Government Accountability Project

PUBLIC HEALTH & CORPORATE/GOVERNMENT ACCOUNTABILITY Our Food Integrity Campaign (FIC) is a central component of our Public Health & Safety program. In 2023, we continued to be a leader in the efforts to identify and expose potentially deadly inspection short-cuts and worked both independently and with coalitions to put pressure on the USDA to decrease line speeds. Our efforts have been successful; line speeds have been greatly curtailed. Working with partners and volunteer attorneys, we have successfully challenged both proposed AG-Gag laws and final statutes in numerous states. We won Peta v. NC Farm Bureau, as co-plaintiffs. The law that was struck down was particularly problematic because it was written in a vague way that could be applied to any corporate venue. In 2023, we continued our #FairShake for farmers campaign, to raise awareness and solidarity for farmers fighting against corporate retaliation for whistleblowing as well as the importance of anti-trust enforcement. We collaborated with the Center for Agriculture and Food Systems at Vermont Law School to research if the anti-retaliation protections in the Packers and Stockyards Act can be expanded through rulemaking as opposed to legislation. To this end, we also collaborated with the Vermont Law School Clinic, growers from Mississippi and Texas Sanderson farms, and the USDA. Our Know Your Rights campaign continued, as we presented to USDA employees and managers at the Department of Agriculture Federal Research Center. We supported several pieces of legislation, which promises to hold big corporations responsible for disaster mitigation and put an end to line line speed increases and company self-inspection models. Other pending legislation includes Farm System Reform Act; Voice for Farm Workers Act; and Protecting Americas Meatpacking Workers Act. We published our issue brief Raising Voices, Protecting Lives: Whistleblowers at the Intersection of Oversight Failures in the Immigration System and Food Production Industry after reports of immigrant minors released to dangerous and unlawful situation of child labor. We worked with Johns Hopkins University on a policy program called The Center for Law & Ethics in Animal Research, or CLEAR. We continue to represent a client through this program who as a research scientist blew the whistle on animal welfare compliance violations at a major research university. We researched and filed an amicus brief in the US Supreme Court on behalf of US Senators Charles Grassley and Ron Wyden to contest a corporate whistleblower case decision by the Federal Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit which upended the burdens of proof in nearly every federal whistleblower law in the nation, including Sarbanes Oxley, the Safe Food Modernization Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, and over twenty other laws protecting whistleblowers who expose violations of law, environmental dangers, public health threats, worker safety endangerment, and government fraud. The unacceptable burden of proof established by the panel of judges would force the whistleblower to prove that the employer had acted out of malice in retaliating against the employee for their whistleblowing. In February 2023 the Court overturned the local court ruling in an unanimous decision.

INTERNATIONAL We presented an amicus brief for a World Health Organization (WHO) whistleblower who was threatened with a retaliatory firing for writing a report which truthfully stated that Italys Pandemic Plan had not been updated since 2006. WHO leadership attempted to cover up the failure to update Italys Pandemic Plan in 2016, as it should have been, by threatening to fire the whistleblower if they did not falsely state that the plan had been updated. We represented a whistleblower at the Asian Development Bank (ADB), who disclosed that hundreds of millions of dollars from ADB were used for military and other non-humanitarian purposes or simply stolen by government ministers in Pakistan. He experienced retaliation, but we have recently settled this case successfully. We participated in a USAID-funded project as a subcontractor in Malaysia. GAP worked with project partners including Combatting corruption and Cronyism (C4 Center), the National Union of Malaysian Islamic Students (PKPIM), National Oversight Whistleblowing (NOW), and Transparency International-Malaysia to provide international expertise on whistleblowing, to provide external perspectives on reforms, and to help them increase public engagement. We assisted in drafting proposed legislation in over a dozen countries, including Ghana, Serbia,Liberia, Canada, and Tunisia. We updated a co-publication with the International Bar Association, a report called Are Whistleblowing Laws Working? A Global Study of Whistleblower Protection Litigation, which tracks the records of whistleblower laws in 38 countries and provides an unprecedented effort to understand the successes and shortcomings of whistleblower protection legislation worldwide, following a proliferation of laws in recent decades. International Program Director Samantha Feinstein continued to serve as the Vice Chair of the Board of Directors of the UNCAC Coalition - Association for the Implementation of the UN Convention against Corruption. We participated in multiple USAID-funded projects in Serbia, including in collaboration with Pitaljka, a whistleblowing platform based in Belgrade that combines journalism and legal expertise, to conduct a series of trainings for state and local government agencies in Serbia. We participated in a USAID-funded project in Ukraine as a subcontractor, where we briefed a network of NGOs on whistleblowing law, critiqued language for whistleblower reform legislation, met and counseled Ukrainian whistleblowers, conducted advocacy to earn President Zelenskys veto of a poison pill whistleblower bill. We also conducted three training courses of judges and officials on the new whistleblower law and best practices for working with whistleblowers. We participated in a USAID-funded project in Liberia as a subcontractor, where we made recommendations to strengthen its whistleblower law and engaged in advocacy with the advisor to the President and the Attorney General and Parliamentary Leaders. We implemented a NATO-funded research project called Whistling at the Fake with a subgrant from Manchester Metropolitan University. As part of this project, International Director Samantha Feinstein authored a report titled The crucial role of whistleblowers in countering disinformation. We played a starring role at the United Nations Convention Against Corruption (UNCAC) Conference in Atlanta in December. There were 2000 delegates from 160 nations and 1000 attendees from global NGO organizations. Working with the Serbian government, we helped develop a landmark resolution to safeguard individuals who expose corruption and related offenses to government authorities. Our International Program Director, Samantha Feinstein, who co-chairs the UN committee charged with helping to implement the International Convention Against Corruption, played a a pivotal role in developing and advocating for the resolution, testifying in favor of it, and ensuring that whistleblower protection remains a central topic of global dialogue when addressing corruption. This resolution - a huge milestone for us - marks a significant advancement in global efforts to protect reporting persons. It reinforces international commitments to transparency, training, and technical assistance while advocating for inclusive and confidential reporting channels. Importantly too it adopted an objective standard - reasonable belief -- for recognizing the legitimacy of whistleblower complaints rather than a good faith belief which requires that whistleblowers be interrogated about their motives in bringing forth concerns. The resolution has now established an international standard in whistleblower rights, a significant step forward in advancing whistleblower rights internationally as well as domestically.

ENVIRONMENT, ENERGY & CLIMATE CHANGE In 2023, our long running efforts to push EPA to update their outdated National Contingency Plan finally succeeded, and as a result, EPA is examining the impacts of dispersants during oil spills. In a stunning victory for us and our allies, the manufacturer of Corexit has decided to no longer manufacture it. Since the catastrophic train derailment in East Palestine in early 2023 and the subsequent burn of train cars carrying toxic chemicals, we launched an in-depth investigation into the contamination of the area, the sickening of residents, and the attempts by Norfolk Southern and EPA to mislead the public about the disaster. We have collaborated with independent expert Scott Smith, who has found significantly higher levels of toxins throughout the community than the contractors for the railway company reported. We have represented whistleblower Dr. Robert Kroutil, a distinguished scientist and the designer of the software used in the fights over East Palestine as well as over 180 other missions. He reported that the EPA ordered operators to turn off the chemical detectors when the plane flew over creeks and waterways, only deployed the plane after the toxic plume dissipated, only allowed data collection for seven minutes when usually it would collect data for 100 minutes or longer, misled Congress when it reported that delays in collection were because of weather conditions, and used the resulting failure of ASPECT engineers to detect significant contamination to declare that it was safe for residents to return to their homes. We have filed extensive FOIA requests to EPA and a complaint to the EPA Office of Inspector General. We filed a successful lawsuit to expedite the processing of our East Palestine FOIA document requests and to waive fees.

Other miscellaneous projects