On February 5, 2021, the Office of Hearings and Appeals (OHA) issued an order denying Mrs. Leslie Smith's complaint (Complaint) against Consolidated Nuclear Security, LLC ( CNS) under the Department of Energy's (DOE) Contractor Employee Protection Program, 10 C.F.R. Part 708 (Part 708). Mrs. Smith's Complaint alleged that she made eleven disclosures protected under Part 708 between April 2018 and July 2019 concerning violations of CNS policies, risks to safety and security, and retaliation and other unlawful acts. According to Mrs. Smith, CNS terminated her employment in September 2019 in retaliation for making her protected disclosures. CNS argued that it terminated Mrs. Smith's employment after an internal investigation corroborated the accusations of two employees who alleged that Mrs. Smith used a racial slur in the workplace to describe her supervisor.The Administrative Judge determined that five of Mrs. Smith's disclosures were protected under Part 708. However, the Administrative Judge concluded that only one of those disclosures was a contributing factor in Mrs. Smith's termination. The Administrative Judge determined that the other four disclosures were not contributing factors in Mrs. Smith's termination because too much time passed between Mrs. Smith's disclosures and CNS's alleged retaliatory acts or because the CNS personnel involved in the decision to terminate Mrs. Smith's employment lacked actual or constructive knowledge of the disclosures. With respect to the one disclosure that was a contributing factor in Mrs. Smith's termination, the Administrative Judge found that CNS would have terminated Mrs. Smith's employment regardless of her protected disclosure because of the findings of the CNS investigation corroborating Mrs. Smith's use of a racial slur to describe her supervisor, the lack ofretaliatory animus on the part of the CNS personnel who were aware of Mrs. Smith's disclosure and involved in her termination, and CNS's evidence that it terminated comparator employees who it determined had used racial slurs. For those reasons, OHA denied the Complaint. OHA Case No. WBH-20-0006 (Steven Fine).