SEC Officials Investigated for Downloading Porn: Your Money Hard At Work

This is a rush transcript from "On the Record," February 2, 2010. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

GRETA VAN SUSTEREN, FOX NEWS HOST: Ready for this? This takes the term "government stimulus" to a whole new level. Apparently more than two dozen SEC employees including a regional supervisor have been investigated for viewing porn on government computers. You're paying for that.

It's no secret the country is going broke, but do we really need these porn watchers on the government payroll? Steve Moore joins us live. He's co-author of the new book "Return to Prosperity."

And we're talking one person, the regional supervisor, 1,800 attempts to look up porn in 17 day span. That's more than 100 a day.

STEVE MOORE, "WALL STREET JOURNAL": I was wrong, that the stimulus money is stimulating jobs. It's just jobs at porn websites. What you have here is people stealing from the taxpayer.

VAN SUSTEREN: Arrest them!

MOORE: They may be arrested. But the point is this is going on, they found many cases of this, and not just at the SEC but other agencies as well where people are looking at websites that have nothing to do with their job all day long.

But that one story about 1,700 hits on the Web site in two weeks, that means the person is practically doing nothing but looking at porn all day.

VAN SUSTEREN: More than two dozen at the SEC, and you figure we're paying $100,000 a year, a two year study.

MOORE: And the auditor in the story said this is happening in other agencies as well.

VAN SUSTEREN: But at the SEC that was $4,800,000 we spent that doesn't include overhead or health insurance or whatever.

MOORE: You asked me Greta the question why don't we fire these people? And certainly in the private sector if an employee was caught looking at porn websites all day they would be fired in a nanosecond.

The reason this doesn't happen in government is we have civil service rules that make it extremely difficult to fire a worker no matter how gross their misconduct, if they're looking at sexual websites all day long. It is a stealing of money from the taxpayer.

I believe we ought to really be reducing the workforce at the federal government. We had a story in the journal today the only place in America where is up is in the federal government. We keep hiring when everybody is laying them off.

VAN SUSTEREN: It might be better to send them home and pay them to get rid of the overhead.

Here's my favorite part of the story -- the inspector general at the SEC has provided more than 150 pages of the investigation. This is what it said -- "The inspector general office noted disclosure of the names of the people who were" stealing money, basically, "would conceivably subject them to harassment and annoyance in the conduct of their official duties and private lives."

Now we've got the inspector general trying to protect the privacy of these people who aren't working, who are government employees, and we wonder why we are having such a huge economic problem when this is ridiculous. This is absurd.

MOORE: They should have pink slips. And another very similar example of what has happened in New York City with their public teachers. They have over 200 teachers on the public -- on the city payroll that have been charged with sexual misconduct, gross misconduct in the classroom, but they can't fire these people. So they are still on the payroll, but they are not teaching classes. This is endemic.

VAN SUSTEREN: This is something else I hadn't thought about -- this is the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the people who are supposed to be watching big corporate America, watching Wall Street so they are not ripping us off.

This is the very police agency of Wall Street sitting around surfing the porn, and we're paying for it.

MOORE: And Greta, the next time we do this segment we really need photographs and picture, I think.

VAN SUSTEREN: I don't know.

MOORE: Who says there's not waste in government? This is why we need another Grace commission to go through every agency and find waste, inefficiencies, people who are doing nothing, and save money. We just released a budget with a $1.6 trillion dollar deficit. These are the kinds of things that you have to root out.

VAN SUSTEREN: It is hard when the government says let's create another agency to fix some problem, if we would simply look at what we have and figure out where it works, where it doesn't, where we have people essentially stealing, it would probably go a long way.

MOORE: And you just multiply this a thousand-fold and you understand why we have the budget deficit.

VAN SUSTEREN: I did so much math today figuring out how many these two dozen just at the SEC, figuring out their overhead, healthcare. Anyway...

MOORE: You can't fire people in the federal government. It is a big problem.

VAN SUSTEREN: Steve, thank you.

MOORE: Thank you, Greta.

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