The United States Office of Special Counsel (OSC) is a permanent independent federal investigative and prosecutorial agency whose basic legislative authority comes from four federal statutes, the Civil Service Reform Act, the Whistleblower Protection Act, the Hatch Act and the Uniformed Services Employment and Reemployment Rights Act (USERRA). OSC's primary mission is the safeguarding of the merit system in Federal employment by protecting employees and applicants from prohibited personnel practices (PPPs), especially reprisal for "whistleblowing." The agency also operates a secure channel for federal whistleblower disclosures of violations of law, rule or regulation; gross mismanagement; gross waste of funds, abuse of authority; and substantial and specific danger to public health and safety. In addition, OSC issues advice on the Hatch Act and enforces its restrictions on political activity by government employees. Finally, OSC protects the civilian employment and reemployment rights of military service members under USERRA. OSC has around 100 staff, and the Special Counsel is an ex officio member of Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE), an association of Inspectors General charged with the regulation of good governance within the federal government. The agency attracted public attention in April 2007 when it began an investigation of alleged White House political pressure on federal civil servants. Senior Bush political adviser Karl Rove was reported to be a subject of the investigation.
Read more about United States Office Of Special Counsel: Jurisdiction, 1970s and 1980s, Prohibited Personnel Practices, Scott J. Bloch, Invigoration, List Acting and Confirmed United States Special Counsels
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“A sincere and steadfast co-operation in promoting such a reconstruction of our political system as would provide for the permanent liberty and happiness of the United States.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“And hereby hangs a moral highly applicable to our own trustee-ridden universities, if to nothing else. If we really wanted liberty of speech and thought, we could probably get it—Spain fifty years ago certainly had a longer tradition of despotism than has the United States—but do we want it? In these years we will see.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“A little group of wilful men reflecting no opinion but their own have rendered the great Government of the United States helpless and contemptible.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“The very existence of government at all, infers inequality. The citizen who is preferred to office becomes the superior to those who are not, so long as he is the repository of power, and the child inherits the wealth of the parent as a controlling law of society.”
—James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851)
“The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others—this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world’s peoples.”
—George F. Will (b. 1941)
“For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him:
But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance.
We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.”
—Bible: Hebrew Psalm LV (l. LV, 12–14)