Citizen Times - Mark Meadows Trying Again on Federal Worker Porn Ban

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By Mark Barrett

Eleventh District U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows is trying again with a bill to make it clear that federal employees are not allowed to view pornography on the job.

Meadows, a Jackson County Republican, on Wednesday introduced a bill to prohibit federal workers from accessing pornographic or explicit material on government computers or devices.

He introduced a similar measure last September, late in the congressional calendar, that went nowhere. Meadows said the move was prompted by a case described in a May 2014 committee meeting of an EPA employee found to have spent as much as six hours a day looking at porn on the job using his work computer who was suspended with pay but had yet to be dismissed months later.

Meadows' office said similar cases have surfaced since then.

"It's appalling that it requires an act of Congress to ensure that federal agencies block access to these sites," Meadows said in a statement.

"While there are rules in place at most agencies to ban this kind of unprofessional and potentially hostile workplace behavior, it continues to take place. There is absolutely no excuse for federal employees to be viewing and downloading pornographic materials on the taxpayers' dime," he said.

It appeared last year that the EPA worker was still on the job not because there was no policy preventing the actions, but because firing someone at the agency for any reason is a complicated process.

Many federal agencies explicitly ban the practice, and an EPA policy says workers can be fired for using government equipment to look at "materials that are sexually explicit or sexually oriented."

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