WASHINGTON – This week Empower Oversight filed a response in a whistleblower retaliation case blasting the United States Secret Service (USSS) for attempting to delay accountability by postponing the case until 2025. The employee blew the whistle on the USSS’s lowering of standards for applicants in 2018, which the whistleblower believed could contribute to a lack of readiness at the agency.
The whistleblower, who was also a source for Congress’s 2015 report on the USSS, was unable to have his case heard by the three-person Merit Systems Protection Board (MSPB or Board) for four years because of a lack of quorum at the agency. The Board recently remanded the whistleblower’s case, finding a lower MSPB decision had incorrectly dismissed the claims. Empower joined the case earlier this month to represent the whistleblower.
Despite the whistleblower waiting four years for a hearing, the USSS filed a motion to delay the case for four months, citing vague reasons such as the internal reviews after the attempted assassination of President Trump and the fact that some agency employees “may be called on” to participate in congressional or other investigations of the agency. Today the MSPB administrative judge denied the USSS’s motion. Empower President Tristan Leavitt, a former presidentially appointed member of the MSPB, wrote in the filing: “Not only are the challenges the Agency is facing not due to any action of the Appellant’s, they reflect exactly the sort of negative harm the Appellant has attempted to prevent with his protected disclosures over the years. Further, they appear to be challenges either of the Agency’s own making or of which the Agency has been on notice for almost a decade.”
Leavitt cited the House Oversight Committee’s bipartisan 2015 report, which found that the USSS failing to hear whistleblower disclosures from its employees without retaliating against them contributed to regular USSS security incidents. Leavitt also noted testimony from former Department of Homeland Security Inspector General John Roth, who also reported to Congress the “disturbing trend” that “44% of [USSS employees polled] felt that they could not report misconduct without fear of retaliation” and concluded: “I believe that there is a serious problem within the Secret Service.”
To see USSS’s filing, click here.
To see Empower Oversight’s complete filing, click here.
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