WASHINGTON — Not everyone has the privilege of being Marco Rubio.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is proposing new legislation aimed at restricting government employees from holding multiple civil service positions simultaneously, unless explicit permission is granted.
Currently, laws prevent full-time federal employees from taking on more than one federal role concurrently without authorization. Ernst’s initiative, dubbed the Dismantling Double Dippers Act, aims to enhance these restrictions through mandatory yearly audits of payroll data.
As part of this legislative effort, Ernst, who heads the Senate DOGE Caucus, has requested the Office of Personnel Management to investigate the scale of double-dipping among government workers.
“The public, who funds the salaries of federal employees and contractors, deserves access to this crucial information,” she stated in a correspondence to OPM Director Scott Kupor, which was obtained by The Post.
“Given that OPM manages policies concerning hiring and oversight of the federal workforce, your agency is uniquely positioned to enhance transparency and address timecard fraud linked to double-billing bureaucrats,” she added.
Even with existing regulations prohibiting civil servants from holding multiple government jobs, there have been numerous reports of employees successfully maintaining several federal positions at once.
For example, between 2021 and 2024, a worker from the Department of Housing and Urban Development held multiple full-time contractor roles within the federal government, at times billing the government for over 24 hours of work in a single day.
That employee, Crissy Monique Baker, pled guilty in July to submitting fraudulent hours worked, resulting in approximately $225,866 in taxpayer losses.
She was employed at HUD, AmeriCorps, and the National Institutes of Health, and at one point asserted that she had completed 26 hours of work over 13 days within a single month.
Another case referenced by Ernst involved a contractor at the NSA who simultaneously held a position under a Department of War contract and was found guilty in 2014 of scamming taxpayers out of $65,265 by submitting 79 fraudulent timesheets.
Sen. Ernst also highlighted a separate but related case that did not involve double-dipping directly. It concerns a senior policy adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) who falsely claimed to have been working in another capacity at the CIA.
John Beale, sentenced to 32 months in prison back in 2014, managed to perpetrate this fraud for 13 years, costing taxpayers around $900,000, as indicated by prosecutors.
While pretending to perform vital missions for the CIA, Beale was actually vacationing abroad or enjoying his holiday home in Massachusetts.
“This wasn’t exactly a moonlighting situation, yet the EPA should have realized that such an arrangement was illicit and should have better overseen the activities and efficiency of one of its senior officials,” the senator asserted.
To more rigorously uphold the existing laws, the proposed Dismantling Double Dippers Act would compel OPM’s official watchdog to undertake annual audits to cross-verify government payroll records.
Additionally, the senator has urged OPM to release details about job titles and descriptions to the public.
