Perfected Allegations of Wrongdoing, Part I of IV
Department of Labor/OSHA, January 2009 to October 2024
The Devil in the Details
25 February 2025
Perfected Allegations is offered to support holding federal bureaucrats to account for their abuse of authority and violations of law, rule, and regulation and corruption. It provides witness statements and documentation supporting its allegations to persuade officials tasked with protecting the integrity of our government that scofflaw bureaucrats engaged in criminal act that require legal prosecution. In doing that, we honor our Constitution as a declaration We the People are the final authority for our Constitutional Republic
Devil in the Details takes a close look at the evidence in Perfected Allegations to understand how and why corruption has spread throughout our government, looking individual bad actors, who can and often are quickly replaced by other bad actors, to learn how we got here and how we can return to a nation of laws and shared values. At its core, this examination sees our government as an organization with cracks that allow corruption to invade and capture government functions. It does that in four steps: discussing how our investigations use methods matter; looker closer at who participated in the corruption to map the network created by a vast criminal organization; illuminating how that organization invited corruption; and by offering three proposals for reforming how our government works. These steps then will be repeated at the end of the three remaining parts of Perfected Allegations of Wrongdoing.
Why “methods” matter.
All investigations follow a method set out by those who authorize it. This investigation follows a “rational reasoning” method that goes back more than 2,500 years to the Greeks.[i] In our time, it’s recognized as the “scientific method” which follows a design that begins by assessing what is currently known, followed by a hypothesis about what known facts mean, then a testing of known facts to determine if they are valid in the present context, and finally reformulating our original assumptions into a new understanding of the facts.
This method requires falsifiability which is an essential part of the scientific method. That simply means that someone questioning it must be able to duplicate and test the facts on their own. I learned the scientific method as a university student in the early 1960s studying for a career as a geophysicist (climate scientist). My fellow science students and I assumed the scientific method was a settled and widely used method. But we quickly learned that wasn’t true, echoing President Dwight Eisenhower warning about a “scientific-industrial” complex that was insinuating itself into the federal government. After watching this scientific-industrial complex grow and extend its influence into the deepest parts of American society, it became apparent it also had captured our public policy system.
I took my training in the scientific method into my study of politics and public policy, believing it offered a key to uncovering the politics of corruption. This led to studying the sociology of organizations and how information was used as a tool of control, then to examining the relationship between managers and those who are managed, confirming information is a tool for better or worse, in managing government.[ii] All of this led to a deep study of climate science and how it was shaped as a disaster narrative serving to corrupt government policy, which now looks a lot like what happened with COVID-19. I brought all this training and experience to my work as an attorney-investigator with the Department of Labor (DoL) Whistleblower Protection Program, which allowed me to see beyond an immediate situation to connect the dots.
Organizations also employ qualities of design intended to promote the goals of the organization. In looking at how our government works, it begins with its Constitutional design, and particularly the way that it provides for a “separation of powers”, meaning its three branches of government are divided to ensure if one or even two branches of our government fail to protect the Constitution, the third branch can step in to restore the integrity of the Constitution and the laws, rules, and regulations it authorizes. When evidence emerges that this separation of powers is failing, it should be a signal for the judicial branch to step in and protect the Constitution.
Presently, there are 2.1 million federal workers in the Executive Branch of our federal government, and more than 8 million private-sector workers who work under federal contracts. The federal workers are bound by law to be whistleblowers, but the private-sector employees are not bound by this regulation. Why that disparity exists and how it encourages corruption holds the key to answering the bigger question, how did corruption grow to absorb both groups. This leads back to the war on whistleblowers that goes back more than twenty-five years, because this war first began against private-sector whistleblowers, but intensified and expanded after 2009 to focus on federal whistleblowers.
Examining facts – Who participated in the wrongdoing.
There are two areas in this investigation where wrongdoing occurred: the DoL Whistleblower Protection Program, where whistleblower investigations were corrupted and retaliation against both private-sector and federal employees occurred; and among DoL senior responsible management officials, where disclosures of wrongdoing were met with obstruction and retaliation. Most, but not all, of these DoL officials are identified in the evidence produced to support the allegations of wrongdoing. But this evidence is only a small part of a very large evidentiary base which, if investigated, would reveal the full extent of the corruption.
There also are three levels of participation reflected in the evidence of corruption produced during this investigation: those who actively participated by managing the wrongdoing; those who passively facilitated in the wrongdoing by failing to honor their oversight duties; and those who passively participated in the wrongdoing by abandoning their ethical duty as federal employees to report waste, fraud, abuse of authority and corruption. These need to be closely examined to understand how authority can and does corrupt an organization, and if the goal is to eliminate corruption, this is where we should begin.
While the corruption of the DoL Whistleblower Protection Program appears first in our Report, as the investigation moved up the chain of command, it revealed how other DoL officials protected corrupt officials in the WBPP. There are three contextual facts of importance that explain how that happened.:
a) In 2009, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a highly critical audit report documenting how the WBPP had been failing its mission to protect whistleblowers for twenty (20) years. That was followed by three other audits – one by the GAO in 2010, and two more by the DoL Office of Inspector General in 2010 and 2011, which were similarly critical of the failure of the WBPP management. These audits could have but didn’t, prompt investigations of the WBPP to discover how and why the program was failing. The answer why they didn’t, can be found in the way these audits resurrected a 2008-2009 public scandal about a dysfunctional WBPP that shook DoL management and the Obama administration.
b) Then, in 2013, Secretary of Labor, Hilda Solis, was removed as allegations appeared of her using her office for political purposes (fundraising for President Obama’s reelection). President Obama replaced Solis with long-time Democrat Party loyalist, Thomas E. Perez. Shortly thereafter Obama replaced the DoL Inspector General with another long-time Democrat loyalist, Scott S. Dahl. Then in summer of 2014, after disclosures resurrecting the scandal in the WBPP, Obama sent staff member, Kirk Sanders, then working for Obama’s Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough, to serve as the Chief of Staff for OSHA, a long vacant position for which Sanders had few qualifications, except being an Obama loyalist. It’s reasonable to conclude these changes in senior DoL leadership occurred because it was feared DoL scandals would lead back to White House itself.
c) Also in 2013, Edward Snowden disclosed on WikiLeaks the wide-spread collection of private information by the U.S. intelligence community. This led President Obama to declare a war on federal whistleblowing.[iii] As a federal employee, in the Spring of 2013 I received an anonymous email from the Office of the Secretary of Labor warning its employees against reporting corruption to the media. Then in November 2013, after the change in DoL leadership, a second anonymous email appeared from the Office of the Secretary of Labo, warning all DoL employees against visiting WikiLeaks, even on our personal computers, which would be grounds for our dismissal. This reflected a deeply layered corruption which wanted to conceal its own existence.
These contexts provide clues to why disclosures of corruption in the federal government became targets for retaliation. But they leave unanswered questions of how the corruption itself was designed to weaponize the internal workings of the federal government to broadly suppress disclosures of wrongdoing.
Examining facts – How Corruption Thrived in Executive Branch for Decades
What is a “culture of corruption,” and how does it invite more corruption? Culture, by definition, is a system of beliefs that favor specific behaviors, including corruption. So to understand how corruption thrives within a culture we need to examine how a culture induces acceptance of corruption as discussed in this video..[iv]
Systems of belief that create a culture can range from parents who shape a child’s belief system from birth, to ethnic clans that instill beliefs about group identity, to religious and political organizations, which promote assumptions about the meaning of relationships that survive and thrive over extended periods of time and vast geographies. In the scientific era, one of the most powerful cultural influences is bureaucracy, which was developed to facilitate systems of belief and action that served this mass organization.
That bureaucracies produce cultures is not disputed but rather is an essential theme in management studies.[v] Some of the features of a bureaucratic culture include: a formal organizational structure, formal and implied informal rules about conduct, structured relationships between employees, and a hierarchy of power with a clear chain of command that locates authority at the top. As is the case with all cultural influences, the longer someone works within a bureaucracy, the more they adopt its’ values and expectations. This then argues the design of a bureaucracy is essential to understanding how it encourages particular cultures, including cultures of corruption, to emerge.
Three Proposals for Limiting the Culture of Corruption
If we want to understand how the design of our government promotes corruption, we need to examine its primary features, beginning with its assumptions about controlling corruption. Those can be found in the Federalist Papers, No. 51, which offers insights into how the authors of the Constitution thought about corruption. Here, James Madison displays a clear understanding that the concentration of power in a strong federal government would attract corruption, arguing the separation of powers would deter it. But in the end, Madison threw up his hands, declaring future governments would need “axillary” measures when corruption appeared.
To be fair, the authors of the Constitution did not anticipate the extraordinary growth of the U.S. and its government. Presently, there are more than 10 million people working in and for the Executive branch, another 30 thousand working in Congress as elected members, their staff, and the staff of Congressional committees and administrative staff, and another 30 thousand who work for the judicial branch. That’s a huge number of bureaucrats left to be managed by a small cadre of 537 elected officials.
Further, the problem of public management of these vast bureaucracies is complicated by the fact that actual management is left to some 18,000 career bureaucrats, identified as Senior Executive Service (SES) members, who cultivate a culture within these bureaucracies that serve their interest rather than the public interest. Further and some 4,000 political appointees who serve the interests of the Chief Executive for a short period of time. The political appointees come and go with regularity, rarely able to fully grasp the nature of the culture they are employed to manage, as do elected officials, except for those who choose to become career politicians.
This suggests three reforms that could help combat corruption: limiting terms of service for those who work in the federal government, diluting the concentration of the federal bureaucracy in once place, and strengthening the connections between elected officials and the public they serve.
A. Limiting terms of government service.
The effects of our current system of career employment for public servants became clear during the Whistleblowers United investigation of public corruption. It manifested first in how lower-level employees often succumb to illegal orders from superiors, including concealing and destroying federal documents, and misdirecting communications to protect their boss. Then it manifested in collaborations among senior bureaucrats across agencies to obstruct whistleblower investigations. This clearly was a systemic pattern of corruption which in both cases pointed to the development of a network of corruption which over time has selectively selected and promoted subordinates not on the basis of their merit, but according to their ability to be intimidated and controlled.
This system for hiring and promoting federal employees was adopted by the 1978 Civil Service Reform Act, which described itself as a “merit system”. But after 45 years, accumulated evidence argues this system has failed, and its hiring and promotion facilitated rather than prevented corruption. Some of this can be attributed to a lack of Congressional interest in enforcing merit employment standards, and to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” hiring preferences. But the most likely culprit has been the failure of the federal Office of Government Ethics, empowered to promote merit hiring and promotion, to do its job.
What is currently proposed are term limits for elected members of Congress. However, while that would attack careerism and the corruption it produces, it would strengthen the power of careerist federal bureaucrats who would be more insulted from accountability as few members of Congress would be likely to discover the schemes career bureaucrats use to stay in power. Thus, the better answer is to limit terms of public service for both politicians and senior federal bureaucrats.
As our investigation developed over time, we also began to see evidence that careerism among senior officials and the intimidation of subordinates was primary source of corruption with a common root. Each of them in their own way had a strong interest in their federal career. This allowed corrupt officials to leverage their power over subordinates to bend and break federal laws, rules, and regulations that defined their work. If term appointments were substituted for life-time appointments at all levels of federal service, and coupled with peer-reviews substituting discretionary hiring and promotion by responsible management officials the corruption produced by careerism would soon begin to abate.
B. Diluting the concentration of the federal bureaucracy in Washington, D.C.
During his first term, President Donald Trump took a small but important step toward diluting the concentration of the federal bureaucracy in Wahington, D.C. by moving the headquarters of the Department of Interior to Denver, Colorado. The logic of that move was compelling as the DoI is a relatively small federal agency with the lion’s share of its work in the American West. Thus, a DoI headquartered in Colorado acted to shorten the real and psychological distance between the DoI and a majority of the people concerned with its management, while substantially reducing the costs of the DoI as a whole. Also, the cost of living is significantly lower in Colorado than in Washington, D.C, as is the cost of office space and other management expenses. The lower cost of living means DoI central office employees don’t require high cost of living adjusted pay, which then adds to the reduction of DoI cost to American taxpayers.
The same logic can be applied to many other federal agencies and programs which have non-defined geographically constraints, including the Department of Agriculture, National Park Service, Coast Guard and other uniformed services, Department of Homeland Security, Bureau of Indian Affairs, etc, allowing the benefits of appropriately disbursed relocations accrue. Even more agencies could be moved to lower cost of living locations to the benefit of federal employees and the national budget, while bringing the federal government closer to the people and the realities of their daily lives. Relocating agencies would also blunt the tendency for concentrations of bureaucrats to develop an independent bureaucratic culture hostile to the public interest.
C. Strengthening connections between elected members of Congress and the citizens they serve.
Currently, there is a widening divide between the elected members of Congress and the citizens they serve. This divide has been visible for at least 25 years, if not longer, promoted by the growing influence of political parties over the management of Congress.[vi] Many, if not most, elected members of Congress, and particularly newer members, have little idea how the government actuallyt works.[vii] Instead, they rely on the Democrat and Republican party organizations that recruited them and support their careers to instruct them about their role. This is unacceptable, because it reveals an unaccountable shadow government, not citizens, as the primary source of political authority within Congress, which points to the need to change the structures around Congress as critical to restoring the authority of We the People over Congress.
The two principal issues involved on making these changes are interconnected: the effect of money on public policy are interlinked with the influence of parties over the elected members of Congress. Both also share a common root in the incremental shift of power away from candidates for Congress to the “donor class” which now controls of the electoral and policy processes. The U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in Citizens United, which defined corporations as people who enjoyed unlimited free speech rights, also contributes by blocking efforts to restrict campaign financing and limit the influence of money.
However, there is a way to limit the influence of money while strengthening the influence of citizens. This can be done by restricting all campaign contributions to those that originate from within the geographical boundaries of states, for Senators, and Congressional Districts, for members of the House, where the money will be spent. This meets the Citizens United concern about disparate treatment of corporations, while curtailing the current practice of using political Packs and other outside organizations funded by wealthy donors to fund political campaigns. It would also limit “influencers” to those who are qualified residents of the state or Congressional district at issue in an election, while making transparent to the electorate who was actually supporting a candidate. The real resistance to this reform would be careerists in Congress who greatly enhance their power by distributing party funds to preferred candidates.
It’s a traditional assumption that members of Congress represent actual people, rather than geographies, which argues members of Congress should live and work within the constituencies that elect them, and not in Washington, D.C. For a long time, that assumption was discarded by technological barriers limiting travel and communications. Members of Congress have long complained about the costs and inconvenience of maintaining two residences - one their established home and the other occupied to serve their Congressional work. It was an arrangement which is unhealthy for members of Congress, their families, and their constituents, who slowly lose contact with each other.
Fortunately, this is a problem with a solution, brought to us by the miracle of modern technologies. It's now common for large organizations to conduct their business via the internet, using email and internet communication applications to conduct meetings. This has made the management of organizations more transparent, creating a consciousness about accountability, while also increasing their efficiency and reducing the costs of management. Working from home has quickly blossomed with these technological changes and is pointing the way ahead to future organizational management. If that works for other big organizations, why shouldn’t it apply to our Congress, which is suffering from a lack of transparency and credibility?
Conclusion
What a close examination of the facts in this Whistleblower investigation reveals is a culture of corruption involving a wide-spread disregard for ethical mandates that require federal employees to report waste, fraud, abuse and corruption [5 C.F.R., ⸹2635.101(b)(11)]. It is remarkable because there is a federal agency, the Office of Government Ethics, devoted to that mandate. Yet, there also is a line between those who exercise authority within the bureaucracies of the federal government and those subject to their power. In this case, that includes at least one President, multiple Chiefs of Staff, Attorneys General, Inspectors General, Special Counsels, Agency Counsels, and senior political appointees who, for the most part, are lawyers. Perhaps the broad takeaway from this investigation is we need fewer lawyers and more ordinary citizens in our government.
Respectfully,