Speaking Up for Those Who Speak Out

Four years ago, when Teresa Chambers told The Washington Post that the nation’s monuments and parklands were less secure than they had been in previous years because fewer police were available to patrol them, she never thought her job as police chief of the U.S. Park Police would hang in the balance. Her bosses at the Interior Department had long appreciated the way she had interacted with the news media, she says, and had never complained when she had done so.

“They had encouraged me to speak not only for the park police but for the entire department. When the story came out, we were very pleased that our side of it came out clearly and that our bosses didn’t end up looking bad,” says Ms. Chambers.

But just three days after the article was published, she was stripped of her badge and many of her powers. Six months later, she was fired. Ms. Chambers — a lifelong Republican — believes she was let go because White House staff members were worried that her published comments made the government appear weak on homeland security. (A spokesman for the Department of the Interior declined to comment on Ms. Chambers’s case because a lawsuit over her dismissal is still pending.)

Aid in Court

To help get her job back, Ms. Chambers turned to Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, an advocacy group in Washington that supports government workers who may have lost their jobs or been threatened by their superiors for speaking out.

PEER, as the advocacy group is known, publicized Ms. Chambers’s case during the months after she lost her badge and was under orders not to speak to the press. The organization later created a page on its Web site to help raise money for her legal defense, eventually winning $30,000.

The charity also represented her in federal court, successfully navigating her case through a labyrinthine system in which the claims of nearly all federal government whistle-blowers who have filed them have been dismissed. Now, Ms. Chambers says she has hope that her case will soon end, perhaps at the Supreme Court next year, with the return of her job, plus back pay.

“PEER has been a very effective advocate for me,” she says. “They’ve done a lot of things for me that I couldn’t have done by myself.”

PEER and a handful of like-minded organizations, most based in Washington, have heard more stories like Ms. Chambers’s in recent years, as whistle-blowing, particularly at the federal level, has mushroomed.

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the Enron accounting scandal early this decade, “people have become more aware and patriotic, and are more liable to speak up,” says Stephen M. Kohn, acting executive director of the National Whistleblower Center, in Washington.

As a result, the workload for nonprofit groups that aid whistle-blowers is rising. PEER reports that it now receives five inquiries a day from people who want to divulge information, as opposed to three before 2001.

New groups have sprouted to handle the growing load, and some groups have expanded their fund raising — especially through online appeals — to allow them to handle more cases.

Helping a whistle-blower takes a lot of effort. Organizations spend money on staff members to interview them and to conduct research on their claims. They file Freedom of Information requests with federal agencies to flesh out or better document a whistle-blower’s complaint. Some groups assign staff lawyers or solicit them from private firms to represent whistle-blowers, while others investigate the claims, with an eye to affecting legislation or spurring an inquiry by Congress, the news media, or the agencies themselves.

Workers at such groups contact reporters and Congressional staff members in hopes that the story will reach a larger audience and the problems will attract more attention. Often, organizations that assist whistle-blowers will protect the identity of those who come forward in order to protect their jobs. Some will ask whistle-blowers whether they are speaking out to save their jobs, to call attention to problems, or to get something else out of the situation. Whistle-blowers can receive as much as 20 percent of court-ordered settlements or verdicts if they win cases against corporations or the government.

Sometimes, those court decisions will be worth millions of dollars.

“I’m a big fan of not worrying about their motivation,” says Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, in Washington, a group formed 27 years ago by whistle-blowers at the Pentagon.

“Often, people only have a piece of the picture. We look for documents on our own to piece things together. One of the big mistakes people on Capitol Hill and in the media make is to question a whistle-blower’s motives. If what they’re exposing is real, that shouldn’t matter.”

Working With Congress

Like some other organizations, the Project on Government Oversight, or POGO, doesn’t provide whistle-blowers with legal counsel.

Instead, the group tries to work the halls of Congress to solve the problems people bring to them. POGO also holds monthly information meetings with Congressional aides to educate them on how to perform oversight of federal agencies.

Other organizations will work along with government agencies to help resolve an employee’s complaint. Craig Williams, the director of Chemical Weapons Working Group, an organization in Berea, Ky., that encourages government agencies around the world to properly store and dispose of chemical agents, such as mustard gas, controlled by the military, says his organization won’t use the news media to pressure the government to solve its problems — except as a last resort.

“It gets complicated when national-security issues are tossed into the equation,” says Mr. Williams. “I won’t go public with things that are security-sensitive. We’ll try to work things out at the base level or at the local level.” Nonetheless, some whistle-blowers will step forward to state their case, especially if negotiations with government officials don’t alleviate a problem, or if they have been threatened for bringing them to light.

Because whistle-blowers often point out environmental or storage problems involving deadly substances, “they take on incredible risk for themselves and their families when they speak out,” says Mr. Williams. “It’s bad enough in industry, but it’s really bad in the military. There really should be a Hall of Fame for these people.”

Whistle-blowers and the groups that back them up also have fans in government who believe they provide a valuable function in a democracy.

Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has led investigations into claims by whistle-blowers at the Food and Drug Administration and other federal agencies. He lauds groups that amplify their concerns.

“These organizations help give whistle-blowers the confidence and fortitude to press ahead against difficult odds in strenuous times,” says Mr. Grassley.

“They also provide constructive advice, practical knowledge, and contacts to Congressional members, which are all necessary to help whistle-blowers bring forth allegations of wrongdoing.”

Few Court Victories

Even though charities are stepping up their work with whistle-blowers, the vast majority of such people never get any help; and even those who do get help are rarely successful in court.

A report issued last year by the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit research group in Washington, and Salon.com, a Web magazine in San Francisco, found that only about 3.5 percent of whistle-blowers win cases taken before a special federal court in Washington.

The inability of existing charities to help her pursue her case led Ms. Edmonds to form her own group, the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, in Alexandria, Va.

After she was fired by the FBI in 2002, Ms. Edmonds sought help from several Washington organizations. She had accused fellow agents and FBI managers of incompetence and misconduct surrounding the investigation into the 2001 terrorist attacks, and she had alleged that high-ranking government officials sold nuclear secrets to Pakistan and Turkey illegally.

Ms. Edmonds, who worked as a translator for the FBI, says that while POGO successfully sued to release transcripts of a “top-secret” Senate committee hearing on her case in 2004, and the American Civil Liberties Union, in New York, has taken up her cause, she never got as much help as she felt she needed.

“I had called all of these other groups to ask about how to take my information to the Office of the Inspector General, or to ask them how to get an attorney” shortly after she was fired, Ms. Edmonds says.

“No one responded to my e-mails, phone calls, or letters,”she says.

“Until my story was on the front page of The New York Times, they didn’t care. They didn’t want to take my case until it became a delicious case,” she adds.

Working With Journalists

In the past four years, her organization has offered support to some 40 workers at the Defense Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency who have information about alleged wrongdoings in those offices, but has made limited gains for them.

Because she has been unable to raise much money, Ms. Edmonds has concentrated on using what little she has to educate the news media.

“If it’s a national-security case, most lawyers see it as hopeless. You need a dedicated lawyer to make this happen and we haven’t been able to get our people dedicated attorneys and help them pay for them,” she says.

Navigating the federal legal system can cost more than $300,000, as her case has.

Although Washington whistle-blower groups eventually found lawyers to help her with aspects of her case, she remains unconvinced that their motives are entirely pure.

“I’m friends with these groups, but they use these high-profile cases to raise funds,” she says. “They have to. That’s the way the system works.”

Some observers say that long-existing organizations sometimes need to cherry-pick their cases to maximize their impact on the way the government is run and to perpetuate themselves. “Groups need to take on cases they can win,” says C. Fred Alford, a professor of government at the University of Maryland at College Park and author of Whistleblowers: Broken Lives and Organizational Power.

“There are a lot of cases they’ll never win or will never get them headlines.”

He maintains that organizations perform a meaningful function, despite their limited clout. “They have value because no one else is doing anything,” says Mr. Alford, who sits on a POGO advisory board. “These groups are bold enough, but making a real difference is hard for them because they’re constrained by a lack of resources, staff, and time.”