Empower Oversight Founder Jason Foster penned a column with former Hill and White House staffer, Katy Talento on how Congress enabled Trump’s “Anti-Weaponization Fund” by handing over its power of the purse half-a-century ago. You can read the post here or the original substack post here.
Like most whistleblowers, we did not wake up one morning and decide to pick a fight. We simply tried to do our jobs like always, even in the face of increasing resistance from a system that did not want to treat the president’s son the same as any other taxpayer. The foundation of our tax system …
The Federalist Last week, the Justice Department finally charged three men with murdering infamous Boston crime boss Whitey Bulger in 2018. He was in federal custody at the time of his death. The circumstances, including the delay in charging anyone for the crime, raise a host of questions. The FBI’s long, sordid history with Bulger and his …
Newsweek Last November my organization, Empower Oversight, sued the National Institutes of Health (NIH) for failing to comply with Freedom of Information Act requests related to the agency’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Around half a dozen other entities have also been forced to go to court to compel the NIH to make pandemic documents public. It’s worth …
Substack Healthy financial markets need clarity and transparency to function properly. Financial regulators are supposed write clear rules so that markets can operate on a level playing field. Instead, they sometimes make arbitrary enforcement decisions that look unfair and undermine public confidence in their integrity. Among the safeguards against the kind of government overreach that …
Substack Last week, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) finally admitted that it funded gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Worse, it also failed to adequately monitor its grantee, EcoHealth Alliance. The NIH letter containing these admissions should have come much sooner and in response to serious bipartisan oversight from Congress. Instead, the NIH reply came in …
Whistleblower Network News Whistleblowers—and the truths they tell—far too often become the first casualties in the clash of bigger forces with other agendas. People tend to oversimplify complex stories to fit their preferred political narrative or to protect their own interests. If the facts do not fit neatly into a convenient set of preconceptions, too …
Newsweek The recent spats between Dr. Anthony Fauci and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) about how the coronavirus pandemic started made for good television. The head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases wagged his finger at a United States senator and called him a liar. Dr. Fauci rejected the premise of tough, evidence-based questions about our government’s support of …
Holding leaders accountable is an American tradition worth preserving, and applauding lawlessness undermines that tradition. July 29, 2021 By: Dan Meyer and Jason Foster Two hundred and forty-three years ago, on July 30, 1778, the Continental Congress passed the world’s first whistleblower law. As that anniversary is commemorated on National Whistleblower Appreciation Day this Friday, it is …