THE WAR ON WHISTLELBLOWERS:
How Corruption in the Federal Government Grew and Thrived Over 60 years
12 April 2025
The two principal policies of the federal government are transparency and accountability. These are interactive policies because achieving accountability requires witnesses and documentation with sufficient credibility and weight to meet legal standards to indict and prosecute those guilty of federal crimes. This requires people, and particularly federal employees who are willing to be whistleblowers who bring credible, first-hand knowledge and information to federal prosecutors who are mandated to uphold and defend the Constitution.
A breakdown of any part of this system of transparency will result in reinforcing a belief that laws, rules and regulations don’t matter, which is an essential ingredient to the development of a culture of corruption where even those who sincerely support accountability will be discouraged from becoming whistleblowers. That process was at work during the 1960s that eventually led to the collapse of the U.S. war in Vietnam and Daniel Elsberg’s revelations in 1971 about lies that led to it, which continued into the 2000s to conceal fraud and abuse of power by the National Security Administration, then to the 2010s and the Obama administration’s open war on whistleblowers that has continued into the Trump Administration.
How could that happen if the two principal policies of the federal government are transparency and accountability?
Weapons of War: Institutional Capture and Cultivating a Culture of Corruption
As the last video commented, it is well known that bureaucracies are self-promoting and self-protecting, which make them easily corruptible institutions given sufficient time and opportunity. Daniel Elsberg’s documents from the Rand Corporation make that case, as do Thomas Drake, Bill Binney, and Edward Snowden, as each of the institutions in which they worked had a history of self-interested abuse of authority. Then, when nothing fundamentally changed with their whistleblowing, the message delivered to all federal employees was clear that whistleblowing would not be tolerated.
The principal difference between these high-profile incidents of whistleblowing was the degree of intolerance and the willingness of at least some journalists, their editors, and elected members of Congress to expose both the truth of their disclosures, as well as the retaliation they suffered. This allowed to public to see and understand the importance of whistleblowing, then speak up in support of these whistleblowers.
In that sense, the message and the messenger were in the 1970s equally important and protected, with Elsberg escaping from the legal charges against him, when it became known federal officials were actively corrupting the conduct of the investigation of those charges. Similarly, the case against Thomas Drake was dropped, when another senior federal official quietly blew the whistle on senior Department of Defense officials withholding exculpatory evidence that exonerated Drake.
Rather than acting to limit the Obama war on whistleblowers, the failure of the Thomas Drake prosecution only intensified it, with federal employees being ominously warned via anonymous email against whistleblowing they would be fired if they talked to the press about corruption, or even just accessed Wikileaks on their own personal computers, they would be fired. That solidified an already strong culture of corruption in federal agencies with unambiguous intimidation, leading to the most ethical employees either seeking shelter away from centers of administrative power, or leaving federal service.
But by the early 2010s, the culture of corruption was already deeply rooted in federal agencies, and particularly in those agencies tasked with protecting whistleblowers – the Department of Labor, which a 2009 federal audit had found had been failing its mission to protect private-sector whistleblowers for 20 years, the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which another federal audit in 2018 found it had been failing its mission to protect federal whistleblowers since at least 2011, and the system of federal inspectors general, which beginning shortly after they were organized into the Counsel of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency in 2008, had morphed into a system protecting corruption, rather than whistleblowers.
The corruption of all three of the primary whistleblower protection programs, coupled with the lack of accountability for the Obama Administration’s war on whistleblowers, offered a very strong presumption that both Congress and the Executive Branch were actively opposed to whistleblowing and protecting whistleblowers.
The exploitation of whistleblowers
Whistleblowers continue to be a source of disclosures of wrongdoing, but now they do so without protection. Whistleblower stories have always been highly valued by media, including corporate journalism, for their “shock value” and ability to attract attention for profit. Politicians similarly are attracted to whistleblower stories, because they are ready-made for political exploitation and image polishing. But neither the corporate media, nor elected members of Congress commonly acted to protect whistleblowers themselves.
For example, in a case involving two Wells Fargo Bank employees who blew the whistle in 2010 on the Bank’s massive consumer fraud, the corporate media took notice in 2016, only after Senator Elizabeth Warren called for Congressional hearings. The hearings featured the most senior Wells Fargo officials, who boldly claim they had discovered fraud only in 2015, and Senator Warren ordered DoL-OSHA to investigate.
As the investigator for the two bank employees, I knew that the Wells Fargo CEO had lied during the hearing and packaged up the evidence and sent it to the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco assigned to investigate the fraud in December 2016. The Department of Justice never completed an investigation, and in early 2017 complained to me to stop asking questions. Senator Warren never followed up on her order for the Dol-OSHA to investigate, so the DoL-OSHA only conducted a “review”, which did find that almost 100 Wells Fargo employees had contacted DoL-OSHA about the fraud, which effected 3.5 million Wells Fargo customers. Then, when I offered the documented evidence to the New York Times, who published the story about Senator Warren’s hearings, they didn’t respond.
There are many similar stories that followed this same pattern: whistleblower reports serious criminal wrongdoing, members of Congress feign concern and collect media interest, media publishes breathless story that rarely goes into detail, federal officials get interested, then the whole enterprise collapses into silence, leaving the whistleblowers unprotected. When you see that over, and over, and over again, it breeds a deep cynicism about transparency and accountability.
The death of whistleblowing
There’s a passage from Milton Mayer’s penetrating 1955 book, They Thought They Were Free, on the rise of Nazism in Germany that haunts my thinking about the current state of whistleblowing in the U.S.
“What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever- widening gap after 1933 between the government and the people. Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with here in Germany. And it became always wider. You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote. All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.
"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security. And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.
"This separation of government from people, this widening of the gap, took place so gradually and so insensibly, each step disguised (perhaps not even intentionally) as a temporary emergency measure or associated with true patriotic allegiance or with real social purposes. And all the crises and reforms (real reforms, too) so occupied the people that they did not see the slow motion underneath of the whole process of government growing remoter and remoter.
This description of the rise of totalitarian government easily fits what is happening in the U.S. today. The general public is buried under propaganda on a daily basis, while federal officials withdraw behind an impenetrable wall of obfuscation. Agencies, which only a few years ago displayed their membership on their websites, now only show facades with empty spaces for those once employed. Senior federal officials and members of Congress offer forms, not emails, for contact, which can’t be the “safe channel” required by law for whistleblowers. When I provided disclosures of wrongdoing to members of Congress in 2014-2015, I received a reasonably timely response. But after 2016, those responses have dwindled, sometimes redirected, sometimes ignored, and sometimes simply destroyed. Whistleblowers and whistleblowing is dying, and few notice, with even fewer seeing what that portends.
All of this may be because of ignorance or neglect. But it is happening. Ultimately, only the American people can return transparency and accountability to our Constitutional Republic, which puts the responsibility on us to combat the corruption that deeply infects our government. Citizenship isn’t a spectator sport, and we can’t be mere consumers of information. If we don’t demand a government “of the people”, by default we’ll get a government by unelected bureaucrats. Above all, we must protect whistleblowers who provide us both the information and the evidence we need to ensure transparency and accountability.
Respectfully,
Dr. Darrell Whitman, for
Whistleblowers United