whistleblowers

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 Times on Sunday that Obama has issued [...]

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 the whistle on fraud and abuse of taxpayer money. [...]

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 president said that the provision [...]

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.
As I reported earlier, that protection [...]

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 government contractors, as exhibited in [...]

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 isn’t yet available on the Library of [...]