Fed agencies banishing whistleblowers to basement offices...
For whistleblowers, a bold move can be followed by one to
department basement
A VA worker in Phoenix experiences an old federal
tradition
Paula Pedene, a former chief spokeswoman for the
Phoenix Veterans Affairs hospital, works in the basement of the hospital, where
her desk was relocated amid a misconduct investigation after she blew the
whistle on the hospital’s director. (SAMANTHA SAIS)
By David A. Fahrenthold August 3 at 8:28 PM
PHOENIX — On her 71st workday in the basement, Paula
Pedene had something fun to look forward to. She had an errand to run, up on
the first floor.
“Today, I get to go get the papers. Exciting!” she said.
“I get to go upstairs and, you know, see people.”
The task itself was no thrill: Retrieve the morning’s
newspapers and bring them back to the library of the Phoenix Veterans Affairs
hospital. The pleasure was in the journey. Down a long, sunlit hallway. Back
again, seeing friends in the bustle of the hospital’s main floor.
Then, Pedene got back in the elevator and hit “B.” The
day’s big excitement was over. It was 7:40 a.m.
“I will not be able to do this forever,” Pedene said
later that day.
Pedene, 56, is the former chief spokeswoman for this VA
hospital. Now, she is living in a bureaucrat’s urban legend. After complaining
to higher-ups about mismanagement at this hospital, she has been reassigned —
indefinitely — to a desk in the basement.
In the Phoenix case, investigators are still trying to
determine whether Pedene was punished because of her earlier complaints. If she
is, that would make her part of a long, ugly tradition in the federal
bureaucracy — workers sent to a cubicle in exile.
In the past, whistleblowers have had their desks moved to
break rooms, broom closets and basements. It’s a clever punishment,
good-government activists say, that exploits a gray area in the law.
The whole thing can look minor on paper. They moved your
office. So what? But the change is designed to afflict the striving soul of a
federal worker, with a mix of isolation, idle time and lost prestige.
“I was down there in that office for 16 months. Nothing.
They gave me no meaningful work,” said Walter Tamosaitis, a former contract
worker at an Energy Department installation in Washington state.
Four years ago, he raised concerns about the processing
of radioactive waste. Then he was transferred to a windowless room in the
building’s basement.
“It was so lonely,” he said. One day, there was a big
snowstorm outside. In the basement, the phone rang. It was his wife, who’d seen
a TV report that his workplace had been shut down. He went upstairs: lights
out. Doors locked. Nobody told him.
“I thought the Rapture had occurred,” Tamosaitis said.
“And I said, ‘Well, [expletive]. I’m the good guy, it can’t be the Rapture. I
should be gone, and they should be here.’ ”
A four-year punishment
In Phoenix, Pedene believes she is stuck in the basement
now because of something she did four years ago.
At the time, she was a 20-year employee at the hospital
who oversaw everything from news releases to the hospital newsletter to the
annual Veterans Day parade. In 2010, Pedene joined a group that complained to
VA’s upper management about the Phoenix hospital’s director. They alleged that
the director had allowed budget shortfalls and berated subordinates.
And it seemed to work. VA’s inspector general
investigated and found an $11 million shortfall in the hospital’s budget. The
director retired voluntarily. “I felt we had actually done the right thing,”
Pedene said.
But that turned out to be the beginning of her troubles,
not the end.
Pedene said the hospital’s new leaders were still
suspicious of her, since she’d made trouble for the old leader. In December
2012, she said, those new bosses accused Pedene of violating VA rules.
The chief accusation was that Pedene had let her husband
upload photos of a VA-sponsored Veterans Day parade onto her work computer. He
was helping her finish a PowerPoint presentation she was working on. He was a
non-VA employee, working on a VA computer.
Pedene and her allies admit that this happened. (She was
also accused of excessive spending, which she denies.) But they say her
punishment has been far greater than the offense.
“They took her out from there like she’d sold nuclear
secrets to the Iranians,” said Sam Foote, a former doctor at the Phoenix VA
hospital, who had been an ally of Pedene.
While the allegation was being investigated, Pedene lost
her BlackBerry, her e-mail address, her office and her position as spokeswoman.
She was shifted, instead, to the hospital’s library.
Back then, the library was on the third floor. The
library had windows. But not for long.
“They knew that it was moving to the basement,” Pedene said.
In April, it did.
Today, the library is one room stuffed with bookshelves
and computers. Pedene is a kind of backup receptionist there, sitting in the
second desk that visitors get to.
“I used to be the first reception person,” she said. “Now
I’m the second reception person. So my days are even more boring.”
That’s because the library’s visitors don’t really need
that much help. Many of them are here to do personal business on the free
computers and phone.
On one recent morning, for instance, a man at one
computer was loudly doing a telephone interview. (“Occasionally, I’ll have a
beer. But that’s it,” the man said. “No addiction. No felony.”) Another visitor
said his truck had been stolen.
He wanted to borrow the library’s phone.
“If it’s not back today — in the yard and parked — those
boys will be looking for you,” he said in one phone call. He seemed to be
leaving a message to the actual truck thief, threatening to call the police.
Pedene’s role in all this is to log visitors onto the
computers, help them make copies, and occasionally lend a stapler or a pencil.
In her idle time, the wheels still spin. One day last month, she was constantly
thinking about how she would be handling the hospital’s P.R. — if that were
still her job.
The Facebook postings have been pretty poor lately, she
said one day last month. And they’ve done nothing with the health observation
calendar! Nobody has a clue that this is World Hepatitis Day, or Cord Blood
Awareness Month.
“I don’t feel like I’m using the full potential that God
has given me,” Pedene said. She is staying on in the basement because she
thinks someday, the VA will let her out. “My goal is to be an awesome PR person
for VA again,” she says.
A non-answer from the VA
So how does VA explain what has happened to Pedene?
Here, things turn slightly Kafkaesque. At the Phoenix
hospital, a spokeswoman said she couldn’t answer the question.
“Why she was moved to the library was Ms. Helman’s
decision,” said spokeswoman Jean Schaefer. She meant Sharon Helman, the
hospital’s director from 2012 until this year.
Could Helman explain it, then?
The spokeswoman said no to that, too.
The reason was that this spring, Sam Foote — the doctor
who was Pedene’s old ally — revealed an enormous scandal that occurred on
Helman’s watch. Phoenix VA staffers were using bogus wait lists to hide the
fact that patients were waiting too long for care.
Helman was put on leave, Schaefer said. She couldn’t be
reached (Helman didn’t respond to an e-mail from The Washington Post).
So the person who forced Pedene out of her office has
been forced out of her office. Has anybody checked to see whether Pedene should
get out of the basement now?
Schaefer said she couldn’t answer the question.
“Since these are personnel actions, we are unable to
provide any comment,” she said in an e-mail.
A spokesman for the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee
said the committee is looking into Pedene’s case — and so is the Office of
Special Counsel, which is in charge of protecting federal whistleblowers. The
Office of Special Counsel declined to comment, citing privacy rules.
Across the country, there are no reliable statistics
about how often federal employees and contractors are sent into this kind of
internal exile. In a 2010 survey, 13.7 percent of federal workers said they had
personally been punished by their bosses, by being moved to a different
“geographical location.” But the question was too broad. Its wording could
include a relocation to the basement, or to North Dakota.
‘A long, rich tradition’
But activists who help whistleblowers say they’ve seen it
happen again and again.
“There’s a long, rich tradition of exiling whistleblowers
to dusty, dark closets, or hallways, or public spaces,” said Tom Devine, of the
watchdog group Government Accountability Project.
He said that, in many cases, the new, bad office is close
enough to the old, good office that the person’s colleagues see what’s become
of them. “The bureaucratic equivalent of putting a whistleblower in the
stocks,” Devine said.
In the 1980s, for instance, Air Force chemist Joseph
Whitson testified in a military court about mismanagement in his office. When
he got back to work, he was given a new job in a basement: dusting file
cabinets and sweeping the floor.
More recently, Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) has
drawn attention to the case of Robert Kobus, an FBI employee who complained
that agents were entering false information into the FBI’s time-and-attendance
system. Grassley said that in 2005, Kobus was moved to a cubicle on an
otherwise vacant floor of an FBI building in New York. Kobus’s own attorney
declined comment on the case.
In theory, it is illegal to make the basement into a
bureaucratic purgatory. In 1994, for instance, Congress prohibited agencies
from making significant changes in a whistleblower’s “working conditions” as
punishment for speaking out.
But in practice, the situation is murkier. Some courts
have said moving an employee to a basement or closet usually amounts to
punishment. But others have said this is a decision that should be made case by
case. How nice is the basement office? How big is the closet?
“To get a lawyer to take your case, you need to have
damages. And the damages for that kind of claim, standing alone — it just
wouldn’t be a great case to bring in court,” said Sandra Sperino, a University
of Cincinnati law professor who has studied this kind of scenario. “If you’re
fired, you might be able to get damages for your lost income. There may be some
damages for getting moved to the basement or a dingy closet, but they’re
minimal.” She said a lawyer’s best bet would be to seek punitive damages, or
compensation for emotional distress.
Back in the basement of the Phoenix hospital, Pedene’s
day unspooled slowly. Somebody asked her how to repair his home printer.
Someone needed help printing a résumé. Somebody needed her to look up Home
Depot in the phone book.
“What can you do?” a woman in a doctor’s coat asked
Pedene, inquiring quietly about her situation.
“Nothing,” Pedene told her. “Just hope it gets better.”
This was a rare good moment: a friend who’d ventured
downstairs into the hospital basement. But eventually, the friend revealed why
she was there.
“But anyway,” she said, “I’m looking for a copy machine.”
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