BREAKING: Roger Marshall’s Office Charged Taxpayers $44,000 to Pay for His Top Staffer’s Commute from Central Virginia to DC

Part of a disturbing pattern of Marshall and his staff using taxpayer money to fund their wasteful, personal travel to places that have nothing to do with Kansas or their work.

Topeka, Kansas — Breaking new reporting from POLITICO revealed that Senator Roger Marshall’s office charged taxpayers $44,000 to pay for a senior staff member’s commute from their home in central Virginia to his DC Senate office – an exorbitant expense that ethics experts say violates the spirit of the law.

Brent Robertson, Marshall’s chief of staff, charged taxpayers repeatedly for trips that raise ethics red flags. Among them was a $10,000 per diem payment – for only one weeklong trip to Washington, DC.

This comes after Roger Marshall himself faced questions for charging Kansans thousands of dollars to cover the cost of his flights to his million-dollar Florida home in 2024.

“Roger Marshall charged taxpayers thousands of dollars for trips to his luxury home in Florida and now his top staffer has charged them tens of thousands for his commute to work,” said Kansas Democratic Party Chair Jeanna Repass. “This needless, self-serving travel on the taxpayer dime is exactly the kind of corruption in Washington that Kansans hate.”

By Daniel Lippman

October 29, 2025

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 POLITICO 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.

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