A Qualitative Study of Federal Employee Whistleblowing and Reprisal for Whistleblowing

Federal employee whistleblowing is essential to holding government officials accountable. The U.S. Office of Special Counsel (OSC) was established in 1979 to provide a secure channel for federal government employees to report wrongdoing while protecting them from reprisal. More statutory protections were enacted with the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA) in 1989; however, deficiencies in the WPA led to the eventual passage of the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act in 2012. The problem is that the literature on whistleblowing fails to distinguish the OSC as the Executive Branch whistleblower protection agency nor recognize its annual reports and surveys as the only known source of data on federal employee whistleblowing. This is problematic because academia’s unfamiliarity with the OSC’s data published since 1979, limited access to whistleblowers, and statutory provisions for anonymity confound research in this field. This study used multiple qualitative methods to examine OSC’s annual reports and surveys, and interviewed whistleblowers to answer the research questions: 1) What do the OSC annual reports reveal about federal employee whistleblower disclosures and reprisal for whistleblowing from 1979 to 2022? 2) What do OSC surveys of complainants reveal about the effectiveness of whistleblower protection from reprisal from 1996 to 2022? 3) What do actual federal employee whistleblowers reveal about the extent of whistleblower disclosures necessary to remedy wrongdoing in an organization? The theoretical framework was the Anvari et al. Hierarchical Structure model of whistleblowing. This study found that despite legal protections, whistleblowers experience high rates of reprisal and low rates of obtaining the desired result at the OSC. This research has policy implications and fills a gap in the literature.