I never knew Ernie Fitzgerald. Aside from patching through a stray phone call from him to my superiors some 20 or 25 years ago, I had no opportunity to talk with him or meet him in person. I could only read of his achievements in news clippings or articles in NTU’s newsletter Dollars and Sense from the 1970s, when he served as Chairman of our organization.
Further, I could only gain glimpses into the man’s personality through glowing accounts that my senior coworkers would relate to me. In a word he was portrayed as a legend. But that description does not capture the life of Ernie Fitzgerald. Legendary characterizations often blend doses of fact with bits of the apocryphal, to create a narrative that is somewhat more generous than reality. On that score, Ernie Fitzgerald was no legend – because the superlatives I have read and heard about him are indeed reality.
Fitzgerald served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and became an engineer who worked with the Senior Executive Service for the U.S. Air Force. During this time, he testified to Congress about cost overruns for major Pentagon projects – most notably, a nearly $2 billion overrun on the C-5A aircraft project. For his whistleblowing testimony, he was harassed and eventually fired from the Department of Defense. As an Air Force procurement official, he was supposedly paid to be a watchdog of taxpayer dollars on notoriously wasteful military contracts. The military chain of command, however, hoped the watchdog would quit barking so loudly.
Like many military projects, the C-5A ran over-budget, behind-schedule, and below performance expectations. Yet, Fitzgerald found something worse about this particular program – nearly from its beginning, many managers inside and outside the Air Force knew that the entire venture would not succeed as intended, and sought to cover up that inconvenient fact. For his insistence on transparency and accountability, he was fired from the government. Even Richard Nixon reviled him and told his underlings to “get rid of that son of a b___h.”
Consumer activist Ralph Nader is credited with popularizing what was once the pejorative term “whistleblower” to describe those courageous individuals who, when seeing institutional wrongdoing, sacrifice their comfort and often their careers expose it and seek change. But Ernie Fitzgerald became the embodiment of that term in the 1970s and beyond.
Fitzgerald could have spent his post-Air Force days in the professional wilderness; instead, he devoted much of his time and talent to growing National Taxpayers Union into a nonpartisan force for fiscal responsibility. When he was vindicated in court after a 13-year battle and given back his government job (only to encounter other obstacles from the bureaucracy), Fitzgerald continued to advise his successor Chairman James Dale Davidson and other leaders of NTU. They (and through them I) learned that profligacy knows no partisan or institutional boundaries – nor should there be boundaries on allies who, despite ideological differences, have a common interest in protecting the public good.
By pioneering the whistleblower movement, Fitzgerald gave inspiration and impetus to other organizations too, like the Project on Government Oversight (founded by NTU alum Dina Rasor), the Government Accountability Project, and Taxpayers for Common Sense.
The fact is, without information from the inside, the pressure for meaningful lasting change from the outside is often just wasted energy. Without all the consumer and taxpayer groups, legal advocacy organizations, social and community groups, and government employee unions dedicated to protecting whistleblowers, there would be no foundation for the everyday pro-taxpayer oversight mechanisms (e.g., the Government Accountability Office’s waste, fraud, and abuse hotline) we take for granted. Ernie Fitzgerald helped to build that foundation. If only the bureaucracy itself, which even now pushes back on maintaining whistleblower safe harbors, would act the same way.
Ernie passed away recently at the age of 92, but his legacy of working for a transparent and honest government on behalf of American taxpayers will be remembered forever. We wish his family comfort and peace.