How does the public know what government is doing?

The government can announce it -- they'll be building a new bridge, for example, or banning a toxic chemical -- and the press will report it.

The government can hold public hearings that people can attend to find out what's going on.

A reporter can dig and find out something that the government isn't likely to announce and then write a story about it -- that the government awarded the contract for building that new bridge to the president's largest campaign contributor, for example.

There are countless other ways for the public to get vital information about their government. One of the most crucial is from a whistleblower, a government employee who sees wrongdoing, fraud or waste and tells about it.

Examples include the Federal Aviation Administration employee who blew the whistle after his concerns about missed safety inspections by Southwest Airlines were ignored and allegedly covered up within the agency. That whistleblower caused the grounding of dozens of jets.

Another whistleblower came from the Food and Drug Administration. The agency's associate director for science and medicine told a Senate committee in late 2004 that he had done a comprehensive study about the risk of heart attacks from high doses of Vioxx, a painkiller, and found that such doses seriously increased the danger of an attack. But, Dr. David Graham testified, he had been "pressured to change my conclusions and recommendations" by senior management at the agency, which Graham told the New York Times may have caused as many as 55,000 deaths. The drug's manufacturer withdrew it from the market later that year.

Government whistleblowers go public at substantial risk to their career. They're subject to retaliation by their managers and may lose their jobs, opportunity for advancement or even forfeit their careers.

Yet there are insufficient legal protections in federal law for government employees who undertake what is often an excruciating act of conscience. Once punished, they lack normal court access. Most are, instead, shunted off to an administrative hearing at the Merit Systems Protection Board which has historically ruled overwhelmingly against whistleblowers, according to a coalition of public interest groups pressing for stronger whistleblower protections.

When whistleblowers act, they do so to hold government accountable and should be protected, not punished, for their courage.

That's the purpose of legislation that has been debated in different forms in Congress for an unimaginable eight years. The measure, co-sponsored by Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins, would provide a range of protections to federal government workers in areas as diverse as national security and science. It expands the scope of what disclosures can be protected and provides whistleblowers better access to courts.

Yet the bill has been stuck, seemingly forever, in negotiations between House and Senate committees over whether a watered-down or more strongly protective version should pass. A coalition of more than 100 organizations, from the Union of Concerned Scientists to the National Taxpayers Union to the Society of Professional Journalists, has urged passage of the stronger version of the bill, which they -- and we -- see as crucial and justified protection for government workers exercising their conscience.

We commend Sen. Collins for her sponsorship of the bill and urge Maine's other delegation members, and Congress, to work with her to move a bill -- with the strongest protections for whistleblowers -- from possibility to reality.