The top aide to Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas charged $44,000 to taxpayers over the past two years in commuting expenses between Washington and Lynchburg, Virginia, where he lives, according to public records.

The reimbursements paid to Brent Robertson are legal and comply with congressional rules governing expense reimbursements, according to experts who reviewed his arrangement, but they also said it was highly unusual and at odds with the intent behind those rules. Typically senior congressional aides are stationed either in Washington or their employer’s home state.

Not so for Robertson, Marshall’s longtime chief of staff, who bought a home about 190 miles from Washington in March 2024.

Between April of that year and the following September, he took 11 trips labeled “Lynchburg VA to Washington DC and Return” and got $16,000 back in expenses from the government, according to Senate expense records. The expenses covered “incidentals,” “transportation” and a “per diem,” which is not usually taxed.

Between October of last year and this past March, Robertson took 15 trips with the same label and got an additional $28,000 in expenses back. He secured a per diem payment of $10,000 for one trip to D.C. between Jan. 14 and Jan. 23, coinciding with the presidential inauguration.

Stanley Brand, an attorney who served as House general counsel under Speaker Tip O’Neill, said it appeared to be “a big, wide loophole” and said he had “never” heard of a similar arrangement.

“What if everybody decided to do that, let their staff live far away from their location, and then just charge it off to the government?” Brand said after reviewing the arrangement at Blue Light News’s request.

Robertson declined to comment. Neither Marshall’s office or other experts, including a Senate Democratic aide familiar with official reimbursements, could point to another case where a senior congressional staffer lived outside the Washington area or their employer’s home state and expensed travel costs in this way.

Payton Fuller, a spokesperson for Marshall, said the senator is permitted under Senate rules to designate a remote duty station for his employees, which would allow them to expense work trips to Washington. Marshall’s office shared documentation showing Robertson changing his duty station to Lynchburg before charging the trip expenses.

“After a gang shooting struck his wife’s vehicle outside their D.C. condo, Brent and his family made the decision last year to move to Virginia,” Fuller said in a statement. “Like dozens of other chiefs of staff who have duty stations outside of D.C., and in full accordance and approval of Senate ethics, rules, and guidelines, Brent is reimbursed for official travel to and from his home and duty station in Virginia.”

She declined to comment when asked whether Robertson, who is separately on track to earn more than $220,000 in salary this year, intends to keep charging regular travel to and from his Virginia home to Marshall’s official expense account.

The Republican and Democratic spokespeople for the Senate Rules and Administration Committee, which oversees the chamber’s personnel practices, declined to comment.

Dylan Hedtler-Gaudette, interim vice president of policy and government affairs at the nonprofit watchdog group Project on Government Oversight, questioned the arrangement after being briefed on the expenses. Robertson’s use of official funds, he said in an interview, “appears as though it’s purely personal, which is not what those funds are supposed to be used for.”

Senate expense rules prohibit spending taxpayer funds for personal use, and Hedtler-Gaudette said the expenses “violate the spirit” of those guidelines. “It would be one thing if he was traveling to Kansas because that’s the state that his boss is the senator from,” he said.

He also raised the concern that arrangements like Robertson’s, that “stretch the definition of what a duty station is and encompass the personal home of every staffer,” could proliferate.

Robertson’s expenses were paid out of Marshall’s Official Personnel and Office Expense Account, a $4 million annual allowance that encompasses staff salaries, representational costs and other office expenses. Marshall has spoken out against federal employees doing remote work and sponsored legislation to curtail the practice.

“I want to make it clear, I’m against teleworking from home,” he said last year. “I’m just against it overall at the government level.”

Robertson’s decision to live in Lynchburg and seek travel expenses back and forth is further complicated by the fact that he continued to own a Washington condo that he claimed as his primary residence until it was sold in May, according to D.C. property tax records. Publicly available copies of his tax bill show that lowered his property tax bills by hundreds of dollars during the period he was claiming travel expenses to and from Lynchburg.

After Blue Light News inquired about Robertson claiming a “homestead” tax deduction, Fuller said a “delay in processing” led to the error and that the “issue has been resolved.” Robertson, she said, recently paid about $700 in back taxes and fees owed to the D.C. government.

The Senate once again rebuked President Donald Trump on tariffs, a vote that comes as the president is in Asia touting tariffs and notching progress on trade agreements.

Senators on Tuesday voted 52-48 to terminate the national emergency Trump declared in order to impose 50 percent tariffs on most Brazilian goods in July. Five Republican Senators joined the Democrats in the vote: Thom Tillis (N.C.), Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Mitch McConnell (Ky.) and Rand Paul (Ky.), the measure’s co-sponsor.

The vote — the first in a series of three expected resolutions aiming to block President Trump’s tariffs on Brazil and Canada as well as his widespread global tariffs — comes amid bubbling tension in the Senate over how Trump’s trade war has affected farmers and small businesses.

Next week, the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments over whether Trump has overstepped his authority by using an emergency law to impose tariffs on nearly every country in the world.

“Emergencies are like war, famine [and] tornadoes,” said Paul, the most vocal opponent of Trump’s tariffs in the Senate. “Not liking someone’s tariffs is not an emergency. It’s an abuse of the emergency power and it’s Congress abdicating their traditional role in taxes.”

But the vote remains largely symbolic: Republican leaders in the House have blocked the chamber from voting to overrule the tariffs until March, protecting Republican members who are facing blowback from home state farmers and small businesses angry over the economic impact.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a co-sponsor on the Canada and global tariff resolutions, said he is hearing rising discontent among “Republican senators who go home and they just feel like they’re getting hit by a trade wrecking ball.”

“People come up and say ‘the tariffs are killing us.’ You go to the grocery store and everybody’s up in arms,” continued Wyden, a ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, which oversees trade issues.

Trump announced that he would impose a 50 percent tariff in July, in response to what he felt was an unfair legal case against former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro — a Trump ally — over his role in attempting to overturn the results of the country’s 2022 election, as well as over a Brazil’s policies on digital content, which has ensnared U.S. social media companies.

In his order imposing the tariffs, Trump declared a national emergency over “the scope and gravity of the recent policies, practices, and actions of the Government of Brazil constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat, which has its source in whole or substantial part outside the United States, to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States.”

That order has received pushback from some in Congress, including Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), who argued that by allowing the president to declare an emergency over a country’s treatment of a political ally would open the door to broader use of national emergencies to govern.

“Don’t lie and say there’s an energy emergency when there isn’t,” said Kaine, who sponsored the resolution. “Don’t lie and say Brazil’s prosecution of a president is an emergency when it’s not. Don’t use the lie to increase the price of coffee by 40 percent in a year. Don’t use the lie to punish a country with whom we have a trade surplus. Don’t lie and don’t hurt my citizens.”

Sen. Tom Cotton wasn’t fast enough in 2022 to block Senate passage of legislation that would make daylight savings time permanent. Three years later, he wasn’t about to repeat that same mistake.

The Alabama Republican was on hand Tuesday afternoon to thwart a bipartisan effort on the chamber floor to pass a bill that would put an end to changing the clocks twice a year, including this coming Sunday.

“If permanent Daylight Savings Time becomes the law of the land, it will again make winter a dark and dismal time for millions of Americans,” said Cotton in his objection to a request by Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) to advance the bill by unanimous consent.

“For many Arkansans, permanent daylight savings time would mean the sun wouldn’t rise until after 8:00 or even 8:30am during the dead of winter,” Cotton continued. “The darkness of permanent savings time would be especially harmful for school children and working Americans.”

A cross-party coalition of lawmakers has been trying for years to make daylight savings time the default, which would result in more daylight in the evening hours with less in the morning, plus bring to a halt to biannual clock adjustments.

President Donald Trump endorsed the concept this spring, calling the changing of the clocks “a big inconvenience and, for our government, A VERY COSTLY EVENT!!!”

His comments coincided with a hearing, then a markup, of Scott’s legislation in the Senate Commerce Committee. It set off an intense lobbying battle in turn, pitting the golf and retail industries — which is advocating for permanent daylight savings time —against the likes of sleep doctors and Christian radio broadcasters — who prefer standard time.

Joined by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) in calling for the Senate to pass the bill Tuesday, Scott cited states’ rights as a major reason for his support for the so-called “Sunshine Protection Act.”

“It allows the people of each state to choose what best fits their needs and the needs of their families,” said Scott. “The American people are sick and tired of changing their clocks twice a year. It’s confusing, unnecessary and completely outdated.”

There was hope earlier this year that momentum was growing for the quixotic legislative campaign after progress stalled following senators’ success in 2022 to pass a version of Scott’s bill by unanimous consent — an outcome typically reserved for noncontroversial bills that took lawmakers by surprise.

Cotton on Tuesday decried the “abject failure” of the last time Congress enacted permanent daylight savings time in 1974, pledging to always oppose legislation that would do just that.

He said he took “full responsibility” for dropping the ball in 2022, explaining he hadn’t adequately communicated the extent of his opposition and that he had expected another senator to object.