Interior and outside employment

A third answer to the same question

Federal law enforcement officers do not share one rule on outside employment. Each department writes its own supplement to the government-wide ethics standards, and reading three of them side by side shows how differently the same question gets answered.

Homeland Security requires written approval before any outside employment, paid or unpaid, and then presumes the answer is yes — approval is granted unless there is a reason to refuse. Justice requires approval too, and presumes nothing: the request is granted only on a positive finding that the work is not prohibited.

Interior starts further back. Most employees need no approval at all. The requirement bites only where the outside employer is a prohibited source — and where it does bite, the standard is the permissive one: approval shall be granted unless a determination is made that the employment is expected to involve conduct prohibited by statute or federal regulation.

So a park ranger taking a weekend job at a shop, a garage or a school is not filing anything. A ranger taking a job with a company that does business with the Park Service is.

This is the department that polices the national parks, the public lands, the wildlife refuges and, through the Bureau of Indian Affairs, a share of the police departments on tribal lands. Roughly 3,400 officers, which makes it the fourth largest law enforcement contingent in the executive branch after Homeland Security, Justice and Veterans Affairs.

Who counts as a prohibited source depends on your badge

The mechanism that decides all of this is worth understanding, because it produces an outcome that surprises people: the same second job can require approval for one Interior officer and none for another.

A prohibited source is broadly anyone seeking official action from your agency, doing or seeking to do business with it, conducting activities it regulates, or whose interests may be substantially affected by how you do your job.

The question is what counts as “your agency”. The regulation designates eleven components as separate agencies from one another for this purpose — among them the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the U.S. Geological Survey.

The regulation's own example makes the point: a company conducting activities regulated by the Bureau of Land Management is not a prohibited source for a National Park Service employee — unless that company also seeks action from, does business with, or is regulated by the Park Service itself.

But an employee in a component not on that list — the Office of the Secretary, the Solicitor's Office, an Assistant Secretary's immediate staff — is treated as an employee of the whole Department. For them, anyone doing business with any Interior bureau is a prohibited source. The regulation works that example too: a part-time paralegal in the Solicitor's Office must get approval for a second job with a company that does business with the Geological Survey.

For an officer, the practical question is not what the job is. It is which bureau the badge says.

The Survey is the exception inside the exception

One component is carved out and pointed the other way. An employee of the U.S. Geological Survey must obtain written approval from the USGS deputy ethics counselor before engaging in any outside employment — not merely employment with a prohibited source.

So the same department contains both the most permissive regime in this comparison and one of the strictest, and which applies to you depends entirely on which bureau you are in.

There is a release valve. The Survey may issue instructions exempting whole categories of employment from the requirement in advance, where it determines that employment of that kind would generally be approved and is unlikely to involve prohibited conduct.

That is a mechanism worth noting on its own. Rather than deciding each request, the agency decides each class of request once, in public, and takes itself out of the loop for the rest.

Approval is bought with a promise to recuse

Where approval is required, the request has to carry five things: the employee's name, title, office address and telephone number; a brief description of their official duties; the nature of the outside employment, including a full description of the specific duties or services to be performed; the name and address of the prospective employer; and one more.

The last item is the interesting one. The request must include a statement that the employee currently has no official duties involving a matter that affects the outside employer, and will disqualify himself from future participation in matters that could directly affect them.

So the approval is not simply permission. It is an exchange: the officer gets the second job, and in the same document commits in advance to standing aside from any official matter touching that employer, indefinitely.

A revised request goes in on any significant change — in the nature of the outside employment, or in the employee's own official position. A promotion or a transfer can make a previously unremarkable second job into a problem, and the duty to re-file sits with the officer.

Bureau by bureau, the specific bans

Beyond the general scheme, three components carry flat prohibitions written into the regulation.

Geological Survey employees shall execute no surveys or examinations for private parties or corporations. It is a statutory prohibition, and it is the oldest thing on this page — the provision dates to the Act that created the Survey.

Bureau of Land Management employees may not engage in outside employment as real estate agents or realty specialists. And then a small, humane detail that no other policy in this section matches: such employees are not required to cancel a real estate license, and may maintain it on an inactive basis. The rule reaches the work, not the qualification — which matters to anyone who spent money and time earning one.

Set that against the range elsewhere. Cook County treats acting as a real estate broker or agent as secondary employment while owning property is not. Illinois State Police counts the rental property itself. Honolulu permits real estate work but requires a signed license disclosure. Interior bars the work for one bureau and lets the license sit.

Standing for office in your own tribe

The Bureau of Indian Affairs provisions are the closest thing to tribal policing anywhere in this section, and they are drawn with some care.

Employees in the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, or in the BIA, may not hold a position on a tribal election board, or on a tribal school board which oversees BIA schools. Both are places where a federal employee would be administering something their own employer funds or oversees.

But the note attached to that prohibition matters more than the prohibition. Except for those two boards, an eligible person employed in Indian Affairs or the BIA may become a candidate for office in their local tribe, or be appointed as a representative of it, with prior approval from the Deputy Assistant Secretary.

There is a second carve-out in the land rules. Interior employees and their spouses and minor children are generally prohibited from acquiring or retaining any claim, permit, lease or other right granted by the Department in federal lands. Indian Affairs and BIA employees, and their families, are expressly excepted where the rights are in federal lands controlled by the Department for the benefit of Indians or Alaska Natives.

Both provisions are recognising the same fact: BIA officers are frequently members of the communities they police, and a rule written without that in mind would bar them from ordinary participation in their own tribe.

As of December 2023 the BIA employed 166 uniformed police officers, 195 special agents and 162 correctional officers. Most policing on tribal lands is run by tribes under their own authority; the BIA administers a minority of it, and those officers are federal employees.

What is not employment at all

The definition of employment is deliberately broad, then carved.

It means any form of non-federal business relationship involving the provision of personal services by the employee, with or without compensation — as officer, director, employee, agent, attorney, consultant, contractor, general partner, trustee, teacher or speaker. It includes writing done under an arrangement with another person for production or publication.

Unpaid counts. That matters: Orange County reaches the same conclusion for security work and says so loudly, while several agencies here treat volunteering as the easy case.

What it does not include is participation in a nonprofit charitable, religious, professional, social, fraternal, educational, recreational, public service or civic organisation — unless that participation involves providing professional services or advice for compensation beyond reimbursement of actual expenses.

So sitting on the committee of a local club is not outside employment. Being paid to give it professional advice is.

One more exception is worth knowing for anyone who works on public land. The prohibition on holding Department-granted rights in federal lands does not touch recreational or other personal, non-commercial use of those lands by an employee or their family, on the same terms available to the general public. A ranger can still camp in a national park.