President Trump’s vision of a streamlined executive branch, remade in his image and tailored to his whims, is alarming. He seems intent on dismantling the guardrails long in place to keep our leaders in check, and hobbling the agencies that are critical to our health and financial well-being.

But an unintended consequence emerging from Trump’s imperious leanings is an opening for whistleblowers to fill the breach. There are three reasons why.

First, there is strong bipartisan support for whistleblowers supplementing the government’s limited resources to combat fraud and misconduct. Starting with the False Claims Act — enacted during the Civil War to enlist whistleblowers to go after war profiteers defrauding the Union Army — America has a long history of relying on whistleblowers to uncover misbehavior that would otherwise remain undetected by government enforcers.

The role whistleblowers have played in policing unlawful activity has only gotten stronger in recent years, with Congress passing a slew of legislation providing whistleblowers with significant financial incentives to lend a helping hand to numerous agencies — the SEC (securities fraud), the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (commodities fraud), the IRS (tax........

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