We investigated a complaint of whistleblower reprisal under Presidential Policy Directive 19—which prohibits whistleblower retaliation in the form of actions that affect an employee’s eligibility for access to classified information—after an employee from the Office of Public Safety, Resources Protection, and Emergency Services alleged that their supervisor withdrew their national security clearance after they had filed two Equal Employment Opportunity complaints against their supervisor.
We concluded that the evidence established that the supervisor did not have the employee’s Top Secret security clearance administratively withdrawn as reprisal for protected disclosures the employee made in 2017 and 2018 with the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) Office of Civil Rights (OCR). We determined that while the supervisor knew about the employee’s protected disclosures, there was clear and convincing evidence that the employee no longer needed access to classified information as part of their job duties and, therefore, their Top Secret clearance would have been administratively withdrawn regardless of the protected disclosures to the OCR.
We provided this report to the Secretary of the Interior for any action deemed appropriate.