Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) recently announced that she is not seeking re-election in 2026, but her exposure Tuesday of federal workers illegally drawing paychecks from multiple agencies shows the Iowa Republican isn’t backing off the anti-waste and fraud crusade that she has led since coming to the Senate in 2015.

“As you know, federal employees are prohibited from being paid for more than one full-time position for the government at the same time, with some limited exceptions,” Ernst told U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) Director Scott Kupor in a September 22 letter made available to The Washington Stand. “Yet, I’ve identified numerous examples of full-time federal employees moonlighting for other agencies or government contractors without approval or knowledge of their managers.”

As an example, Ernst told Kupor that “from 2021 to 2024, a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) employee held multiple other full-time government contractor jobs, frequently billing taxpayers for more than 24 hours of work in a single day. In addition to HUD, she was paid by AmeriCorps and the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Since she teleworked in all three positions, she was able to hide her overlapping jobs and get away with billing taxpayers $225,866 for hours she never worked. She claimed she worked 26 hours on 13 of the 21 workdays in a single month.”

The former HUD employee — Crissy Monique Baker of Fairfax, Virginia — pleaded guilty June 26 and will be sentenced September 30 in federal District Court.

“The investigation that led to her guilty plea required work by investigators in Offices of the Inspector General for the following agencies: AmeriCorps; Housing and Urban Development; the Department of Energy; the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation; the Department of Homeland Security; the General Services Administration; the Department of Health and Human Services; and the Department of Treasury (Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration), the Department of Defense (Defense Criminal Investigate Service), and the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation, along with the FBI Washington Field Office,” according to the HUD Inspector-General.

In another illustration of the problem, Ernst told Kupor that “beginning in 2023, a senior human resources official at the Peace Corps was also employed as a contractor for two other government agencies, the Federal Housing and Finance Agency [FHFA] and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission [NRC]. He falsified timecards submitted to the different agencies and double billed taxpayers for tens of thousands of dollars. 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.”

Ernst further pointed to examples of federal workers at OPM and NSA double-billing taxpayers for work they were not performing.

“A full-time contractor for OPM was simultaneously employed full-time for NSA. While required to work on-site at both jobs, he wasn’t showing up at either. He got away with it for four months, during which time he double billed taxpayers for $70,646. A full-time contractor at the NSA headquarters was actually working for another DOD contractor for nearly a year. She submitted 79 fraudulent timesheets for the NSA job, costing taxpayers $65,265 for hours she never worked,” Ernst told Kupor.

A decision in 2022 by an unknown official of the Biden administration resulted in the redaction of names and related information for more than 350,000 federal workers and the worksites of 281,000. The names had been requested in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed by the non-profit government watchdog Open the Books. The redactions seriously hampered Ernst’s efforts, and she worked with the non-profit to understand how double and triple paychecks going to one federal worker could continue for months and even years without being detected.

“Each of these cases demonstrates how easy it is for corrupt public employees to pull down a pair of paychecks without actually earning either, sometimes for years or even a decade or more. 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 non-profit 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 explained.

Ernst gave her “September 2025 Squeal Award to the double-dealing bureaucrats bringing home two or more paychecks but doing nothing.” She is also introducing legislation — the Dismantling Double Dippers Act of 2025 — to mandate that federal personnel officials develop the capability of cross-checking government payrolls to prevent employees from drawing paychecks from more than one department or agency.

Kupor, as OPM Director, is the chief human resource manager for all civilian federal employees, and his agency maintains the most comprehensive database about career and non-career government workers. Ernst, who is co-chairman of the Senate DOGE Caucus and a member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, wonders if OPM can do the data cross-checks that should catch employees drawing paychecks from more than one department or agency.

Mclaurine Pinover, OPM spokesman, told The Washington Stand that the personnel agency “supports reviewing the available data to ensure federal workers are not working multiple jobs within the government. Unfortunately, some bad actors are taking advantage of the fact there are over 100 HR systems in the federal government that don’t communicate with one another. OPM is working to tackle this issue and others in order to root out fraud and abuse.”