US federal employees would lose whistleblower safeguards under Trump rule

Audio By Carbonatix

By Courtney Rozen and Sarah N. Lynch

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration is close to implementing a rule that would end long-standing legal protections for whistleblowers among senior career federal employees, according to documents reviewed by Reuters.

The rule, if finalized, would follow Trump’s April proposal to change employment standards for federal workers and build on a series of actions by the administration to minimize dissent across the government.

Specifically, the documents showed the rule would remove legal protections that prohibit U.S. government agencies from retaliating against employees who accuse them of wrongdoing, such as violating the law or wasting funds.

The Trump administration said in a statement that the employees would not be stripped of protections, although it said the rule would put individual federal agencies in charge of enforcing those protections.

The statement said the administration had made it clear in its April proposal that the employees would not have the law’s safeguards, pointing to a footnote in the proposal that cites the protection law. That footnote, however, did not use the word “whistleblower.”

The White House staff is preparing a new policy on “accountability” in the civil service, according to a government website, although it did not indicate the content. The rule would become final upon publication in the Federal Register.

Whistleblowers help to uncover fraud, abuse and misconduct inside government agencies that might otherwise remain hidden from Congress and the public.

The loss of legal protections would make it more risky for individuals to come forward with accusations that can help to improve public safety or government operations, federal employment attorneys and union leaders said.

The U.S. government would be “taking away whistleblower protections from the people who are likely to be best positioned to identify misconduct,” said Erik Snyder, a federal employment lawyer at Gilbert Employment Law.

The Trump administration has taken a number of actions to dissuade whistleblowers from accusing federal agencies of wrongdoing.

In the first weeks of his second term, Trump fired former President Joe Biden’s choice to lead the Office of the Special Counsel, a government office that handles whistleblower disclosures from most civilian federal employees. Trump’s nominee to replace him, Paul Ingrassia, withdrew from Senate consideration following a report that he described himself as having a “Nazi streak.”

Federal workers affected by the new rule would also be easier to fire, according to documents reviewed by Reuters. 

The Office of Personnel Management, the government’s HR team, earlier this year estimated that the policy would apply to 50,000 positions.

The documents reviewed by Reuters specified that employees determined by the administration to be in “confidential, policy-determining, policy-making, or policy-advocating” jobs in the federal government would lose their whistleblower protections.

(Reporting by Courtney Rozen and Sarah N. Lynch in Washington; Editing by Edmund Klamann)