by the garden variety hacks typical of the Bush Administration.

I really, really want to hear what she has to say.

look, the federal government is made up of retired-in-place boomer veterans who hire contractors (disposable white collar temp workers) such as myself to do their work for them. are these personal service contracts rife with conflicts of interest, you bet. but the federal government is going to have to contract-out entire swaths of itself just so grandma boomer can get her monthly cheque. unless you’re a civil servant related to a lawyer willing to work for free, the federal government has unlimited resources to do what it wants to anyone – it doesn’t pay to be a federal worker anymore, as there is no difference between them and contractors-for-hire doing their work.

watch the watchers.

As the Special Counsel of the United States Office of Special Counsel (OSC), I am charged by law with protecting especially those who have blown the whistle and are reprised against. I take special pride in this job and am very pleased to have protected many whistleblowers and others in government in my nearly four years in office.

Salon, in its article, “War on Whistleblowers,” has made some good points, but overall failed to reflect what we do in a balanced fashion. It is not a he said, she said proposition. It is - we show it, they say it.

See our achievements, real stories or real people who have been benefited by our staff, at www.osc.gov by clicking on the left side that says “Successful Case Summaries.” You can also see our achievements in reducing backlogs and graphing our increased enforcement by looking at the button called “OSC Achievements.”

Let’s get one thing straight: whistleblowers and those who stick their heads up to complain in the federal government, as in the corporate world, sometimes get their heads blown off. They are ridiculed, frozen out, mistreated, shunned, and outright fired. We try to combat this, but it is difficult to prove these cases sometimes. And as the article rightly points out, much of it has to do with a Byzantine set of legal precedents that force whistleblowers to jump through legal hoops to get any protections. Also, the reality is that some people just don’t have a good claim for whatever reason.

Reckless accusations are leveled at me and my career officials at OSC, such as that we threw out 1000 cases without justifications. Why does Salon or whistleblower groups then repeat these scurrilous charges when a bi-partisan group of 13 investigators from Congress (House and Senate) came in, over three weeks, looked through our files and questioned my career staff in four areas of enforcement, and gave a clean bill of health in a letter, declaring that we did not throw those cases out without justification and said we were doing a “great job for whistleblowers?” That was in May of 2005, and still these baseless charges are trotted out every chance the press gets.

If I have such a low opinion of whistleblowers, why then did I increase by 100 percent the number of substantiated whistleblower disclosures in 2004, 2005, 2006, and 2007 over prior years, if my object was to “purge files” as I was accused? In fact, we resurrected dead files and found a high priority disclosure was to be substantiated from the piles of dusty files left around to rot. One whistleblower had died it had taken so long for the agency to get to him. That was the summer I arrived, we discovered another who died who had complained in another area of enforcement. I demanded that we stop the practice of allowing claims to go un-reviewed and justice to be ignored.

We doubled the rate of positive referrals to our prosecutions unit of backlogged prohibited personnel practice matters in the year of our backlog resolution. Since that first year of my tenure, we have had no backlogs in any of our divisions. We give attention to the age appropriateness of claims, aggressively litigate matters that require litigation before the MSPB, and get national attention on serious cases such as the 10 year cover up of near misses and fraudulent assigning to pilot of what are FAA controller errors. That matter is being investigated for the second time in my tenure because I believed in Anne Whiteman, the whistleblower, and because justice required it.

I am not popular for making findings against administration officials or government employees who are not political appointees. We have caused high level appointees, and high level career officials to have to leave government. We have insisted that the rule of law prevail over party or fears of negative press or harassment by Congress. OSC has acted independent and effective at being a watchdog over the Executive Branch, and that has many scared.

The survey of those who have come to OSC is not a terribly useful tool because of the failure of more than the 15 percent of those polled who respond. More were satisfied or partially satisfied than the 5 percent the article mentions. If you take into account those who were fully satisfied with those who were moderately satisfied, the total is closer to thirty percent. If you look at the numbers of who responded, it is likely that only those who were not very happy with their results are the one who are motivated to respond.

I have tried to protect whistleblowers every chance I could. I have taken it on the chin from advocacy groups who profit from trying to stir up trouble and make everyone else but themselves look bad. I tried to file on behalf of Ms. Chambers, but her attorney with PEER (Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility) filed on her behalf before we could, and this deprived her of our ability to pursue her case. She lost our presumption of a stay of termination. If we had been allowed to file on behalf of Ms. Chambers, I believe we would have obtained the stay we were going to seek and the case would have been settled favorably for her. As it was, the court denied the stay requested by her and she has lost at every stage.

Sometimes, when people seek justice they get caught up in the war of egos of whistleblower groups and press, and they don’t look at the objective reality that sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. We are there every day trying to do what is right for people who complain. We are helping to clean up government, but not everyone has a winning case. But there are a lot of loud voices of criticism. I accept that - it’s my job.

Hon. Scott J. Bloch

U.S. Special Counsel