Waste of the Day: Federal Employees Lied To “Work” Multiple Jobs

Topline: Working for the government is supposed to be a full-time job, but several employees have been caught working for several federal agencies simultaneously — or at least claiming to be.

Federal double- and triple dippers

In a Sep. 23 letter to the new Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor, Sen. Joni Ernst identified $1.2 million in salary paid to employees with duplicative jobs.  

Key facts: From 2021 to 2024, then-Department of Housing and Urban Development employee Crissy Monique Baker also worked remotely as a contractor for AmeriCorps and the National Institutes of Health. She was paid almost $226,000 for hours she never worked, including 13 days in June when she claimed to be working 26 hours per day. Baker pleaded guilty to fraud this June. 

Daniel Glauber was convicted in 2017 of working for both OPM and the National Security Agency for four months and earning over $70,000. Both jobs were in-person, but Glauber wasn’t showing up to either one, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. 

Attorney John Beale earned $900,000 over 13 years by telling his managers at the Environmental Protection Agency that he often missed work because he also had a job with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia. He admitted in 2013 that he was actually traveling overseas and spending time at his vacation home in Massachusetts, and was sentenced to prison. 

More examples

Former Peace Corps human resources employee Evester Edd is currently facing criminal charges for allegedly falsifying time cards to earn tens of thousands of dollars from the Federal Housing and Finance Agency and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Ernst noted that “According to his LinkedIn profile, he was ‘key in the development’ of the Peace Corps’ remote work policy, which he presumably took advantage of to get away with his job juggling.” 

Supporting quote: Ernst’s letter also called on Kupor to fulfill an open records request filed by Open the Books in 2022 asking for the names, salaries and other information of federal employees that had been redacted from previous record productions.  

“While some government managers do not know, or even care, where their employees are, I tried tracking down the exact locations of the federal workforce with the help of the nonprofit transparency group Open the Books. The quest turned into a game of bureaucrat hide-and-seek with the Biden administration redacting the names of 350,861 rank-and-file employees and the worksites of over 281,000 bureaucrats,” Ernst wrote. 

Search all federal, state and local salaries and vendor spending with the world’s largest government spending database at OpenTheBooks.com.  

Summary: The easiest way for the public to have oversight of federal employees is for the government to commit to transparency. The names, salaries, work locations and more of all taxpayer-funded workers should be available to all. 

The #WasteOfTheDay is brought to you by the forensic auditors at OpenTheBooks.com.

This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.