From October 2014 to May 2015 she served on the staff of Reinhold Mitterlehner in the Ministry for Education, Research and Economics.

[5] Chancellor of Austria Sebastian Kurz appointed Aschbacher to his cabinet in January 2020; she resigned amid thesis plagiarism scandal.

According to allegations first levied by blogger Stefan Weber, Aschbacher has committed plagiarism and academic fraud in two these.

According to Weber, that thesis includes a variety of “gobbledygook, nonsense and plagiarism” with over 20% of the paper coming from other sources that are not cited.

[6][7] It soon became clear that the thesis was not only heavily plagiarized; other parts were written in rambling, grammatically incorrect German.