The MSPB currently has no sitting members. Prior to March 1, 2019, the Board operated for over two years without a quorum. Board members Anne M. Wagner and Susan Tsui Grundmann left on March 1, 2015, and January 6, 2017. Board Member Mark A. Robbins (above), served as the sole Board member from January 7, 2017, through February 28, 2019, when his statutory term ended. Image: Juliet Linderman/AP/Shutterstock
By: FEDweek StaffA coalition of some 100 organizations has urged the Senate to act on nominees to fill the MSPB board, saying that the five-year lack of a quorum is “jeopardizing the existence of meaningfully enforceable employment rights for millions of Americans, including whistleblowers.”
“Behind these cases are individuals and their families desperately seeking legal relief, often from reprisal like job termination and loss of income after they patriotically sought to expose governmental waste or wrongdoing at great personal and professional risk to themselves,” said a letter to Senate leaders.
The letter, whose participants include some federal unions and other employee groups as well as several outside whistleblower advocacy organizations, stresses that with the board vacant, “whistleblowers waiting for board review of their retaliation claims remain in limbo while the largest-ever backlog of more than 3,500 cases continues to grow.”
“Paralysis on the Board is even creating perverse incentives for federal agencies to appeal the most meritorious whistleblower claims that won in earlier stages to the full Board, knowing that those claims will then be forced to sit unresolved,” it says. “Furthermore, the longer that federal employees’ merits system cases are forced to wait for resolution, the larger the back pay ordered to be paid could be to federal employees with wrongful termination or demotion claims.”
Nominees for all three seats—two Democrats and one Republican—cleared the committee level last year and one of the Democratic nominees was again approved recently in a second vote that was required for technical reasons under Senate rules.
However, there has been no indication of progress toward bringing them to a floor vote due to Republican opposition to that nominee and that party’s insistence on filling all three board seats at the same time.
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