A battle between the pork industry and the state of California will soon make national news as the U.S. Supreme Court is hearing arguments on whether a state prohibition of slaughtering nonambulatory or “downer” livestock preempts federal law.
A controversial bill that would have made it a crime to take photographs of ag facilities in Florida has met its demise for this session, but similar legislation remains a possibility in Minnesota and Iowa.
Reporter Brett Ader from our sister site The Florida Independent notes that while the More…
IOWA CITY — The general public has a warped view of a bill that would make it a crime to produce audio or video of an agriculture facility because media coverage of the proposal “is disingenuous,” according to Iowa Sen. Sandy Greiner (R-Keota).
The bill, House File More…
Moments before members of the Iowa House voted to institute new criminal penalties for those involved in undercover sting operations at agricultural facilities, U.S. Sen. Tom Harkin cautioned that such penalties don’t appear to be in the public’s best interest.
Harkin, who has not studied the specifics of the More…
Despite President Obama’s previous criticism of former President George W. Bush’s “signing statements” that limit the president’s responsibility to comply with a bill passed by Congress, it turns out Obama has been doing much the same thing since he took office. Charlie Savage reported in The New York More…
In February, TWI’s Daphne Eviatar called attention to the weak protections in the federal economic stimulus bill for whistleblowers who expose contracting fraud. At the time, Daphne wrote:
[T]he stimulus bill fails to adequately protect employees of government contractors, who are in the best position to blow
On March 11, President Obama issued a signing statement attached to an omnibus spending bill that qualified a small but important provision that would deny a salary to a federal manager who “interferes with or prohibits certain communications between federal employees and Members of Congress.” In his signing statement, the More…
Turns out the final language included in the agreed-upon stimulus bill does indeed include protections for employees of government contractors — like KBR, Halliburton, etc. — who report fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer money, even if they report within their own company rather than to an outside government agency. More…
Despite a strong push from whistleblower advocates, the final stimulus bill appears not to include protections for federal employees who call attention to waste, fraud and abuse of stimulus money. It’s an odd outcome, given that federal employees are often the first people to notice fraud and other abuses by More…
Here’s some good news: since our story Tuesday about Congress’ failure to include adequate protection for government contractor whistleblowers in the stimulus bill, Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has taken up the cause.
McCaskill has introduced a whistleblower amendment — S.AMDT. 196 — to the stimulus bill. Although the amendment More…
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