Porn Part Of Job At U.S. Agency
Employees at the multi billion-dollar federal agency that promotes science and national health spend substantial amounts of work hours viewing pornography on government computers yet a chunk of economic stimulus money is coming its way.
With an annual budget of $6.6 billion, the National Science Foundation (NSF) was created by Congress in 1950 to promote the progress of science, advance national health, prosperity and welfare and to secure national defense. The NSF has about 1,700 employees at its Arlington Virginia headquarters, including about 150 scientists from research institutions.
According to a 68-page semiannual report published by the NSF Inspector General, many of them spend quite a bit of time—often significant portions of their workdays—watching, downloading and e-mailing pornography. Investigators found “numerous reports” and more than half a dozen investigations into “abuse” of NSF information technology resources.
The abuse took place over periods of months or even years, according to the report, which states that one “senior official” spent as much as 20% of his working hours over a two-year interval viewing sexually explicit images and engaging in sexually explicit online chats with various women. The estimated cost to U.S. taxpayers for that one case was nearly $60,000, investigators said.
A selective sample of a single internal server at the agency found even more NSF workers harboring hard-core porn images on their government computer hard drives, according to the report. Overwhelmed investigators say the number of “inappropriate use” cases was too large to thoroughly probe them all.
The limited nature of the sampling—its restriction to only one computer drive—cannot therefore measure the actual extent of the misbehavior, the report points out. Yet, on the heels of this shameful revelation, the NSF will get $3 billion from the Democrat-sponsored economic stimulus bill making its way through Congress this week.
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