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Federal courts trumpet steps to protect workers after #MeToo movement
The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York stands in the Brooklyn borough of New York City in 2019.
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The federal courts have taken “extensive” steps to protect workers from abuse, discrimination and harassment since the rise of the #MeToo movement, by creating more paths to report misbehavior and offering a new training session for in-house investigators, U.S. District Judge Robert Conrad Jr. said Wednesday.
The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, which handles the judiciary’s administration, reported that the overall number of complaints against federal judges remains small, with just three brought by judiciary employees under the Judicial Conduct and Disability Act in the last fiscal year. Many more complaints are handled internally, through mediation, court leaders said.
“In some ways, we have more of a middle management problem than a judicial problem,” said Conrad, who was named director of the Administrative Office earlier this year — pointing to statistics showing many complaints are not about judges per se but about other court employees.
However, some outside critics and former court employees say workers they’ve talked to don’t trust the internal system and don’t use it to report complaints, meaning any statistics are likely to be undercounted.
Conrad said the courts are making “steady, sustained” progress toward tearing down barriers to report misconduct for the 30,000 people who work in their buildings — from judges and their staff, to federal public defenders.
“This is not the systemic failure that some critics stuck in a six-year time warp have used to describe the judiciary’s efforts,” Conrad added. “The journey has not reached its destination, but we are committed and have demonstrated this commitment with concrete steps.”
Abusive conduct, retaliation complaints
The bulk of complaints against judges involve abusive conduct, the new report said, followed by allegations of retaliation against people who report problems.
In July, a federal judge in Alaska resigned after investigators found he engaged in a sexual relationship with a former clerk and created a hostile working environment in his chambers.
Aliza Shatzman, who interacts with many current and former federal law clerks through her Legal Accountability Project, said the people she talks with “have not and would not report misconduct” because they do not believe it would be taken seriously or investigated vigorously.
“(W)ith limited remedies available, no legal protection against retaliation, and, sadly, often no legal counsel to assist them, it is difficult to convince law clerks to stick their necks out and blow the whistle on misconduct,” Shatzman said. “Law clerks face enormous headwinds in reporting misconduct, and the federal judiciary does not make the process any easier.”
The quality of legal protections for judiciary employees have been hotly debated in Congress and reviewed in two separate audits this year. A pair of reports by the Government Accountability Office and the National Academy of Public Administration offered recommendations the judiciary continues to review.
Rep. Norma Torres, a California Democrat who has called on the judiciary to do more to shield workers from abuse, said in a written statement Wednesday that “deep concerns and significant questions” linger about the courts’ commitment to reform.
“Sexual assault and harassment are pervasive issues that demand substantive and urgent action, not rhetoric,” Torres said. “It is troubling to continue to see insufficient steps being taken to address the concerns raised by the House Appropriations Committee, and I will continue to closely monitor the judiciary’s efforts, or lack thereof, to protect the safety and dignity of all individuals, inside and outside the courthouse.”
Workforce survey not public
Torres is one of several critics who want to see the results of a national workforce survey the federal courts administered in 2023, but which is still not public. Judge Conrad said confidentiality concerns meant the findings would remain under wraps, but that administrators are assessing the survey results and would follow through early next year.
Court leaders emphasized that in some ways, their systems go beyond other offerings for federal workers, by, for instance, allowing people to report instances of hostile or abusive behavior. Conrad said the code of conduct for federal judges now prohibits abuse or harassment by judges themselves as well as failing to report “reliable” instances of potential wrongful acts they observe by others.
The Office of Judicial Integrity at the courts’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., has expanded to include three people, with two more expected to come on board. That office holds training for court systems nationwide. Since the federal courts operate in a patchwork, with different rules and management across a dozen or so circuit court systems, there are about a dozen more employees who handle workplace complaints spread out across the country.
The systems for reporting misconduct can be byzantine, and contribute to employees’ inability to find lawyers to help them navigate the process. Some auditors have recommended employees who bring complaints with merit should be able to recover attorney fees.
“I get that the judiciary is trying to do more to protect its workers,” said Gabe Roth, who fights for more transparency through his nonprofit group Fix the Court. “But there remain obvious reforms they appear to not even be considering, from ensuring mistreated staff have access to legal assistance to mandating workplace conduct training for judges and other managers, and these omissions do not instill a lot of confidence.”
Roth and other close observers of the federal courts said the internal system for resolving employee disputes remains rife with potential conflicts of interest, because a judge overseeing the dispute can work in the same courthouse as the judge who is the subject of a complaint.
The judiciary has said multiple ways to report complaints are meant to mitigate the problem of conflicts of interest.
Were you harassed or bullied by a federal judge or do you know someone who was? We want to hear about your experience. Your name will not be used without your consent, and you can remain anonymous. Please contact NPR by clicking this link.
Now-former Democratic Senate candidate Graham Platner speaks at his primary election night event on June 9 in Blue Hill, Maine. Platner officially dropped out of the race July 10 following rape allegations from a former romantic partner that he denies.
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Graham Platner, Maine’s Democratic nominee for Senate, is officially out of the race.
The Maine Secretary of State said Platner filed the necessary paperwork to withdraw his candidacy two days after he announced he planned to do so following an accusation of rape by a former romantic partner. Platner denies the allegation.
The Maine Democratic Party has until July 27 to pick Platner’s replacement.
In his withdrawal notice, Platner said “people are desperate for change” and that’s why they voted “for a new kind of politics” by making him the Democratic nominee. He expressed gratitude for those who supported his campaign and said that he will continue to fight for “the movement we have built together and the future we believe in.”
He ended his notice with a strong statement aligned with the progressive platform.
“F*ck ICE. Free Palestine. Up the Hearts.”
Platner announced his plan to withdraw from the race in an 11-minute video he posted to social media on July 8. He said he had no choice but to suspend his campaign, citing it was no longer viable financially.
“We are going to lose our ability to fundraise. We are going to lose our ability to access voter data. We are going to lose all of the things that any campaign needs on the basic level simply to function,” he said.
Platner added that dropping out was not an admission of guilt. Rather, the decision, he said, is to keep the progressive movement in Maine alive to defeat Republican Sen. Susan Collins in November. Platner blamed the “political establishment” for his downfall and argued the goal was to force him out of the race.
“We built a campaign. We engaged in electoral politics. We motivated people. We banded together. We did it the way that we were told we are supposed to make change and we won. And now they are not going to let us have it. Not if it’s me,” he said.
Many powerful Democrats and progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent, urged Platner to step down.
Platner has had to answer to a waterfall of scandals since he launched his Senate bid. Despite those, he ran away with the nomination in the June 9 primary, securing more than 150,000 votes — more than any other Democratic Senate candidate in Maine’s history.
Platner ran on a progressive platform centered on affordability, universal health care and getting corporate money and influence out of politics. During his campaign, he generated an undeniable amount of enthusiasm, something the Maine Democratic Party will have to harness if it hopes to beat Collins in the general election.
Multiple people have already launched campaigns to replace Platner, including former state Sen. Troy Jackson and former CDC official Nirav Shah, who both ran unsuccessful bids for governor.
Platner called on the replacement process to reflect “the Mainers who on June 9 turned out and showed that they are desperate for a different kind of politics.”
“We were asking for real democracy, and we did it the right way. And we won. But now the ball is in the court of the Democratic establishment,” he added.
The Maine Democratic Party said that it intends to hold a new nominating convention where around 600 delegates will select Platner’s successor. Candidates have until July 15 to declare their intent to seek the nomination and gather signatures from at least 8 of Maine’s 16 counties. Party leadership added they will make the nomination process public and transparent.
A Waymo robotaxi drives in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood this week.
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Police in San Mateo, Calif., posted Monday on social media that they had apprehended a pair of teenagers from a Waymo driverless robotaxi after the company alerted authorities to suspected criminal activity. It’s the latest incident involving video surveillance of passengers and others by autonomous vehicles — raising questions about the limits of privacy in such vehicles.
The Facebook post by the San Mateo County Police said: “Parents do you know where your teens are? @waymo does!”
The 15-year-olds were allegedly drinking alcohol and shooting toy guns from the car, according to the police. They said Waymo’s systems detected behavior that then triggered a safety response, after which the company disabled the vehicle and contacted police.
Waymo’s cars, equipped with an array of cameras, microphones and other sensors to monitor passengers and other nearby vehicles, are becoming more common in cities across the United States. Experts say the detention of the two teens in San Mateo highlights a potential — but not inevitable — trade-off between privacy and convenience. It also questions the extent to which companies similar to Waymo are required to hand over private data, including audio and video of passengers, in situations where a crime is suspected.
NPR reached out to Waymo, which is owned by Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for comment on the details of the San Mateo incident and how the company responded, but did not hear back. But on its website, the company says that as many as 29 cameras in its autonomous cars provide an all-around view and “are designed with high dynamic range and thermal stability, to see in both daylight and low-light conditions, and tackle more complex environments.”
“There already exist laws that govern duty to report or even duty to protect” for carriers such as Waymo, according to Alessandro Acquisti, a professor of information technology at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “The privacy problems arise when and if driverless carrier companies used such laws or ethical obligations as a pretext for blanket, indiscriminate accumulation of identifiable data for unspecified future purposes.”
That includes not just monitoring people inside the cars, but outside too. Take, for example, a hit-and-run investigation last year in Los Angeles. Media reported that the police inquiry was aided by video captured by a Waymo taxi that had a clear view of the crime. Critics suggested at the time that authorities were using the company’s vehicles as a mobile surveillance platform. And during 2025 protests in Los Angeles against Immigration and Customs Enforcement crackdowns, demonstrators vandalized Waymos, apparently angry that video recorded by the vehicles could be used by police, although there is no evidence that happened.
In a transparency report, Google says it received nearly 290,000 requests from governments worldwide in the first six months of 2025 for disclosure of user information across all its platforms, including Waymo. The company says that in more than 80% of the requests in those six months, some information was disclosed. “Google carefully reviews each request to make sure it satisfies applicable laws. If a request asks for too much information, we try to narrow it, and in some cases we object to producing any information at all,” the company says.
In an email to NPR, San Mateo Police Department spokesperson Jeanine Luna said that detaining the teens in the Waymo on Monday was “wholly appropriate” under the circumstances. “We received the call of a ‘firearm’ being shot from a moving vehicle,” she said. “Furthermore, the occupants were described as being possibly ‘intoxicated.’” she said.
“Being that the vehicle was disabled (the occupants had every right to exit the vehicle before police arrival, but they did not), a high-risk traffic stop was conducted to ensure the safety of all involved,” Luna added. “They were not arrested and were released to their parents, however, potential charges are still pending dependent on what the video from inside the vehicle shows.”
Autonomous taxis represent an ethical gray area
Robotaxis began to roll out across the U.S. in December 2018, when Waymo launched in Phoenix. These services have been used for less than a decade — so the norms surrounding them aren’t settled, experts agree.
The Facebook post may make Waymo passengers wonder what triggers a police intervention, says Irina Raicu, director of the Internet Ethics program at Santa Clara University. She has used Waymo’s driverless taxis and says ethically, the privacy issues surrounding them sit in a gray area. “There’s something about being in a car without another person that makes you think it’s private.”
“With all these recording devices, we don’t see them, [and] they’re not these obvious things being stuck in our faces,” Raicu adds.
That brings up a key issue: informed consent, Acquisti says.
“It is not clear the extent to which passengers … are reminded that when they step into the car, that they are being monitored, and most likely they are not told in its entirety how the data will be used,” he says.
Bruce Schneier, a cybersecurity and privacy expert and professor at the Munk School at the University of Toronto, believes that Waymo does have a compelling interest in protecting its vehicles. He compares monitoring a robotaxi via cameras to a human taxi driver keeping an eye on passengers in the rearview mirror.
“Maybe the driverless car comes back … and it has all of its cushions slashed, and it’s like, ‘Who the hell did that? Let’s go and look at the tape,’” Schneier suggests. “You can’t have sex in the back of a taxi, right? Someone would say, ‘Stop it.’”
He concludes that some supervision makes sense. In an Uber rideshare, he notes, “most of the time there’s a camera recording the back seat.” (Uber says on its website that it allows drivers to install such cameras for the purpose of “fulfilling transportation services.”)
Waymo robotaxis, while a fairly common sight in the San Francisco Bay Area, are still a novelty in much of the country. And many people are hesitant to ride in one, according to a Pew Research Center poll published this month. The survey found that only 5% of Americans had ever ridden in a driverless car. Meanwhile, 71% of those polled said they would feel uncomfortable in one, with only 7% saying they would be “extremely or very comfortable” riding in one.
For that reason, experts who spoke with NPR said they were optimistic that it’s not too late to shift gears on privacy norms and policies surrounding these vehicles.
Acquisti doesn’t see why privacy measures can’t be built into driverless vehicles.
“I would immediately challenge the notion that people have to be monitored,” he says, noting that privacy-preserving technologies exist and can be installed.
“Driverless cars are coming, but they don’t have to come in this particular incarnation,” Raicu says. “They’re still being designed and redesigned. It’s early days.”
Donald Trump has terminated the remaining members of the independent, federal commission that assists election administration officials nationwide just a few months before the midterm elections, multiple outlets reported Thursday.
The remaining three commissioners of the four-member bipartisan commission were forced out on Thursday in different ways. The one Republican appointee resigned and the other two, Democratic appointees were notified of their terminations via email from the White House presidential personnel office.
“On behalf of President Donald J Trump, I am writing to inform you that your position as Commissioner of the Election Assistance Commission is terminated, effective immediately. Thank you for your service,” the email, seen by Reuters, said.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Election Assistance Commission serves as a “national clearinghouse of information on election administration”, accredits testing laboratories and certifies voting systems, and maintains the national mail-voter registration form developed by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, according to the commission’s website. The terminations follow Trump and top administration officials’ advocacy to change vote-by-mail requirements and investigations into the 2020 election outcome, which Trump lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
“It is irresponsible and dangerous that this Administration remains dead set on causing chaos for our election officials across this country,” Arizona secretary of state Adrian Fontes said in a Thursday statement. “This move undermines the integrity of nonpartisan election administration.”
The 2002 law that established the commission, the Help America Vote Act, states the president can appoint replacements to the commission.
It is unclear how Trump will move ahead with the commission.
Reuters contributed reporting
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