GSA Told to Reinstate Whistle-Blower Fired for Warning of Building Hazards

The federal government has been ordered to reinstate a senior official who was fired five years ago after repeatedly warning that the government’s housekeeping agency had allowed many major government buildings here to deteriorate into hazardous conditions.

The ruling by the Merit Systems Protection Board, which can be appealed to the courts, also requires the government to give Bertrand G. Berube back pay and legal fees. Berube, who once was in charge of maintaining virtually every government building in Washington--from the White House to the Pentagon--estimated that he could receive as much as $750,000.

The board ruled in a 15-page decision that the General Services Administration had failed to prove that it had a legal basis for dismissing Berube.

“This is an unprecedented and long-awaited victory for whistle-blowers,” said Louis Clark, one of Berube’s attorneys and director of the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit group that has championed the cause of bureaucrats threatened with disciplinary action for advocating change.

Clark said Berube, a member of the Senior Executive Service, is the highest-ranking executive to win an administrative decision ordering his reinstatement for whistle-blowing.

Called a ‘Gadfly’

“I was fired as a troublemaker, and they called me a gadfly,” Berube said. “I was just doing my job. If telling the truth makes me a gadfly, then I was a gadfly.”

In 1983 then-General Services Administrator Gerald P. Carmen dismissed Berube as regional administrator for GSA’s National Capital Region after Berube alleged that many federal buildings in Washington posed serious fire and health hazards. Berube said GSA officials were routinely deferring needed building repairs so they could claim budget savings.

“It’s like buying a new Mercedes-Benz and not buying a quart of oil for it,” he said Tuesday. “It’s poor fiscal policy. It saves a dollar now, but you end up having to buy a new engine.”

A GSA spokesman declined to say whether the agency will appeal. “We’re going to have to study it,” he said.

As the GSA official in charge of virtually all of the government’s telecommunications, buildings and transportation services in Washington, Berube contended that many of the city’s major federal buildings, including the Pentagon, were contaminated by asbestos and filled with fire hazards and that some had crumbling foundations.

‘Dead Buildings’

Andrew A. Feinstein, staff director of the House subcommittee on civil service, said Tuesday that Berube’s charges seem to have been substantiated by recent findings that a number of agencies are working in “dead buildings,” contaminated by asbestos and other hazards.

Although Berube’s ideas were scorned by the Ford and Carter administrations, he appeared to have won early backing in the Reagan Administration and a chance to run Washington, GSA’s largest region.

The honeymoon proved short-lived. “They never gave me that chance,” he said in a 1983 interview. “They repeatedly shot down my ideas. Every single thing I suggested was turned down.”

Depending on how GSA calculates his back wages, Berube said his retroactive pay could be as much as $350,000 and his legal fees could be $300,000 to $400,000.

“I’d like to go back and help fix the problems,” Berube said in his Beltsville, Md., shop where he transformed his woodworking hobby into a small business after he could not find a job in private industry.

Asbestos in Pentagon

Berube acknowledged the problems he would face back at GSA will not be easy to solve. The government has begun work on some of the hazards he cited, such as asbestos contamination at the Pentagon.

But because GSA is giving up control over many buildings, requiring the agencies that occupy them to maintain them, Berube said his impact could be reduced. The Pentagon, which he said is in the worst condition of any federal building in the Washington area, is now operated by the Defense Department.

“It’s a neat trick,” Berube said. “It gets rid of your problems real quick.”

Feinstein said the ruling will add impetus to the strong movement in Congress to add protections for whistle-blowers. “It is a spectacular vindication for him (Berube), and it is an equally spectacular loss for GSA,” Feinstein said.

He predicted that the legislation likely to be sent to President Reagan will give whistle-blowers the right to carry their appeals directly to the Merit Systems Protection Board, rather than to their agency as they do now. The legislation also would direct special counsels in the agencies “to protect the employees and not to harass them as they did in the Berube case,” he said.