The Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB), the quasi-judicial agency tasked with ruling on federal employee whistleblower retaliation cases, has lacked a quorum for over 5 years. Because the Board has been unable to issue any final rulings since losing a quorum, whistleblowers have been left in legal limbo and an immense backlog of cases has piled up. In a new interview, a former MSPB member predicts how long it would take the new board to work through the backlog.
Mark Robbins is the most recent MSPB member: his term expired in March 2019. On January 28, Robbins spoke with the Federal News Network about the MSPB’s backlog. In January 2021, WNN reported that the MSPB had a backlog of 3118 cases. This number is now estimated to be at about 3600. Robbins predicted this backlog would take at least five years to resolve.
“If the new board, whenever it gets there, operates consistent with tradition for the board,” Robbins said, “that amount of cases would take about five years to process, just given the amount of staff and the time that the three new members are going to need to read through these files. But five years is a vacuum because there are new cases coming in and the new board will have to prioritize the import of new cases with those that have been in existence for up to five years.”
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