While millions of jobless Americans struggled to make ends meet during devastating government-mandated lockdowns, thousands of federal employees double-dipped from taxpayer-funded pandemic unemployment funds while mostly working from home.
Despite staying on taxpayers’ payroll during the height of the pandemic panic, greedy bureaucrats in the Internal Revenue Service, Transportation Security Administration, Federal Emergency Management Agency, United States Postal Service, Amtrak, and the Secret Service defrauded taxpayers out of millions more dollars under the guise of Covid unemployment fund and wage assistance programs.
In the Department of Homeland Security alone, nearly 2,000 ineligible or potentially ineligible employees received lost wage assistance designated for unemployed Americans, a 2022 DHSIG report found.
Thanks to rushed and lax standards, whereby “claimants only needed to self-certify they met eligibility requirements when they filed for [pandemic unemployment assistance] benefits,” more than $8.8 million in taxpayer funds were funneled to 638 DHS employees unlawfully. FEMA’s state workforce agencies also paid out $1.2 million in “lost wages assistance” to 935 DHS workers who were “fully employed.” At least 366 of those ineligible DHS officials were actually paid overtime during the period they were approved, receiving up to hundreds of dollars per week on top of normal unemployment benefits.
The illegal grift by federal “fraudsters” earned the attention of Republican Sen. Joni Ernst and her January “make ‘em squeal” award, a monthly effort led by Ernst to expose government corruption and “make Washington more competent and less wasteful.”
“Thousands of active federal employees may have falsely claimed that
