Tenacious G

… Sen. Charles Grassley, possibly the least colorful — but most tenacious — member of the Senate …

Iowa senator a champion of whistle-blowers
Sen. Charles Grassley has become Congress’s expert on using whistle-blowers to ferret out waste and fraud.

By Jeff Nesmith
Washington Bureau
Sunday, November 19, 2006

WASHINGTON — When Victoria Hampshire, a Food and Drug Administration veterinarian, raised questions about the safety of a drug to protect dogs from heartworms, the manufacturer fought back.

Records show that on Nov. 29, 2004, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals officials met privately with Dr. Lester Crawford, then FDA’s acting commissioner, and other agency officials to present what the company said was evidence that Hampshire had an improper relationship with the maker of a competing drug.

The “evidence” had been dug up by a private detective hired by Wyeth. Although Hampshire said she wasn’t told of the charges made against her, the agency suspended her from further action on the drug and conducted its own investigation.

Later, she was exonerated, reinstated and given an award for raising questions about the safety of Wyeth’s drug, ProHeart6. The drug was pulled from the market, and the FDA said last year it regarded the matter as “concluded.”

“Concluded” turns out to have been a bit premature.

The agency hadn’t considered the fact that Sen. Charles Grassley, possibly the least colorful — but most tenacious — member of the Senate, had taken an interest in Hampshire’s story.

Grassley, a 73-year-old Iowa Republican, has become Congress’s expert on whistle-blowers and how to protect them, support them and take advantage of what they know and want to tell.

Hampshire is one of several officials who have provided information to Grassley and his committee about the FDA, which he describes as an agency with a “culture” of helping drug companies rather than regulating them.

And the FDA, where Grassley says with a hint of pleasure that he’s “about as popular as a skunk at a picnic,” is only his most recent target. Previously, he has used information from dissident government employees to take on the FBI, the Defense Department and others.

In Hampshire’s case, Grassley has been hounding the FDA and Wyeth for more than a year, seeking documents related to the way Hampshire was treated. More important, he wants to know why the drug manufacturer was able to persuade the agency to take such strong action against her.

Each FDA response to his inquiries results in more questions and requests for documents, as Grassley’s Senate Finance Committee staff tunnels deeper into the affair.

Last month he was back again, demanding additional records, complaining that the FDA’s response to his previous request was inadequate, demanding to know whether transcripts existed of meetings and, if not, who decided — and on what basis — that a meeting wouldn’t be transcribed, and on and on.

Many of Grassley’s most avid supporters disagree with him about half the time. In addition to his dogged resistance to moneyed interests and corporate greed, the senator just about always votes in favor of measures to make flag burning a crime, against freedom of reproductive choice and in favor of measures to ban gay marriage.

“I’m a Democrat, but I’m sure that if there were 535 Charles Grassleys in Congress, people wouldn’t be complaining about the place like they are,” said James Moorman, president of Taxpayers Against Fraud, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of the federal False Claims Act.

The law allows private whistle-blowers to sue on the government’s behalf and collect a portion of the damages.

According to Justice Department figures, the law, which was introduced by Grassley and Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif., in 1985, has resulted in the recovery of more than $18 billion from companies accused of bilking Uncle Sam through defense contracts, Medicare payments, housing construction and other deals gone bad.

Money has been recovered in large and small amounts. This year, for example, Tenet Healthcare Systems, the nation’s second-largest hospital chain, paid $900 million for allegedly bilking the Medicare system.

Clark Atlanta University paid $5 million after it was accused of taking Energy Department money to train minority environmental scientists and then using the money for something else.

Grassley said he and Berman introduced the False Claims Act shortly after he had tried to meet with a Pentagon budget analyst in 1983 and Caspar Weinberger, then defense secretary under President Reagan, blocked the meeting.

“I told a member of my staff, ‘Warm up the orange Chevette. We’re going to the Pentagon,’ ” Grassley recalled. With Weinberger fighting every step of the way, Grassley met with the budget analyst, who eventually ended up on cover of Time magazine for his disclosures of Defense Department waste.

Grassley’s Chevette is one of the symbols of what appears to be a carefully cultivated image of personal frugality.

“I’m tight with a dollar,” he said. “It comes from growing up on an 80-acre farm with a lot of sandy soil on it.”

The farm belonged to his father, who Grassley says “jumped a freight train” in Indiana in 1910 and jumped off in Iowa. Grassley was doing sheet metal work and serving in the Iowa state House of Representatives when he inherited the farm in 1960.

Asked how he could increase the size of the farm to 500 acres on the income of a public servant, Grassley interrupted the questioner.

“It’s 710 acres,” he said. “Well, when I came to the (U.S.) House of Representatives in 1974, I had been making $5,500 a year as an Iowa state legislator and about $10,000 or $12,000 on my farm. The salary of a member of Congress was $42,000. I nearly tripled my income and saved $20,000 that first year.

“The income I received as a senator enabled me to invest in more land,” he added. “I practice what I preach.”

Not always.

Four years ago, Grassley got an earmark added to the federal budget to provide $50 million to subsidize development of a “rain forest” in Iowa.

The center, which Grassley said will have an educational purpose, has become a symbol of government waste and pork-barrel spending in some circles.

“But this wasn’t snuck in in the middle of the night,” he said. “I looked at this project as something that would be good for Iowa, and I was open about getting these funds for it.”

Because Democrats will become the majority party next year, Grassley will lose his chairmanship of the Senate Finance Committee, the platform from which he has investigated the FDA, the FBI, the IRS and several other agencies for the past decade.

“Just because I’m no longer chairman of the committee, I don’t intend to let up any,” he added.

His current term will end in 2010, a century after his father hopped off that freight train from Indiana. Grassley will be 77 years old.

Asked if he planned to seek re-election, he responded with characteristic unadorned frankness: “Yeah.”