Tens of thousands of federal employees stole taxpayers’ money by filing bogus pandemic loan requests.
Sen. Joni Ernst wants each of them fired.
“I hope this money can be recovered, and, to deter those who might ever think of trying to do this again in the future, those who abused the public trust will have their federal employment terminated,” the Iowa Republican said in a letter to Michael Horowitz, the inspector general leading the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee.
The employees were flagged by the committee’s Pandemic Analytics Center of Excellence, a data-driven attempt to sniff out fraud in the trillions of dollars of pandemic assistance that the federal government has paid out over the past three years.
PACE built a database of all pandemic loan applications filed with the Small Business Administration, matched it to lists of federal employees and came up with leads to investigate. It then worked with inspector general offices in various federal agencies to follow up.
“So far, this analysis has helped six agency OIGs match tens of thousands of employees with SBA loans for which they were not eligible,” PACE’s overseers at the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee said last month in a report to Congress.
Ms. Ernst tapped the double-dipping federal employees for her “Squeal award,” which she bestows on wasteful government spending. The award is derived from a campaign commercial in which Ms. Ernst, who grew up on an Iowa farm where she castrated pigs,...
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