The Bush admin­is­tra­tion is report­ed­ly using its final months in office to exact ret­ri­bu­tion on fed­er­al employ­ees who have spo­ken out against agency poli­cies dur­ing the past eight years.

Since April, the admin­is­tra­tion has dis­missed – or noti­fied of pend­ing dis­missal – more than a dozen fed­er­al whistle­blow­ers, accord­ing to Mar­sha Cole­man-Ade­bayo, founder of the civ­il rights group No Fear Coali­tion and direc­tor of the Nation­al Whistle­blow­ers Cen­ter. Some have come as recent­ly as Novem­ber. They include staffers at the Depart­ments of Com­merce, Labor, Edu­ca­tion and Trans­porta­tion. And, Cole­man-Ade­bayo says, those are only the employ­ees who are will­ing to go on record.

“We have a much longer list,” she says. ​“A num­ber of peo­ple have asked us not to share their names pub­licly as they are hop­ing to keep their gov­ern­ment jobs.”

For Cole­man-Ade­bayo, the fir­ings are a ​“final act of retal­i­a­tion” against employ­ees – many of them long­time staffers – who have expressed dis­sent with­in Pres­i­dent Bush’s high­ly politi­cized fed­er­al agencies.

So far, the dis­missals have flown large­ly under the radar. Rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Gov­ern­ment Account­abil­i­ty Project (GAP) and the Project on Gov­ern­ment Over­sight – promi­nent whistle­blow­er advo­ca­cy groups – say they were unaware of the recent fir­ings but were not surprised.

Jes­se­lyn Radack, a for­mer Jus­tice Depart­ment whistle­blow­er who serves as home­land secu­ri­ty direc­tor at GAP, says such purges have been a Bush admin­is­tra­tion pol­i­cy since the beginning.

“It’s hard to imag­ine that they’re doing it at a faster rate than the mete­oric pace they already have been,” Radack wrote in an e‑mail. ​“I would view such a phe­nom­e­non as just a con­tin­u­a­tion of [the administration’s] noto­ri­ous eight-year long, bru­tal cam­paign of retal­i­a­tion against any­one who dis­sents, dis­agrees or exer­cis­es inde­pen­dent judgment.”

Cole­man-Ade­bayo, her­self a pol­i­cy ana­lyst and whistle­blow­er at the Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Agency (EPA), received notice of her own dis­missal on Oct. 30. She had 15 days to respond to the rough­ly 200-page doc­u­ment, which cit­ed ​“med­ical inabil­i­ty to per­form the duties of her posi­tion” as the rea­son for her ter­mi­na­tion. Cole­man-Ade­bayo suf­fers from hyper­ten­sion and had been work­ing from home. She is cur­rent­ly on unpaid med­ical leave from the EPA.

Coleman-Adebayo’s trou­bles with the EPA began under the Clin­ton admin­is­tra­tion. On assign­ment in Africa, she raised a red flag over a U.S. cor­po­ra­tion that was poi­son­ing its work­ers with tox­ic waste in South Africa. When the EPA failed to act, she went pub­lic – a move her supe­ri­ors did not appreciate.

In the months fol­low­ing her whistle­blow­ing, Cole­man-Ade­bayo, who is African Amer­i­can, was sub­ject­ed to racial and sex­u­al harass­ment, accord­ing to details released in the ensu­ing court bat­tle. In 2000, a jury award­ed her $600,000 – the largest award ever levied against the EPA.

“Essen­tial­ly, the EPA was reduced to find­ing some­thing that is pret­ty far­fetched and actu­al­ly ille­gal to fire me,” Cole­man-Ade­bayo says. ​“So this is clear­ly a last-minute ​‘Hail Mary’ in terms of get­ting rid of me – they sim­ply didn’t have any oth­er basis.”

EPA spokesman Jonathan Schrad­er declined to dis­cuss the Cole­man-Ade­bayo case in depth, say­ing it is against agency pol­i­cy to com­ment on per­son­nel matters.

“All I can say at this point is that she remains an EPA employ­ee,” he said, adding, ​“If you call back in about a week, that could change.” Schrad­er stressed that his deci­sion not to elab­o­rate on the case ​“is cer­tain­ly not an admis­sion that any of her accu­sa­tions are truthful.”

Cole­man-Ade­bayo has worked close­ly with law­mak­ers to pass the Noti­fi­ca­tion of Fed­er­al Employ­ees Anti-dis­crim­i­na­tion and Retal­i­a­tion Act. Known as the No FEAR Act, it cre­at­ed guide­lines that fed­er­al agen­cies must fol­low in deal­ing with whistle­blow­er com­plaints and noti­fy­ing employ­ees of their rights. In 2002, Bush signed the act into law.

Cole­man-Ade­bayo says she plans to chal­lenge her dis­missal – a fight she expects to win. But she says the real test will come Jan. 20.

“I’m hop­ing the new pres­i­dent will send a clear mes­sage that he will not tol­er­ate this kind of ille­gal retal­i­a­tion and harass­ment, and one way that he can do that is to rein­state whistle­blow­ers who were ter­mi­nat­ed at the end of the Bush admin­is­tra­tion,” she says. ​“It would be a very pow­er­ful gesture.”