The letter said that several whistle-blowers had indicated the reduction "possibly resulted from your powerful political influence".
In November that year, he filed the first of several whistle-blower complaints to the Labor Department, invoking federal statutes promising immunity.
Mr. Obama raised concerns about several whistle-blower provisions to protect people who provide certain executive branch information to Congress — including employees of contractors who uncover waste or fraud, and officials raising concerns about the safety and reliability of nuclear stockpiles.
Several whistle-blower lawsuits have been filed over the years involving other high-profile Air Force projects, but this appears to be the first filed against the controversial Raptor project, said Richard Aboulafia, an analyst at the Teal Group, an aerospace consulting firm.
Several F.B.I. whistle-blowers are expected to testify about difficulties they encountered in exposing lapses at the agency.
Kaplan is also facing several federal whistle-blower lawsuits whose accusations dovetail with the findings of an undercover federal investigation of the for-profit industry this summer, including video of high-pressure recruiting and unrealistic salary promises.
In affidavits given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal assistance group for whistle-blowers, several inspectors who work at plants where the pilot program is in place said the main problem was that they were removed from positions on the assembly line and put at the end of the line, which made it impossible for them to spot diseased birds.
At a recent gathering at a Washington hotel of lawyers who represent whistle-blowers, several hundred of them sipped on glasses of wine and cocktails as they began a series of meetings with senior officials from the Justice Department, the S.E.C. and Medicare programs — as well as Mr. McKessy — to compare strategies on how to bring in more corporate wrongdoers.
At Medgar Evers College Preparatory School in Brooklyn, several anonymous whistle-blowers accused school administrators of pushing for higher scores through a practice city teachers refer to as "scrubbing," in which scorers reread essays or other open-response questions to search for extra points.
In affidavits given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal-assistance group for government whistle-blowers, several inspectors who work at plants where the pilot program is in place said the main problem is that they are removed from positions on the assembly line and put at the end of the line, which makes it impossible for them to spot diseased birds.
