When Baghdad fell in 2003, Robert Isakson saw an opportunity. He took his disaster relief company to Iraq to help build military bases and other large installations under another Coalition Provisional Authority contractor, a firm eerily named Custer Battles, after its founders Scott Custer and Mike Battles.
Within a few weeks, however, his Custer Battles colleagues had run him out of town at gunpoint. According to Isakson, the company’s goons rounded up his team and dumped them outside the Green Zone, presumably hoping they’d be killed. The men survived the ordeal by paying a taxi driver several hundred dollars to ferry them from Baghdad, through Falluja, and all the way to the safety of Jordan.
Isakson’s sin had been threatening to inform government officials of Custer Battles’ plan to fib its way into a windfall. The firm had secured a sweet deal with the Coalition Provisional Authority—it was getting reimbursed for its expenses at 125 percent of cost. Not satisfied with that haul, the company repeatedly pressured Isakson to inflate his receipts. When he threatened to squeal, the firm tried to lose him in the violent chaos that had enabled its profiteering in the first place.
Isakson’s ordeal aside, he’s one of the lucky ones. “He had a contract,” says his lawyer Alan Grayson, “and he had the resources to take action and defend his rights.” He’s now litigating a $10 million fraud suit. But Isakson and others like him are on their own if they see something fishy and want to report it. The existing whistleblower laws don’t do much for government employees, but they offer almost no protection to the legions of employees working for government contractors—an army of over 600 companies in Iraq alone, including scores of security firms like the now-infamous Blackwater.
A host of legislation to bring contracting do-gooders in from the wilderness is slowly making its way through Congress.
The bill most relevant to men and women in Isakson’s quandary is a provision by senators Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine) affixed to the Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2008. The bill passed through the Senate earlier this month and is now headed for conference committee. According to Tom Devine, a whistleblower expert at the Government Accountability Project, it will protect “not just traditional contractors, but employees of any organization receiving federal funds for that work.” That adds up to about $800 billion worth of government spending a year that will be less likely to fall prey to waste and fraud.
The McCaskill-Collins amendment allows whistleblowing workers who feel they’ve been retaliated against to appeal to the Defense Department’s inspector general and get a ruling within 15 months. If no ruling is made in that time, or if an adverse ruling is issued, whistleblowers will have 90 days to, as Devine put it, “get another bite at the apple” before taking the case to federal court. (Advocates are hoping to bring the 15-month delay down to 6 or 7 months in conference committee.)
The House version of the bill passed with no whistleblower protections in it, but Devine says members of the House Armed Services Committee were receptive to whistleblower protections back in 2006, though a similar measure—which failed—was more modest than it is this time around.
The far broader, gold standard legislation is California Rep. Henry Waxman’s Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act, which enshrines First Amendment rights quite broadly, extending whistleblower protections to both government and nongovernment recipients of federal dollars. It passed in the House, but until very recently was being held hostage by Senator Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), who blocked the bill with a legislative hold.
In a new twist, though, Coburn has agreed to lift his hold, according to Senate Armed Services Committee staff, in exchange for language that prevents the law from being used to file frivolous lawsuits and mandates a Government Accountability Office study of its impact on litigation. The revised bill will be reintroduced to committee, where previously Coburn was the only senator who objected to it.
Devine expects the bill to finally get out of the Senate this month, but President Bush already vowed to veto it back when it passed the House. “The wave of corruption has been the catalyst for a public mandate to protect whistleblowers,” he says. “There’s been more raw material to make our case than at any time since Watergate, and the public has responded.”
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