The life of a whistleblower is hardly the glamorous stuff of Hollywood. Often it’s spent looking over one’s shoulder, hoping for small victories while withstanding reprisals.
What’s so unusual about whistleblower Ken Pedeleose, an industrial engineer at the Defense Contract Management Agency, is that he scored a big victory last month in a little-noticed ruling by the U.S. Merit Systems Protection Board.
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The federal mediation panel concluded that Pedeleose, 46, had been improperly suspended from his job after calling attention to overcharges on Lockheed Martin military contracts and for advising a fellow employee who found safety problems with a military aircraft used by the Air Force.
The board ruled that Pedeleose, a 13-year veteran of DCMA, the Department of Defense’s front-line defense against contractor fraud, must receive back pay for a month-long suspension and the action against him must be expunged from his personnel record.
Pedeleose, who acted as his own attorney in the case, works at Lockheed Martin’s plant in Marietta, Ga. DCMA engineers and inspectors typically are based at defense contractor facilities to ensure that the government gets what it paid for.
Lockheed Martin is the Pentagon’s top defense contractor, receiving $26.6 billion in U.S. military contracts in 2006 alone.
In January 2006, the DCMA suspended Pedeleose for 30 days on charges of insubordination and failure to cooperate in an internal investigation into who had spread reports about DCMA personnel problems. Pedeleose appealed the suspension, claiming that the suspension was reprisal by his boss, Air Force Col. Nicole Plourde, commander of the DCMA office at Lockheed Martin’s manufacturing facility in Marietta, Ga. Pedeleose said he was being punished for blowing the whistle concerning excessive costs on Lockheed Martin and for helping a colleague file a report alleging 14 safety violations on the C-130J transport plane.
The federal mediation board agreed with Pedeleose that the agency had abused its authority.
“There is no evidence regarding whether the agency takes similar actions against employees who are not whistleblowers but who are otherwise similarly situated,” the board concluded in a 2-1 vote. “Therefore, we find that the agency has failed to meet its significant statutory burden of proof to show by clear and convincing evidence that it would have disciplined the appellant absent his whistleblowing.”
The dissenting vote in the case was from Neil McPhie, the board’s chairman and a Bush administration appointee. Ruling in favor of Pedeleose were Mary Rose, the board’s vice chairman and also a Bush appointee, and Barbara Sapin, who has served terms under Presidents Clinton and Bush.
Danielle Brian, executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, a private group that advises whistleblowers, said, “The Pedeleose victory is a victory for all whistleblowers. Unfortunately, it requires the remarkable tenacity of Mr. Pedeleose to get any satisfaction from the broken whistleblower protection system.”
DCMA and Pedeleose have had a rocky relationship. The agency suspended him in 2003 after officials claimed he had made threats against fellow employees. The agency later acknowledged that he had made no such threats and reinstated him.
Since 2000, Pedeleose and two colleagues have told their DCMA superiors and Congress that Lockheed Martin was trying to overcharge the Pentagon for work on the C-5 and C-130 transport aircraft programs. In one report, they said lackluster DCMA and Air Force managers were reluctant to confront the defense contractor about excessive costs.
After then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld ordered the termination of C-130J airplane production, Pedeleose wrote a 2005 report to congressional offices that the Air Force and Lockheed Martin were dramatically overestimating the costs of canceling the program in order to ensure that aircraft production continued.
The Pentagon inspector general later corroborated the essence of Pedeleose’s claims when it concluded that the Air Force may have overstated the cost of canceling the C-130J by up to $1.1 billion.
Pedeleose and two other colleagues concluded in a 2002 report that Lockheed Martin sought to bill the Air Force $714 per rivet and $5,217 per inch-long bracket in the company’s C-5 production program. The government-recommended price for the rivet was $53 and $258 for the bracket.
DCMA successfully fought the overcharges and the government ultimately wasn’t billed for the excessive costs.
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