Maybe the Facts are Just Biased

This week, Scott Bloch, the head of the Office of the Special Counsel (OSC)--the lead federal agency for investigating whistleblower claims--charged that the non-profit Government Accountability Project (GAP) "cherry picked" statistics to show that there is a decline in the help OSC offers to whistleblowers.  Are GAP's facts even cherry picked though?  Bloch didn't really say anywhere in his 672 word opinion piece how they were wrong, he just asserted they were while saying that under his tenure OSC has doubled its positive findings for whistleblowers (which GAP says is a result of OSC broadening "its definition of favorable actions")--though he cites no numbers or years himself.

The only places I saw stats or numbers--based on OSC's own reports--mentioned by GAP's Tom Devine and Adam Miles in their op-ed were:

• According to OSC's own reports, the number of "favorable actions" OSC obtained for whistleblowers, its primary constituency, fell from 98 in fiscal 2002 — the last full year of the previous special counsel — to 40 in fiscal 2006. The figure of 40 is an inflated one considering that OSC broadened its definition of favorable actions in 2005.
• Our analysis of OSC's annual reports indicates that the percentage of complainants helped by OSC, 2.49 percent, is the lowest since the Whistleblower Protection Act's 1989 passage.

Unless Bloch can somehow refute his own office's numbers or GAP's analysis of them, this reminds me of this famous Daily Show exchange:

Rob Corddry: How does one report the facts in an unbiased way when the facts themselves are biased?

Jon Stewart: I'm sorry, Rob, did you say the facts are biased?

-- Nick Schwellenbach

Comments

[Joe Carson]

the hand-waving is a direct result of OSC non-compliance with 5 USC 1214 since 1989. By it, OSC must make and appropriately report its PPP determination "whether there are reasonable grounds to believe a PPP has occurred, exists, or is to be taken." But it has never done this, so no one knows the real situation before Bloch or currently.

The piece conflates feds who make whistleblower disclosures to OSC per 5 USC 1213 with feds who file PPP complaints with OSC, per 5 USC 1214, particularly the whistleblower reprisal type PPP. Those are two completely different things.