Skip to content

Ernst Unmasks Double Dipping Bureaucrats

Full-time government employees caught claiming jobless benefits

WASHINGTON – U.S. Senator Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) is asking the Trump administration to conduct a government-wide review to put a stop to bureaucrats double dipping on the dole.

Ernst’s effort to ensure government employees are not illegally receiving unemployment benefits comes after federal and state employees have been exposed for stealing millions of dollars of unemployment benefits while collecting a taxpayer-funded paycheck.

It wasn’t just one or two bad apples, either. Hundreds, even thousands, of government employees appear to have been ripping off the unemployment system by claiming to be unemployed. Some of these fraudulent claims may also be the result of identity theft, like the California Employment Development Department employee who applied for and received unemployment benefits using the name of the state’s senior U.S. senator at the time,” wrote Ernst.

Click here to read the full letter.

Ernst is exposing some of the worst abuses by government employees, including:

  • 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 United States Postal Service employee in Michigan collected hundreds of thousands of dollars of unemployment assistance from multiple states over four years.
  • Another postal worker in Massachusetts applied for and obtained unemployment assistance while being employed by USPS.
  • A full-time Social Security Administration employee collected more than $30,000 in unemployment benefits over two years.
  • A Department of Veterans Affairs employee who worked at the Veterans Health Administration and then the Internal Revenue Service collected more than $130,000 by claiming he was unemployed.
    • During the six years he claimed to be out of work, he was promoted several times at his government jobs.
  • In Georgia, more than 280 full-time state employees received unemployment benefits over a two-year period. The fraudulent payments totaled more than $6.7 million, averaging about $23,700 per employee.
  • The Commonwealth of Massachusetts paid $315,340 in jobless benefits to at least 22 state employees while they were on the state’s payroll.

###