Part Five: Wounded vet blew whistle on FMCS, rewarded with pink slip, harassment -- By Luke Rosiak, The Washington Examiner

Last in a five-part Washington Examiner series, "Just Sign Here: Federal Workers Max Out at Taxpayer Expense." See the entire series -- and FMCS workers' salaries -- at this link.

Weeks after Tanya Pelcher-Herring told oversight bodies that the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service was breaking federal contracting rules and wasting tax dollars, the agency terminated her employment for not reporting to work.

Pelcher-Herring has one Ph.D. and a second in progress. She’s brave, enlisting in the Army with her husband, dealing with his death and sustaining her own respiratory injuries that make it impossible for her to speak some days, and on others, difficult just to breath.

But standing in front of the nine-story FMCS building in Washington, she can neither bear the way she was cast aside, nor comprehend how a bureaucratic culture of excess has gone on uninterrupted so long at an agency of which few Americans have ever heard.

 The 230-person agency with a $50 million budget has “taken the phrase 'independent' in ‘independent small agency’ out of context to mean you can do whatever you want with no oversight,” she said.

I t didn’t take long after Pelcher-Herring began working at the agency as a contracting officer in 2011 to notice some of the irregularities that the Washington Examiner has documented.

 (Click link below to read more)
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