U.S. Whistle-Blower Said to Be Facing Retaliation : Senate Panel Opposes the Proposed Demotion of Manager Who Warned of Bungled Age-Bias Cases

A high-level manager at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission whose congressional testimony fixed blame on top agency executives for bungling thousands of age discrimination cases is facing demotion in retaliation for her candor, Senate investigators have charged.

In a blistering report, the Democratic staff of the Senate Aging Committee alleges that the agency ignored St. Louis District Director Lynn Bruner’s warnings almost two years ago about the handling of the cases. She had said the agency’s policies were allowing older workers’ complaints to go unresolved until after the two-year legal time limit for action had expired.

Then, when her comments to a newspaper reporter led to her being compelled to testify before the committee about the problems, Bruner was harassed and, ultimately, put on notice five days before Christmas that she was being demoted and transferred, the report says.

Number Put at 9,000

“We view your proposed retaliation against her as most disturbing, as obstructive of the oversight and investigative functions of the committees of the United States Senate,” retired Sen. John Melcher (D-Mont.), the committee’s former chairman, said in a letter to EEOC Chairman Clarence Thomas accompanying the report.

The report was issued without publicity on Dec. 30, a day before Melcher left office, and was not reviewed by other committee members before its release.

It also alleges that Thomas repeatedly understated the extent of the foul-ups in testimony before the panel and blamed his managers, rather than bad policy, for the problem.

Initially estimated just over a year ago to involve about 900 workers’ bungled cases nationwide, the agency’s latest report to the committee says almost 9,000 workers may have been forced to rely on a deadline extension rushed into law after news reports detailed the commission’s mismanagement.

Thomas was insistent Monday that Bruner’s proposed demotion was the result of poor performance evaluations, not vindictiveness.

“There has been no retaliation,” he said. “Ms. Bruner may have made life uncomfortable, but there was not anything particularly offensive about what she did. Certainly there are others in this agency who have received excellent ratings who have said a lot worse things to me or about me than what Ms. Bruner has done.”

Irate at the charges in the report--which he termed “a cheap shot”--Thomas said he turned over information to Congress as he acquired it and took full responsibility for the problems, even though they were the result of ineptitude by district-level managers.

“We’ve got 50 offices out there,” he said. “What do you expect me to do? Run them all?”

Bruner has challenged her proposed demotion out of the government’s senior executive service to a job as deputy director of the commission’s Phoenix office. To allow for a review by the Office of the Special Counsel, which investigates allegations of retaliation against high-level government whistle-blowers, Thomas has agreed to postpone the demotion until mid-March.

The Senate report says Bruner began asking commission headquarters for help addressing a huge backlog of cases within a month after she took over the St. Louis office in mid-1986. But her memos--which noted that age-bias complaints were slipping past the deadline for action--were ignored for nearly a year, the report says.

Nonetheless, it says, Bruner got a poor performance rating for 1987 in part because of the problems with the age cases, even as other district directors with worse records got better ratings and bonuses.

Bruner’s problems intensified in January, 1988. Asked by a St. Louis newspaper reporter to respond to Thomas’ published criticism of her office and others, she gave an account of the commission’s failure to address the needs of the St. Louis district, which is responsible for employment discrimination complaints in Missouri, Kansas and southern Illinois.

Aging Committee investigators soon asked her to testify about the problem. Two days before she was scheduled to appear under subpoena, Bruner was given a negative mid-year performance review which criticized her for, among other things, her comments to the St. Louis newspaper.

The Senate report concludes that the review was timed “to harass and intimidate her just before she was to appear before this committee.”

In her testimony, Bruner--along with several other commission managers--said the agency did not start giving priority to age-bias cases until after Congress began investigating the mishandling of such cases. A few days later, a top commission official criticized Bruner’s testimony and warned her she was in danger of losing her job, the Senate report says.

Bruner received another negative performance rating in October and then was notified by Thomas on Dec. 20 of her proposed demotion and transfer.

Thomas denied Monday that Bruner had been criticized in her 1987 review for her district’s handling of age cases, even though the Senate report was accompanied by copies of memos and records containing the criticisms.

He rejected the committee’s characterization of Bruner’s early memos as a “warning” of the problem with age discrimination cases, saying Bruner should have spent her time addressing the problem rather than sending memos to Washington.

“These are people who are supposed to exercise the judgment in their offices about what to do under difficult circumstances,” Thomas said. “If you are going to foreclose somebody’s rights by missing the statute of limitations, you tell me what to do. And if you can’t tell me what to do, why are you in the senior executive service?”

Also, Thomas said it was a coincidence that Bruner received her mid-year review last year just as she was preparing to testify before Melcher’s committee.

“If somebody is not doing the job,” he asked, “does the mere fact they testified against me mean I don’t hold them accountable?”