Bring Jobs Home Act--Motion to Proceed

Floor Speech

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Mr. GRASSLEY. Madam President, I come to the floor to address my colleagues about a Federal agency that has forgotten that this Federal agency is supposed to be working for the American people. This is an agency that has gotten too big for its britches. Some of the officials have forgotten who pays their salary.

The Food and Drug Administration is supposed to protect the American people, except lately the only thing the FDA bureaucrats seem to have any interest in is protecting themselves. According to whistleblowers and published reports in the Washington Post and in the New York Times, the agency in charge of safeguarding the American public and providing for the public safety has trampled on the privacy of its very own employees. The FDA mounted an aggressive campaign against employees who would dare to question its actions and created what the New York Times termed an ``enemies list'' of people it considered dangerous. It kind of reminds us of President Nixon and the IRS going after enemies.

The Food and Drug Administration has been spying on this enemies list. The FDA has been spying on the personal e-mails of these employees and everybody these employees contacted. That includes their protected communications even with those of us in Congress.

We would not have known the extent of the spying if internal FDA documents about it had not been released on the Internet, apparently just by accident. We would not have known how the FDA intentionally targeted and captured confidential, personal e-mails between the whistleblowers, their lawyers, and those of us in Congress.

In these internal documents, the FDA never wanted the public to see that it referred to whistleblowers as ``collaborators.'' FDA refers to congressional staff as ``ancillary actors.'' FDA refers to newspaper reporters as ``media outlet actors.'' These memos make the FDA sound more like the East German Stasi than a consumer protection agency in a free country.

At the beginning of Commissioner Hamburg's term, she said whistleblowers exposed critical issues within the FDA. That seems to be a very approving comment. She vowed to create a culture that values whistleblowers. That appears to be a very approving statement. In fact, in 2009 she said: ``I think whistleblowers serve an important role.''

I wanted to believe Commissioner Hamburg when she testified before the Senate committee during her confirmation. I wanted to believe her when she said she would protect whistleblowers at the Food and Drug Administration. However, the facts now appear very different.

In this case, the FDA invaded the privacy of multiple whistleblowers. It hacked into the private e-mail accounts and used sophisticated keystroke logging software to monitor their every move online.

When an FDA supervisor was placed under oath in the course of an equal employment opportunity complaint, that employee--that supervisor--testified that the FDA was conducting ``routine security monitoring.'' That is entirely false. This monitoring was anything but routine. It specifically targeted five whistleblowers. It intentionally captured their private e-mails to attorneys, to Members of Congress, and to the Office of Special Counsel. The internal documents showed that this was a unique, highly sophisticated, and highly specialized operation.

According to the Office of the Inspector General, the Food and Drug Administration had no evidence of any criminal wrongdoing by these whistleblowers. This massive campaign of spying was not just an invasion of privacy; it was specifically designed to intercept communications that are protected by law. The Office of Special Counsel is an agency created by Congress to receive whistleblower complaints and to protect whistleblowers from retaliation. The law protects communications with the special counsel as a way to encourage whistleblowers to report waste, fraud, abuse, mismanagement, and threats to the public safety, and to do that reporting without fear of retaliation. The FDA knew that contacts between whistleblowers and the Office of Special Counsel are privileged and confidential, but the James Bond wannabes at the FDA just didn't seem to care what the law said.

In the end, the self-appointed spies turned out to be more like the bumbling Maxwell Smart. Along with their own internal memos about spying, the fruits of their labor were also accidentally posted on the Internet. It is tens of thousands of pages of e-mails and pictures of the whistleblower computer screens containing some of the very same information the FDA bureaucrats were so keen to keep secret.

When I started asking questions about this, FDA officials seemed to suffer from a sudden bout of collective amnesia. It took them more than 6 months to answer a letter from last January starting my investigation of this issue. When I pushed for a reply during those 6 months, FDA told my staff that the response would take time to make sure it was accurate and complete.

When I finally got the response on Friday, it doesn't even answer the simplest of questions, such as who authorized this targeted spy ring, and isn't it a coincidence that just Friday, before the New York Times article was going to come out, they finally answered a letter going way back to my questions of January. Worse than that, though, it is misleading in its denials about intentionally intercepting communications with Congress.

When I asked them why they couldn't just answer some simple questions, they told my staff that the response was under review by the ``appropriate officials in the Administration.'' The nonanswers and the doublespeak would have fit right into some George Orwell novel.

Of course, when my staff dug deeper and asked if the response was being reviewed by the Office of Management and Budget, the Food and Drug Administration responded: No, it wasn't being reviewed by OMB.

FDA refused to identify who within the administration was holding up the FDA's response to my letter. Now, that is in an administration that said on January 20, 2009, they are going to be the most transparent in the history of this country. FDA refused to say how long it had been sitting on that person's desk or why it had been approved by the political officials outside the FDA. Who is this shadowy figure conducting some secret review of the FDA's responses to this Senator's questions? Why was there all of a sudden interest in exerting political control over the correspondence of this supposedly independent Federal agency? And when we use the words ``independent Federal agency'' around here, we mean not subject to political control.

We need answers, and we need answers now. I have been demanding answers for 6 months. For the past 6 months, FDA has been telling me to just be patient. The FDA has been telling me they have a good story to tell--and those are their words, ``a good story to tell.''

Apparently, though, there is someone in this administration--President Obama's administration--who didn't want them to say anything for as long as they could possibly get away with not saying anything. I finally got Commissioner Hamburg on the phone in June of this year. Commissioner Hamburg personally assured me the FDA was going to fully cooperate with my investigation. Yet the FDA has provided me with nothing but misleading and incomplete responses.

The FDA has failed to measure up to Commissioner Hamburg's pledge of cooperation. The FDA buried its head in the sand in hopes I would lose interest and go away. They don't know me very well. That is not going to happen.

I don't care who is in charge of the executive branch--Republican or Democrat--I am going to continue demanding answers. When government bureaucrats obstruct and intercept my communications with protected whistleblowers, I am not going to stop. When government bureaucrats stonewall for months on end, I will not stop. When government bureaucrats try and muddy the waters and mislead, I will not stop. I intend to get to the bottom of it.

I will continue to press the FDA until we know who authorized spying. Can my colleagues imagine spying in American government, a transparent government--supposed to be transparent--spying on whistleblowers who are protected by law and who have a special office set up to protect them, and spying on communications between a lawyer and their client?

Someone within the FDA specifically authorized spying on private communications with my own office and with several other Members of Congress. Someone at FDA specifically authorized spying on private communications with Congressman Van Hollen's office. Someone at FDA specifically authorized spying on private communications with the staff of the Senate Special Committee on Aging. Someone at FDA specifically authorized spying on private communications with the lawyers for whistleblowers, and those lawyers are called the Office of Special Counsel.

These whistleblowers thought the FDA was approving drugs and treatment it shouldn't. These whistleblowers thought the FDA was caving to pressure from the companies who were applying for FDA approval. They have a right to express those concerns without any fear of retaliation whatsoever, if the law is going to be followed--the law protecting whistleblowers. But after doing so, two of these whistleblowers were fired, two more were forced to leave FDA, and five of them were subjected to an intense spying campaign.

Senior FDA officials may have broken the law. They authorized the capturing of personal e-mail passwords through keystroke logging software. That potentially allowed them to log in to the whistleblower's personal e-mail accounts and access e-mails that were never even accessed from a work computer. Without a subpoena or warrant, that would be a criminal violation.

After 6 months, FDA finally denied that occurred. However, that denial was based on the word of one unnamed information technology employee involved in the monitoring. We need a more thorough investigation than that.

I have asked the FDA to make that person and several other witnesses available for interviews with my staff. We will see how cooperative FDA plans to be now. I will continue to press the FDA to open every window and every door. Eventually enough sunlight on this agency will cleanse it.

FDA gets paid to protect the public, not to keep us in the dark. Secret monitoring programs, spying on Congress, and retaliating against whistleblowers--this is a sad commentary on the state of affairs at the FDA.

I know there are hard-working and principled rank-and-file employees at the FDA who care very much about their mission to protect the American public from harm. Unfortunately, all too often those rank-and-file employees are unfairly tarnished by others, such as those involved in this spy ring.

This is a sad commentary on President Obama's promise to the American people that this would be the most transparent administration in history. The American people cannot lose faith in the FDA. Unfortunately, after this debacle, some of that faith may deteriorate. The FDA has a lot of work to do to restore the public's trust.

I yield the floor and suggest the absence of a quorum.

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