For more than 40 years, Government Accountability Project has assisted over 8,000 whistleblowers, some of the most significant being science professionals who disclosed censorship, gross waste of funds, and serious threats to public health, safety and the environment.
Working with Government Accountability Project, science experts have exposed such serious concerns as inappropriate censorship of climate science documents intended for Congress and the public, unsafe practices that threatened worker safety and the environment at Hanford, Rocky Flats, and other nuclear weapons sites, dangerous health risks of pharmaceuticals like Vioxx, threats to safe food from weaknesses in poultry inspection, and waste of taxpayer dollars on weapons programs justified by biased and incomplete research.
Science, free from political influence, should be a non-negotiable priority of our government. Evidence-based, publicly transparent science protects the public and the environment from present harm and is essential to securing the future of our country and planet. But in the past several months, government scientists have faced increasingly restrictive conditions.
For example, references to climate change have been scrubbed from agency websites. The Department of Energy, the Department of Agriculture, the National Park Service, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Environmental Protection Agency have sought to ban employees from making statements or providing documents to the public or journalists. Last fall, the EPA barred three of its scientists from speaking at a press conference and workshop about the effects of climate change on the health of the Narragansett Bay. At the end of 2017, the Washington Post reported that Centers for Disease Control and Prevention officials implemented a “word ban” allegedly prohibiting policy analysts from using certain terms, including “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based,” in budget documents given to the CDC’s partner organizations and to Congress.
Government Accountability Project, along with its Climate Science & Policy Watch program and Food Integrity Campaign, is committed to holding government agencies and corporations accountable by supporting transparency and scientific integrity, fighting instances of unjust censorship, and empowering and protecting whistleblowers who choose science over silence in service of the public interest.
We do this by:
- Providing legal representation to science whistleblowers
- Advocating to ensure whistleblowers’ concerns are publicized and addressed
- Developing legislative reforms to expand whistleblower protections
- Partnering with organizations, including the March for Science, Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Geophysical Unionand others working to protect science integrity
- Offering new resources about whistleblowing:
Speaking Up for Science: A Guide to Whistleblowing for Federal Employees
Working with Whistleblowers: A Guide for Public Interest Organizations
Working with Whistleblowers: A Guide for Journalists
- Educating employees, public interest organizations, journalists, students and others about the crucial role whistleblowers play in protecting consumers, workers, and the environment and the rights of and risks to employees who disclose violations of law, gross mismanagement, abuse of authority, serious threats to public health and safety or censorship.
For more information about Government Accountability Project’s work supporting science whistleblowers, contact us at [email protected].
Gallery of Science Whistleblowers:
Engineer Walt Tamosaitis raised concerns about serious technical flaws at the Department of Energy’s Waste Treatment Plant at the Hanford nuclear site. These flaws, if unaddressed, could have resulted in a nuclear accident on the scale of Fukushima. Dr. Tamosaitis’s disclosures, validated by independent investigations, resulted in stopping the multi-million dollar project pending resolution of those concerns.
USDA veterinarian Dr. Dean Wyatt reported horrendous, unlawful instances of animal abuse at slaughterhouses in Oklahoma and Vermont, including the shackling and bleeding out of conscious pigs and allowing livestock to be trampled and killed while unloaded from trucks. His disclosures prompted the shutdown of one of the plants and reforms to the federal inspection program.
Physicist Aldric Saucier blew the whistle on gross mismanagement and waste of funds associated with the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, otherwise known as the Star Wars program), an anti-nuclear missile defense project with biased and incomplete research. It was funded by misleading Congress about the efficacy of the program being developed. Mr. Saucier’s disclosures substantially eroded political support for the SDI program.
FDA safety researcher Dr. David Graham’s research showed that the painkiller Vioxx had caused 88,000 to 139,000 heart attacks, with a 30 to 40% fatality rate. Dr. Graham went to Congress after the FDA attempted to suppress his findings. His disclosures resulted in Merck pulling Vioxx off the shelves and exposed FDA bias in favor of the pharmaceutical industry over the science.
Dr. Susan Wood, who served as FDA Assistant Commissioner for Women’s Health for five years, concluded in 2005 that Bush administration politics, rather than safety or efficacy concerns, was tying up the approval of Plan-B (the “morning-after pill”). Dr. Wood resigned from her position in protest and spoke our forcefully that FDA science was being held captive by the “pro-life movement,” sharing her story across the country and voicing her concerns over the state of public health policy.
Rick Piltz served as a long-time senior associate in the coordination office of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program. During the George W. Bush Administration, Mr. Piltz became aware that White House officials were improperly censoring scientific program reports on global warming intended for the public and Congress–editing out scientific findings on the strong human impact on climate change. Mr. Piltz decided to leave the government, and contacted GAP to release copies of the edited reports to The New York Times that documented the actual hand-editing by White House official Philip Cooney – a lawyer and former climate team leader with the American Petroleum Institute. The disclosures sparked a media frenzy that resulted in Cooney’s resignation, who found a job at ExxonMobil days later.
Joel Clement directed the Department of Interior’s Office of Policy Analysis and assessed the impacts of climate change on Native Arctic communities. In June 2017, Clement and dozens of senior officials were involuntarily reassigned as part of a larger systematic effort within President Donald Trump’s administration to marginalize employees whose work focuses on climate change and other environmental issues. Clement wrote a scathing letter of condemnation in The Washington Post entitled “I’m a Scientist. I’m blowing the whistle on the Trump administration.” He called out the administration for its dismissal of climate change issues and for silencing civil servants.
Larry Criscione, an engineer and risk analyst with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), became increasingly alarmed that the Oconee nuclear power plant in South Carolina was at risk of flooding and undergoing a meltdown similar to the disaster at Fukushima. When his warnings went unheeded, he blew the whistle by reporting to Congress in 2012 that the NRC was failing to act on evidence that Oconee and nearly a quarter of the nation’s nuclear plants could not withstand an upstream dam break, a risk that escalates as climate change exacerbates the threat of flooding. Criscione’s disclosures have drawn public attention to the urgent need to prevent a flood-related nuclear disaster; he received the 2016 Joe A. Callaway Award for Civic Courage.
