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employees had none of the whistleblower protections extended to other federal
employees.29 In all, government whistleblowers filed an average of 690 reprisal
complaints annually in the four years prior to the 2001 terrorist attacks; the annual
average jumped to 835 over the five years after the attacks.30
The OSC, which was established to enforce the Whistleblower Protection Act, is widely
viewed as “inept and even hostile to whistleblowers.”31 In the late 1990s, Senator
Grassley, who coauthored the law, complained that according to the OSC’s 1995 report to
Congress, the office sided with the government in all but three of the 603 reprisal
investigations it had conducted to date.32 Whistleblower advocates claim that the OSC
under the Bush administration is no less hostile than it was under President Clinton. In
2004, the office found that only 2 percent of the 1,262 cases that year warranted an
investigation, up from 1 percent in 2003. There have even been allegations of retaliation
within the OSC. A group of OSC employees recently claimed that the office’s head, Scott
Bloch, had retaliated against OSC staff, issuing illegal gag orders to prevent them from
going to Congress or the public about efforts to suppress whistleblower retaliation,
cronyism, and invidious discrimination.33
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which has jurisdiction over government
whistleblower retaliation, has similarly failed to provide adequate protection. In deciding
such matters, the court assumes that the agency involved has acted properly unless an
employee offers “irrefragable proof to the contrary.”34 Both Grassley and Democratic
Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, a coauthor of the Whistleblower Protection Act, have
argued repeatedly that this standard is much too rigid. Nonetheless, the court continues to
apply it and ruled against whistleblowers in 125 out of 127 cases between 1994 and late
2006.35
The U.S. Supreme Court has also recently weighed in on the issue of whistleblower
protection. In Garcetti v. Ceballos (2006), the court ruled, 5 to 4, that government
employees who are retaliated against for raising job-related concerns internally, as
opposed to publicly, are not protected under the free speech doctrine of the First
Amendment, and therefore have no recourse in court outside the Federal Circuit. In the
majority opinion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy suggested that federal employees might fare
better by going public than by raising concerns in the course of their government duties,
since they were more likely to be constitutionally protected when speaking in their capacity
as citizens. Given the court’s finding, and the perceived hostility of the OSC and the
Federal Circuit appeals court toward whistleblowers, the recent trend of anonymous
sources leaking controversial programs and questionable government actions to the press
is not surprising.

Conclusion

Political corruption is much less of a problem in the United States than it is in most parts
of the world. Unlike in many countries in Africa and Latin America, for example, companies
in the United States generally do not expect to pay bribes or accede to extortion when
doing business with the government. U.S. officials are not commonly accused of pilfering
state resources or embezzling public funds. Nor are they immune from prosecution when
they are suspected of corrupt practices. Political corruption in the United States is also

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