This Proves that Federal Agencies Are Full of… It

by Mark Horne 

I would say this is unbelievable, but the truth is that nothing is absurd or disgusting enough to surprise me anymore. The EPA, the same group that followed the IRS tradition by claiming that the records required by Congress were eaten by a crashed hard drive, has some interesting problems.
According to Government Executive:

Environmental Protection Agency workers have done some odd things recently.

Contractors built secret man caves in an EPA warehouse, an employee pretended to work for the CIA to get unlimited vacations and one worker even spent most of his time on the clock looking at pornography. 

It appears, however, that a regional office has reached a new low: Management for Region 8 in Denver, Colo., wrote an email earlier this year to all staff in the area pleading with them to stop inappropriate bathroom behavior, including defecating in the hallway.  

It is hard to know how to write about this story. How many non-rude, non-crud synonyms are there for “defecate”?

Government Executive acquired an email from Deputy Regional Administrator Howard Cantor about “several incidents,” including intentionally clogged toilets and then excrement being left for people to find in the hallways. Reading the report, I’m not sure if one person clogged them and then the other person was reduced to “placing feces in the hallway” because the usual place was now blocked off.

Just thinking about it reminds me how much I would like to flush the EPA.
Of course, we can never allow a chance to stimulate the economy get wasted, even over waste product. So the managers hired an “expert.”
Newser.com reports:

Almost as strange as the hallway-pooping is the fact that the EPA decided to hire a national expert in workplace violence, who concluded that hallway feces was indeed a health and safety risk, and the behavior was "very dangerous," notes Tina Nguyen at Mediaite. "Why such a distinguished mind was consulted by the EPA to reach the conclusion that leaving feces in hallways is bad, we'll never know," she writes. An EPA spokesman says that while the agency can't comment on ongoing personnel matters, its "actions in response to recent workplace issues have been deliberate and have focused on ensuring a safe work environment for our employees."

Isn’t it great that we have an organization staffed with such passionate geniuses who care so much about the environment that they get all the authority they need to run our lives?