June 08, 2005
Whistleblowing v. Leaking
There’s a big difference between blowing the whistle and being a leaker. Whistleblowers take responsibility for their actions and suffer the career consequences, as today’s news amply points out.
The White House war on global warming science suffered another damaging blow today thanks to Rick S. Piltz, a former high official in the government’s Climate Change Science Program. He resigned in March after a former petroleum industry lobbyist now working for the Bush administration watered down his office’s reports on the need for near-term action to halt global warming.
Piltz could have remained in the shadows and leaked his information to the press. But instead he went to the Government Accountability Project, which provides legal assistance to government employees who want to go public with knowledge about government wrongdoing. In today’s New York Times story documenting his allegations, Piltz not only attached his name to the allegations that Philip Cooney, a non-scientist who previously lobbied for the American Petroleum Institute, added equivocating language to a 2002 global warming report, but he provided the documents that proved the allegations.
The movement to improve the Food and Drug Administration’s safety record is also benefiting from the actions of a courageous whisteblower. David Graham, who testified before Congress late last year on the problems with Vioxx and a number of other potentially unsafe drugs, is still working at the agency. In today’s Washington Post, Graham attacks the independence of the FDA’s new Drug Safety Oversight Board, claiming it contains too many officials with ties to the agency’s new drug approval arm – an institutional conflict of interest. He and Sen. Chuck Grassley, chief sponsor of the bill that would make the safety arm of the agency independent, sent a letter to the FDA protesting the oversight board’s make-up.
The FDA asked Graham to serve on the new oversight board, but he turned down the offer. According to the article, he feared it would limit his ability to criticize the agency.
Like Piltz, Graham was assisted by the Government Accountability Project. While GAP often counsels would-be whistleblowers not to go public because legal protections for public employees have been all but eliminated by the courts, in these cases the stories were so compelling and the individuals involved so intent on getting their stories known that they ignored that legal advice in favor of serving the public interest.
If legal protections are ignored in the public sector, they are virtually non-existent in the private sector, as the sad tale of Pfizer vice president Peter Rost in today’s New York Times shows. Rost appeared on 60 Minutes last Sunday to repeat his claims that the drug industry consistently overcharges for its products, games public sector agencies like Medicare, Medicaid and the IRS, and has essentially lied about the safety problems of imported drugs.
His reward inside Pfizer has been near total isolation. Though he’s still on the payroll at $600,000 per year, the marketing executive’s employees have been taken away and he has no authority. Pfizer even locked him out of its corporate email system for a brief time this week until the New York Times reporter called to inquire about the move. “I guess everybody’s waiting for me to get fired,” he said.
The article speculates that the only thing keeping him on the payroll is a federal investigation into the marketing of a Pfizer drug that Rost used to manage.
These whistleblowers’ actions stand in stark contrast to the methods of anonymous leakers. In this week’s New Yorker, legendary investigative journalist Seymour Hersh recounts his own experiences with anonymous sources during the Watergate years. It wasn’t just Mark Felt, the 91-year-old former number two man at the Federal Bureau of Investigation who came out last week as Deep Throat. The Nixon White House couldn’t control the unraveling cover-up “because of the wealth of information, including documents, that reporters got from sources within the Administration. Many reporters also had sources on the various congressional investigating committees and in the Justice Department and other agencies,” he wrote. “Anonymous sources were essential to the Watergate story.”
They talked because they were “outraged by the sheer bulk and gravity of the corrupt activities they witnessed in the White House . . . some feared that the government might fall, and some talked to reporters about their concern that the President, facing impeachment, might try to hold on to his office by defying the Constitution.”
These anonymous sources, most of whom dealt with national security secrets, had their “worst fears confirmed by the revelation” that Nixon was taping their conversations. Presumably, this dictated their need to stay anonymous.
Scientists concerned about the fate of the planet and the safety of common medicines somehow found the courage to put their careers at risk to unmask administrative wrongdoing by high government officials. But when the fate of the Republic was at stake, top government officials – who had been entrusted with the nation’s highest secrets – felt the need to stay anonymous to bring serious malfeasance to the public's attention. The system may have worked during Watergate, but I still say it set a bad precedent.