Eight score and two years ago, President Abraham Lincoln signed the False Claims Act into federal law. The anti-fraud tool, enacted March 2, 1863, became known as Lincoln’s Law. Our 16th president embraced meatier measures to go after fraudsters bilking the U.S. Treasury during the Civil War. Contractors were selling inferior supplies to the Union Army, outfitting the troops with poor quality uniforms and boots, mixing sawdust with gunpowder and even selling blind horses to the Union cavalry.

Back then, Congress resurrected the legal principle known as qui tam – part of a Latin phrase that translates to “in the name of the king” – with origins from 13th century England in which citizens could bring lawsuits on behalf of the king.

Lincoln’s Law gave workers a financial incentive to blow the whistle on their employer’s wrongdoing, rewarding them with a share of fines collected through litigation. This common sense, patriotic solution put more eyes and ears on the ground to save tax dollars and ensure Union soldiers were getting high-quality supplies the federal government purchased.

The principle also was anchored in the merits of our nation’s first whistleblower law enacted on July 30, 1778. The Continental Congress sided with naval informants who reported abuses by their supervisor. Since the earliest days of our republic, our nation’s leaders affirmed it is the duty of every American to report wrongdoing “in service to the United States.”

During my first term in the U.S. Senate, I launched a decades-long crusade to expose wasteful government spending, leaning on the inside scoop provided by patriotic whistleblowers such as Ernie Fitzgerald. A Pentagon analyst, Fitzgerald relentlessly pursued the facts and courageously told the truth. When he appeared before my Judiciary Subcommittee in 1984, he testified the Air Force pumped the brakes on his requests for information needed to properly analyze costs for weapons systems and spare parts. At the time, I remarked how “inefficiency is almost an underground economy in this town.” Those comments offer a foreshadowing clue to the Trump administration’s effort to drain the swamp.

Transparency brings accountability. It’s impossible to expose wrongdoing if whistleblowers are muzzled and access to information is blocked. President Trump created the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to derail the ”underground economy” and scrutinize how taxpayer dollars are spent. Fleecing Uncle Sam’s coffers is a tale as old as time, exploited during war, natural disasters and economic crisis, including the pandemic. Honest Abe deployed the False Claims Act to unleash an army of private citizens to serve as watchdogs during the Civil War. Congress can’t adequately do its constitutional oversight duty without them.

After hearing from truth-tellers like Ernie Fitzgerald, I dusted off the Civil War-era law to encourage more patriots to step forward and help put a stop to fraud and corruption. In 1986, I authored amendments to the False Claims Act that beefed up the qui tam provisions in Lincoln’s Law to strengthen financial incentives and protections for whistleblowers.

It takes guts to stick one’s neck out and report misconduct within an organization. Whistleblowers put their careers, livelihoods and reputations on the line in service to their country. So, when a qui tam case is successful, the whistleblower can receive up to 30 percent of the recovery. My amendments to the False Claims Act put fraudsters across the sprawling bureaucracy on notice that fraud is no longer the cost of doing business and empowered whistleblowers throughout the private sector to report willful misuse of taxpayer dollars.

Since the enactment of my 1986 amendments, the False Claims Act has become the federal government’s #1 tool to fight and deter fraud. It has returned over $78 billion back to taxpayers and saved countless more by deterring would be fraudsters. Last year, whistleblowers filed 979 suits, a historic number of qui tam actions in a single year. The False Claims Act recovered nearly $3 billion in fiscal year 2024, of which $2.4 billion came from whistleblower qui tam actions.

In just the last year, whistleblower qui tam cases exposed fraud in defense procurement, pandemic and disaster relief programs, federal housing grants and underpaid royalties on federal lands. Notably, the healthcare industry produced the lion’s share of fraud recoveries. Whistleblowers exposed kickbacks, price fixing, double billing, unlawful prescriptions for opioids and controlled substances, and other fraudulent schemes that returned scarce resources to federal programs, such as Medicare, Medicaid and TRICARE. These False Claims Act whistleblowers also protected patients by exposing providers who billed for medically unnecessary, substandard, and potentially harmful care.

Every dollar lost to fraud rips off the American people and erodes the public trust. I’ll keep fighting misguided efforts to water down Lincoln’s Law and build on whistleblower protection laws across-the-board so truth-tellers don’t fear reprisal. I’ve asked President Trump and every president since the Reagan administration to hold a Rose Garden ceremony honoring whistleblowers. Such an event would complement President Trump’s efforts to drain the swamp, eliminate waste and promote government efficiency by welcoming the very whistleblowers who put Washington, D.C. on notice to wake up and smell the roses.

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Chuck Grassley, a Republican from New Hartford,

represents Iowa in the U.S. Senate. He is a founding

member and co-chair of the Senate Whistleblower

Protection Caucus.