Federal Workers Lose Bid to Halt Drug Testing

The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the government to continue drug tests on federal white-collar employees whose occasional access to the White House complex could in theory pose a security risk to the president.

Economists, budget analysts and other white-collar bureaucrats with passes to the Old Executive Office Building “are uniquely well positioned to threaten the president and the vice president,” Clinton administration lawyers had asserted in asking the court to uphold a lower-court ruling.

“Mind-altering drugs could induce a pass-holder to take actions that would jeopardize the safety of those officials,” the lawyers said.

The court, without comment, refused to hear a plea from two budget analysts who contended that the rationale behind the drug tests was far-fetched. “Suspicionless drug testing must be based upon real, not imaginary or symbolic, dangers,” they argued.

The case illustrates how uncertain the law on drug testing remains. The high court has insisted that the 4th Amendment protects the privacy of public employees from “unreasonable searches,” including mandatory drug tests. But when there is a true threat to public safety, such as in the case of airline pilots or train engineers, the court has said that the government can require workers to undergo drug tests.

Despite that invocation, the justices also have refused to block drug-testing programs that go much further and include, for example, teachers, student athletes and now some white-collar federal workers.

The case rejected Monday had its moments of unintended humor.

White House interns are not forced to take drug tests, Clinton administration lawyers conceded, even though they sometimes can move freely in the West Wing of the White House, where the president’s office is located.

The budget analysts who challenged the drug tests, Arthur Stigile and Ellen Balis, are not confidants of the president. They do not brief him on the budget or even visit the main White House. They work one block away in the New Executive Office Building. Their security passes also allow them to enter the ornate Old Executive Office Building next door to the White House.

The mandatory drug-testing program began under President Reagan in 1986. He adopted the goal of having a drug-free federal workplace and allowed federal agencies to test employees in “sensitive” posts. At the White House, this included officials who worked with the president or who had a top-level security clearance.

In 1995, the Clinton White House expanded that program to include the budget analysts and other white-collar workers. Lawyers said that 7,000 full-time workers are covered by the order.

A federal judge initially blocked the broader testing as unwarranted and unconstitutional, but the U.S. appeals court revived it last year. The appeals court opinion, written by Judge David Sentelle, agreed that bureaucrats working a block away pose a greater danger to the president than the White House interns.

These “permanent pass-holders are in a superior position to acquire information on the comings and goings of the president and vice president,” said Sentelle, the conservative North Carolinian who heads the panel that appointed Kenneth W. Starr as an independent counsel.

“They are therefore far more valuable sources for blackmailers who wish to harm either official,” Sentelle said.

Without comment Monday, the justices dismissed the appeal in the case (Stigile vs. Clinton, 97-837).

Arthur Spitzer, an ACLU lawyer who represented the two budget analysts, said he was disappointed by the court’s action but doubts that it has broad significance.

“Maybe they think the White House already has enough trouble without trying to explain this,” he said.

In other actions, the court:

* Agreed to rule on whether a worker whose union contract calls for mandatory arbitration of disputes can sue his employer for discrimination in federal court. The case (Wright vs. Universal Maritime Service Corp., 97-889) will be heard in the fall.

* Refused to expand the “innocent spouse” exception in the tax laws to a New York City woman who has maintained that her brief marriage left her with a crushing $650,000 bill for back taxes.

Under the law, when married partners sign a joint return, both are fully liable for mistakes, although there is an exception for a spouse who can show that she “did not know and had no reason to know” about gross mistakes on the return.

A tax court found that Elizabeth Cockrell, a college graduate from Canada, had reason to know that her husband had claimed phony tax shelters. She testified recently before a Senate committee overseeing abuses at the Internal Revenue Service.

Her appeal to the high court called her “a classic innocent spouse . . . required to pay for the misdeeds of her miscreant husband.”

The justices may have disagreed with that view, or they may prefer to let Congress deal with the problem. In either event, they dismissed her appeal (Cockrell vs. IRS, 97-877).