An employee at the United States Bureau of Reclamation received a 14-day suspension for “substantial inappropriate activity,” following accusations that he accessed child pornography on his government computer.
Investigators in the Interior Department’s Office of the Inspector general didn’t find any child pornography on the employee’s computer, but they did find an “unauthorized scrubbing program” designed to stymie forensic examinations of the computer.
The IG also “discovered thousands of downloaded photographs depicting children in gymnastics-related poses and clothing, [and] hundreds of photographs of the employee wearing girls’ gymnastics leotards,” according to a report released last week.
Federal agencies have gained notoriety in recent months for the difficulty they have in firing employees who watch porn at work. One employee who was caught viewing illicit material by a child who was in the office for Take Your Kids to Work Day spent a year on paid leave before the EPA attempted to fire him.
House lawmakers passed a bill in April that would limit the amount of paid leave that can be given to “bad apples” on the federal government payroll. “The bill before us strikes the appropriate balance, we believe, between the need for stricter oversight of agency use of administrative leave and the due process rights of federal employees,” Stacey Plaskett, the Democratic delegate to Congress from the Virgin Islands, said during a floor debate.
