| Open Left: To begin with, PEER is not generally a household name. Can you briefly describe what PEER is, and what you do?
Jeff Ruch: PEER is a service organization for public employees. working on environmental issues On essence we ask as a giant shelter for battered staff that work in agencies like EPA, the Fish & Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, as well as state, local, and tribal agencies.
The typical PEER intake is a specialist of some kind who is under political pressure to either not do his job, or facing retaliation for doing his job too well. So at the moment when there's a conflict between a public employee's career and their conscience is when we usually get the call for help.
OL: And when were you founded?
Jeff Ruch: We were founded in 1993. So we're in our 16th year, going on 17.
We came out of an organization that was doing work in the forest service. And PEER was founded to take what's really employees activism outside of that one agency, and take it nationally, because the way we operate is that we're completely intake driven, All of our work comes from employees, all the information comes from employees. Were just the way that they can beet serve the public when they can't do it on their day job.
Typical of the way we work, we protect whistleblowers and we provide legal representation for them. We strive to help employees avoid be put in the situation where they are whistleblowers. We talk about ways to deliver the message without the messenger, and symbolically the way we operate is the one product we sell, which is on our website, is underwear. Boxer shorts that say undercover activists on the back. And our logo on the leg so you can safely wear them to work.
Because in many instances the source of the information is completely irrelevant to the internal documents that show official malfeasance. And so, if you can confront the agency with some malfeasance. in a way that doesn't allow them to easily change the subject, which they would if there's a source, they would change the subject to whether the source was disgruntled or whether it was a good employee, or they could make up things to try to discredit the source. If you force them to focus on the message, then it's much more efficient.
From the point of view of employees that come to PEER, there's some sort of underlying disconnect an environmental or public health issue. And if we can focus the pushback on the issue, or as we say, if you're going to fight the agency, the last place to fight them is form within your own personnel jacket. So that's a lot of the methodology of what we do.
Having said that, there are instances where scientists and other specialists get in trouble before they realize it. And often their instinct is because they're the specialist, and they know they're right, they think that if they run into political interference that if they just can elevate it to a higher level within the agency, then everything will be resolved
Oft-times, in the people who come to us, by elevating it they've actually themselves have been plunged deeper into their won career inferno. And so they typically call us at the moment they realize their own chain of command is the problem.
So those are the people we hear from.
OL: How do you differ, and how do you overlap in terms of the issues and concerns you work on compared to some other groups people may be more familiar with?
Jeff Ruch: We work on a whole array of environmental issues. The thing that's different about us is that our target ecosystem, our key resource is the employee. So we're entirely directed by public employees and the issues they bring to us range from genetic engineering to global warming. And when we are working with them, we then reach out to groups that are working on those issues so they can take advantage of this information that is often inside validation of their outside criticism.
And for that same reason, a number of the employees are brought to us by environmental organizations. So, these organizations do good work, but the Sierra Club, Environmental Defense, the other groups, NRDC, they have environmental missions, but it's outside of their mission to protect employees. They often, in working on issues have their own inside sources, and there is not infrequently a time when that source says to them, "if I give you this key smoking gun document, what happens to me?"
And frankly they're not empowered, they're not really authorized to defend the employee. That's when they bring them to us, because that's what we do.
And so a lot of our alliances are from groups that want to take advantage of what these public servants are saying, but don't realize they are in no way prepare to handle consequence of the collateral damage form directly working with them.
OL: Last Friday, you sent out a press release, "Why Whistleblowers Are Worse Off Since The Inauguration". This raises a number of questions. First off, what is the importance of whistleblowers-and why should the public care?
Jeff Ruch: Whistleblowers in this context are public servants, and in blowing the whistle they are trying to communicate with their true employers, the public. They work in agencies, but they don't work for agencies. They work for the public. And so whistleblowers are usually the way that the media and public and Congress learn about misconduct, waste of funds, threats to public health and safety, everything from conditions of the air in places like the World Trade Center to problems in Libby Montana where hundreds of people have died, you sort of go down through the list of debacles, and usually the way they first came to light was because someone blew the whistle. So whistleblowers are in many cases society's first line of defense.
And in government agencies, theoretically they are supposed to be protected. There's something known as the Whistleblower Protection Act, and a number of other specific statutes that in essence say we want public servants to be able to freely communicate with Congress or with inspector generals or other entities. The problem is those laws aren't very well enforced.
OL: Second, how were they treated during the Bush Administration?
Jeff Ruch: The Bush Administration was noted for a very strict command-control direction from the White House, and almost a mania on message control. And that meant that any information that was off-message, let alone contradicted the message had to be suppressed or change. And so as a result, the Bush years became renowned for, for example in the area of science, having political appointees who were non-scientists re-write scientific documents to coincide with agreed-upon political ends. In many instances you're talking about documents on the effects of climate change, the causes of climate change, as well as endangered species, even reproductive health, and things like that, that bore on a conservative social agenda were re-written so as to not offend the "base."
And the Bush Administration was also renowned for going after people who openly spoke out, unless they were so well insulated they couldn't be fired. So there was really a spike of incidents where people were targeted for their candor.
OL: Third, how have things gotten worse since the inauguration?
Jeff Ruch: The main reason that things have gotten worse is that no one is in charge. We're still, almost a year now after the election, with many of the agencies still running with the managers [put] in place by the Bush Administration. You've got a number of holdover whistleblower cases, people who blew the whistle on the Bush Administration, whose cases are still in litigation, and they're being basically litigated by the Obama Justice Department and other agency lawyers the not only work for the Obama Administration. Because nobody's in charge, the prosecution of these whistleblowers is running on automatic pilot, with nobody in power to turn it off. And at the same time, beside those "holdover cases", you have new instances in the last several months where holdover managers have use the transition period to take action people who either blew the whistle before, or blew the whistle now. So we have new case that have popped up in just the last few months in which the deciding officials were holdover managers, and you have new Obama appointees who either weren't in place or hadn't even got a chance to warm their swivel chairs.
OL: How would you explain this? What's the primary thing responsible? Is it inattention? Is it benign neglect?
Jeff Ruch: We don't think this is a priority of the Obama Administration. We've pointed out that the only time as President the Obama has spoken about the need to protect whistleblowers was when he spoke to the Parliament of Ghana. He hasn't spoken about it in a domestic agenda. His administration, for the most part, has opposed reform legislation that the Democrats in Congress have been trying to enact for the past five years, and which, when he was in Congress, he supported. And also, there's a key position called the special counsel, who is sort of the policeman of the merit system. It's a place where whistleblowers can go to try to obtain relief or to force investigation of wrongdoing that they've disclosed. That position has been vacant since December, when President Bush fired his own appointee for misconduct, and we're approaching a year of that office being vacant, and the Obama has not even nominated anyone. And this is a confirmed position, so [it's] almost certain no one is going to be in place in 2009. So to the extent they don't even think it's important to appoint a special counsel to protect whistleblowers, it suggests that it's very, very low on their priority list.
OL: Going back, again to not supporting legislation he supported when he was in Congress. Can you say more about that?
Yeah, There's been an attempt for the last few years to strengthen the whistleblower Protection Act, And That legislation has never made it to the President's desk, and for the most part it was hampered not only by Republican control of the Congress, or by when the Democrats took over, by opposition of the Justice Department. So in this new session, in this first year winding down, the Obama Administration has taken, in essence, the same position that the Bush Administration took, for many of the same reasons. They've couched it not as the Bush people did, But in term of problems they'd like to work out so that the President can support it. So it's wrapped in a little sweeter package, but in terms of protections for people who work in National Security agencies, the right to jury trials, some other fundamental reforms, they're not supporting [it], and so as a result, that legislation has stalled. And hopefully will move in 2010, but the first year of the Obama Administration will have gone by and there's been no significant progress.
OL: Now I think you said before [previous to this interview] that part of the reason was that they were looking for consensus before doing anything? Could you talk about that?
Jeff Ruch: Sure. The style of the Obama Administration has been to seek consensus among the Federal agencies before they take a position, except on a very small number of issues. But whistleblower protection is not one of the issues where they're affirmatively taking a stand, and is not one of the things about which they've issued a public statement. And so the style is more, instead of a commander-in-chief, you have more a committee chairman. And as long as agencies such as the Justice Department, which has to litigate against whistleblowers, objects, the Obama Administration has sort of stalled and they are not inclined to over-rule objections from among the agencies. And so it adds to the sense they don't have a policy, and without a policy, nobody is empowered to make decisions and so it almost operates as a de facto continuation of a third Bush term.
Part 2 will be published later today. |
Jeff Ruch is executive director of 
