Compilation of Federal Whistleblower Protection Statutes

"Overview

In general, whistleblowers are employees who report misconduct or illegal activity committed by their employers.

This report is a compilation of federal whistleblower and employee protection statutes. In addition to identifying laws that protect whistleblowers from retaliation, this report includes employee protection laws that prohibit retaliation against employees who engage in various protected activities, such as participating in an investigation or filing a complaint.

For each law, the popular name of the Act with a whistleblower or employee protection provision is provided. If the whistleblower protection provision was amended after original enactment, the date of those changes is noted. The United States Code or public law citation for the provision and an excerpt of the text of the provision is included. Listed below this text are protected individuals or classes identified in the provision(s). Lastly, the original congressional committee(s) to receive or consider the legislation are identified.

Where statutory text falls outside the scope of the topic, CRS has deleted portions of statutory provisions and replaced them with ellipses symbols (...) standing alone within a passage.

Methodology

CRS identified these statutes by reviewing various internal CRS products and federal government resources, and by searching the United States Code Service on Lexis Advance and the Statutes-atLarge on ProQuest Congressional for variations of (whistleblower or (employee w/2 protection) or (((person or employer or employee or witness) /20 (fire or fired or discharg! or discriminat! or demot! or “personnel action” or retaliat!)) /20 (person or employees or applicants or witness))).

This report uses the official version of the United States Code on the House Law Revision Counsel’s website.1

The committees identified for each law were found by searching Congress.gov and ProQuest Congressional for the public law number and reviewing committee reports. CRS identified persons or classes covered by the law from the Act’s text.

Limitations

CRS searched and reviewed a range of laws to provide an extensive list of statutes. It is nonetheless possible that some relevant laws do not appear in this report for various reasons, including the following:

 Due to variations in database search functionalities, the searches may not have captured all relevant authorities currently in effect.

 Other unofficial versions of the United States Code may retrieve different results from various databases.

 The criteria used to identify statutes may have excluded relevant authorities that did not contain terms used in the database search, particularly if they did not expressly refer to whistleblower, discharg!, discriminat!, demot!, “personnel action” or retaliate..."
Whistleblowers