United States Office of Special Counsel - 1970s and 1980s

1970s and 1980s

The Watergate investigation of the 1970s revealed a Nixon administration operation to replace the non-partisan civil service system with a politically loyal workforce dedicated to partisan election goals. Every agency had a shadow “political hiring czar” whose operation trumped normal civil service authority of personnel offices. Then-White House Personnel Office chief Fred Malek teamed up with Alan May to prepare the “Malek Manuel,” a guide to exploiting loopholes in civil service laws to drive politically undesirable career employees out of government and replace them with applicants selected through a political rating system of 1-4, based on factors such as campaign contributions and future campaign value. The Watergate Committee’s finding of the abuses led to creation of the Ink Commission, whose exhaustive study and recommendations were the foundation for the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978, including creation of the Office of Special Counsel to see that this type of merit system abuse never happened again.

Under former President Carter the Office languished with no permanent head, funding or White House support.

When Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980, he appointed Alex Kozinski to head the OSC. Within 14 months of his appointment, 70 percent of attorneys and investigators at the Office's headquarters were either fired or had resigned. Mr. Kozinski kept a copy of the Malek Manual on his desk. He used its techniques to purge the professional civil service experts on his own staff and replace them with employees who viewed whistleblowers as crazy troublemakers, disloyal to the President. He taught courses to federal managers on how to fire whistleblowers without getting caught by OSC investigators, using the OSC Investigations Manual as a handout. He tutored Interior Secretary James Watt on how to remove a whistleblowing coal mine inspector from the Department of Interior. The OSC became what one Senate staffer called “a legalized plumbers unit.” Mr. Kozinski’s abuses were the major catalyst for passage of the Whistleblower Protection Act of 1989, and he was forced to resign. A few years later he was confirmed for a seat on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite the negative vote of 43 senators, after Senator Carl Levin’s intensive investigation of Kozinski’s Special Counsel tenure.