Military police and outside employment

There is no off-duty policy

Every municipal department in this section has a document called something like off-duty employment. The Defense Department has no such thing. What it has is the Joint Ethics Regulation, reissued on 15 May 2024 and signed by the Secretary of Defense, and a short supplement to the government-wide ethics rules in the Code of Federal Regulations.

Outside employment appears in the Joint Ethics Regulation as paragraph 2-502, which runs to two sentences, in a chapter that also covers gambling, bribery, commercial dealings and gifts at ship launches. The fuller statement is in the chapter on non-federal entities, and the approval requirement itself sits in the regulation.

This is the strongest case of a pattern the section keeps meeting: the document is not called what you would search for, and the substance is not where the title says it is. California's chapter is about incompatible activities; Georgia's rules are in the administrative code; Washington's are in a bargaining agreement. Here it is an ethics regulation, and the paragraph you need is three lines long.

One thing to be careful of if you go looking yourself. Guidance published across the services still cites JER 2-303 as the off-duty employment paragraph. That was true of the previous edition. In the May 2024 reissue, 2-303 is about limits on the use of government resources, and outside employment moved to 2-502. Plenty of installation legal pages have not caught up.

Most people need no permission at all

The starting position is stated plainly: personnel are not precluded from participating in outside employment, business activities or volunteer activities in their personal capacities.

Prior approval is required only of someone who files a financial disclosure report — an OGE Form 450 or 278e — and then only for a business activity or compensated employment with a prohibited source. Everyone else needs nothing. And where approval is required, the regulation says it shall be granted unless a determination is made that the work is expected to involve conduct prohibited by statute or regulation.

That makes this the most permissive regime on the site, ahead of the Interior Department, which held the position until now on nearly identical wording. A soldier working weekends at a hardware store files nothing, tells nobody and asks no one — unless their commander has said otherwise, which is the next section and the whole of the difference.

Two mechanisms soften it further. A component's ethics official may, by written notice, exempt whole categories of employment in advance, on a determination that work in those categories would generally be approved. And the Defense Department General Counsel may waive any provision of the supplement outright, in writing, supported by findings, narrow in scope and limited in duration.

What a commander can do about it

Here is the counterweight, and it is why the two sentences matter more than their length.

First, any supervisor may require the people under them to report outside employment before starting it, whether or not the regulation would otherwise require approval. The default is permission, but the default can be switched off locally without amending anything.

Second, the head of the organisation or the supervisor may prohibit the employment altogether where they believe it will create a conflict that cannot be resolved by recusal, will detract from readiness, or will pose a security risk.

Those last two tests appear nowhere else on this site. Civilian departments ask whether a second job interferes with duty, brings discredit, or creates a conflict of interest. Readiness is a different question — it is about whether you can deploy, not whether you turn up rested. And a security risk is a question about who your employer is, which for someone holding a clearance can close off work that would be unremarkable for a city police officer.

Neither test comes with a definition, a form or an appeal route. Compare Illinois State Police, where a refusal must state its reasons on the form, or the Highway Patrol, where a commander's refusal is automatically reviewed a level up. Here the judgement sits with the commander and the regulation supplies the words they judge against.

Breaking it is a military offence

This is the real distinction, and no civilian agency in the section can match it.

Provisions of the Joint Ethics Regulation printed in bold italics are punitive. Someone subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice who violates one may be punished under Article 92 — failure to obey a lawful order or regulation. The regulation states it, the Secretary of Defense approved the punitive paragraphs specifically, and the enforcement chapter repeats it.

Everywhere else in this section, working an unapproved second job is a personnel matter. It might cost you the permit, a written reprimand or, at Baltimore and King County, the right to work off-duty at all until something is put right. Here it can be a criminal charge under military law.

For National Guard members not serving under federal orders, the enforcement route is the applicable state code of military justice instead. Which state you are in decides what happens to you.

Violations may also bring criminal prosecution, civil action or administrative action, and the regulation is explicit that it creates no right or benefit enforceable by anyone against the United States.

The permit is a line on your annual disclosure

Where approval is required, it is not recorded on a separate form. Approval of the business activity or compensated outside employment is annotated on the employee's annual financial disclosure report, and supervisors are told to annotate their approval as a comment on that report.

So the permit and the conflict-of-interest declaration are the same document, reviewed on the same cycle. The supervisor's review has a deadline — 14 calendar days from the filer's submission, extendable by the responsible ethics official — and their signature records a determination that the reported interests, including outside activities and positions, present no conflict.

That is a different design from anything else here. Kansas City replaced annual renewal with continuous verification in a scheduling platform; the Highway Patrol ties the permit's life to the performance appraisal. This ties it to the financial disclosure, which means the reviewer looking at your second job is looking at your investments on the same screen.

Nothing in the supplement stops a supervisor giving written approval separately as well.

Your rank, your uniform and your own face

The rules on using who you are turn out to be more precise than most, and one of them is very new.

You may not use your official title, official photographs, position or organisation name in connection with anything done in a personal capacity. But you may use military rank and your service as part of your name — Captain Smith, U.S. Navy — in the same way as Mr or Ms, unless it could discredit the Department or give the appearance of sponsorship or endorsement.

Then the provision written for the present decade. Personnel are prohibited from monetising their name, image or likeness as it pertains to their status as a service member. Use of official position expressly includes any reference to your status, name, image or likeness — and photographs that display a connection to that status, the regulation's own examples being a photograph in uniform or one wearing an identifying lanyard or lapel pin.

Private gain is defined to include advertising revenue, sponsorships and sponsorship agreements, affiliate marketing agreements and the promotion of commercial ventures on personal social media accounts. Nowhere else in this section is any of that addressed at all.

The paragraph closes by saying it does not preclude compensated outside employment where that is otherwise permitted. The line being drawn is not between earning and not earning. It is between being paid for what you do and being paid for who you are.

You may not sell to anyone junior to you

Personnel may not knowingly solicit, or make solicited sales to, personnel junior in rank, grade or position, or to their family members, on or off duty. The list of what this covers is given: insurance, stocks, mutual funds, real estate, cosmetics, household supplies, vitamins and other goods and services.

Both the soliciting and the resulting sale are prohibited, but a solicitation is necessary for a violation — if a junior member approaches you and asks to buy, absent coercion or intimidation, that sale is not prohibited. Unsolicited sales of your own personal property, and ordinary retail transactions including during off-duty employment, are fine.

It reaches your household as well: personal commercial solicitation by a spouse or other household member to those junior in rank may give rise to the appearance that the senior member is using public office for personal gain.

Every other agency here restricts what work you may do or where you may do it. This restricts who your customers may be, by their rank relative to yours, and it follows you home.

Board service is rationed by rank

Service on a company board is limited on a sliding scale, and the scale is set out by grade.

Officers in the grades of O-9 and O-10 may not serve on the board of any company that does business with the Department or focuses its business principally on military personnel. The same bar applies to regular component O-7 and O-8 officers.

Reserve officers at O-7 and O-8 who have served more than 179 days on active duty in the preceding 365 must resign from the board of a company focused on military personnel, and must obtain an ethics determination to continue on the board of one that does business with the Department.

Below that, the restriction narrows to a specific kind of job rather than a rank: regular component officers at O-6 and below and enlisted personnel at E-9 who serve in a leadership position spanning an entire installation — the examples given are base commander and base command sergeant major — need an ethics determination before joining such a board.

Both categories are defined rather than left to judgement. Companies that do business with the Department are those on the $25,000 list, published annually, which includes universities, think tanks and non-profits holding grants as well as defense contractors. Companies focusing principally on military personnel are described as including insurers whose clientele is predominantly military families, financial planning firms in the same position, and military-focused credit unions and banks.

Enlisted members get there by a different route

A whole chapter exists because the criminal conflict-of-interest statutes do not apply to everyone in uniform in the same way.

Section 208 of the criminal code — the financial conflict-of-interest provision — applies to officers of the active and reserve components, but not to enlisted members of the services or to Title 32 National Guard members. Rather than leave a gap, the regulation imposes an equivalent prohibition on them by regulation instead, with the same exceptions and authorisations available.

Three further statutes — sections 203, 205 and 207, covering representation and post-employment — simply do not apply to enlisted members or Title 32 Guard members at all.

Section 209, on salary supplementation, is handled the same way as 208: it does not apply directly, so the regulation restates it. Enlisted and Guard members may not receive any supplementation of their federal pay from any source other than the federal government, or from the treasury of a state, county or municipality. That last clause is worth noticing, because it contemplates exactly the arrangement a Guard member policing under state orders might find themselves in.

The practical effect is that two people doing the same work at the same installation can be bound by a criminal statute or by a regulation carrying an Article 92 charge, depending on whether they are commissioned.

The rest of it

A few provisions that do not belong to outside employment but shape what an off-duty member may do.

Gambling is prohibited with government equipment, on government property or while on duty. But private wagers among personnel are permitted while off duty, if they are based on a personal relationship, transacted entirely outside the federal workplace or within assigned government quarters, and within the limits of local law.

Extra pay for extra services is prohibited by statute, and the regulation points at it directly.

Retired members and reservists not on active duty may use terms of address and rank provided they clearly indicate their retired or reserve status — but any use of a military title is prohibited if it discredits the Department or creates an appearance of sponsorship or endorsement, and overseas commanders may restrict it further.

And personal participation in outside organisations is expressly open: personnel may become members of, and participate in the management of, non-federal entities in a personal capacity, subject to the board limits above. You are not acting in a personal capacity, though, if the invitation came primarily because of your assignment or duty position.