Compromise on Whistleblower Plan Raised

The Obama administration has proposed a compromise designed to overcome what has been the major obstacle in recent years to a proposal to strengthen protections for federal employees who blow the whistle on fraud, waste and abuse. At a House hearing, a Justice Department official said that rather than generally bringing employees of security agencies under the same protections as others — as the bill proposes and which has caused concerns for years about disclosures of classified information — the official proposed creating a separate entity of senior officials from inside and outside the intelligence community to which employees could make disclosures involving classified matters. That panel would be empowered to overrule an agency head that refused to pass the disclosure on to Congress, and also could review employee allegations of reprisal through security clearance decisions, under this plan.