WASHINGTON — Not everyone can be Marco Rubio.
Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is rolling out a new bill to crack down on government employees who are working more than one civil service job simultaneously, unless they have permission to do so.
While existing law prohibits full-time government workers from obtaining more than one federal position concurrently without permission, the Hawkeye State Republican is hoping to tighten those rules via the Dismantling Double Dippers Act, which would require annual audits of payroll records.
In tandem with the new bill, Ernst, who chairs the Senate DOGE Caucus, urged the Office of Personnel Management to study the extent to which government employees are double-dipping.
“The public, who is paying the salaries of federal employees and contractors, deserves access to this information and the federal government,” she wrote in a letter to OPM Director Scott Kupor obtained by The Post.
“Because OPM oversees policies related to hiring and managing the federal workforce, your agency is best situated to provide the leadership necessary to increase transparency and stop the timecard fraud by double-billing bureaucrats.”
Despite the existing rules against civil servants having more than one government job, there have been multiple known instances of workers managing to hold several federal positions at the same time.
For instance, between 2021 and 2024, a Department of Housing and Urban Development worker had several full-time contractor gigs with the federal government and, at times, even billed Uncle Sam for more than 24 hours of work in a day.
That worker, Crissy Monique Baker, pleaded guilty in July to making fraudulent claims about the work hours she put in, costing taxpayers an estimated $225,866 in losses.
She worked at HUD, AmeriCorps, and the National Institutes of Health, and at one point claimed to have done 26 hours’ worth of work on 13 days in a single month.
Another case cited by Ernst entailed an NSA contractor who had filed another Department of War contract at the same time and pled guilty in 2014, bilked taxpayers $65,265, and submitted 79 fraudulent timesheets.
The GOP senator also pointed to a case that didn’t involve actual double-dipping but is thematically relevant. It involved a top policy adviser at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), who claimed to have been moonlighting in another role at the CIA.
John Beale, who was sentenced to 32 months in jail back in 2014, managed to keep the scheme going for 13 years and ripped off taxpayers to the tune of $900,000, according to prosecutors.
While claiming to be carrying out critical missions for the CIA, he would actually go on jaunts overseas or relax at his vacation home in Massachusetts.
“This wasn’t a case of moonlighting per se, but the EPA should have known such an arrangement was illegal and better monitored the whereabouts and productivity of one of its senior staff members,” the senator argued.
To better enforce the existing law, the Dismantling Double Dippers Act would require OPM’s official watchdog to conduct an annual audit cross-checking government payrolls.
The senator also asked OPM to make information about government job titles and descriptions available to the public.
