If you see something, say something. It’s a simple phrase that carries a lot of weight if you’re a federal whistleblower.

Maybe you pass off a tip to your agency’s inspector general, or Congress, about something that doesn’t quite pass the smell test. Maybe that’s as far as it goes. Or maybe it’s just what auditors and investigators need to dig deeper on some particular wrongdoing.

Few whistleblower tips turn into the latest Hollywood blockbuster, but there are plenty of disclosures below that threshold that still root out fraud, waste and abuse.

And yet, whistleblowers often come forward with what they know at great personal risk. Sometimes that means losing their jobs, or facing years of drawn-out legal battles to clear their names.

Take the Defense Department’s inspector general office, for example, which receives at least 10,000 calls on its whistleblower hotline every year.

One of those calls, back in 2014, led to a $25 million False Claims Act settlement last year with a Boeing subsidiary that allegedly sold used and refurbished drone parts to the Navy and Special Operations Command (SOCOM) for the price of new materials.

The whistleblower in question, former Insitu executive D.R. O’Hara, took his concerns to the company’s executive staff before making a call to the DoD IG’s hotline. The former action, by his telling, led to a demotion.

O’Hara received $4.6 million of the recovered funds part of the qui tam provision of the False Claims Act, but spent several years...

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