Forest Service Whistleblower Faces 'Six-Figure Legal Debt,' Calls For Reform

United States Forest Service whistleblower Scott Ashcraft has called on legislators in Washington, D.C., and Raleigh, North Carolina, to create publicly funded legal defense options for whistleblowers. 

“When I formally reported the U.S. Forest Service for failing to protect important Native American sites in North Carolina, I didn't expect it to end my career and leave my family with six-figure legal debt,” Ashcroft wrote in an op-ed published by the Charlotte Observer. “But that's exactly what happened. It shouldn't be this hard—or this expensive—to do the right thing.”

The Asheville Watchdog recounted what happened to Ashcraft, who was a Forest Service archaeologist. On April 22, 2021, following a 19-acre wildfire, he surveyed the damage. “Over three days, Ashcraft documented enough artifacts, many at an ancient quarry and all dating to the millennia before Europeans came into contact with Native Americans.”

The Seniard Creek fire unearthed a site that left Ashcraft and “leading scientists” convinced that “the site held rich information about the labor, commerce, and spiritual lives of the Cherokee and Muscogee people who once inhabited the land and whose descendants needed to know what they’d found.”

However, in 2023, under President Joe Biden, Ashcraft filed a whistleblower complaint that accused Forest Service officials of violating laws related to the environment and preservation of Indigenous history. The response from government officials was harsh. Ashcraft was allegedly subject to workplace harassment from “colleagues, forest rangers, and the top-ranking Forest Service official in North Carolina.”

“Ashcraft was stripped of projects and responsibilities, including his authority to communicate with tribal officials, with whom he’d developed relationships over many years,” according to the Watchdog. “In 2024, he was relegated to one of what archaeologists call the ‘scary rooms,’ vast backlogs of uncataloged artifacts dating back decades.”

As Ashcraft further details in his op-ed, significant ancestral sites are “often concentrated” in upland mountainous areas. The Forest Service has “targeted” these landscapes for “the construction of road and trail systems, timber sales, controlled burns, and recreation infrastructure, with little to no screening for protected sites.”

“I raised these concerns within the agency, explaining that we had spent decades failing to survey nearly 80 percent of mountainous terrain for archaeological resources,” Aschraft recalled. “Instead of addressing the problem, leadership chose retaliation and isolation—excluding me from meetings, removing me from fieldwork, preventing me from communicating with tribes and ultimately pushing me toward early retirement.”

During the past three years, Ashcraft has had to pay more than $100,000 to cover legal fees. He raised some funds from “non-profits, academics, and tribal leaders,” but only about $14,000.

“Government employees are told that whistleblowing is safe, accessible and effective, but in reality, pursuing a whistleblower case requires legal representation that is prohibitively expensive for most people,” Ashcraft contends. “Even with a lawyer, many end up forced out or worn down—not because their claims lack merit, but because they just can't take it anymore. Faced with financial risk and long odds, many who witness wrongdoing choose not to come forward—and, based on my experience, I cannot blame them.”

Ashcraft suggests that lawmakers develop a system of public defenders for government whistleblowers that have credible claims. He points to the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission that offers rewards to private sector whistleblowers who expose fraud and other criminal acts.

Through the DOJ and SEC, the government has managed to recoup around $90 billion. 

“While much of that money goes back to harmed investors and some of it rewards the whistleblowers themselves, plenty of it goes back to the government and could easily provide a free legal path to report government corruption and wrongdoing for public interest whistleblowers,” Ashcraft argued. 

In the absence of reforms at the state or federal level, Ashcraft recommends that private law firms prioritize pro bono services for people like him. He also urges philanthropists to increase their support for “whistleblower protection initiatives.”

“It is too late for these reforms to help my family. But it is not too late to ensure that the next person who steps forward to do the right thing is not punished for it.”