Senior Counsel & Director of Education

Dana Gold is Government Accountability Project’s Senior Counsel and Director of Education, as well as the Director of its Democracy Protection Initiative. Dana has had a lifelong professional relationship with whistleblowers and Government Accountability Project. She joined Government Accountability Project in 1991 as a student fellow, continuing on as a legal intern. From 1995-2002, Dana served as Government Accountability Project’s Director of Operations and as a staff attorney, representing whistleblowers who disclosed fraud and serious public health, safety, and the environmental threats on the Trans-Alaskan pipeline and at contractor-operated nuclear sites, including Hanford, Rocky Flats, and Los Alamos. Over the past 25 years, Dana has represented and worked with dozens of whistleblowers on issues such as nuclear weapons risks, food safety, climate science censorship, banking fraud, illegal electronic surveillance, and immigration abuses.

In her role as Director of Education, Dana educates and develops partnerships with diverse audiences—employees, journalists, advocacy organizations, unions, professional associations, attorneys, ethics and compliance professionals, faith leaders and communities, academics and others—to foster understanding about the essential role whistleblowers play in promoting accountability and democracy and the legal and practical complexities involved with whistleblowing.

Dana also leads Government Accountability Project’s immigration advocacy, serving as lead counsel for several Department of Homeland Security whistleblowers who have disclosed systemic risk of harm to both children and adult migrants in detention, who challenged the legality and adverse effects of the Trump administration’s “Remain in Mexico” program, who raised the alarm about the health threat to immigrants, workers and the public posed by the spread of COVID-19 in ICE detention, and who disclosed that women immigrant detainees at Irwin County Detention Center were being subjected to hysterectomies and other gynecological procedures without fully informed consent.

In addition to her work with Government Accountability Project, Dana co-founded and directed the Center on Corporations, Law & Society at Seattle University School of Law, served as Program Director for Corporate Governance Executive Education at Boston College Law School, and served as an employee advocate member of the Hanford Concerns Council, an alternative dispute resolution forum that resolved complex whistleblower issues at the Hanford nuclear site in Washington state.

Dana is a graduate of the College of William & Mary and Seattle University School of Law, a former Network Fellow with Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, and the recipient of the 2019 Professional Women in Advocacy Conference’s Excellence in Advocacy award. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, Newsweek, Slate, The Hill, CNN, Government Executive, and WNYC’s On the Media.

[email protected]
(202) 926-3306