The Justice Department says lying is part of the job

On Sept. 29, a FEMA official swore in a deposition that she went to law school as “a night student” while working for the agency. Two weeks later, her school’s subpoenaed records showed day classes in fall 2018 and spring 2019 and a degree from its “day division.”She ran FEMA’s Continuous Improvement Program in Puerto Rico, overseeing a $7 million Lean Six Sigma contract that could have shaved years off the Hurricane Maria recovery. She put law school first. The program collapsed.I was the program’s technical lead and one of the whistleblowers who reported her. We were seven older white men, former military officers and corporate executives. FEMA investigators later found two employees made derogatory comments about exactly that. We reported gross mismanagement of the program to the inspector general, then filed reverse-discrimination complaints. We were retaliated against for both. Neither kind of case is easy to win, and retaliation claims are nearly hopeless. In September, the Government Accountability Office reported that the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general substantiated just 11 of 3,025 retaliation complaints from 2018 to 2025. Two were on our contract.A colleague and I sued her for defamation in San Juan federal court (Angeline et al. v. Aldarondo-Jiménez). The Department of Justice moved to make the case disappear, arguing “responding to investigative questions — truthfully or not — is part of the course of employment.”“Truthfully or not” made me do a double take. My response began: “The United States asks the Court to hold that it was part of a federal employee’s job to lie about not doing her job. That is the motion, stripped to its premise.”On Nov. 4, U.S. District Judge Camille L. Velez-Rive granted the motion in one sentence, “for the reasons well explained by the United States,” without mentioning my response.I asked her to reconsider. On Nov. 5, 28 minutes after the government responded, she said no in a one-paragraph docket entry that again resolved none of the disputed facts. Twenty-eight minutes is not much time to read a brief. When I asked to file a reply anyway, she said no in 12 minutes. I’ve come to expect federal courts to tip the scales toward the government. This judge set a new indoor speed record. I’ll appeal.How the law works The Westfall Act lets the United States step in as the defendant when a federal employee is sued for on-the-job conduct. A U.S. attorney, not a judge, certifies that she was doing her job. The plaintiff must prove otherwise, and few do.Congress passed it in 1988. The textbook case is a mail carrier’s fender-bender. There, it’s fair. The government pays. But the U.S. can’t be sued for libel or slander, so in a defamation case, substitution doesn’t move the case. It ends it. Even when the employee acted with malice.In 1995, writing for the court, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg warned in Gutierrez de Martinez v. Lamagno that when the government can’t be sued, “certification disarms plaintiffs,” and the U.S. attorney “will feel a strong tug to certify, even when the merits are cloudy,” at a cost “borne solely, and perhaps quite unfairly, by the plaintiff.”What happened The program lead abandoned her post for day classes, though the school’s night classes wouldn’t have conflicted with her job. She also missed about half the program’s FEMA-funded Black Belt training, telling us she had midterms.When we pressed her about the absences, she turned on the program. We had gone to the inspector general three times. Once we told the prime contractor, ATCS P.L.C., word reached her. The day before we told her ourselves, she asked FEMA to end our contract. FEMA’s lawyer warned in writing that the Whistleblower Protection Act and our equal employment complaint “may prevent us from terminating for convenience.” Three days later, we were gone. The program soon followed.The damage went far beyond us. FEMA lost a digital site inspection tool and about $100 million in projected benefits. Some 50 employees never earned the LSS certification they had worked toward, leaving Puerto Rico without a trained cadre for future disasters. All of it was sacrificed to cover for one employee.In 2020, FEMA’s Office of Professional Responsibility investigated our discrimination and retaliation complaints, with her as the subject. She swore law school hadn’t interfered with her training. Asked whether she had commented on our age, race, or gender, she said, “Absolutely not.” Witnesses disagreed. So did OPR.Then, though no one asked about weapons or records, she told investigators my colleague and I had intimidated her by mentioning weapons we used in the military. She also tied us to a deleted FEMA shared-drive folder.The folder claim is false. Deleting a folder leaves a digital fingerprint. None has been produced. I had turned in my badge and laptop when we were removed, nearly three weeks before anyone noticed the folder was gone. FEMA wiped our laptops and, with the prime contractor, purged files to cover up unauthorized work. Then she blamed us for it. A September 2025 FEMA memo found the digital site inspection tool was lost in those “post-retaliation file purge operations.” Today, the program’s entire shared drive is gone and cannot be produced in discovery.The threat claim is false, too. She wrote that she felt safe and never thought we would act on it. Real threats get reported to security or the police. None was. She later testified she told only FEMA’s chief of staff. FEMA produced no record of it. Nobody questioned me or escorted me out.Neither of us threatened anyone. I never even served in the military. My colleague did. He’s a decorated 82nd Airborne veteran who broke his neck in the invasion of Panama, was paralyzed for a time, has had dozens of operations, and is rated 100% disabled.She turned his service into a threat.She made up both accusations to discredit the whistleblowers who exposed her. Those falsehoods, which we sued over, landed in three investigative files that security and credentialing officials can read. My clearance has since come under scrutiny, and federal work has dried up. I doubt that’s a coincidence.Those accusations are what DOJ certified and a federal judge accepted as part of her job. The judge didn’t find she told the truth. Under the government’s theory, she didn’t have to. By that logic, an employee who leaves her post for personal reasons is off the clock while gone and magically back on it the moment she lies about having left.Assistant U.S. Attorney Priscila M. Acevedo-Roman, who filed the motion, received a draft of this article and disputed nothing.Nobody pays The same memo, a recommendation to FEMA leadership rather than a final action, found she “terminated the LSS program prematurely upon learning the LSS team had blown the whistle on her” and recommended she be “terminated from federal employment.” The government knew. The inspector general found our removal was a reprisal. Her school records and absences show she lied under oath about law school, twice, and OPR found she made the remarks she swore she never made.The government can’t even keep its story straight about her job or that of the second employee investigators found made derogatory remarks. In December 2025, the DOJ lawyer representing FEMA in a colleague’s discrimination case told him she and the second employee no longer worked at the agency and offered their home addresses for subpoenas. A month later, both were back. By August, the same lawyer said neither had ever left. It’s all on the federal docket.There’s no record she was even reprimanded. Seven years later, the system still protects its own. At FEMA, the main job is keeping the workforce employed. Disaster recovery is a side hustle.Two sets of rules The investigated employee gets a DOJ lawyer on the taxpayers’ dime. The whistleblowers pay their own way. I represent myself. Her retaliatory accusations get stamped as government business, and our truthful reports cost us our careers.DOJ headquarters bears this inscription: “The United States wins its point whenever justice is done its citizens in the courts.” Certification is a judgment call, and DOJ made it. We tried to protect the government from her misconduct. The government gave her immunity from the truth.That second employee is suing me for defamation in Virginia (Pushkarewicz v. Angeline) over whistleblower reports FEMA leadership asked me to make and my articles in this newspaper. Both were accurate. They covered his discriminatory remarks, which witnesses and OPR confirmed, and the program’s mismanagement.My counterclaim alleges he retaliated by telling FEMA counsel and security things that got me barred from FEMA facilities. His lawyers answered with the Westfall Act. His communications, they argue, were part of his federal job, and “malice or retaliatory motive” doesn’t change that.So a federal employee can sue a citizen over what that citizen told the government, then claim the government’s immunity when the citizen countersues.Heads, they win. Tails, I lose.Who’s really chilled? The government warned our case risked “chilling participation in investigations.” But she wasn’t a witness. She was the target. We spoke honestly to investigators, and we’re the only ones being chilled.An honest witness has nothing to fear from a defamation suit. A ruling for us would deter only an investigation’s subject who smears her accusers. Immunize that, and every bad actor learns the best defense against an accusation is a malicious counter-accusation. Psychologists call it DARVO: deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender.The law has become a shield for the cover-up and a sword for the counterattack. The employee hides behind one and swings the other. The citizen gets neither.The fix Congress doesn’t need to gut the Westfall Act. It needs to close three doors. First, no certification for statements the subject of an internal investigation makes about the people who reported her. Second, no immunity against a counterclaim in a lawsuit the employee chose to file. Third, when a plaintiff offers evidence that an employee lied under oath, a judge must hear it before substituting the government.The mail carrier in a fender-bender stays protected. The cover-up and the counterattack don’t.THE BOOM YOUR PAYCHECK MISSEDCongress wrote the Westfall Act to protect federal employees doing their jobs. DOJ says that protection holds “truthfully or not,” and Judge Velez-Rive agreed. That’s the letter of the law turned against its spirit. In opposing reconsideration, the DOJ called the question of her truthfulness “immaterial.” Every would-be whistleblower should hope a higher court disagrees.Lying about not doing your job should not be part of the job.Barry Angeline is a retired executive with more than 30 years of experience leading process improvement at General Electric, Sun Microsystems, and Time Warner, and consulting for the Marine Corps, Army, and Executive Office of the President. He led FEMA’s Lean Six Sigma deployment in Puerto Rico. He is a federal whistleblower.