Government Accountability Project

Defends corporate and federal government whistleblowers, substantiates their concerns and brings to national attention problems related to public health, the environment, food and drug safety, nuclear power/weapons and national security.

Why do we exist?

The Government Accountability Project is the nation's leading whistleblower protection organization. It was created twenty-nine years ago to ensure government and corporate accountability by advancing occupational free speech, defending whistleblowers and empowering citizen activists. To achieve its mission, GAP assists whistleblowers in making disclosures to institutional policymakers, the public and the media.  Over the decades GAP’s staff has developed in-house expertise in several broad program areas, including: strengthening the legal rights of whistleblowers, increasing food and drug safety, ensuring safe and cost-effective clean-up at nuclear weapons facilities, enforcing environmental and worker protections, pursuing national security, and increasing accountability mechanisms in international institutions.

GAP’s strategy involves four key day-to-day activities:

Ø      First Activity:  We represent employees of governments and corporations who want to raise concerns about serious problems within their agencies or companies.  We offer our legal services if the problem is serious enough and the employee is committed to seeking reform.  For those whistleblowers we do not represent, we offer self-help materials.

Ø      Second Activity:  We design and carryout effective campaigns, usually national in scope, to publicize and force change on issues of concern for the general public, policymakers, and key decision makers, often in coalitions. 

Ø      Third Activity:  We help draft both model and actual legislation for federal, state and local governments as well as for international NGOs and governments.  Most often legislators and other policymakers formally request our help.  We also help agencies and companies develop and implement effective whistleblower policies.

Ø      Fourth Activity:  We are experts on occupational free speech and scientific dissent issues. We regularly share our views in academic and non-academic publications.

Central to our achievements remains our unique and effective methodology of turning information into power. The whistleblower’s story adds  to the momentum for reform because the media, previously uninvolved corporate and government officials, and the general public often respond positively to the whistleblower whose integrity breathes life into important allegations.

What have you accomplished?

The power of information and expertise strategically applied to a problem is able to reverse top level decisions, undermine multibillion dollar contracts, and derail the plans of the largest corporations in America, despite the unlimited legal and lobbying resources that they are able to command. Since 1977 GAP has helped over 600 whistleblowers from the nuclear power industry and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, 500 from the meat processing industry and the Department of Agriculture, 300 from the nuclear weapons industry, 200 from federal agencies overseeing environmental protection and natural resource preservation and 300 from government contractors and the government bodies they serve. In the past year and a half alone, our whistleblowers have raised serious issues of grave importance leading to some major reforms. For example:

-Dr. David Graham, a top scientist with the Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Office of Drug Safety, revealed important risks associated with Vioxx and five other drugs; he also exposed both the significant influence of the pharmaceutical industry on FDA decisions and the inadequacy of the monitoring of drugs that are approved and on the market. Since we began our work with Dr. Graham, the FDA has taken regulatory action on four out of the five drugs that he named, a substantial victory in the uphill battle for drug safety.

-Gary Aguirre, a former S.E.C. lawyer, recently charged that the agency backed his investigation of a major hedge fund until he sought the testimony of “an influential Wall Street executive” who the Times identified as Morgan Stanley CEO John Mack, a heavyweight GOP donor. GAP has shepherded Mr. Aguirre to the Senate committees with relevant oversight duties where he recently testified.

-Rick Piltz, a former climate change program associate at the federal climate change office, blew the whistle on the White House’s improper, politically motivated editing and censorship of scientific reports on global warming intended for the public and Congress. We helped him leak documents that showed the editing that the chief of staff of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality – an “ex”-lobbyist for the oil industry – had engaged in to alter these scientific climate change reports, weaken them and assert uncertainty where there actually was none. The former lobbyist resigned two days after our exposé. 

-Hanford Whistleblowers have provided us with information about safety concerns all over this 500 square mile nuclear reserve.  As a result of our most recent nationally significant revelations, we have exposed serious safety concerns at the new Waste Treatment Plant, the largest environmental remediation facility in the world, and are trying to remove the Department of Energy from oversight in favor of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

-Whistleblower Policy development has been one of the most significant long-term contributions of GAP. We have been largely responsible for the federal laws that should protect federal employees, hundreds of thousands of government contractor employees and corporate employees of publicly traded companies. We essentially wrote the new whistleblower policies for the United Nations and enjoyed the unaccustomed experience of having the U.S. government championing our work. The U.S. embassies of Mexico, Argentina, Jamaica and Slovakia have even sponsored GAP speaking tours in their host countries because of what they see as our important contribution to democracy building. We are on the verge of policy breakthroughs at the World Bank and probably some of the other international development banks. The number of workers impacted by these policies reaches into the millions. 

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