By Alliance Intern Eleanor Hulan
In 10 days we pay homage to an American tradition older than baseball and more patriotic than the anthem: National Whistleblower Day. As power becomes more centralized instead of less, and the gaps between the average citizen and the elites widen, the gateways to one person being able to influence the trajectory of a mislaid policy and expose corruption are more important than ever. We cannot let these gateways close.
The term has felt particularly charged in the last year. Living in the Twin Cities and bearing witness to ICE brutality during Operation Metro Surge and beyond, the sound of a whistle now means more to me than ever before. It triggers something deep in my psyche: anger, fear, but also determination.
The Founding Fathers Sanction Whistleblowing
Stephen Kohn, the Executive Director of the National Whistleblower Center, attributes the origin of this day to a 1778 resolution enacted by the Founding Fathers. The year prior, 10 sailors and marines convened to discuss misconduct by their captain, who they had observed torturing British soldiers. A representative was chosen to report these wrongdoings to the Continental Congress.
Captain Hopkins, a rich man with familial political connections, was suspended and subsequently responded by bringing libel charges against the sailors; Three were jailed. The men brought their case to mainland Congress, who responded with a law unequivocally in favor of the sailors.
That it is the duty of all persons in the service of the United States, as well as all other inhabitants thereof, to give the earliest information to Congress or any other proper authority of any misconduct, frauds or misdemeanors committed by any officers or persons in the service of these states, which may come to their knowledge.
This first example is fascinating, and important to legal scholars. But the iteration of whistleblower protections as we know them today is relatively modern.
Nixon, Ellsberg, and the Making of Modern Whistleblowers
The word “whistleblower” didn’t enter Webster’s dictionary until 1970, and it got there because of Daniel Ellsberg. Ellsberg leaked the Pentagon Papers, thousands of pages revealing the government had known for years the Vietnam War was unwinnable while telling the public otherwise.
Nixon’s response set the template for how the modern state punishes whistleblowers: his administration ordered a break-in at Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office to dig up material to discredit him, then charged him under the Espionage Act. The case only collapsed because of that same illegal conduct.
That break-in became one of the abuses of power that fed into Watergate — the scandal that produced the most famous whistleblower in American history, known only as “Deep Throat” until his identity was revealed in 2005: Mark Felt, the FBI’s associate director.
Support for holding Nixon accountable didn’t start out strong. As the Watergate hearings opened, only 19% of Americans backed his removal. By 1974, that number had climbed to 58%, including 31% of Republicans. Felt spent three decades as an anonymous source before being unmasked, and by then, public opinion had already caught up to what he’d done. Today he’s remembered as one of the whistleblowers who did the most good.
From Mark Felt to the Ukraine Whistleblower: A Different Reaction
Compare that to the reception the next generation of whistleblowers are getting. When an anonymous official came forward about Trump’s pressure campaign on Ukraine and impeachment proceedings began, only 7% of Republicans supported the inquiry — not after years of hearings, but from day one.
Where Nixon-era Republicans came around as evidence built, Trump-era Republicans decided before any hearing was held. The bar for believing a whistleblower didn’t rise. It got outsourced to party loyalty.
The clearest evidence of how seriously Trump takes that threat isn’t public opinion, though — it’s policy. He understands exactly how much power a whistleblower can wield, the same way he understands the power of a free press or a fair election, which is precisely why he’s moved against all three.
In November 2025, his administration proposed a rule stripping whistleblower protections from more than 50,000 senior federal officials, the people best positioned to catch wrongdoing before it becomes a scandal.
Congress Is Trying to Get Ahead of AI’s Ellsberg Moment
Months earlier, Daniel Kokotajlo spent two years at OpenAI as a governance researcher before concluding, in early 2024, that the company was prioritizing product speed over the safety commitments it had made. When he resigned that April, OpenAI’s standard exit paperwork asked him to sign a non-disparagement agreement in exchange for keeping his vested equity — worth roughly $2 million. He refused, and walked away from the money instead.
Six weeks later, Kokotajlo and twelve other current and former employees of OpenAI and Google DeepMind published “A Right to Warn about Advanced Artificial Intelligence,” backed publicly by AI pioneers Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, and Stuart Russell. The letter argued that employees inside frontier AI labs have no safe way to raise concerns about risks to public safety, information security, and privacy.
The current and former employees at frontier AI companies called for an end to retaliation, a real channel to flag problems to regulators, and protection from the kind of financial coercion Kokotajlo had just faced. It became public two weeks after reporting exposed OpenAI’s restrictive NDA practices in the first place; CEO Sam Altman said he was “embarrassed” and promised to change them.
Congress noticed. In May 2025, Senator Chuck Grassley (R) introduced a bipartisan bill to create formal whistleblower protections for the AI industry, one of the few AI proposals with genuine support from both parties.
Representatives from both sides worry about the potential for critical harm in avenues like information security, public safety, and rights to privacy as the technology continues to advance exponentially. In fact, 75% of Americans think AI should be more regulated.
As the National Whistleblower Center put it: “Like powerful developing sectors preceding it, insiders in the Artificial Intelligence industry do not have explicit access to safeguards for reporting until legislation is passed, as the misconduct they seek to report may not be considered illegal under existing law. At present, the regulation of AI is far behind technological advancement.”
The need to quickly provide safeguards for potential whistleblowers is a huge problem. As The Economist put it, “A new model is born in the time it takes Congress to schedule a hearing.” Kokotajlo didn’t wait for the law to catch up, and he paid for it. The bill now moving through Congress is an attempt to make sure the next person who tries doesn’t have to.
Whistleblowers Teach us the Importance of Courage, Integrity, and Truth
True courage is difficult to attain. We may find it in times of crisis, for ourselves or our loved ones. Courage not for a personal investment but for a value, for one’s deeply held convictions, is more rare. I can’t be the only one who’s wondered: If I was in their position, could I have done the same thing? How deep do my values run? Enough to flee the country? Enough to be pursued by malicious actors? Enough to be in danger every day?
Fundamentally, being a whistleblower means speaking the truth, and the truth can be inconvenient, unpopular, or dangerous. On National Whistleblower Day, even if your answer to the questions I posed is no, you can still embody the essence of what whistleblowing means.
Take action to strengthen critical whistleblower laws and protect them from attack. Speak the truth, maybe to a family member or friend who has bought into misinformation, maybe in your workplace or on social media. The Times may not pick up the story and you probably won’t need to flee the country, but with fundamental truths becoming more and more obscured, every small action counts.
Being a whistleblower requires access, knowledge, connections and most importantly, courage. America, and we and the world, would be worse off without them.