Trump's heralded whistleblower office at VA is failing in its most basic mission, watchdog says
Source: Washington Post
Politics
Trump's heralded whistleblower office at VA is failing in its most basic mission, watchdog says
By Lisa Rein
Oct. 24, 2019 at 12:48 p.m. EDT
One of President Trump's signature initiatives to turn around a culture of retaliation against whistleblowers at the Department of Veterans Affairs is an office in disarray that instead has punished them -- and held almost no wrongdoers accountable.
Those are the conclusions of a scathing report released Thursday by the agency's inspector general, which found that the office created early in Trump's term in 2017 has failed in its core mission.
The Office of Accountability and Whistleblower Protection, which the president has heralded as a tool to clean up the troubled agency, instead resembled a kangaroo court from the start, investigators found.
The office has shown "significant deficiencies," including poor leadership, skimpy training of its investigators, a misunderstanding of its mission and a failure to discipline senior leaders for misconduct, according to Inspector General Michael Missal's 100-page report.
"Notably, in its first two years of operation, the [office] acted in ways that were inconsistent with its statutory authority while it simultaneously floundered in its mission to protect whistleblowers," the report says. VA "created an office culture that was sometimes alienating to the very individuals it was meant to protect."
....
Lisa Rein covers federal agencies and the management of government in the Trump adminstration. At The Washington Post, she has written about the federal workforce; state politics and government in Annapolis, and in Richmond; local government in Fairfax County, Va. and the redevelopment of Washington and its neighborhoods. Follow https://twitter.com/Reinlwapo
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trumps-heralded-whistleblower-office-at-va-has-failed-its-most-basic-mission-watchdog-says/2019/10/24/561e9022-f679-11e9-8cf0-4cc99f74d127_story.html
The Washington Post Retweeted
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost
BREAKING: Trump's heralded whistleblower office at VA has failed in its most basic mission, a scathing new report by @VAOIG finds. Whistleblowers are not protected, but retaliated against.
Link to tweet
= new reply since forum marked as read
