60 Minutes - 6/14/2020: The College Test, Exhume the Truth, Three Empty Chairs

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

Amid a still-present pandemic, John Dickerson reports on the the challenges colleges face -- as they prepare to re-open in the fall. Scott Pelley tells us about the Greenwood Massacre -- a two-day assault in 1921 on a thriving black community in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and what we are learning today. Plus -- The Merit Systems Protection Board gives two million federal civil service workers -- including whistleblowers -- a place to appeal should they be disciplined, demoted or fired. Norah O'Donnell has the story on this week's "60 Minutes." To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The new Mitsubishi Outlander brings out another side of you. Your regular side listens to classical music. Your adventurous side rocks out with the dynamic sound Yamaha. Regular you owns a library card. Adventurous you owns the road with super all-wheel control. Regular side, alone time. Adventurous side journeys together with third row seating. The new Outlander, Bring out your adventure aside.

Mitsubishi Motors. Drive your ambition. It's a test no one wants to fail. Safely getting college and university students back to campus in the fall. There's much to consider. And as you'll hear tonight, students, families, and educators are all feeling the burden. One way it comes from, surely from uncertainty. Human beings loathe it. We will do almost anything not to have it. And we are called to tolerate uncertainty at a really high level right now. In 1921, the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, was among the wealthiest black communities in America. But it was destroyed in a race massacre. Hate rained down on churches

and homes from above. The first time in American history the airplanes were used to terrorize America was not at 9-11, was not at Pearl Harbor. It was right here in the Greenwood District. The Merit Systems Protection Board. Why should Americans know or care what that is? This agency is there to help and protect federal employees from both bad supervisors and poor performers. And all you need is one bad employee, one bad supervisor for things to go amok in any federal agency. And if you're getting your benefits, your services, whatever they are, safe drugs and medicine,

you're going to want this agency to be there. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm John Dickerson. I'm Nora O'Donnell. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories and more tonight on 60 Minutes.

This fall, college will start with a test. Can America's universities reopen during the greatest pandemic in 100 years? Some universities are remaining online. Others are still unsure. But a growing number are preparing for perhaps the largest coordinated return institutions have made since the virus hit. In many ways, colleges and universities are the perfect places for an American reawakening. Scientists can track and trace, behavioral experts can make the pitch, and philosophers can explain the balance between collective good and the individual. But we go to college to be social, with no distance. College students are

going to have to step up by staying apart. If they do, they may lead the way not just for the next semester, but for the entire country and its future. In 1795, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill became the first public university in America to open its doors to students. But since this past March, those doors have been shut. In August, the silence on campus will be lifted. Though the pandemic persists, the university was among the first schools to announce a plan to bring its 40,000 students, faculty, and staff back to campus for in-person classes. Kevin Guskiewicz is UNC's chancellor. What are you hearing from students about coming back in the fall?

They're excited about the opportunity to come back, knowing, though, that it's not going to be the same Carolina. Is it worth the risk, then, to bring everybody back if it's not going to be the same Carolina? We're not going to bring students, faculty, staff back onto a campus where we don't believe it's a safe environment. There certainly is some risk, but we believe we're putting in place the right measures to mitigate that risk. Those measures include starting the fall semester early. In seven weeks, students will begin the familiar ritual of moving into dorms. Final exams will end just before Thanksgiving, and then students will be sent home through at least the new year. We're trying to stay ahead of the potential second wave of the virus, which the experts think that if we're going to see that, it's likely to happen in late November, December. To reduce density, lecture classes will be downsized.

Disinfecting is happening in the athletic facilities, the dormitories, and classrooms. There's a plan A, a B, C. To help design its reopening, the school turned to Dr. Myron Cohen, the director of UNC's Institute for Global Health and Infectious Diseases. How important are masks? Masks, masks, and more masks. You can't say enough about masks. What is the mask rule? We require that the students in the classroom will wear a mask, that the professor will be some distance away from the students,

and the professor will wear a mask. So we intend our classrooms to be 100% masks. How do you teach a class without a mask on? Well, I guess we're going to figure that out pretty quickly. But I think I can put my mask on, we can continue the interview, and we can see how it goes. It's not impossible. What may be impossible is preventing students from gathering in dorms.

College-age kids are wired to socialize. They mark the time by the big celebrations like this one after North Carolina's national championship in basketball three years ago. How leaky, for lack of a better word, is the campus environment? How many threats to your system are there? Oh, it's completely leaky. The students can go anywhere they'd like to go. And the most important thing is the leakiness matters less under two conditions. We reduce the density, that is, we do not allow large numbers of people congregating, and masks. I can't think of a more difficult cohort than college students to tell don't congregate. Isn't the

whole reason they're being brought back here to congregate? Well, I guess we're going to have to see. Because it feels like you're one keg party away from a bad problem. The entire campus will be trying to create environments where people are incredibly socially responsible. Humans are smart. Okay, these students are smart. Reeves Mosley, a rising senior from Texas, is UNC's student body president. We have to grow up a little faster than we would otherwise and be able to say this is a new community standard that we have to set. This is unprecedented, but we have to rely on the social pressure for students to wear masks, to social distance. The university acknowledges there will be cases. A challenge will be catching them before a larger spread occurs.

Two dormitories will be set aside to quarantine students. We'll look for clusters. If there was a cluster of positive cases, that that would potentially create an off-ramp for us. We could pivot back to a remote learning environment. Many schools around the country are still working on their specific plans for the fall that must now include how to handle almost certain protests against racism. Due to the pandemic, the California State University system announced last month courses will be taught primarily online in the fall. For UNC's Reeves Mosley, remote learning this spring led

to a sense of isolation and a loss of community. If they had said you're going to have to do online learning for one more semester, how many of your fellow students would have said I'm not going to do that or their parents would have said I'm not going to pay for that? A lot. You know you're paying these tuition dollars and if you're having an online instruction experience, that's nowhere like the actual experience you'd be having otherwise. For UNC's Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz, that's another reason to reopen. I just wonder if it would have been financially infeasible to not reopen. We would have been challenged financially to not reopen. We know that many students would have perhaps taken a gap year or to defer their enrollment, but I want to emphasize that our

decisions are based on creating that learning environment for students where we know they can thrive and building in all of these measures for safety. College in the fall is a time of renewal, a return to fields of possibility, a place where your route to the future is visible. At William & Mary in Virginia, the school year is launched with a traditional raucous welcome of new students. In the middle of it all the past two years

has been the university's first female president, Catherine Rowe. Have you already started writing the speech for when they return? Oh, I'm thinking about it all the time. I miss them so much. We spoke to President Rowe in the oldest building on any American campus. At the 327-year-old school that educated three U.S. presidents, Roe and her husband are now the only people living on campus. She walks daily past the empty halls and dorms, burdened by what's ahead. What causes the most weight to that burden? One weight comes from, surely from uncertainty. Human beings loathe it. We will do almost anything not to have it.

And we are called to tolerate uncertainty at a really high level right now. After a marathon of Zoom calls, William and Mary announced Friday it too will return early to in-person classes. But students will have the flexibility to finish the school year through next summer. It's helpful to know that we've survived enormous shocks in the past and to think about what it took to persevere. That's incredibly encouraging. Twice before in its long history, William and Mary shut down, during the Civil War and during a late 19th century financial crisis. This pandemic and its economic impact may present the biggest challenges to the school in over a century. How many students do you think won't be able to come here because of the economic devastation?

I think that's one of the questions that is most concerning and that we still don't know the answer to. If you think about 40 million people in the country out of work, some of them will be the parents of our students. Some people worry about a lost generation. We have an obligation to ensure that this cohort of students doesn't lose speed, doesn't lose momentum in their college educations. What would happen if the students lost that speed? It's really hard to imagine accepting that as a possible path forward. We can't. So however we have a year next year, we will have a year.

However they learn, we will make it possible for them to learn. Three-quarters of college students attend public institutions, which are reliant on state funding. What's coming is that states are seeing huge drops in revenue that will translate into a big hit to public higher education. And if we see huge cuts to public higher ed, that will mean less financial aid for students. John King served as the Secretary of Education in the Obama administration and is now the CEO and president of the Education Trust, a nonprofit that works with underserved students he worries will be hurt the most. Budget cuts could cripple institutions like those in the City University

of New York system, known as CUNY. I think a lot about CUNY, partly because it's such a powerful engine of social mobility today and has been for generations. Generations of low-income folks, generations of immigrants who, through CUNUNY have gotten access to the American dream. This is not just about the next semester of college. This is about the next phase in the economy. Absolutely. As we've moved towards an information economy, the future jobs that will provide a good family-sustaining wage are jobs that require college degrees. We know that earning a college degree adds a million dollars in lifetime earnings. And if the three-quarters of the college students are going to state institutions

and those are feeling particular pressure, this economic challenge for colleges exacerbates the existing economic challenges in the American workforce. If we make cuts to higher education now, if we undermine public higher ed as a driver of economic opportunity, we will hurt the economy 5, 10, 15 years out. The incoming freshmen this fall, the high school class of 2020, were denied the pleasure of breaking the tape at the end of a long marathon. Lawn signs replaced graduation day. There were a few innovative

ceremonies. Clover High in South Carolina rented out Hounds Drive-In Theater to hand out diplomas to departing seniors, some of whom will be entering an uncertain collegiate landscape. And the struggle extends to those already in college who are laboring to pay tuition and are weighed down by debt, like 20-year-old Catherine Trejo of Arlington, Virginia. The daughter of a single mom from Bolivia, Catherine was supposed to graduate from George Mason next year. She is the first person in her family to attend college. Was it always the expectation that you would go to college?

Yes. My mom wanted me to begin reading law books when I was in fourth grade. Obviously, fourth grade. Yes. She wanted, she's been pushing me to be a lawyer since I was in the fourth grade. But Catherine lost her two jobs this spring that helped her finance her tuition and support her family. She has no health insurance and has $11,000 in student debt. So right now you won't be going back in the fall? As it stands, no. So with everything you're facing, COVID still going on, the economy has hit your family really hard. That dream that you've been talking about for yourself and your family, do you feel like that's slipping away? Yeah. I worry about it every day.

Just sometimes I get really overwhelmed, and I do feel like the dream is slipping away. What would happen if you didn't graduate from college? That's not an option. It's just not an option. I value education a lot, and whether it'll take me five years or another ten years to get it,

but it's just not an option to not go back. That is the kind of determination that spurs universities to reopen. And when the COVID-19 challenge is over, schools will return to the previous test they faced, finding a way to make education available to enough students so that America can still be called the land of opportunity. There are very few things that you can be certain of in life. But you can always be sure the sun will rise each morning.

You can bet your bottom dollar that you'll always need air to breathe and water to drink. And, of course, you can rest assured that with Public Mobile's 5G subscription phone plans, you'll pay the same thing every month. With all of the mysteries that life has to offer, a few certainties can really go a long way. Subscribe today for the peace of mind you've been searching for. Public Mobile. Different is calling.

Why do fintechs like Float choose Visa? As a more trusted, more secure payments network, Visa provides scale, expertise, and innovative payment solutions. Learn more at visa.ca slash fintech. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.

Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer groceries that over-deliver. The death of George Floyd in the hands of Minneapolis police came on Memorial Day. Ninety-nine years before, that same week, black Americans suffered a massacre. In the days after World War I, a neighborhood in Tulsa, Oklahoma, called Greenwood, was among the wealthiest black

communities. Oil made Greenwood rich, but jealousy made it suffer. In 1921, a white mob with incendiary rage burned Greenwood to ash. Even memories were murdered when the dead were dropped into unmarked graves. Last December, before the pandemic, we found Tulsa preparing to embrace a reckoning with a plan to exhume the truth and raise the dead. The community that is Greenwood has thriving businesses, professional offices, doctors, lawyers, dentists. John W. Franklin speaks of Greenwood in the present tense. Greenwood is the nexus of that African-American community.

Perhaps because he studied Greenwood in 32 years as a historian at the Smithsonian, or likely because Greenwood is personal. And my grandfather moves here from Rentersville in February 1921, and he's the first person in the family to go to college, Buck Colbert Franklin. Buck Colbert Franklin was a lawyer who chased his dream to a promised land. Booker T. Washington named Greenwood Negro Wall Street because the district was lined with black-owned shops, restaurants, two newspapers, a 54-room grand hotel, a hospital, and the Dreamland Theater,

which would soon boast air conditioning. But on the day after Memorial Day 1921, Buck Franklin awoke to fearful news. He hears that there's to be possibly a lynching. There's this black man who's been caught with this white woman in the elevator and the newspapers are saying, read all about it. There's extra, extra, read all about it. Tulsa's white newspapers told of a black teenager who allegedly attacked a white female elevator operator. At the jail, a lynch mob demanded the prisoner. Black veterans of World War I arrived

to shield the defendant for his day in court. A shot was fired, and in a running gun battle, the mob chased the black vets to Greenwood. One of the moments during the riot that your grandfather wrote about was this. On they rushed, whooping to the tops of their voices, firing their guns every step they took. What is it like for you to read those words today? He too was traumatized by seeing people being shot in front of his eyes.

He describes a woman who's trying to find her child who's run in front of her, and she's unafraid of the bullets raining down because her concern is to find her child. What began as an attempted lynching at the jail erupted into a massacre. From a high grain elevator, a machine gun laid fire on Greenwood Avenue. Where's the fire department? Where's the police when we need them? We're part of a city. This is not some small town. This is a city of wealth and order and governance.

It is now taken over by a mob. The police joined the mob. National Guard troops pressed the attack against what one Guard officer called the enemy. Quotes from eyewitnesses include, Old women and men, children, were running and screaming everywhere. A deputy sheriff reported a black man dragged behind a car. His head was being bashed in, the deputy said, bouncing on the steel rails and bricks but what happened next may have frightened buck franklin even more and he hears planes circling and sees roofs of buildings catching fire

and these are from turpentine balls burning turpentine balls dropped from planes. The first time in American history the airplanes were used to terrorize America was not at 9-11, was not at Pearl Harbor. It was right here in the Greenwood District. Reverend Robert Turner's Vernon AME Church was among at least five churches burned, along with 1,200 homes. A photo was crudely and imperfectly hand-lettered at the time, running the Negro out of Tulsa. 36-odd square blocks, city blocks, was destroyed.

And before they destroyed it, they looted. They took nice furniture, money. When the Black hospital burned, white hospitals refused to take Greenwood's wounded. Those who bled to death included Greenwood's most prominent surgeon. Ultimately, one hospital did make space in its basement for black casualties. The number of dead is estimated between 150 and 300. Survivors included 10,000 now homeless African-Americans. 6,000 of them were herded into internment camps and then released weeks later.

I don't know how they did it, but the following Sunday after the massacre, they came and worshipipped in our basement. And that's the same basement that we have today. I can't breathe! The death of a black man at the hands of police is today shouted into the national memory. Thanks to all of you for being here. But in 1921, it remained possible to erase a genocide. I grew up attending segregated Tulsa public schools.

Never in any of the schools was anything ever said about it. The congregation of Vernon AME Church is two generations beyond 1921, but they too were victimized. This was not taught in the public school. No. You never heard about this in class. You never heard a word about it. When I went to OU in 1998, I was sitting in a class on African American history. And the professor was talking about this place where black people had businesses and had money and had doctors and lawyers.

And he said it was in Tulsa. And I raised my hand and said, no, I'm from Tulsa. That's not accurate. And he was talking about this massacre, riot. I said, man, what are you talking about? I said, I went to school on Greenwood. I've never heard of this ever. How many people were arrested, tried for what happened in Greenwood? No one. Two or 300 people murdered, an entire community burned to the ground, and the police were unable to find a single person. It's a real tragedy.

All the thousands of claims that were filed by African Americans, not a one, not a one insurance company paid that claim. And our church was included. No insurance honored for black Tulsans, no arrests made, no complete count of the dead. The Salvation Army recorded only that it fed 37 gravediggers. The nameless were buried in unmarked graves, while their families were locked down in the internment camps. I wonder if there are any doubts in this room about whether there are mass graves in Tulsa,

Oklahoma. No doubts. Oral histories passed down generations pointed to at least four sites of possible mass graves. As a mayor, I view it as a homicide investigation. Phase one. G.T. Bynum is Tulsa's Republican mayor. In 2018, he ordered an investigation of all remaining evidence. What you have is a case of law and civil order being overrun by people who were filled with hatred. We believe at the end of this road we're walking down right now is one of the sites where we found an anomaly. Anomalies of disturbed earth showed up in the studies of Scott Hammerstedt. That's not a mower. It's ground-penetrating radar. And right here is the anomaly as we see it.

He's a senior researcher at the Oklahoma Archaeological Survey. The anomalies that we're looking at, what are those? It's just a contrast between the surrounding soil that's undisturbed and then this soil that has been disturbed. So we're not seeing in these images human remains? No, no, it's definitely not like CSI. You don't see individual skeletons. You just see disturbances and contrasts,

which is why you can't really say necessarily that for sure it's a common grave, but it's very consistent with one. Of course, there's any number of things it could be. That's always the thing I have to remind myself. And there's only one way to find out. That is exactly right. We have to dig. We have to dig.

But we don't know what's underneath. A 10-day test excavation is scheduled to begin in July, led by University of Florida forensic anthropologist Phoebe Stubblefield. She'll investigate cause of death, but it's complicated because of the Spanish flu pandemic from the same period. So just because you find a burial site, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's from the massacre. Correct. And so I'm interested in markers like signs of violence or any kind of ballistic injuries or chop injuries. Can you retrieve DNA? If it's a good preservation state, there's a high probability.

Would it be possible, in your opinion, to actually identify some of these people? We could try for genealogical matches. So if we had people now who say, oh, I'm missing a relative from that time period, here's my DNA, then we can make matches through similar markers and do the genealogical matches. There's a long legacy from 1921. Tulsa is still one of the most segregated cities in the country. Yes. The north part of Tulsa is black, the south part is white, and the twain don't meet very much. Right. Because of the history of racial disparity that exists in our city, a kid that's growing up in the predominantly African-American part of our city is expected to live 11 years

less than a kid that's growing up in a whiter part of the city. By the way, Tulsa's not unique in that regard. You see disparities like that in major cities all around America. The test excavation is expected to discover whether there are human remains. Next steps would include recovery and the question of how to honor those who have waited nearly 100 years for justice. How do you commemorate an event that gives dignity and honor to the people who have been lost? We have taken, in recent decades, in our memorials,

to etch the names of every single person who was lost. The 9-11 memorial, the Vietnam memorial. That's not going to be possible here. We don't know the names. We don't know the names. And you're going to have to do some kind of, you know, we have the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. So it has to be something that is representative of lost souls, lost

in anonymity. Something like that will have to be planned. This is a story about a small federal agency most Americans have never heard of called the Merit Systems Protection Board. It's meant to give 2 million federal civil service workers, including whistleblowers, a place to appeal should they be disciplined, demoted, or fired. It's not that the board is working poorly, but that the board is not working at all. Since 2017, it has lacked enough members to pass judgment on any appeals. And for well over a year, the board has had no one on it, leaving three empty chairs and a backlog of cases that's now in the thousands. Half a mile north of the White House stands the unmarked headquarters

of the Merit Systems Protection Board, or MSPB. We got permission to visit in early February, before COVID-19 made working from home the norm. About 100 staffers were there, analyzing petitions from both federal workers and agencies about employment disputes. Cases that would usually make their way to the board for a final ruling were instead going into storage because the chairman's spacious office suite,

as well as the vice chairman's, and another for the third and final member of the board, were all empty and not because of the pandemic. Today, we're also considering three candidates for appointment to the Merit Systems Protection Board. President Trump has nominated people to fill all three open positions, but the nominations have languished in the Senate, awaiting confirmation. Without a board, without at least two board members, we're lost.

From 2010 to 2018, Jim Eisenman worked for the chairman of the board as general counsel and executive director. The Merit Systems Protection Board. Why should Americans know or care what that is? This agency is there to help and protect federal employees from both bad supervisors and poor performers. And all you need is one bad employee, one bad supervisor for things to go amok in any federal agency. And if you're getting your benefits, your services, whatever they are, safe drugs and medicine, you're going to want this agency to be there to protect and enforce the federal merit systems. What are these merit systems principles?

That people will be hired based on merit, that they will not be discriminated against, that decisions will be based on their performance rather than someone's personal feeling about them. And has the board ever had so many vacancies for so long? Never. In a divided capital, the board stands apart in that by law, it is bipartisan. Only two of three members can be from the same political party. It was established 42 years ago, but its roots go back to the 19th century and Republican Teddy Roosevelt, who before becoming president, championed the creation of the U.S. Civil Service Commission, the precursor to today's board. The American public made a decision 140 years ago

that they want their government run by qualified people, and they want it run efficiently. For 30 years, attorney Deborah Roth has represented both federal agencies and employees in front of the board. She's worried about what the breakdown at MSPB means for the average citizen. MSPB is the one making sure that everyone's playing by the rules on the inside. So in effect, with no board, is there more waste, fraud, and abuse that's going on in government? Probably. It is the internal

accountability for the rest of government. It's not like every case ends up at MSPB. So for statistics, you consider something like over 2 million people are part of the federal workforce in the executive branch. About every year, about 80,000 of them quit. Another 12,000 are getting fired for cause. And those people are probably the ones who are going to end up, possibly a portion of them, filing an appeal at MSPB. Before a case gets to the board, it goes to an MSPB administrative judge who issues an initial decision. Only about 800 decisions a year then get appealed to the board. These days, with no one to rule on them, the cardboard boxes holding some of the nearly 2,900 cases in the backlog are stacked

in multiple offices throughout the agency. And each of those cases is an individual waiting for justice and an agency waiting for certainty as to what's going to happen with that employee. Is that employee going back to work or are they not? Traditionally, the board gets involved in other cases at the request of the Office of Special Counsel, a federal watchdog that's supposed to protect whistleblowers like Rick Bright. Bright was the first federal official to publicly proclaim that the Trump administration's response to the pandemic was disorganized and so slow that it cost lives. If we fail to improve our response now based on science, I fear the pandemic will get worse and be prolonged.

Before he testified before Congress, Bright filed a complaint with the special counsel, alleging his bosses at Health and Human Services demoted him for sounding the alarm. The special counsel's office found a substantial likelihood of wrongdoing and asked HHS Secretary Alex Azar to give him his old job back while it investigated. In April, Bright sat down with 60 Minutes. Our understanding is that the Merit Systems Protection Board could reinstate you at your job pending an investigation into your complaint. Had you ever heard of the MSPB before your complaint? No, honestly, I hadn't. I've

learned, though, since my complaint that MSPB, that Merit System Protection Board, is full of empty chairs. Rick Bright's case may be the most high-profile impacted by the three empty chairs, but it's not the only one to involve a whistleblower. After filing a Freedom of Information Act request, we learned about a quarter of the cases in the backlog include whistleblower claims. The backlog stretches across 55 federal agencies, but the most whistleblower cases from one agency, 197, are from the Department of Veterans Affairs, or VA. One of them belongs to Chris Marcus. I put my heart and soul into the VA because I knew we could fix it.

After graduating from the Air Force Academy in 1992, Marcus served for 20 years. In 2008, he helped run the U.S. military's busiest combat trauma hospital during the surge in the Iraq War. After retiring as a lieutenant colonel, Marcus was hired by the VA and eventually put in charge of three outpatient clinics serving approximately 80,000 veterans in Tennessee. He says members of his staff violated basic health and safety guidelines and mishandled patients' medical files. But the worst problem he described was doctors who showed up late and sometimes disappeared, leaving elderly veterans waiting for hours. If you can't get your staff to show up for work on time, then that's a problem. That's one of the accusations I had against me was that I would walk around the halls

looking for people coming into work late. I'm like, I'm guilty. Yes, I did. What did you do? A co-worker and I, we were constantly elevating that to the appropriate leaderships, and we have got to do something about these providers, and nothing ever happened. When the VA fired you, what was their justification? That I created a hostile work environment. That was pretty much it.

The unprofessional behavior that you were accused of by the VA, is there any truth to it? No. And they gave me a stack of paperwork about this thick. It was the evidence file used against me. And I'm just thinking, oh, my goodness, what did I do? I mean, I'm really racking my brain. What on earth did I do? An administrative judge ruled this past December that the only thing Chris Marcus did was his job. The judge wrote in his decision the VA's allegation Marcus had been unprofessional lacked any factual basis and that a VA executive had a

motive to retaliate against him. More importantly, the judge added Marcus was an employee that the VA should be seeking to retain and promote instead of removing. He's absolutely right. I challenge anyone to find anything in that evidence package that is actually evidence of any conduct unbecoming or unprofessionalism. It's just not there. The judge ordered the VA to reinstate Lieutenant Colonel Marcus and give him back pay and interest, which at the time was upwards of $50,000. The VA refused and appealed to the board, but because no one was on it, the case and Marcus' life entered a state of limbo.

Even if you win, you lose. Do you consider yourself a whistleblower? I never thought of me as being a whistleblower. I guess I am because I've been identifying these things for years, and my leadership retaliated against me for that. In early April, five months after Chris Marcus's case joined the backlog, we asked the VA about him. The VA declined to comment specifically, but two weeks later offered him a settlement that included nearly a year's worth of back pay, plus interest, damages, legal fees, and a new job that

allows him to work from home that he started last month. Attorney Deborah Roth does not represent Chris Marcus but says justice for others caught in the backlog will be harder to come by. An appeals process that used to take months will now take years. She says typically about 15 percent of those who appeal to the board end up getting their jobs back. And the longer it takes to get their job back the clock is running because the board will determine that they were fired improperly, illegally, and the remedy will be that they will get a retroactive hiring and their back pay. There are government workers right now sitting at home, not working, who will eventually get back pay. A lot of it at taxpayer expense. For every single day,

every single year that goes by without a decision, that's just more and more back pay for the individual if they're being reinstated. That's more attorney fees, that's more interest, that's just more money generally. Former MSPB Executive Director Jim Eisenman told us the prospective new board members face a daunting task, digging out from the nearly 2,900 cases piled up in their office. It will probably take three to four years just for those cases to be decided by any board. If you had board members start today. That's justice delayed. And denied, absolutely. Which brings us back to the reason we ever heard about the Merit Systems Protection Board in the first place. Not a single board member has been confirmed by the Senate in over eight years,

since April 2012. 60 Minutes has learned only one of the president's nominees faces serious opposition from senators in both parties. But if two of the other nominees were confirmed, the board could quickly get back to work. We wanted to ask the most powerful man in the Senate, Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, why that hasn't happened yet. After his office ignored several of our inquiries, we went to the Capitol to ask him directly. This is a challenging time for federal workers, especially those on the front lines of the coronavirus. So we wanted to know, why has the Senate not confirmed any of President Trump's three nominees to the Merit System Protections Board?

Well, if they're out on the calendar, you'd have to ask Senator Schumer. We contacted the office of Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose spokesman pointed out Senate Majority Leader McConnell has full control over which nominees are voted on and which ones aren't. How does this happen? How does such an important government agency remain shut down for so long? Negligence, if not an intentional failure to do a constitutional duty. Tonight marks the opening of a new era in storytelling for 60 Minutes. We are launching an innovative way for our one-of-a-kind reporting to reach a new and expanded audience on the mobile app, Quibi. We've named it 60 in 6, and each week, 60 in 6 will report an original story in a shorter, approximately six-minute form, produced specifically for viewers watching on mobile devices. We've recruited a dedicated staff of correspondents, producers, and editors from both inside and outside CBS News,

who are working to guarantee true 60-minute reporting and high standards to the stories in our new mobile home. This week, we kick off with Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent Wesley Lowry, reporting from Minneapolis with a view from that city you haven't seen before, including an interview with George Floyd's brother, Philonise. Do you see your brother and his story as part of a bigger, broader movement? Yes, sir. People who knew my brother, they always say the same thing. Floyd, he died for a reason.

I think this is the biggest civil rights movement ever People tired, man Everybody wants to live on this earth and have peace That's all I want is peace I'm John Dickerson And we'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes