WASHINGTON – Among many critics of “big government,” it’s a common practice to assert as established fact private entities operate more efficiently than their state-run counterparts. The government, we’re told, is a monument of inefficiency, waste and graft.

There’s plenty of rhetorical ammunition out there for such critics to latch onto, as well, from $640 defense-contractor-supplied toilet seats to one of the Heritage Foundation’s favorite complaints, billions of dollars spent each year maintaining vacant government-owned properties.

Of course, when it comes to cooking up a good, salacious headline, nothing draws an itchy click-finger like the notion of federal bureaucrats wasting their time on the clock by endlessly surfing porn sites.

Considering how often it’s a topic of such headlines, it’s reasonable to ask: Just how big a problem is federal employee porn surfing, really?

A report from Washington-based NBC affiliate’s “News4 I-Team” revealed “(a)lmost 100 federal government employees have admitted to or been caught viewing copious amounts of pornography while on the job in the past five years.”

Does this sound like a lot of people to you? If so, take a moment to consider the size and scale of the federal government.

For example, there’s approximately 23,000 people employed by the Pentagon alone (as of 2014). Even if 100 employees of the Pentagon habitually watch porn at work, they would represent less than one-half of 1 percent of the Pentagon workforce.

The NBC investigation didn’t include the Pentagon, of course, so let’s look at this as a function of two departments that were covered by the Freedom of Information Act request which informed the report’s figures, the Environmental Protection Agency and NASA.

As of 2016, the EPA reportedly employs 15,376 people while NASA employs more than 18,000. Combined, the two agencies employ a shade over 33,000 people.

While the News4 I-Team doesn’t specify the exact count of employees each agency identified as being problematic porn watchers (saying only the total across 12 agencies was “about 100”), they do reveal the number is a count that covers a five-year period.

Rounding off the figure to an even 100, this means the report discovered 20 employees per year across 12 federal agencies who watched enough porn while on the clock to land on their employers’ radar. Even if we use just the total number of employees under the EPA and NASA, 20 employees per year out of a population of more than 33,000 doesn’t sound like a bureaucratic porn epidemic to me.

Another question those concerned about government employee time-wasting should consider: Is porn even among the top 10 most common ways such employees waste time while on the clock? Or are we just seeing a lot of articles about the erotic time-wasting because it gives media outlets an excuse to put “porn” in a headline?

Going back to the private sector many critics of the federal government are fond of pointing to as a superior workplace culture, does anybody believe private sector employees don’t watch porn on the clock in similar (or even greater) numbers as their government-employed brethren?

How about social media? Is it less a waste of time for an employee to sit around watching videos shared by his Facebook friends than it is to spend the same amount of time watching porn? I can see how the latter would be more objectionable (especially if done in a way noticeable to coworkers), but from the perspective of an employer, both are problematic for the same reason: Employers want their employees to be working, not entertaining themselves, regardless of their choice of entertainment.

Another consideration — one you probably won’t often hear from government critics or workplace efficiency experts: Nobody works 100 percent of the time they’re on the clock.

I don’t care how tireless a worker you may be, over the course of every shift you’ve ever worked, you’ve taken a minute here and there, at least just to pause and take a breath. You’ve stopped to talk to a coworker, or lingered a little longer than necessary in the bathroom, or volunteered to be the guy who goes to the post office on a stamp run even though you know you still have a couple sitting in your desk drawer.

This doesn’t make you a bad employee. It makes you a human.

In my pre-porn-industry days, I once managed a large production department for a successful software company. Early on, I realized the way to measure the output and efficacy of any individual employee was not to obsessively linger at their desk to make sure they were working every available second of their shift. It was to look at the totality of their work and to perform a qualitative, not quantitative, analysis.

At the end of the day, I didn’t give a shit if my best programmer put in only six hours of real work out of every eight for which he got paid so long as his projects were completed on time and all the (significant) bugs were smashed before the customer used the software.

By the same token, I also didn’t value an incompetent who was rooted to his desk typing furiously for 12 hours a day. If the final product is shit, knowing it got that way despite tremendous effort only makes things worse. From an efficiency standpoint, there’s nothing more wasteful than a full-time effort that produces a half-assed result.

So, as we sit here gauging how concerned we ought to be about a vanishingly small percentage of government employees spending their days watching porn, maybe we ought to be asking ourselves more questions about the quality of their work and fewer about the propriety of their time-wasting methods of choice.

Granted, we’re probably going to be just as disheartened by the answers to those questions, but at least we won’t be wasting our time obsessing about how 0.029 percent of federal employees waste theirs.