Although three-quarters of Americans are unhappy with the way their government was run in 2015, Congress enjoyed a more productive year than it has since 2009.
Lawmakers passed 113 laws in 2015, the Pew Research Center found. Some of them attempted to make egregious government behavior illegal for the first time.
Amid debates over healthcare policy and national defense, a handful of lawmakers put forward bills that, surprisingly, did not already exist, such as a provision to stop federal employees from watching pornography on their government computers.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Congress was not always able to reach a consensus on even these seemingly common-sense measures.
Casino spending
A bipartisan group of senators put forward a bill earlier this month that curbed wasteful spending on government charge cards, which have often been used to fund questionable activities.
Included in the bill, which passed the Senate Dec. 17, was a provision that prevented federal workers from spending the taxpayer money on the cards at casinos.
Because of the government’s lax oversight of charge cards, federal workers were often able to withdraw cash using the cards so they could gamble freely at casinos around the country.
“We owe it to the taxpayers to make sure these cards are being used for legitimate business purposes, and not as a personal credit card,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., of the Saving Federal Dollars Through Better Use of Government Purchase and Travel Cards Act of 2015.
Watching porn
After an Environmental Protection Agency employee was allowed to keep his job despite getting caught watching six hours of pornography on his work computer each day, a GOP lawmaker introduced a bill to prevent federal workers from viewing pornography on the taxpayer’s dime.
Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., put forward the Eliminating Pornography from Agencies Act in February, but it does not appear to have come up for a vote in the House.
“It’s appalling that it requires an act of Congress to ensure that federal agencies block access to these sites,” Meadows said.
Using personal email for government work
Hillary Clinton’s brush with political scandal brought the issue of personal email use to the fore, but the practice had already hindered an investigation into the Internal Revenue Service’s alleged targeting of conservative groups.
In March, the House Ways and Means Committee passed a bill that prevented IRS employees from using personal email to conceal official business.
Lois Lerner, former head of the IRS’ tax-exempt unit, was accused of using a private email account to conduct official affairs.
Hiring tax cheats
In March, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee took up a bill to prevent the federal government from hiring people who were “seriously delinquent” on their taxes.
The Federal Employee Tax Accountability Act of 2015 came after the IRS revealed more than 100,000 federal workers had evaded all or part of their taxes, but kept their taxpayer-funded jobs.
Democrats argued tax delinquency should not be a fireable offense because such legislation unfairly targeted federal workers over private ones, and the bill failed in the House in April.
Paying for patriotism
Republican Sens. Jeff Flake and John McCain and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal added an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act that barred the Pentagon from giving taxpayer money to sports teams in exchange for displays of support for American troops.
“Football fans across America learned last month that several NFL teams were honoring U.S. service members not out of a sense of patriotism, but for profit in the form of millions of dollars from the U.S. Department of Defense,” the senators said in June. “Our amendment would put an end to this practice, and ask professional sports leagues like the NFL to donate to charities supporting American troops, veterans and their families.”
The lawmakers were referring to an oversight report that discovered the National Guard had paid the NFL $7 million in marketing contracts over the last three years.
