Quality public services depend on competent leadership, sound policies, and public servants with good character and emotional maturity. If one of those legs is weak or missing, service delivery suffers and accountability breaks down.
Weaponized Discipline
Track how fabricated paper trails, vague PIPs, and stacked documentation are used to push out targeted employees.
Retaliation & Silencing
Identify patterns where whistleblowers and high performers are disciplined while favored employees are shielded.
Taxpayer Cost
Examine the financial, legal, and human cost of abusive discipline across federal, state, and local agencies.
Share Testimonial
Targets and witnesses of government disciplinary actions are invited to share their experiences. Your testimony helps expose patterns of abuse that would otherwise remain buried in personnel files.
Real-Time Data Map
Explore a live map that updates in real time with submissions from the public about federal, state, and local government disciplinary actions.
Support DATracker
Help sustain this independent, community-driven project to analyze how ethically and impartially government agencies wield their unchecked disciplinary authority. Your donation helps cover research time, data acquisition costs, and technology for collecting and presenting curated data.
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This project examines 30 years of federal, state, and local government disciplinary actions to understand how systems intended to correct misconduct are instead being used to silence employees, retaliate against whistleblowers, and protect those in power.
Woodrow Sanders III founded this project in March 2026 to raise public awareness about federal, state, and local government disciplinary practices. Woodrow has more than twenty years of experience in information technology, having served as a cyber security engineer, cyber security analyst, DevOps specialist, application developer, UNIX administrator, network administrator, and software support specialist for several private and government organizations.
When the disciplinary process is abused, taxpayers lose experienced civil servants, agencies face costly legal settlements, and a culture of fear takes root. By studying discipline, we can see clearly where merit-based accountability ends and weaponized management begins.
Information on disciplinary actions will be gathered from public agencies using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and state and local public records laws. Where possible, disciplines will be analyzed alongside outcomes such as resignations, terminations, settlements, and reinstatements.
Weaponized discipline refers to situations where managers use the disciplinary process—paper trails, investigations, PIPs, reassignments, and “quiet firing”—to punish employees for speaking up or challenging the status quo, rather than to improve performance or address genuine misconduct.
Current and former public employees at the federal, state, or local level—as well as witnesses to disciplinary actions—are invited to share what they have seen or experienced, whether they were targets of discipline, coworkers, or union representatives.
The project encourages contributors to protect their identity where needed. The JustFollowingWoodrow.com platform accepts video and audio submissions with optional digital voice alteration, and stories may be anonymized or de-identified before they are shared publicly.
Steven Larson, a former debris operations manager at California’s Office of Emergency Services (Cal OES), alleged mismanagement, overspending, and harassment connected to wildfire cleanup efforts. After raising concerns, he reported facing retaliation, including negative performance reviews and termination. Related Los Angeles Times coverage can be found here and
here, illustrating how discipline and retaliation can be intertwined with larger questions of public safety and accountability.
Woodrow Sanders III is another person who can personally attest to how this weaponization is aimed at employees. During his tenure at the same agency (then known as CalEMA) from 2007 to 2017, he was subjected to a series of escalating adverse actions between 2009 and 2010. The pattern was clear: after two initial adverse actions were eventually withdrawn via a signed settlement agreement, a third attempt—a dismissal—was launched just months later. Like the previous attempts, this third action was also withdrawn, and he received full back pay, minus an eight-day suspension for agreeing to a lesser charge. This cycle of "charge and withdraw" is a textbook example of how government agencies use the disciplinary system to exhaust an employee's resources and resolve.
You can sign up here for a free, guest account. This is a personal project; likewise, you’ll have an opportunity to make a donation when signing up to help cover research efforts, data acquisition costs, and the technology infrastructure for collecting and presenting to the public disciplinary data. Targets and witnesses of disciplinary actions can share their stories and audio/video testimonials here.
Records received from federal, state, and local government agencies are the backbone of this project; you can e-mail and call to demand that your elected officials and government officials respond to our requests for information.