In a recent decision, the Merit Systems Protection Board confirmed that people are covered by the Whistleblower Protection Act, even if they blew the whistle before applying for a federal job. The board disagreed with a federal court, but upheld the board’s own precedent. For the significance of this case, the Federal Drive with Tom Temin spoke to attorneys Christine Kumar and James Eisenmann of the Alden Law Group.

Interview transcript:

Tom Temin And this case, well, there’s a couple of cases that it revolved around, but what is the significance? In other words, if I blow the whistle in one case, someone from a contractor blew the whistle on the government and then applied to work for the government. And it turned out that that person was protected per the Merit Systems Protection Board. And so what does this all mean? How do you interpret this?

James Eisenmann Right. The significance of it? It’s important, but I think there are some qualifications to that importance. The Whistleblower Protection Act protects people who make what are called protected disclosures. And the question in this case was whether this person, this appellant, qualified in terms of making protected disclosure, because at the time they made that disclosure, which was about fraud, they were not either an employee of the government or an applicant to be an employee with the government. They were contractor. And when you look at the actual statutory language of the Whistleblower Protection Act, in...

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