Cattalaxy comments on this Telegraph piece by Delingpole, which says that a whistleblower under US law can claim a proportion of the total government funds that were misused. All the folks at the Earth System Science Center at Penn have apparently been emailed a note reminding them of the provisions of the legislation and inviting them to rat out their friends.
I'd put odds close to zero that this results in anything: I doubt that any court under the current administration would push anything or would deem any government funds to have been misused, and so the off-diagonals aren't all that lucrative in expected value terms.
I'd also expect the expected payouts to have to be pretty high: surely any one of them could have received several million from the oil companies by defecting earlier on. So if it's a PD game, it's one that's been going on for rather some time now.
