On the recordJune 10, 2010
I want to thank Chairman Frank and Chairwoman Waters for bringing this bill and my amendment to the floor. We were all outraged when we learned that dozens of employees at the Securities and Exchange Commission were found to have been using their government-issued computers to view pornography. Some of these employees were senior staffers, earning as much as $222,000 a year. One SEC attorney in Washington, D.C., spent up to 8 hours a day watching pornography. An accountant in a regional office was denied access by the government firewall 16,000 times when he tried to access Web pages containing sexually explicit material. Mr. Chairman, this behavior, these abuses are not just an abuse of government resources but also of the public trust. It undermines confidence in our institutions. It subjects the thousands of SEC and other government employees who work hard every day to a diminishment, and, simply put, it is outrageous and unacceptable. This amendment is very simple. It simply says that if you are an FHA employee who is officially disciplined for viewing, downloading, or exchanging pornography, including child pornography, you lose your job. No private business in America would tolerate this kind of behavior, and there's no reason our government institutions should either. Again, very, very simple. If you're caught and officially disciplined for viewing, downloading, or exchanging pornography, you lose your job. It's that simple.
