Pentagon Orders Stronger Whistleblower Protections
Mandatory Investigations, Punishment for Retaliators, Appeals and Wider Coverage

WASHINGTON - JULY 31 - In a sharp departure from policies of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the Department of Defense has unveiled new rules to better protect both uniformed and civilian employees from retaliation for reporting wrongdoing, according to an agency directive posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). In certain respects, the new rules, which go into immediate effect, are stronger than existing protections for non-Defense civil servants.

In a Department of Defense (DOD) Directive dated July 23, 2007, Deputy Secretary Gordon England mandates a series of procedural and substantive safeguards for agency whistleblowers, including:

Punishment for officers or civilian supervisors found to have restrained or reprised against whistleblowers. Regulations are being prepared to make whistleblower retaliation explicitly punishable under the Uniform Code of Military Justice as an act of insubordination;
Mandatory investigations of whistleblower complaints by service inspector general offices within 180 days. The rules provide for oversight of all such investigations by the DOD Inspector General. In addition, any decision flowing from these investigations may be appealed to the Secretary of Defense; and

Explicitly extending whistleblower protection regulations to cover disclosures made within the military chain-of-command, as well as disclosures made to Congress or inspector generals. Under current law, non-DOD civil servants are not protected for whistleblower disclosures made within their chains-of-command, although legislation pending in both houses of Congress would extend coverage to these intra-agency reports.