Dozens of workers at multiple federal government agencies have either been busted watching pornography on the job or confessed to doing in the recent past, according to a new report by NBC News published Monday. The report found that employees of at least 12 federal agencies, including the Department of Justice, perused porn sites on their government-issued computers while on the job.
NBC News was able to identify the agencies, but not the workers, where employees were guilty of the extra-curricular activity through agency records provided after Freedom of Information Act requests were submitted. In one case, a worker at the Environmental Protection Agency admitted to viewing the adult content on his government computer for as many as six hours daily for “several years.”
“This is not just an isolated incident at one single agency,” Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), chairman of the Subcommittee on Government Operations, told NBC. “We’re starting to find it across almost every agency.
The federal agencies named in the report included:
Environmental Protection Agency
U.S. Department of Transportation
U.S. Department of Justice
U.S. Department of the Interior
U.S. Postal Service
U.S. Department of Labor
NASA
Export-Import Bank
U.S. Department of Commerce
Social Security Administration
U.S. Department of Energy
U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Meadows introduced the Eliminating Pornography from Agencies Act
last month after it was learned that as many as six EPA employees were engaging in the salacious activity at work, according to Nextgov.
It was not immediately clear what, if any, discipline these workers faced. But the federal government typically has much stricter policies for their workers that other places of employment.
Case and point: An Australian man who was fired for looking at porn while at work sued the company and won on the technicality that while he used his work-issued computer for viewing, he was doing so off the clock and outside of work hours. The court ended up siding with the worker, according to Geek.com.
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