There were signs early on that Scott Bloch’s tenure at the U.S. Office of Special Counsel — the independent agency created to investigate whistle-blower complaints — was going to be problematic.
Among the first moves Bloch made at the office was to remove references to sexual orientation from a discrimination complaint form, training slides, a brochure titled “Your Rights as a Federal Employee,” and other documents. The motivation was pretty obvious — it’s harder to protect gay government employees from discrimination if the government’s lawyers delete information about their rights from official documents.
As it turns out, however, the controversies surrounding Bloch’s leadership of the OSC only got worse. Much worse. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal reported, government workers want to blow the whistle on Bush’s choice to protect federal whistle-blowers.
Mr. Bloch, a Lawrence, Kan., lawyer and former counsel to the Justice Department’s Task Force for Faith-based and Community Initiatives, was appointed special counsel in 2003 by President Bush. The 106-person office reviews sensitive personnel cases in which federal workers report wrongdoing. The office also reviews cases in which federal workers claim they have been wrongly fired or retaliated against because of such reports.
Now, some current and former employees of Mr. Bloch are claiming wrongdoing. An administrative complaint filed with the agency two weeks ago by unnamed workers and several nonprofit legal groups charges that Mr. Bloch and his chief political deputy, James Renne, have pushed out career staff members, hired associates who lack labor-law experience and ordered 12 career staff members to be fired unless they accepted immediate transfers to a regional office slated to open this year in Detroit.
The complaint also alleges that Mr. Bloch dismissed as many as 1,000 federal-worker claims without an adequate investigation.
Pretty serious stuff. The complaint against Mr. Bloch has been forwarded to the President’s Council on Integrity and Efficiency, a group comprising federal inspectors general, and will be investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Separately, two Senate committees are probing the special counsel’s actions.
It’s a good thing; the more one hears about Bloch’s management and decision-making, the more worrisome it appears.
Here are some of the highlights from Bloch’s relatively-brief tenure:
Mr. Bloch’s hiring practices also are mentioned in the complaint. In most cases, new hires “had little or no background in employment or labor law” and “are known to have a personal connection” to Mr. Bloch or his deputy, including one from Mr. Renne’s Army Reserve unit and another who is the brother of an officer in the unit, according to the employees’ complaint, which was filed by Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer who represents corporate and federal whistle-blowers.
Mr. Bloch also hired a former headmaster of a boarding school attended by his children as an OSC consultant. In a Feb. 14 letter responding to concerns raised by Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.), Mr. Bloch called the “insinuations about the ‘boarding-school headmaster’ both irrelevant and unworthy of professional discourse.” Mr. Renne said the consultant was brought in on “an intermittent basis” for employee training and education and is no longer working with the agency. Some longtime OSC employees say Mr. Bloch stopped hiring law students from Washington’s Georgetown University, and began hiring instead from Ave Maria School of Law, a Catholic law school in Ann Arbor, Mich., that opened four years ago with donations from Thomas Monaghan, the founder of Domino’s Pizza Inc. and a benefactor of conservative causes.
What’s more, Bloch is not only accused of mismanagement, as my friend Eugene Oregon recently noted, he’s also accused of reprisals against his employees.
When Scott Bloch was appointed by President Bush to lead the Office of Special Counsel, one of the first things he did early last year was to scrub all department literature of any mention of discrimination based on sexual orientation. Last spring career employees within the OSC say they informed members of Congress and the press that Bloch was ignoring this part of the agency’s mandate.
What happened next, according to a legal complaint filed by a group of anonymous OSC employees, was a series of retaliatory strikes by Bloch. First, he slapped a blanket gag order on all employees, forbidding them from talking about agency matters with anyone, including members of Congress, without first getting permission from Bloch or one of his political appointees.
Remember, the Office of Special Counsel is supposed to be independent and non-partisan.
Already, a bi-partisan group of senators have started raising serious questions about Bloch’s behavior, and are apparently considering hearings on the problems in the OSC.
One question I’d like to see asked: who at the White House picked Bloch to head this office?