So many federal bureaucrats, including those in power civil service employee unions, oppose changes sought by Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) reformers because they fear being exposed as double-dippers on the dole, according to a new report made public Thursday by Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa).

Ernst, who is chairman of the Senate DOGE Caucus, said caucus investigators have turned up extensive evidence that thousands of federal workers are receiving paychecks and benefit checks simultaneously, in large part because officials at the Department of Labor (DOL) and other major agencies have failed to perform standard “dupes” analytics on available databases.

“Why are government employee unions fighting so hard, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, to block [DOGE] from accessing the information necessary to stop fraud and abuse? The answer is obvious. The deep state doesn’t want those meddling whiz kids at DOGE exposing the Washington corruption that’s been hiding in plain sight for way too long. Unscrupulous bureaucrats have been ripping off public assistance programs intended to help the needy, disabled, hungry, out-of-work folks, veterans, small businesses, and even children who lost a parent,” according to the Ernst DOGE Caucus report.

The research cites multiple examples, including this one from the Department of Agriculture, where an anti-fraud investigator used her insider access to steal $36 million in federal food assistance benefits:

“A U.S. Department of Agriculture employee who worked in the office responsible for identifying food stamp fraud, for example, was ‘selling confidential government information to the very criminals she was supposed to catch.’ She enriched herself by abusing her ‘privileged access to confidential government databases’ to enable the theft of $36 million in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) funds meant to help low-income families put food on the table.”

In another example cited by the report, this one at the Social Security Administration (SSA), employees used fictitious children’s names to obtain illegal survivor benefits of actual dead adults.

“Using the records of real people who recently died, several Social Security Administration (SSA) claims specialists — in separate incidents — made up fictitious children to steal hundreds of thousands of dollars of survivor benefits. A SSA claims specialist robbed disabled beneficiaries by using her position to redirect their disability payments into her own PayPal account. Another SSA customer service representative diverted direct deposits from unsuspecting beneficiaries into accounts she controlled, “ the report explained.

The corruption is especially deep where employees use their access to receive both paychecks and benefit checks, a situation that was first identified during the COVID Pandemic when federal unemployment benefits were widely available and with little anti-fraud attention, according to the Ernst DOGE Caucus report.

“But no scheme is more blatant than the double dippers on the dole who are receiving two paychecks from taxpayers, one for being on the public payroll and another for being on unemployment rolls. So confident they won’t get caught, these fraudsters flagrantly filed jobless claims using their own names which are also on government paychecks, and get away with it, sometimes for years.

“This isn’t just one or two bad apples, either. Thousands of government employees appear to have been ripping off the unemployment system by claiming to be out of work. This includes hundreds who were also receiving overtime pay. A full-time Department of Labor employee received nearly $46,000 in jobless benefits while claiming every week for a year-and-a-half that he did not work or receive any income. 

“A USPS employee in Michigan collected hundreds of thousands of dollars in unemployment assistance from multiple states over four years. His scheme was only brought to an end after a vigilant supervisor noticed he was receiving mail at multiple addresses where he did not live along his delivery route. 

“For six years, a federal employee who worked at the Veterans Health Administration and then the IRS collected more than $130,000 in jobless benefits by claiming he was unemployed. A full-time SSA employee collected more than $30,000 in unemployment benefits over two years. 

“Hundreds of state bureaucrats are lining their pockets in the same way. In Georgia alone, more than 280 full-time state employees received a total of $6.7 million in unemployment benefits over two years. Some even filed unemployment claims from their government offices while on duty,” the report said.

In a letter to Acting Deputy DOL Inspector-General Michael Mikulka, Ernst noted that she first called attention to the illegal double-dipping during the pandemic.

“Several years ago, I brought attention to thousands of government employees who were receiving two paychecks from taxpayers, one for being on the public payroll and another for being on the unemployment rolls. These ‘unemployed’ included hundreds of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees who were also collecting overtime pay,” Erst told Mikulka.

“Staff at other agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Amtrak, and the U.S. Postal Service (USPS), were also claiming to be unemployed. Because most of these cases involved the enhanced unemployment benefits provided during the pandemic, I requested an investigation by the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PACE) in January 2023,” she continued.

The Iowa Republican told Mikulka she never heard of any action being taken in response to her request. “This isn’t entirely surprising since the committee was overwhelmed pursuing hundreds of billions of dollars of potential pandemic fraud,” Ernst observed.

Ernst asked Mikulka to launch an investigation, making full use of “the data analytics involving Social Security numbers the OIG used to identify billions in potentially fraudulent UI benefits.” Doing so should equip the DOL IG “for spotting government employees receiving both paychecks and unemployment checks or impostors using stolen identities of unsuspecting civil servants.”

List-matching is not a new invention in the area of official waste and fraud investigation. During the Reagan era, Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Inspector-General Richard Kusserow used matching analytics on lists of Social Security recipients and state death notices to find benefits still being paid to dead recipients.

Kusserow was one of Reagan’s first IG appointees, all of whom were described by then-White House Press Secretary James Brady as “being meaner than a bunch of junkyard dogs.”

Ernst also noted in the Senate DOGE Caucus Report that “with fraud growing increasingly sophisticated, there is no excuse for allowing preventable crimes to continue in plain sight. That is why I am giving my August 2025 Squeal Award to the double dealing on the dole who are enriching themselves at the expense of taxpayers and those in need.”