Whistleblower Protection Blog : Whistleblower Lawyer & Attorney : National Whistleblower Legal Defense and Education Fund : Whistleblower Protection, Fraud Claims : Washington DC

Yesterday, Senator Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) introduced the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act of 2011 (WPEA), S. 743. Stephen M. Kohn, Executive Director of the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC) issued the following statement on this bill:

In December of 2010, the National Whistleblowers Center (NWC), the Federal Ethics Center, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition and the No FEAR Coalition, together with nationally respected whistleblowers and thousands of citizen activists, strongly opposed the prior version of the WPEA (S. 372) calling it a "bad deal for whistleblowers." We laid out seven detailed reasons for why the bill would be detrimental for federal employees and would roll back existing whistleblower protections.

We were strongly criticized for opposing S. 372. We were told that this was the best bill we were going to get and if we did not change our position federal employee whistleblower protections offered in the new Congress would be worse. However, we believed that we were doing what was in the best interest of all federal employee whistleblowers and refused to back down.

Federal employees deserve better and were promised more by President Obama. If the flawed S. 372 had passed in December, all federal employees would have been materially harmed by the roll backs in protections. We had no choice but to stand our ground and it turns out that we were right - changes could be made to improve the bill.

The WPEA was re-introduced yesterday with one of our major concerns fixed. The exception for "minor" and "inadvertent" violations of law in the definition of protection disclosure has now been removed from this latest version of the Senate bill.

We are pleased that the Senate sponsors of the WPEA have agreed with the NWC, the Federal Ethics Center, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition and the No FEAR Coalition, and the thousands of persons who advocated for this important change in the bill from what was proposed in the last Congress.

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The Iowa House of Representatives has voted to put animal rights whistleblowers in jail.  On March 17, 2011, the House voted 66 to 27 to pass House File 589, "A bill for an act relating to offenses involving agricultural operations, and providing penalties and remedies." If enacted, the bill would make it a criminal offense to lie on a job application to work in an animal facility, or to obtain "access to an animal facility by false pretenses for the purpose of committing an act not authorized by the owner of the animal facility." (Section 10) A second offense would be a felony. The bill would also criminalize the act of producing, "a record which reproduces an image or sound occurring at the animal facility . . .." Possessing or distributing such a record would also be a crime. Again, a second offense would be a felony. The bill is obviously aimed at animal rights activists who have successfully documented inhumane treatment of animals used in agriculture. Recall that those who love sausage or respect the law should never see either one being made. This is no April Fool's Day joke.  The Iowa House really did pass this. The Iowa City Press-Citizen calls the "kill the messenger" bill, "blatantly unconstitutional." The paper said the bill has no chance of passing the other Chamber, but an Iowa Senate committee approved the bill last Wednesday. "[W]e know bizarre backroom deals are sometimes made as part of the legislative sausage-making process," the paper explains. And that is why I am a vegan.

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