Just after three senators introduced a bill to tighten whistleblower protection for Energy Department employees and contractors, the agency itself released a new internal order aimed at ratcheting up those same protections without congressional action.
DOE order O 221.1B, “Reporting Fraud, Waste and Abuse to the Office of Inspector General,” was approved Sept. 27, only a day after the “Department of Energy Whistleblower Accountability Act” was sent to the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. The bill’s path to law is uncertain in a lame-duck Congress.
The new DOE order serves nominally the same function as an old order that it supersedes: to codify procedures for reporting waste, fraud, and abuse to the agency’s inspector general. The new order contains stricter language than did the old, specifying, among other things, that DOE and its contractors “must not deter or dissuade employees from notifying an appropriate authority of actual or suspected violations of law, rule or regulation.”
Meanwhile, the Sept. 26 bill, introduced by Sens. Edward Markey (D-Mass.), Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), and Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), would go beyond sharpening existing provisions of law and create new whistleblower protections and new consequences for subverting them.
For example, the legislation would extend the amount of time DOE employees can wait after an alleged safety incident to file a complaint with the agency. Under the bill, employees could wait up to one year, compared with the current six months. The bill also would give DOE only a year to complete an investigation of a complaint before the whistleblower could seek a jury trial in federal court. The bill would further permit the Labor Department to impose punitive damages on DOE contractors that retaliate against whistleblowers.
