1. “Whether a federal employee makes a protected disclosure under the Whistleblower Protection Act, 5 U.S.C. 2302(b)(8), when he reports alleged ethics, constitutional, statutory, and regulatory violations arising from adjudicative practices that he contends discriminate against claimants based on criminal history, work history, substance-abuse history, or protected class status.”
2. “Whether the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit errs by affirming the rejection of a whistleblower claim on the ground that the employee ‘did not identify any law, rule, or regulation’ allegedly violated, where the record is clear that the employee did explicitly and repeatedly allege violations of federal statutes, constitutional protections, agency ethics obligations, and binding adjudicative standards throughout the record.”
3. “Whether a federal attorney may be charged with ‘misuse of position’ wholly for sharing with another attorney publicly available statutory and regulatory information concerning a well-known legal framework—specifically, the standard multi-step disability evaluation process and the relative importance of one of its components—where the information shared is neither confidential nor proprietary, and whether this violates the First Amendment.”
4. “Whether disclosures concerning directives to federal attorneys to disregard binding adjudicative guidance in order to predetermine outcomes in individual cases constitute. protected whistleblowing under the Whistleblower Protection Act.”
5. “Whether the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause and federal civil-service protections are violated when an agency removes a federal employee non-progressively for a first offense without applying any or most of the Douglas factors—including by explicitly failing to consider comparator discipline, penalty guidelines, work history, and substantial mitigating factors—and where the MSPB and the reviewing court uphold the removal despite uncontroverted evidence that similarly situated employees were not removed for comparable or more egregious misconduct.”
6. “Whether the MSPB and the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit commit reversible legal error by upholding a federal employee’s removal based on findings that proposing and deciding officials exercised independent judgment and applied the Douglas factors, while failing to consider or address sworn deposition testimony in the record that materially bears on whether the deciding (and proposing) officials independently assessed the evidence or applied any Douglas factors at all.”
7. “Whether due process and the Whistleblower Protection Act are violated when an agency sustains a lack-of-candor charge based on an employee’s denial that he transmitted PIT, where the employee preserved the information as whistleblower evidence to prevent retaliation and destruction of evidence, where he reasonably understood the information to be protected whistleblower evidence rather than prohibited PII, and where the MSPB and the Federal Circuit expressly declined to address this legal justification.”
