Sen. Grassley asks FDA for details on employee monitoring

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wrote to FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, MD, asking her why the agency accessed an alleged whistleblower’s emails in an instance that appears to be an act of retribution.

P.J. Hardy was one of nine FDA employees who wrote to the presidential transition team in 2009 to express concerns that Center for Devices and Radiological Health managers disregarded laws governing the assessment of medical devices, according to Grassley’s Jan. 31 letter.

Grassley accused the FDA of accessing Hardy’s emails after he revealed potentially illegal or inappropriate actions occurring at the FDA to the presidential team, using the information contained within to damage his reputation with other government agencies and seeking his dismissal against the advice of the Office of Special Counsel.

Questions that Grassley posed to Hamburg included:

• Who authorized the monitoring of all the whisteblowers' email accounts for communications with Congress?

• Did the FDA monitor all employee email accounts, including personal accounts, or was the monitoring targeted only at the nine whistleblowers?
• Did the FDA obtain the passwords to employees’ personal email accounts, which would allow emails to be intercepted even when not sent or received from a government computer?

“Whistleblowers point out fraud, waste and abuse when no one else will, and while they do so while risking their professional careers, they are often treated like skunks at a picnic,” Grassley wrote. “Whistleblowers have played a critical role in exposing harmful government actions and retaliation against whistleblowers should never be tolerated.”

Read Grassley’s letter in its entirety here.