Climate Of Fear Intensifies As Trump Officials Fire HUD Whistleblowers

Two civil rights attorneys at the United States Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD) were fired after blowing the whistle on President Donald Trump and his administration’s efforts to undermine enforcement of the Fair Housing Act. They also challenged a “strict gag order” that was allegedly imposed against them.

Paul Osadebe and Palmer Heenan were first interviewed by Maximillian Alvarez of the Real News Network, which published the segment on September 22. A week later, they returned to the Real News to discuss their termination. 

Officials at HUD invited Osadebe to a meeting on September 29. They recommended “that I be fired for my whistleblowing activity for speaking out to protect civil rights, and nothing else. Not anything related to performance or any actual misconduct. [It] was entirely for speech and for telling the truth,” Osadebe recalled.

Osadebe turned in his laptop, building access card, and said goodbye to his coworkers. “[I] told them to be strong and continue the fight, and then I was walked out of the building.

For Heenan, the retaliation was similar. He had been certified as someone “necessary to the mission of HUD.” The certification was rescinded. “They said it was for the disclosures that I had made of non-public information and that I was being summarily terminated as of yesterday at 10 o’clock.”

Security escorted Heenan around the office to surrender his laptop. They even escorted him to the restroom, and then he was taken to the door of the building where he “was able to say goodbye” to colleagues.

On September 22, the whistleblowers sued HUD and its secretary, Scott Turner. After agency leaders recognized there were legal obstacles to eliminating the Office of Fair Housing entirely, they allegedly targeted the attorneys and forced them to leave the office “against their will.”

The attorneys in the Office of Fair Housing further alleged that they had been “subject to a strict gag order that prohibits them from engaging in any ‘external communications’ without political leadership approval for each individual matter. That approval has been granted only rarely, and requests often linger for months without action.”

Both Osadebe and Heenan emphasized that they were informed that their termination stemmed from their “unauthorized disclosures.” They were punished for communicating with members of Congress, the inspector general’s office for HUD, and the American public.

“That is being fired for whistleblowing,” Osadebe declared. “There’s no other disclosures that we’re talking about here. We’re talking about attempts to dismantle civil rights enforcement in this country.”

Heenan added, “We’ve told the American public, we’ve told Congress, we’ve told really anyone that will listen that has the power to do something, that things need to change, that there are rights that are being trampled. There are laws that are being broken and people we hope will listen and do something about it. And that’s why we were terminated.”

At a time when the Trump administration is doing everything to roll back whistleblower protections for federal workers, Heenan emphasized that in order to have a government that serves the public the whistleblowing rights of workers in government agencies must be upheld.

“[We are] the only ones inside the building who can tell you, the public, what is happening inside the building, what laws are being broken, what money is being wasted, who is being abused and who is being hurt and who’s being left to kind of fend for themselves,” Heenan contended. 

The climate of fear for government whistleblowers increases every time that the Trump administration engages in this kind of retaliation.

“There’s no legal cover for what they’re doing. It’s a pure attempt to intimidate and silence, and that’s the impression that they’re trying to create and the feeling that they’re trying to instill in federal workers,” Osadebe concluded. "And that’s a loss because people are going to feel reluctant to tell the truth, to give accurate legal analysis to political appointees to speak out about when contracts are legally violated, or laws are not followed.”

Watch the full followup interview with Paul Osadebe and Palmer Heenan here.