Jim Sensenbrenner: “This bill shows that elected officials do listen, and a few people speaking out when they have right on their side can…”

“This bill shows that elected officials do listen, and a few people speaking out when they have right on their side can bring about a change in the laws of the United States of America, which I hope will have a far-reaching impact in preventing discrimination and retaliation within the Federal workforce. If it were not for the work of Dr. Marsha Coleman-Abebayo and the NAACP Federal Workforce Task Force, I do not think that the Congress could ever have known about how bad the situation was in the EPA. But they did speak out, they did present a convincing case. They convinced both the Committee on Science in the last Congress and the Committee on the Judiciary in this Congress, as well as this House and the other body, that we needed to change the law to try to clean up some of these abusive practices. I hope that this legislation will go a long way to doing this by making the agency financially accountable for settlements and judgments caused by the misdeeds of their supervisors. The system does work, Mr. Speaker.”