After d***king around for 12 years, yesterday, Congress finally passed the Whistleblower Protection Enhancement Act (WPEA), a bill that strengthens protections for many federal employee whistleblowers.

While the bill is an important step toward gaining meaningful protections for government whistleblowers, it will not help many of my clients, like National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Thomas Drake or Central Intelligence Agency Whistleblower John Kiriakou. Drake and Kiriakou blew the whistle on two of the biggest scandals of my generation, warrantless domestic surveillance and torture. Considering the lengths to which the government will abuse the classification system to keep secret embarrassing or illegal conduct, Intelligence Community whistleblowers are often who the public most needs to hear from. Yet, Congress excluded them from the WPEA, even though Intelligence Community whistleblowers currently have no existing meaningful legal protections.

As my colleague at the Government Accountability Project, Tom Devine told the Washington Post:



“It would be dishonest to say our work is done, however, or to deny that government whistleblower rights are still second class compared to those in the private sector,” he said. “House Republicans blocked two cornerstones of the legislation: jury trials to enforce newly-enacted protections, and extension of free speech rights to national security workers making disclosures within agency channels.”