EEOC Chairman Withdraws Demotion of Whistle Blower

Backing away from a step that critics decried as retaliatory, the chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has dropped plans to demote a regional official who helped alert Congress to the agency’s mishandling of thousands of age discrimination cases.

Chairman Clarence Thomas informed the official, St. Louis District Director Lynn Bruner, in a memo this week that she would retain her post and her standing in the government’s senior executive service.

Senate investigators had charged in a report released in December that the job bias commission for two years ignored Bruner’s warnings that the agency’s poor management was allowing age discrimination charges to languish while a legal deadline for action on the cases slipped by.

Then, when a Senate committee called her to testify about the matter last summer, Bruner was harassed by her superiors at the commission, the investigators alleged. A few days before Christmas, Thomas told her that she was being demoted and transferred to Phoenix.

In the memo canceling the demotion, Thomas rejected the charge that the agency was pursuing a vendetta against Bruner.

“I am firmly convinced that no EEOC officials have retaliated against you or treated you unfairly,” Thomas wrote. “However, because I wish to bring this recent difficult period to an end, I have decided to resolve this matter so that the commission can better focus, without further distraction, on fulfilling its primary mission.”

Thomas had been under congressional pressure to rescind Bruner’s demotion; a House subcommittee held a hearing in March to air the charges of retaliation.

Donald G. Aplin, a lawyer in Washington for the Government Accountability Project, which represented Bruner in her efforts to retain her job, said Thursday that the resolution of the case may be a reflection of Thomas’ job ambitions. Thomas reportedly is in line to be nominated by President Bush to a seat on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

Thomas was unavailable for comment. Deborah Graham, spokeswoman for the commission, said Thomas’ memo to Bruner spoke for itself.

The commission’s failure to act on age bias cases within a two-year legal time limit forced as many as 9,000 workers to rely on a deadline extension rushed into law last year after congressional investigators discovered the extent of the miscues.