On December 9, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a 174-page package of oversight and transparency initiatives. Included in the package is the Whistleblower Protection Improvement Act (WPIA), a landmark bill which, among other reforms, would grant federal employee whistleblowers access to federal court trials.
The WPIA was reintroduced by a bipartisan group of representatives on May 4, 2021. The bill aims to address a number of shortcomings with the Whistleblower Protection Act (WPA), the main law offering whistleblower protections to federal employees. The bill is widely supported by whistleblower advocates, who have pushed for some of the reforms for decades.
According to leading whistleblower attorney Stephen M. Kohn of Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto, “the most important part of the bill targets the failure of Congress to permit federal employees to have their day in court. The bill would permit most federal employees to remove their cases to federal district court for a real trial, if the Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB) does not issue a ruling on their whistleblower retaliation claims within 180 days.”
Currently, under the WPA, federal employees’ whistleblower retaliation claims are exclusively heard by the MSPB, a quasi-judicial federal agency chaired by Presidential appointees. Whistleblower advocates have long taken issue with the lack of court access for federal employee whistleblowers, but the cause has taken on added...
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