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Whistleblowers and partisan politics don’t mix
By Kent R. Kroeger (March 3, 2020)
The first thing you learn when you work in an Office of the Inspector General (OIG) is that a whistleblower’s grievances should be addressed at the lowest level possible.
Why? Two reasons: For one, in most cases, the supervisors closest to the whistleblower’s complaint are generally willing to solve it. Like most people, they want to do the right thing. Secondly, some OIG offices (and their cousins, Offices of the Special Counsel) will receive thousands of whistleblower complaints each year. With investigatory staffs usually numbering less than 30, it is simply impossible to address every whistleblower complaint. Even a thoughtful triage process used to filter down to the most serious whistleblower issues will still leave a case load too large for the average IG office.
If IG and Special Counsel (SC) offices were staffed to handle all whistleblower complaints, the majority of federal government activities would be reduced to investigating itself.
Problems are best solved at the lowest level possible. [In general, that’s a good rule in life.]
In my experience at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Office of the Inspector General (DIA-OIG), in only a small minority of cases did a Federal employee abuse his or her power in a…
