COVID-19 data manager’s retaliation claims fail against Florida health department

Trouble began when her supervisor learned she had publicly identified herself as the dashboard’s manager – on Facebook, in a vendor interview, and on a personal blog – without clearance from the department’s communications office.

Things worsened from there. The employee testified that a then-deputy secretary told her to reconfigure county reopening figures by lowering infection rates and dropping smaller counties from a “scorecard.” She said she saw that as a directive to falsify data and refused. The court pointedly declined to decide whether her account was accurate, calling the veracity of her allegations “immaterial” to the result.

In the following weeks, she kept posting data the department had not approved. On May 5, 2020, she was told to take a data hub offline for vetting but, the court said, was “openly defiant.” She admitted that on May 7 she altered dashboard files and removed colleagues’ administrative access, then ignored an instruction to restore it.

Managers had first planned supervisory counseling, not dismissal. That changed. On May 14, she texted her supervisor about filing a whistleblower complaint over “how I’m being treated, the Dashboard mess, gross mismanagement.” She was terminated on May 18, 2020.

Two months later she filed a discrimination charge – her first written complaint – alleging retaliation under Florida’s Whistle-blower’s Act. The department’s inspector general investigated and found the firing was justified by policy breaches and performance problems, not retaliation.