Homeland Security and outside employment

Not the kind of off-duty work the rest of this section describes

Almost every agency here regulates officers working private security in uniform. That arrangement does not exist at CBP. There is no detail system, no employer paying for a uniformed officer, no scheduling vendor.

What there is instead is a rule about second jobs of any kind, sitting in the federal regulations that govern ethical conduct across the executive branch, supplemented for Homeland Security.

That has one practical advantage worth stating plainly: because the regulation is published in the continuously updated federal code rather than as a departmental PDF, what you read is current. No revision date to check, no wondering whether the version on the website is the one in force.

The same regulation covers several agencies on the same footing. Homeland Security designates its components as separate agencies for these purposes, including CBP, ICE, the Secret Service, the Coast Guard, TSA, immigration services, FEMA and the training center.

Approval before anything, paid or not

A CBP employee must obtain prior written approval before engaging in any outside employment or activity — and the regulation says with or without compensation. Volunteering can require approval where the role is the wrong kind.

The definition is deliberately wide: any non-federal employment, business activity, business relationship or covered activity involving the provision of personal services. It names officer, director, employee, agent, attorney, advisor, consultant, contractor, general partner, trustee and teacher.

The standard for approval, though, leans the officer's way. Approval shall be granted unless it is determined that the work is expected to involve conduct prohibited by statute or federal regulation. That is a presumption in favour, not a discretion to refuse.

An agency can exempt whole categories of work from needing approval at all, through its own internal instructions — and where no such instruction names who decides, the request goes to the agency's chief deputy ethics official.

What does not count

Four things fall outside the definition, and they matter because they are the common cases.

Speaking and writing generally do not count as outside employment, so long as they are not bundled with services that do — though paid speaking or writing in a personal capacity has its own rules elsewhere in the ethics regulations.

Nonprofit and community involvement does not count — charitable, religious, professional, social, fraternal, educational, recreational, public service or civic. But it does count, and needs approval, where the officer acts in a fiduciary capacity, provides professional services for compensation, gives advice for compensation beyond expenses, or the activity relates to their official duties.

Political activity otherwise permitted under the federal political activities statute does not count. And military service, state or federal, protected by the re-employment rights statute, does not count either.

The prohibitions are about trade and immigration

Where a municipal policy bars bars and pawnshops, CBP's bars anything touching the work.

No employee may work for, or support, a customs broker, an international carrier, a bonded warehouse, a foreign trade zone, a cartman, a law firm practising customs, immigration or agriculture law, an entity engaged in enforcing those laws, the import or export department of a business, or a business providing agriculture-related services connected to CBP's mission.

Nor may an employee, in any private capacity, do work related to importing or exporting goods or agricultural products requiring inspection, or to people entering or leaving the United States. A routine personal consumer purchase unconnected to running a business is excluded.

And the nonprofit carve-out does not rescue immigration work: no employee may do outside work for a nonprofit that involves assisting people with entry or departure, or with residency, citizenship, adjustment of status or other immigration benefits.

Separately, employees may not buy property owned by the government and under their own agency's control, or property seized or forfeited incident to their agency's functions, without an advance written waiver.

The rule about your household

This provision has no equivalent anywhere else in this section, and it reaches beyond the officer.

A CBP employee must notify their agency designee in writing where their spouse is employed in a position the employee themselves would be barred from holding. The same applies to a relative who is financially dependent on them or a member of their household — and to any other person in either category, relative or not.

The consequence follows automatically. The employee is disqualified from taking part in an official capacity in any particular matter involving those individuals or their employer.

That disqualification can be lifted, but only by the agency designee acting on the advice and clearance of the chief deputy ethics official, using the impartiality standard in the executive branch ethics regulations or a statutory waiver.

So a customs officer whose spouse works for a customs broker does not merely declare it — they step back from any matter involving that broker unless someone senior authorises otherwise.

One more thing worth knowing

An employee detailed to another agency for more than 30 calendar days becomes subject to the supplemental ethics regulations and instructions of the agency they are detailed to, not their own.

For a workforce that moves between components and task forces, that is a live consideration rather than a technicality: the outside job approved under one set of rules may sit differently under another.

And running underneath all of it is a standing obligation to disclose waste, fraud, abuse and corruption to the appropriate authorities.