Trump’s new VA office shelters whistle-blowers

Advocates praise agency, though some skeptics doubt it will be any different from past failures

Dan Martin is chief engineer for Veterans Affairs hospitals in northern Indiana, but he hasn’t done much engineering for almost a year — or much of anything for that matter.

After he reported concerns about possible contracting improprieties at the hospitals, managers stripped him of his duties last March after they said he had been mean and used inappropriate language to his employees. They isolated him in an out-of the-way office in Marion, Ind., his lawyers said, and moved to fire him in December.

Since President Trump created a whistle-blower-protection office at the agency by executive order in April, the office has stepped in to help Martin and more than 70 other VA employees by delaying discipline against them until further investigation can be done.

The director of the office, Peter O’Rourke, told USA TODAY in an exclusive interview that 41 of those cases remain open, and a “very small number” of the others were decided in favor of the employees.

The office, which has operated largely in secret, had a rocky start and faces staffing challenges and deep skepticism among some whistle-blowers.

But the early moves to help them drew praise from longtime advocates.

“There’s no agency in the executive (branch) that’s come close to providing temporary relief for over 70 people in less than a year,” said Tom Devine, legal director at the non-profit Government Ac-

countability Project, who has worked on federal whistle-blower cases since 1979.

Devine, whose group represents Martin and a handful of other whistleblowers at the VA, said that if only a fraction of cases are decided in the employees’ favor, it would represent an improvement. He said whistle-blowers historically get relief in only 2% to 5% of cases.

Since June, the VA Office of Accountability and Whistle-blower Protection has fielded more than 1,000 complaints about operations at the VA, according to statistics compiled by the office.

They included roughly 300 alleging employees violated rules or laws, abused their authority or were engaged in mismanagement. In 28 other cases, the office determined they involved threats to public health or safety. A total of 232 complaints cited retaliation against whistle-blowers for speaking out about problems.

O’Rourke, a member of Trump’s transition team, said he designed the office to take quick, decisive action on complaints and track them until they are resolved. They are triaged, investigated and, if legitimate, shared with all levels of the agency, from headquarters in Washington to regional and local officials in the field.

“In the past, people make a complaint, who knows who saw it? Maybe the medical center saw it, maybe they didn’t, maybe my supervisor never sent it anywhere,” said O’Rourke, a Navy veteran and former business consultant. “The process we have now, that disclosure now gets visibility … so these things cannot be hidden.”

He said the identities of employees reporting wrongdoing are kept secret unless the employees give permission to reveal them. In cases of retaliation, he said, permission may be necessary to fully vet the complaints.

The office has faced challenges and skepticism. It inherited a number of employees and cases from the now-defunct VA Office of Accountability Review, an Obama-era effort that targeted leaders for discipline but that some whistle-blowers viewed as ineffective.

O’Rourke interviewed a prominent whistle-blower, Katherine Mitchell, a physician who has testified before Congress about threats to patient care at the Phoenix VA and is well-connected to dozens of VA whistle-blowers. She said he offered her a position at the new office in August, then reversed himself in a two-sentence email in October and hasn’t responded since.

Mitchell hasn’t seen any progress on a case she filed with the office accusing the agency of retaliating against her by not allowing her to perform duties related to specialty care contained in her job description. She works in a regional office performing unrelated tasks, including reviewing and distributing policies from headquarters.

“As far as I can tell, they’re not doing anything substantially beneficial for anyone,” Mitchell told USA TODAY. “I’ve not heard anybody say that the office of whistleblower protection has helped them at all.”