July 9, 2026
The Honorable Mike Rogers
Chairman
Committee on Armed Services
U.S. House of Representatives
2216 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
The Honorable Adam Smith
Ranking Member
Committee on Armed Services
U.S. House of Representatives
2216 Rayburn House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515
Re: Suspension Waiver for S. 4631 to Close Loopholes for Government Contractor Whistleblowers
Dear Chairman Rogers and Ranking Member Smith:
The Make It Safe Coalition, a nonpartisan network of taxpayer, good-government, and whistleblower organizations, urge you to provide House leadership with the Committee’s waiver so that S. 4631, the Expanding Whistleblower Protections for Contractors Act, can be considered under suspension of the rules and passed without amendment. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman James Comer and Ranking Member Robert Garcia introduced the bipartisan House companion, H.R. 5578, which their committee ordered reported by a vote of 44 to 0. We request an opportunity to brief your staff on why this legislation is important for the country, as well as for your committee’s oversight duties, and would be significant reinforcement for the President’s War on Fraud.
Senators Charles Grassley and Gary Peters have been the leaders for this legislation, which twice has been unanimously approved by the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that implementation would cost less than $500,000 over the 2026–2030 period. The one remaining step is a House floor vote on the Senate-passed text. Because the bill amends title 10, scheduling it under suspension awaits this Committee’s waiver.
In fiscal year 2025, federal agencies committed about $793 billion to contracts for goods and services, most of it through the Department of Defense. The contract and grant employees paid with those funds routinely outnumber the civil service two or three to one, but the Whistleblower Protection Act and its companion laws cover only civil servants. Whistleblower protection for the rest of the federal labor force comes from two near-identical statutes: 10 U.S.C. § 4701 for Department of Defense and NASA contracts and grants, and 41 U.S.C. § 4712 for the rest of the government.
The Government Accountability Office estimates that fraud costs taxpayers between $233 billion and $521 billion every year, and America’s best weapon against fraud, waste, and illegality are whistleblowers. Congress showed that to be true through the 2009 Recovery Act, which paired $787 billion in spending with the strongest whistleblower protections Congress had ever enacted. Fraud losses came in below one percent, against the five to seven percent government outlays historically lose.
All remedial and accountability laws need regular maintenance to close loopholes and weak links that are inevitable. This Committee has amended the contractor whistleblower statutes in bipartisan increments for forty years, most recently in section 837 of the FY2025 NDAA, and S. 4631 continues that work.
Under current law, every right runs through the word “employee.” The honest company punished for reporting fraud is left defenseless. Individuals who perform a personal service contract for an agency must first convince an adjudicator that he counts as an “employee” at all, despite Congress’s previous attempts at closing this loophole. Both are now protected through a “protected individual” definition that runs from the personal services contractor to the company itself. The bill also adds subcontracts and subgrants to the subjects a protected disclosure may cover, where the current lists stop at the prime contract or grant, and it affirms these protections extend to misconduct that occurs internationally.
A worker under the existing statutes may report an illegal order but has no protection for refusing to carry it out. Congress closed this gap for the civil service in the Follow the Rules Act, which passed the House 407 to 0 and the Senate by unanimous consent, and this bill extends the same protection to the contract workforce, covering refusal to obey an order to commit illegality in connection with a federal contract, subcontract, grant, or subgrant.
The bill also ends waiver of these protections through fine print. The Fifth Circuit has held that an arbitration form signed as a condition of hiring, years before any dispute, displaces the district court and jury trial the statutes provide. The court reasoned in part that Congress had considered, but never enacted, language expressly addressing pre-dispute arbitration. S. 4631 supplies the language the court found missing.
Current law even excuses retaliation ordered by the government itself, whenever a federal official’s request is framed as a nondiscretionary directive within the official’s authority. Agency heads merely are asked to “consider” discipline afterward. The bill cancels the exception. No executive branch official would have authority to request an illegal reprisal, and agency heads could “propose” disciplinary action against officials who do.
National Whistleblower Appreciation Day, which the Senate marks each year on the anniversary of the Continental Congress’s 1778 resolution protecting whistleblowers, falls on July 30, and the House calendar leaves few legislative days before it. We respectfully urge the Committee to issue its suspension waiver in time for the House to pass the Senate text, without amendment, by that date. Taxpayers should not wait another Congress for reforms the Senate has passed unanimously and the Oversight Committee has advanced 44 to 0.
Sincerely,
Tom Devine,
Government Accountability Project
On behalf of Make it Safe Coalition
Cc: The Honorable Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House; The Honorable Hakeem Jeffries, Democratic Leader; The Honorable Steve Scalise, Majority Leader; The Honorable Tom Emmer, Majority Whip; The Honorable Katherine Clark, Democratic Whip; The Honorable James Comer, Chair, and The Honorable Robert Garcia, Ranking Member, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.
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