As part of his recent State of the Union address, President Biden sent a letter (via an email from agency heads) to over two million federal agency employees. It concluded with, “Know that your President has your back.”
Mr. Biden does not have my back nor the backs of other federal whistleblowers. This is because, in my public testimony, the US Office of Special Counsel (OSC) – the agency with the singular statutory to protect federal whistleblowers – is a decade of law-breaking fraud by a federal law enforcement agency. At the same time, the lawyer-leaders of the US Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) are OSC’s decades-long, law-breaking enablers.
I am a licensed professional engineer (PE) employed as a nuclear safety engineer in the US Department of Energy (DOE). I have been a federal agency whistleblower for over 30 years. The legal record is that I “prevailed” in eight separate MSPB decisions from 1994 to 2001, which likely made me the GOAT of career federal whistleblowers.
My whistleblowing played a positive, perhaps significant, role in the passage of the landmark law in 2000—the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). Under it, over 135,000 patriotic, trusting workers in DOE facilities during the Cold War received over 20 billion dollars in compensation for being put in harm’s way without their knowledge or adequate protection.
What is my advice to a concerned federal agency employee? “If you can live with yourself looking the other way, I cannot advise you to do otherwise.” Why? Because being a federal whistleblower is all too often an exercise of futility. This is repeatedly demonstrated by my now over 20-year-long effort – my personal, post-9/11 mission – to obtain an objective resolution of my whistleblower disclosures against the lawyer-leaders of OSC and MSPB.
Agency lawyers, in their application of legal ethics, openly describe themselves as “hired guns” whose clients – their employing agencies – are “never wrong”- and that they will do “whatever they can get away with” to prevent any determination otherwise.
I consider it my sworn duty, as a PE and federal agency employee, to obtain an objective resolution of my whistleblower disclosures against OSC’s and MSPB’s lawyer-leaders, given their troubling implications for nuclear weapon material security and much else relevant to American health, safety, security, and welfare.
In contrast, a phalanx of federal agency lawyers, now led by Cathy Harris, the recently confirmed Chairman of MSPB, apparently consider it their sworn duty, as lawyers employed by federal agencies, to prevent such a resolution in the name of legal ethics and “protecting” their client-agency – regardless of risk and harm to America.
Specific to President Biden’s claim to “have my back,” Cathy Harris, as her predecessors at MSPB, refuses to “sound the alarm” to the President and Congress, as required by law, that federal agency whistleblowers are NOT adequately protected from reprisal (how can they be when OSC, the agency responsible for protecting them, is a decades-long, lawbreaking fraud?
Because of this, President Biden is not alerted to perform his primary statutory duty to the federal agency workforce, which is to “take any action necessary” to correct it.
For President Biden “to have the back” of federal whistleblowers, here are some hard-won recommendations: 1) he tasks the Attorney General to issue his opinion on my whistleblower disclosure against Cathy Harris; 2) inform agency attorneys that the government-wide regulation that requires whistleblowing applies to them too; 3) direct agency attorneys when defending their agencies in whistleblower litigation, to apply the legal ethics of prosecutors – where determining the truth of the whistleblower disclosure is the paramount objective, not a “win” for their client-agency; and 4) perhaps most importantly, issue an Executive Order making National Whistleblower Day permanent.
Joe Carson, PE
Joseph (Joe) Carson, PE, is a decorated veteran of America’s Nuclear Navy with 40 years of federal service. He is also an award-winning engineer. His whistleblowing played a positive, perhaps significant, role in passing the landmark law in 2000—the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA). Under it, over 135,000 patriotic, trusting workers in DOE facilities during the Cold War received over 20 billion dollars in compensation for being put in harm’s way without their knowledge or adequate protection.
