Congress made permanent and expanded protections granted to whistleblowers who work for federal contractors, readying the legislation for President Obama’s signature.
The House of Representatives approved of the bill on Monday, in a voice vote with the rules under suspension, meaning it garnered support from more than two-thirds of the body. In June, the Senate approved of the measure by unanimous consent.
The bill indefinitely extends a pilot whistleblower protection program for contractors, first established in 2013. It also grants the same protections to employees of subgrantees.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), the author of the legislation, noted that such workers have lacked safeguards “even though the federal government distributes billions in grant funding each year, much of which gets passed through to other organizations.”
“We’ve got an enormous contracting workforce in the federal government, and we’ve got to make sure that all of our contractors have the same whistleblower protections as the government employees they work alongside,” McCaskill said Monday, “because these folks are the ones raising the alarm on waste, fraud, and abuse of power.”
Contracted employees in the intelligence community will still, however, remain exempt, more than three years after former Booz Allen Hamilton-NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed to the public vast domestic and global US surveillance powers.
Snowden said he went to the press, in part, because protections for intelligence whistleblowers have been woefully insufficient.
“If there hadn’t been a Thomas Drake, there couldn’t have been an Edward Snowden,” Snowden told Al-Jazeera in 2015.
Drake, a former NSA analyst, saw his home raided by the FBI in 2007, after he had raised internal questions about mass surveillance. Similar raids were also executed against other analysts and a congressional staffer who, alongside Drake, had revealed their privacy concerns to the Pentagon Inspector General.
In 2010, the Obama administration decided to charge Drake under the Espionage Act. The Justice Department, however, eventually reached a deal with Drake, allowing him, in 2011, to plead to a single misdemeanor count of exceeding authorized use of a computer.
McCaskill has supported the extension of whistleblower protections to private sector members of the intelligence community. At a hearing in September of last year, the senator said she is “not aware of any classified or sensitive information that’s made its way to a damaging place” as a result of the recent protections given to Defense Department contractors.
