Whistleblowers

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Mr. President, during my time in the Senate, I have always tried to honor the work of whistleblowers. Those who speak up about government wrongdoing ought to be rewarded and not sidelined and punished. But that is exactly what happened in the Indian Health Service according to a recently released internal report. Now, this goes back a few years, but it still is a constant reminder of how whistleblowers aren't listened to and bad things happen.

According to this internal report, in August 2006, a Dr. Mark Butterbrodt wrote to his superiors about a fellow doctor. Over the course of years, he repeatedly made extremely serious whistleblower complaints alleging that his colleague, a Dr. Stanley Weber, was sexually assaulting his young patients. He was not alone, because other staff tried to report Weber to those at the very top. His behavior was described as an ``open secret.'' It is even alleged that the standard orientation for new nurses included a warning to never leave Dr. Weber alone with young boys.

The response from the Indian Health Service senior staff was silence, so the crimes continued. Over a decade after the first whistleblower report, Dr. Weber continued to sexually assault young boys who came to the Indian Health Service for help.

Instead of removing the man who had been repeatedly, credibly accused of sexually abusing his patients, they punished the whistleblower.

Too often in government, we see the people who report wrongdoing being punished.

Numerous senior officials broke the law by failing to report allegations to law enforcement, so the crime could continue. Instead, what did they do? They promoted Dr. Weber to manage those who witnessed his crimes.

By contrast, the report states that Dr. Butterbrodt was ``banished''--and the word ``banished'' is in quotation marks--to the ``very remote and rural facility'' in Belcourt, ND. So the doctor who was the patriotic American, reporting crimes, eventually resigned, and that was shortly after he was banished to a very remote and rural facility.

This shameful response by the Indian Health Service leadership had a direct impact on future whistleblowers. If you have an environment that discourages whistleblowing, what are you going to get? Less whistleblowing.

This internal report states that ``nurses told Dr. Butterbrodt that now he could see why they never speak up.''

It is unconscionable that these whistleblowers were ignored and a pedophile was allowed to act with impunity. That is why I recently sent a letter to the Acting Director of Indian Health Service to ensure that future patients and whistleblowers do not face the same treatment. I want to make sure that processes have been put in place so that this doesn't happen again.

Dr. Butterbrodt and those like him were right to blow the whistle. We need to make it easier, not harder, to do the right thing.

There is a pattern about whistleblowers. They tend to be treated like skunks at a picnic. They usually end up doing what is patriotic, only to hurt themselves professionally, maybe even becoming unemployed just because they do what most civil servants want to do--just have the government do what the law requires or how the money is spent according to law.

So I take the advantage--every time a Cabinet person or sub-Cabinet person comes to my office for their usual interviews before confirmation, I advise them, whether they run an Agency that maybe has 3,000 or 4,000 people to an Agency that has--I suppose like the Veterans Administration, which I think has 400,000 people--you are head of that Department. You don't know what is going on by everybody underneath you. You should listen to whistleblowers.

They all assure me that they will, but somehow the culture in our government doesn't seem to change.

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