To be a “protected whistleblower disclosure,” the federal agency employee must have reasonable belief about the agency law-breaking disclosed. 

No one, anywhere, claims that the lawyer-leaders of MSPB have ever reported to the President and the Congress “whether the public interest in a civil service free of prohibited personnel practices is being adequately protected,” as required by law at 5 USC §1204(a)(3). In fact, MSPB has never issued a regulation describing how it will perform this duty.

Only one agency—US Office of Special Counsel (OSC)—has the positive legal duty to protect federal agency employees from prohibited personnel practices. MSPB has never conducted a “special study” of OSC compliance with that duty. This is detailed, exhaustively, at the website MSPB Watch.

According to Cathy Harris’ attorney licensing authority, the DC Bar, she has no duty, as a lawyer, to comply with any of her statutory duties as the Acting Chairman of MSPB. Instead, according to the DC Bar, her professional duty as a lawyer is to zealously protect MSPB, which is also her client.

Just like lawyers defending pedophile priests or the lawyers defending the Sackler family and other companies that made billions of dollars from creating hundreds of thousands of opioid addicts, Cathy Harris apparently will do her professional best to prevent any resolution of this whistleblower disclosure against her and MSPB. And she apparently will do so in the name of legal ethics—regardless of the resultant harm to merit-based federal agency employment practices and American health, safety, security and welfare.

No one, anywhere, claims federal agency employees are adequately protected from reprisal and other corrupt agency employment practices. While federal agency employees who join this petition ought to merit praise as patriots from President Biden, what they should expect, instead, is agency officials, particularly agency lawyers, determining if they can get away with unlawfully punishing them for doing their duty to expose 44 years of lawbreaking by Cathy Harris and her predecessors at MSPB.

So….count the cost of joining this petition. According to a Tom Devine, legal director of the Government Accountability Project, if you sign this petition, please do so on your computer and not at work. If you use government email to publicize the petition to colleagues, you are also taking a risk. This, of course, is just more evidence of how corrupt federal agency employment practices are—regardless of government regulations requiring federal agency employees to be whistleblowers, to actually do so, particularly at work, is risky.

On the other hand, according to the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it is now 90 seconds to midnight—where midnight signifies the human-caused destruction of civilization.

Do you really think those born in 2023 have good chances of enjoying flourishing lives, concluded by natural deaths, when to blow the whistle on decades of corruption by the lawyer-leaders of MSPB—the officials most responsible to protect merit-based federal agency employment practices – may be a “clear and present danger” to one’s employment status?

What is the possible upside to the risk federal agency employees take in joining this petition? Well, if it results in overcoming the stonewalling of Cathy Harris and the whistleblower disclosure is then vindicated by the Attorney General, there could be a teachable moment for President Biden, resulting in his issuing a proclamation making July 30th “National Whistleblower Day” as Senator Grassley and many others in Congress advocate.

It could also result in a Presidential directive by which agency lawyers are directed that the government regulation requiring whistleblowing applies to them also—that being a “zealous advocate” for their agency requires them to put obtaining justice for agency whistleblowers ahead of—way ahead of—“winning” for their clients.

Most importantly, it would be “Good News for America.” Why? Because a causal factor—44 years of lawbreaking by the lawyer-leaders of MSPB—for much that has befallen America in that time and which besets America now, will be exposed and is readily correctable. In that sense, it would be like a failing business finding an embezzler—things might not be bad as they seem.