I have read, first hand, only one whistle-blower letter to a regulatory agency. The author was an experieced and well-educated engineer, yet the letter was barely comprehensible in parts, lacked specifics which could be cofirmed or refuted, and, overall, was written at the level of a fourth-grade student. It came across a little bit like an angry, rambling rant. The letter was simply unusable by anyone without an understanding of the basis of the allegations or insider knowledge of the organization concerned. Nonetheless, I know that the agency did ask the organization to respond to the allegations, and since the allegations were so poorly written, it was easy for the organization to convincingly refute them all.
I can’t say that the same applies to the allegations referred to in this article, but I can imagine that the FAA is not ignoring whistle-blower “complaints”, but it has set the “sufficient information” bar high enough that only the most professionally-presented allegations make it through the filter. Perhaps this is to protect the organizations that the FAA oversees, and thus itself, or perhaps it is because the FAA has not the staffing to investigate poorly-documented allegations. If it is the latter case, and I suspect that is so, then I watch for the potential civil service budget cuts stemming from the promise of “smaller governent” in the future with engaged interest.