A prominent New York state senator, Jessica Ramos, has repeatedly used campaign funds to pay for travel expenses while simultaneously billing taxpayers for the same charges, according to records and former staff members interviewed by The New York Times.
In just one expense category — train fare — The Times identified more than 50 instances in which the dollar amounts Ms. Ramos’s campaign paid for Amtrak tickets exactly matched the amounts she received during the same periods from the Legislature’s expense reimbursement system.
Ms. Ramos, a Queens Democrat who last year unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York City, also repeatedly billed her State Senate campaign for hotels while receiving legislative stipends to cover lodging and other costs.
Her billing for hotel stays during one week in April 2024 was a typical example, the former staff members said.
Traveling with one of her aides on April 15, Ms. Ramos checked in under her name to the Home2 Suites on Metro Park Road in Albany for a three-night stay. They moved to the Hampton Inn and Suites in downtown Albany on April 18, also under Ms. Ramos’s name, and stayed another two nights, records show.
Ms. Ramos billed her campaign for the cost of the two hotel stays — $618 — and also submitted a voucher to collect per diems that allowed her to recoup that full amount plus an additional $183, The Times found.
Such double billing was so frequent that one former campaign staff member complained in September 2022 that it was eating into the funds Ms. Ramos had raised for state re-election bids, the former staff member told The Times. That account was corroborated by two other former aides.
The staff member who complained asked why the senator was billing the campaign for travel when the Legislature was already covering it but received no answer, the three former aides said.
They said they did not know how much money in total Ms. Ramos charged to both her campaign and the Senate, but a Times analysis of state records found more than $30,000 in overlapping billing from 2021 to 2025.
The senator received a total of $36,767 in lodging stipends, known as per diems, and train fare reimbursements from the Legislature during that period. She charged $33,049 to her campaign for hotels and Amtrak tickets, records show.
Ms. Ramos, who first rose to prominence working at City Hall for former Mayor Bill de Blasio as the face of his outreach to the Hispanic community, has been chairwoman of the Senate’s influential Labor Committee since she joined the upper chamber in 2019. More recently, she became known for running for mayor of New York herself before dropping out to endorse former Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in his losing bid against Zohran Mamdani.
She did not respond to repeated requests for comment made by phone, in person and via text messages. She has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The senator’s billing occurred against a backdrop of permissive rules in New York State.
The laws around state travel payments allow for legislators, but not their staff members, to recover costs in the form of per diems and direct reimbursements when traveling for official business.
Campaign finance laws permit them to use money raised from donors for electioneering but also for a wide range of purposes so long as they are in the “performance of the duties of his or her public office.” That includes paying for staff members to ride trains and stay in hotels.
Ethics experts say it is something of an open question whether lawmakers can legally receive per diems for lodging, in particular, while also billing their campaigns for the hotel stays. Those per diems are paid out at flat rates — $203 for overnight travel and $86 for day trips — and can be collected without submitting receipts for hotel charges.
The rules around billing for train fare are more clear cut. All state lawmakers must submit receipts for specific trips when applying for legislative reimbursements and certify that those costs had not already been recouped from any other funding source, which would include campaign coffers.
Ms. Ramos, who was elected to the Senate in 2018, was not the only member of the Legislature who used campaign funds to pay for travel while on official business.
A Times analysis found that from 2021 to 2025, at least 130 current and former members used their campaigns to pay for lodging or train fare while also receiving legislative reimbursements.
Those records alone are not evidence of double billing, however.
Campaign expenditure reports do not specify whose travel the funds are being used to cover, and it is possible that the charges were billed appropriately to cover expenses of staff members, and not the lawmakers themselves.
If the charges billed to Ms. Ramos’s campaign paid for travel by her staff and not Ms. Ramos, it would raise no ethical concerns.
But two of the former aides to Ms. Ramos said they were aware that she had charged her own hotels and train tickets to her campaign while also receiving state funds for those purposes.
One of them, Astrid Aune, worked for Ms. Ramos from 2021 to 2025, including as her chief of staff, and also worked on her State Senate campaigns. She said that the senator regularly received per diems and reimbursements from the Legislature for lodging and Amtrak tickets and then shared the hotel rooms with female staff members so she could also expense the stays to her campaign.
“The Senate never proactively gave any training to staff about how per diem payments worked or which expenses qualified for reimbursement,” Ms. Aune said.
The other staff member who confirmed Ms. Ramos’s double billing spoke on condition of anonymity out of fear of professional repercussions.
A third former aide, Luis Escobar, who spent years working as a fund-raiser for the senator before leaving her State Senate campaign in July 2025, said he was asked to provide a campaign credit card for her Senate office to book Ms. Ramos’s train tickets and hotel rooms.
“I thought it was perfectly normal for her to pay for it out of the campaign funds,” he said. Mr. Escobar added that he was not aware she was also getting reimbursed by the Senate for the same expenses.
The former staff members interviewed by The Times said Ms. Ramos constantly complained about being short of money. Her campaign was also frequently in the red, they said, and one former staff member said Ms. Ramos would sometimes have to call donors to raise money so she could reimburse aides who paid for hotels or other items out of their own pockets.
Government watchdogs said that, depending on the fact pattern, any double billing for expenses could run afoul of rules or even violate the law.
Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a nonpartisan government accountability group, took an even harder line.
“No one in either private or public life is entitled to double dip,” said Ms. Lerner, who had no specific knowledge of Ms. Ramos’s billing. “If you’re reimbursed for a travel expense from one source, it’s illegal — it’s a fraud — to receive a second reimbursement.”
To examine Ms. Ramos’s billing, The Times compared campaign disclosure records to her state travel documents, interviewed the former staff members, and obtained records of credit card transactions, emails and text messages about some of the expenditures.
Over the past five years, Ms. Ramos’s campaign spent more than $19,800 on lodging during periods when she was traveling on state business and also receiving per diems to cover lodging and other expenses, records show.
And the Times analysis showed that no state lawmaker spent more campaign money on train fare while also receiving reimbursements than Ms. Ramos did.
On at least 57 occasions, the charges to her campaign for Amtrak fare matched the amounts she claimed as reimbursements for official Senate travel.
On a state voucher covering travel on March 8 and 9 of 2023, for example, Ms. Ramos was reimbursed by the Senate for $140 for two Amtrak tickets. Her campaign records show an Amtrak charge of $140 on March 8.
In another instance, for her train ride to Albany to attend the first day of the legislative session in 2024, Ms. Ramos received $59 from the Senate for train fare. Her campaign reported spending the identical amount on an Amtrak ticket the next day.
From March 24 to 26 of last year, as she was announcing legislation to support fired federal employees, the Senate reimbursed her for $120 in train fare to and from Albany. Her campaign reported spending $120 on an Amtrak ticket on the 24th.
It was not clear whether any of those instances were examples of prohibited double billing. The former staff members interviewed by The Times said her State Senate campaign routinely paid for Ms. Ramos’s travel, but they did not retain detailed travel or financial records after leaving their jobs.
The Times repeatedly asked Ms. Ramos to provide campaign receipts that might show whether the expenses charged to her campaign went to cover her staff members’ travel. She did not respond to those requests.
(State law requires campaign treasurers to retain underlying receipts for expenses for five years, but not to make them available for public inspection.)
In addition to the interviews with former staff members, The Times obtained records describing specific instances in which Ms. Ramos appears to have billed her campaign for her own travel.
One text message from a State Senate staff member about an Amtrak fare, for example, refers to “Jessica’s ticket.” Another mentions using the campaign credit card “to book room for Jessica” and an aide.
The former scheduler in Ms. Ramos’s State Senate office, Denise Vernal, also confirmed in a brief phone call that she booked hotels for Ms. Ramos using a credit card that the senator provided to her. In text messages reviewed by The Times, she described using a campaign credit card to pay for the senator’s travel.
The executive director of the State Legislative Ethics Commission, which oversees the conduct of lawmakers, declined to comment. A spokesman for Senate Democrats did not respond to a request for comment.
James M. McGuire, a former prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office, said submitting a voucher to the state seeking reimbursement for the cost of Amtrak tickets to travel to Albany for legislative business, with knowledge that campaign funds had been or would be used to pay for the same tickets, could be a misdemeanor.
He said it could rise to a felony if such a voucher was submitted with intent to defraud the state.
In June, Ms. Ramos lost her bid for re-election in the Democratic primary.
She is expected to remain in the Senate until the winner of the November election is sworn in.
Kitty Bennett contributed to research.
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