Jeff Ruch likes to quote the father of the nuclear Navy, Hyman Rickover – “If you must sin, sin against God and not the bureaucracy. God may forgive your sins. But the bureaucracy never will.”

Ruch was present at the creation of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER). 

He started out as PEER’s general counsel and then from 1997 to 2019 was its director in Washington, D.C. Ruch now is PEER’s Pacific director, responsible for Hawaii, California, Oregon, Washington and Alaska.

Ruch deals with whistleblowers in the government bureaucracy. But he sees little difference between how corporations and the government treat whistleblowers.

A typical left right argument would be the left saying corporations are the problem and the right saying government is the problem. 

PEER is saying – they both are the problem.

“And we are also saying there is no big difference between Democrats and Republicans – there’s just the Green Party,” Ruch told Corporate Crime Reporter in an interview last week. “It’s Mr. Green’s party. Not the Green Party we all know. It’s money. We’ve seen Democratic politicians put their thumbs on the scale just as much as we have seen Republican politicians do it. But the Democrats have green cover.”

Shed some light on a good government story – an ethical public employee at the top?

“At the top? Generally the ones at the top who exhibit ethics get replaced,” Ruch says. 

“Take the case of Jim Baca, who was Clinton’s first head of the Bureau of Land Management. I remember meeting with him and he said – PEER will never take hold in the BLM as long as I’m director because there won’t be a need for it. And then ten days later he was fired.”

Why was he fired?

“Clinton needed support of western Democrats. Cecil Andrus of Idaho was very upset about some of the new restrictions on grazing and complained loudly enough to Bruce Babbitt, who was then the Secretary of the Interior, that they got rid of Baca. And the whole agenda of what was then called range reform was abandoned in order to keep the Democratic majority to pass budgets and other items.” 

“Fast forward to today, and two thirds of the BLM rangeland fails to meet their own standards of minimum rangeland health in terms of vegetation, water quality, and soil – due to overgrazing.” 

“We are not aware of instances where a whistleblower has been put in charge of a department of program where he or she has risked their career to improve. Instead, they tend to get spit out of government and most of the success stories are after they leave government and become beacons of hope.”

Ruch says his favorite part of his job is dealing with “intakes” – government whistleblowers calling him for help.

“We function as a giant national shelter for battered staff. We are not trying to generate business. And we don’t charge for our services. We answer the phone – how can we help you?”

“People will call up. When they first make that call, that’s an important period. The people who contact us are for the most part people who have been in an agency for at least a decade, sometimes two or three decades.” 

“Generally they are in positions of some responsibility, as opposed to an entry level position. They are seeing something that’s untoward, something to the extreme. Most of them have survived in a bureaucracy and are flexible. But they see something that pushes them beyond the pale and that causes them to say – I never thought I’d be contacting PEER, but I’m contacting PEER and asking for help.” 

“Sometimes they find themselves in trouble, in a downward spiral, or concerned that if they do a certain thing it will result in backlash that will effectively end their career. But more often than not, it has to do with something the agency is doing wrong. So when we ask – how can we help you – sometimes the answer is – please sue my agency.” 

“That is the nature of our work. We do a broad mixture of administrative, personnel and environmental litigation. When we do go into litigation, we are often representing the subject matter experts for the agency who of course can’t be named. Their expertise guides what we are doing.” 

“That means typically, to sue an agency, we will recruit a posse of plaintiffs. We successfully sued the FAA and the National Park Service to get them to control noisy overflight helicopters across national parks. In one case, our plaintiffs were the homeowner associations around Hawaii volcanoes, which suffered from helicopter noise once every eight minutes from dawn to dusk every day.”

Those were tourist helicopters?

“Yes. A biologist from Glacier who we were helping on another problem, in the course of working on this issue, mentioned this helicopter problem. He was the chief biologist for Glacier. Much of their nature studies and wildlife was being disrupted because the helicopter schedules had no real restrictions on how low they could go.” 

“So the park, in its general management plan, outlawed these air tours. And the park was then informed by the FAA – Mr. Superintendent, your authority stops at the treetops. You have no authority – you can’t stop these things.”

“In 2000, Congress passed the National Air Tour Management Act. But by the time 2017 came around, not a single air tour management plan had been adopted, partly because it was one of these laws that required two agencies – the FAA and the Park Service to do something together. And they could never agree on what to do and therefore they didn’t do anything.” 

“At the time we sued, there were 24 parks that didn’t have any control over the number of these flights that went over them every day. We successfully sued on the grounds that there was an unreasonable delay. We got a court order in 2020. And we have been implementing it ever since.”

“As of right now, Mt. Rushmore has completely outlawed air tours. Glacier has a phase out that will be done in a couple of years. That was an example of an employee asking for assistance and PEER figuring out the pressure point and putting legal pressure on the agency until they were forced in this case on the Court of Appeals to succumb.”

Which agencies are your complaints mostly coming from and what are the nature of the complaints?

“The sources vary over time. Right now, since the advent of the Biden administration, by far it has been the Environmental Protection Agency.”

How do you explain that?

“In Republican administrations, the EPA gets completely captured. Under Democratic administrations, they don’t uncapture it. They keep the same managers in place. And the level of corporate pressure inside EPA is much higher than, say for example, the U.S. Geological Survey, which has no regulatory role at all.”

“On a day to day basis, we see a lot more corporate pressure at the EPA. For example, right now we are representing scientists who work on the new chemical program at the EPA.” 

“The Toxic Substances Control Act is one of the oldest environmental laws and up until recently was the weakest. Finally, in 2016, there was something called the Lautenberg amendments that required for the first time that new chemicals, before they were approved for commercial use, be reviewed to see whether or not there were unreasonable risks. Up until that time, chemicals were presumed innocent until proven guilty by a body count.”

“In 2016, this new program was created just in time for the Trump administration, which put the American Chemistry Council in charge. And when Trump left, Biden came in, scientists began to think they could get the agency to change course.” 

“Scientists would identify areas of risk and managers, often at the behest of industry, would eliminate whole categories like carcinogenicity, impact on birth – things like that. So if you look at the whole track record of this new chemical program, of the 4,000 chemicals they have reviewed, they have not disallowed a single one.”

“We have filed a series of complaints. We approached the new Biden Assistant Administrator for the Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention (OCSPP), Dr. Michal Freedhoff, with detailed complaints on behalf of five scientists. This person doesn’t want to meet them, but she took what we gave her and provided the names of the scientists to the managers. Within three minutes of providing the names to her, she outed their identities to the managers. And none of the underlying issues were fixed. And those scientists ended up being exiled from the new chemical safety program. That’s not what we expected from the Biden administration.”

“Next week we are expecting serious pushback, powered by the Inspector General at EPA. We have been told that the IG is going to be issuing reports about these scientists and their managers. And then there will be reports about the underlying chemicals under review.” 

“Take an example like that and multiply it by about five and that will give you a sense about what our current EPA docket is like.”

Why so much more trouble under Biden than under Trump?

“I get the impression that those EPA employees coming to us believe there was some hope of remediation under Biden. When you have the ex-American Chemistry Council executives as your bosses, in many instances, the scientists with industry ties were more honest than their replacements. It wasn’t like the Trump administration was free of scandal. It’s just that the Biden administration has been such a disappointment as was the Obama administration after Bush. They are like janitors that don’t do windows. These Democratic administrations don’t do personnel.”

“When Bush and Dick Cheney were in, Cheney was very good at making sure he had the right people in the right positions in all of the agencies. And the political briefings they did included those people. When Obama came in, all of the same managers were there. For example, the old Mineral Managements office was still hosting parties with cakes that read – drill baby drill. It didn’t change, even though some of the policy and rhetoric changed.”

“Patrick Moynihan famously said – everyone is entitled to their own opinion but not their own set of facts. But in reality, government agencies are entitled to their own set of facts. They make them up all the time. The whole issue of scientific integrity is a recognition of the fact that bureaucracies try to bend the information that they publish so that the only thing that is made public is whatever supports the talking points.”

[For the complete q/a format Interview with Jeff Ruch, 38 Corporate Crime Reporter 36(11), September 16, 2024, print edition only. ]