EPA Employees Not Fired For Watching Porn, Stealing Money

EPA Employees Not Fired For Watching Porn, Stealing Money | The Federalist Papers:
(correction-incorrect photo of Renee Page has been removed)
The Environmental Protection Agency has not been firing employees for watching pornography and falsifying federal documents, according to California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa.
“How much pornography would it take for an EPA employee to lose his job?” Issa asked EPA officials, including the agency’s second-in-command, testifying before the House Oversight Committee.
Issa chairs the committee.

“This individual spent four consecutive hours on a site called ‘sadism is beautiful,’” Issa pressed the EPA employees. “You are running an organization from which no one can get fired.”

Issa was pressing EPA officials to answer his question on whether or not falsifying documents is a crime. It is a crime, but Issa wanted an answer from the panelists.

The EPA officials testifying before the House Oversight Committee struggled to answer Issa’s questions about agency employees falsifying federal documents by saying they are working while they were not.

An EPA employee has been viewing pornography while at work, and has even received performance awards for his time at the agency. The employee was even watching porn when inspector general agents visited his office. The employee had 7,000 porn files on his computer and had been watching porn for two to six hours per day since 2010. This employee still works at the EPA.

Another EPA employee was actually selling jewelry and weight loss pills out of her office. Renee Page is the director of the the agency’s Office of Administration, but that didn’t stop her from using her from selling her own products during business hours using her government email account, according to the OIG.

Page also hired 17 of her family members and friends as paid interns. She also paid her daughter — who also works at the EPA — from her agency’s budget account. 
But instead of being punished, Page received a prestigious Presidential Rank Award in 2010, for which she got $35,000 in cash.